Daniel Friedman - Riot Most Uncouth

“I don’t need to hear these things. This is not why I come here. This is not what I need from you.”

“I care about you, Byron, and I am concerned. Your personality has grown inconsistent and erratic.” Perhaps she cared, but she didn’t know me. My personality had always been inconsistent and erratic; it was one of the few ways in which I resembled my mother.

“If what happened to Felicity Whippleby was arbitrary, then the things that happen to me are likely arbitrary as well,” I said. “That is an unacceptable premise, and one I cannot abide. Events must be animated by purpose. There must be a reason why I spent my childhood in poverty. There must be a reason my mother sank into despondency and failed to protect me. There must be a reason my father left me alone. There must be a reason for this.” I pulled the sheets off my naked, shriveled leg, and then, ashamed of the way it looked, I covered it again. “Either the indignities of my past were preparing me for the special destiny I’ve always believed I was meant for, or they are just a bunch of things that happened.”

Violet crawled across the bed to touch my shoulder. “Byron, I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s all right,” I told her. “I didn’t come here to listen to you talk.” Then, because my lust and vigor had returned, I flipped her over and took her from behind.

“This place is like something out of a fairy story,” said my mother. She flexed her fat ankles and then lifted her bulk into a sort of clumsy pirouette. She spread her arms and wiggled her thick fingers, and tried to spin around but stumbled halfway through her rotation.

“Come dance with me, George!” The sleeves of her dress slid back, so I could see her white, dimpled elbows. The flesh of her arms was like raw bread dough.

“I am not your little George anymore,” I said. “I’m Lord Byron.” I stretched my back, trying to look taller. I was nine years old.

“Dance with me, Lord Byron,” said my mother. I had a great, unwieldy iron brace on my leg, and no intention of trying to dance in it, but she lifted me off my feet and twirled me in the air.

Newstead was a decrepit ruin. The great drawing room had an inch of dirt on the floor, and mold growing up the walls. Shafts of sunlight poked through fissures in the ceiling, for the roof above was mostly blown away. The room was otherwise fairly dark; most of the lamps along the walls were unlit, and many of them were broken.

“There’s no music, Mother.”

Most days, Catherine was beset by melancholia and consigned herself to isolation, and she wept ceaselessly for her dead parents and her lost castle at Gight, and for Mad Jack. On such occasions, I was left mostly to my own devices, and to the depredations and abuses of whatever unsavory sorts I encountered. But when my mother was boisterous, she was inescapable.

“I hear music! The most wonderful music. An elegant chamber quartet; oh, waltz with me, Lord Byron. Do me the honor.”

In the dark recesses of the great long hall, I saw the stooped figure of Joe Murray appear in a shaded doorway. His pale face seemed to glow in the dim light.

Joe Murray had come with the house. He’d been a longtime servant of my great-uncle, and funding had been set aside in the old man’s will to provide a salary for him, as long as he wished to serve whoever was Lord Byron. This was more likely a scheme of some sort rather than an act of generosity, for William Byron was always a schemer and never a benefactor. I suspect that Joe Murray would have been a malevolent presence in the house if the Wicked Lord’s hated son had inherited Newstead, as expected. But the old Byron had borne no particular animus toward me, and so Joe Murray was mostly benign; a servile wraith always hovering at the edge of my perception.

My gaze met his, and he cocked an eyebrow as if to ask if I needed assistance. I waved him off, and he vanished. Catherine never saw him; she was too busy dragging me across the floor, my brace squeaking and scraping through the thick layer of rot and filth caked on the swollen floorboards.

“I had a castle,” she said. “And I lost it unjustly, and my man went away. And I was left all on my lonesome. I was a pretty, pretty princess, consigned to filthy, squalid exile. But my own, only laddie love turned out to be a secret heir to a magnificent fairy palace, and now we will live happily ever after together and never be lonely.”

“You know I must go away soon. To school. I cannot stay here.”

“But today, we dance! And when your father returns, he’ll be so happy to see what we’ve got that he’ll take us both in his arms and never leave again.”

“Father is dead. Everyone says so.”

“Of course he isn’t. He’s traveling on business. You mustn’t believe every naughty thing you hear.”

I was willing to cling to whatever hope my mother gave me, though I’d learned of my father’s death, indirectly, from Catherine. While we were still in Aberdeen, she received a black-bordered letter and retreated into her room to weep for weeks. Concerned by this deep and extended fit of hysteria, I crept into her chambers while she slept, and read the bad news. But I didn’t want to believe it, and looked for any excuse not to.

So my mother and I denied it, and we danced in the dim and cavernous hall of our ruined fairy castle to music only she could hear.

The next day, she was morose again, and wouldn’t leave her bed, so I took my little shovel and went treasure-hunting in the graveyard. Other than the occasional glimpse of Joe Murray peering at me through one of the dirty windows of the house, no adult interrupted my activities until I returned to the house at nightfall, for supper.

I was lucky to have had the stern, corrective influence of my lawyer, Mr. Hanson, in those days, or I might have grown up to become some kind of degenerate.

If I learned one thing from Catherine and her maudlin tendencies, it is this: One must never respond to adversity by retreating into solitude. Others may make untoward imputations; they may think one is ashamed of oneself. Like my father before me, I am proud of my every sin, excess, and abomination, and I respond to rebuke in the only appropriate way: I fling myself headlong into hedonism. It is incumbent upon the unrepentant sinner to flaunt his debauchery.

So, as a means of throwing off the humiliation of my disciplinary hearing and my shabby treatment by Mr. Knifing, I resolved to do precisely that.

I was also emboldened by my congress with Professor Tower’s wife, and I was primed for more ambitious pursuits. Specifically, I had devious designs upon Olivia Wright. I wanted to see if she might tell me more about what had happened to Felicity Whippleby, and I wanted to know what she looked like naked. As the world’s greatest poet, lover, and practitioner of the deductive art, I was amply qualified to solve the mystery of that woman.