Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

After this awful incident the first Lord Beckworth grew melancholy and brooding. He quickly developed an utter terror of high places, a vertiginous fear of falling. Not of heights so much: we know after all, that vertigo is not the fear of heights. It is a fear of depths, of a fall. And it manifests itself not as a fear, but rather a compulsion, a desire even, for a return from the insubstantial loftiness of our aspirations, back down to earth, as it were. And it was, with this awful realisation, that the first Lord Beckworth went into a long decline, a descent into gloom and enervation. Cursed by a strange madness, he climbed up upon the roof of his Great Hall and hurled himself down.

Our young noble visitor then went on to recount the litany of his cursed family. The next Lord Beckworth had been part of the Royalist defence of the castle of Banbury, a stronghold that had been of strategic importance in the Civil War, or what my old friend would have insisted was the ‘English Revolution’. In any case it seems, in a lull in the battle between Roundhead and Cavalier, the second Lord Beckworth had thrown himself, without apparent reason, from the battlements to his death.

The third Lord Beckworth had lived in exile until Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, and then had tripped and broken his neck on the stone staircase of Windsor Castle. The fourth lord was thrown from his horse during a fox-hunt; the fifth, a commodore in the Royal Navy, was captured by Barbary pirates and made to ‘walk the plank’; the sixth fell from scaffolding whilst inspecting repairs to the Great Hall; the seventh slipped and plunged to his death from a precipice while on a walking tour of the Swiss Alps and the eighth, after an assault by footpads on Blackfriars Bridge, had been hurled into the treacherous waters of the Thames.

‘And my own father,’ concluded our guest, ‘the ninth Lord Beckworth, was killed in a ballooning accident five years ago, leaving me this awful inheritance. The family curse is a joke to many. We are known as the “Leaping Lords”.’

He gave a hollow and humourless laugh as he ended his story. I have to admit to feeling an almost disabling bafflement at the conclusion of this extraordinary narrative. My colleague maintained a more thorough and hard-headed attitude to the bewildering unravelling of this supposed ‘curse’. Knowing him as I do, I observed that expression of effrontery on his countenance which manifested itself whenever he found himself confronted with any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that contradicted his precious materialism. His method, after all, was a method of elimination: he always sought to eliminate the impossible in order to arrive at the truth. And yet, as the street lights were being lighted that evening, I saw my esteemed friend for once on the defensive, ‘on the back foot’ as prize-fighters are wont to say.

‘Well, your class is tainted with superstition,’ he muttered, as if trying to make sense of what he had heard. ‘You’re, you’re feudal, barbaric. I’m sorry, I don’t mean this as a personal insult nor a slur on your character but just -’ his gestures for a moment looked helpless, as if he was signifying the very search for meaning, ‘a, a psychology, isn’t that the word? Maybe this “curse” that you speak of is merely that.’

Our young nobleman merely nodded at this and the conversation quickly turned to more practical matters. He invited us both to his townhouse in Mayfair the following day and bade us farewell, as my friend and I had an evening appointment.

I remember feeling an absurd sense of lucidity in the artificial illumination by gaslight of the darkened streets we sauntered south into Soho for our assignation that night. The words that our noble visitor had uttered that very day still affected me deeply, their insistence reverberating in my mind with a contagious fear. I was somewhat reassured to find that my old friend, despite his abundant intellect and rationality, had been no less impressed by the strange unfoldings of the story of the Beckworths’ curse.

‘An interesting case,’ he finally admitted as we passed through Bloomsbury. ‘A series of coincidences, no doubt. But what if they were not?’

We proceeded to amuse ourselves with a kind of intellectual banter, trying to apply theories of historical materialism to what we had heard that afternoon. My friend then suggested that, perhaps, the new and controversial ideas of evolution could be related to this ‘curse’.

‘His class is dying out, after all,’ my colleagues reasoned.

‘You’re surely not proposing that, somehow, one branch of a social class is somehow spontaneously accelerating its own extinction?’ I retorted. ‘I wonder what Mr Darwin would think of that.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of him, but rather of the work of Pierre Trémaux.’

My friend had recently become besotted with this French naturalist who maintained that evolution was governed by geological and chemical changes in the soil and manifested itself in distinct national characteristics. I had no time for this Frenchman’s far-fetched notions and did not hesitate in expressing my doubts to my esteemed friend.

‘His theories are preposterous!’ I exclaimed. ‘No, no, not preposterous,’ my colleague insisted. ‘They are elemental, my dear Engels.’

When we arrived at Greek Street for a meeting of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, our thoughts turned to the business of that evening and no more mention was made of our young nobleman and his family ‘curse’. Except when one of the delegates brought up the proposal that ‘All men who have the duty of representing working-class groups should be workers themselves’, hastily adding with a deferential nod in the direction of my colleague, ‘with the exception of Citizen Marx here, who has devoted his life to the triumph of the working class’; and my friend muttered to me: ‘Well, they should have seen me hobnobbing with the aristocracy this afternoon.’ But the very next morning, when we went to call upon Beckworth at his house in Mayfair, we found a police constable posted at the front door and we were informed that the young lord had died, having fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.

We were ushered into the hallway of the house and greeted by an officer in plain clothes.

‘Inspector Bucket of the Detective,’ he announced and took out a large black pocket book with a band around it. He produced a pencil, licked it, and ungirdled his notebook as a prelude to interrogating us both as to the movements of the young Beckworth the day before. Neither myself nor Marx has ever had much reason to trust a gendarme of any colour, particularly those who go about in mufti, as police spies and agents provocateurs are wont to do. But this Bucket displayed none of the underhand furtiveness one associates with such fellows. Indeed he had an altogether affable manner, if a peculiarly directed energy and purpose in his questioning. Oft-times a fat forefinger of his would wag before his face, not at us, but rather at himself as if in some form of communication. This digit seemed to have a life and intelligence all of its own and Bucket looked to it as his informant.

We learned in the course of our interview that Lord Beckworth had been found dead at the front of the main staircase that morning by the parlour maid. The upstairs rooms were in disarray and it appeared that a great quantity of alcohol and a certain amount of laudanum had been consumed. The butler Parsons was missing and his whereabouts unknown. There was one very strange clue to the death of the young lord: a small green flower, a buttonhole perhaps, was found clasped in his hand.

Marx seemed very taken by the scientific approach of the ‘detective-officer’ and at the end of the questioning turned to Bucket and said: