Daniel Friedman - Riot Most Uncouth

And I had acquired a lovely and unexpected piece of furniture. The feet of it were carved like eagle talons, and the armrests were lions’ heads. The upholstery was velvet. This was an object worthy of cradling my noble and talented arse. Such a thing deserved to be celebrated.

Moreover, I’d learned by virtue of painful experience, when I was taken by one of my black moods, I had the most urgent medical need to surround myself with laughter and music and clinking glasses. Otherwise, the whispers inside my head would poison my thoughts and drag me into the abyss, from which I could emerge only with great difficulty and after a prolonged period of convalescence.

For all these reasons, it was requisite upon me to throw a bacchanal.

Since the invitees had barely an afternoon’s forenotice of the hastily planned party, only about thirty people showed up, a smallish crowd by my standards, but the celebration was commensurate to my reputation for excess. I’d hired laborers who carefully disassembled and removed the dining table from my banquet room, and they’d rolled up the rug to reveal the polished hardwood floors.

The curtains and linens and window dressings were replaced with velvet and satin, all black, to signify the unhappy course of recent events, as well as my own dark mood and current state of disreputability. I was clad similarly; wearing a crisp, high-collared bespoke black shirt, a deliberate affront to conventional tastes, beneath my evening jacket. I disdained the customary cravat and waistcoat, choosing instead to wear a black silk scarf over my shoulders.

I wore the shirt open at the throat to expose the dramatic concavity of my clavicle, and my jutting collarbones. I was proud of my starved physique, and intended to display it at every opportunity until it softened and swelled from indulgence. When that happened, I would have to quit eating again for a while.

I’d brought in some passable musicians, and the cleared room was a fine space for dancing. Cooks had been busy in my kitchen all afternoon, preparing French and Continental delicacies under the watchful eye of Joe Murray, who was quite competent with a saucepan in his own right. My rooms were bedecked with fresh flowers to an even greater extent than usual.

Preparing an event like this on such an abbreviated schedule was costly, but money was no object to me. Whatever funds I left unspent would be reclaimed by the gentleman from Banque Credit Francaise in short order. I considered it my moral duty to waste as much of the bank’s money as humanly possible before Mr. Burke managed to claw anything back.

The Professor was uncomfortable in social situations, so he retired early. I opened a couple of cases of the better vintages from my reserves, and greeted attendees from my new magisterial seat while drinking champagne from my most special and macabre of goblets, a thing I call the Jolly Friar.

The Jolly Friar is made from a human skull, less the lower jaw, mounted upon a silver stem. The interior of the cranium is polished to a high sheen, like tortoiseshell. It is an excellent vessel for wine, burgundy, champagne, or any other fine quaffable, and the appearance of the thing shocks and scandalizes many of my acquaintances, which is really the whole point of the thing.

I noted Olivia’s arrival, but I ignored her for more than an hour, until she’d had time to get appropriately drunk and mellow. When I figured her thirst for my attention must have grown unquenchable, I shooed my friends from my side and beckoned her over; it was time to overwhelm her defenses.

The first thing she asked was the first thing everybody asks when they see me drinking wine out of the Jolly Friar:

“Where does one acquire such a chalice as that?” She reached out with her fingers as if to touch the bleached bone, but she changed her mind and drew them back.

“I have many such strange and delightful things,” I said. “The silversmith in Nottingham has grown accustomed to my unique orders. I am a man of singular tastes, with access to credit.”

“But where do you get-” Here she paused. “-a skull?”

I waggled the cup at her. “It’s quite an easy thing to procure, in fact. There are skulls all around you. To retrieve them, one requires only a sturdy ax, a large pot of boiling water, and a strong stomach.”

“Surely you didn’t?”

“His death was for a worthy cause.” I raised the goblet in a silent toast to the splendid fellow who’d given his head to produce such a marvelous object. Felicity Whippleby had been the subject of everyone’s conversations all night, and many of my guests had heard about my visit to the murder scene. At the back of my mind, a small, raspy voice counseled me against openly joking about murder. I ignored it.

“I think you mock me, Lord Byron,” said Olivia.

“Only with the greatest affection,” I assured her.

“So tell me the truth?”

I touched my fingers to my lips as if I were swearing an oath. This was a trick, to get her to look at my mouth. “The Byron mansion at Newstead used to be a functioning abbey, and it is still full of relics of its previous, pious occupants,” I said. “I had an idea that the monks had buried a great deal of money on the grounds, so I had the flagging pulled up in the cloisters.”

The girl’s eyes widened. “Did you find the treasure?”

I shook my head. “Not a single shilling. But I did find the monks, interred in great stone coffins.”

“Oh my.”

“This fellow’s head was by far the largest, a distinction that earned him the right to join me thereafter as my regular companion in revelry and drink. Behold the only skull from which, unlike a living head, whatever flows is never dull.” I tipped the Jolly Friar back, and drank deeply to demonstrate.

Her brow crinkled like lace. “It seems awfully disrespectful.”

“On the contrary. Few of us will be invited to as many parties as the Jolly Friar when we are dead.”

She laughed, and I knew that she’d be mine. Women always swooned at my swashbuckling tales of grave-robbery and corpse defilement. “The Reaper lurks near us, always,” I said, “but there is no reason he oughtn’t be pleasant company.”

It might properly be called a sort of irony that Leif Sedgewyck chose that moment to glide into my dining room and approach me through the crowd.

“Lord Byron,” he said. His voice was low and melodious, like an unreasonably self-satisfied cello. “I believe we’ve met before. My name is Leif Sedgewyck, if you don’t remember. I must say that I adored Hours of Idleness, and ardently await your next volume.”

Olivia broke her gaze from mine to inspect the interloper, and did not seem displeased by what she saw. Sedgewyck was sober and composed now. No trace remained of the wretched, grieving lover I’d spoken to earlier in the day. Scrubbed and dressed, he cut an impressive figure. His hair was straight and fine and white-blond. His skin was like Italian marble, and his imperious jaw jutted forth like a fjord or the prow of a Viking warship. His smiling mouth was a slash of red, a bloodstain on fresh snow. I locked my gaze with his, and he stared back with eyes like black mirrors that held within them twin reflections of my own clenched teeth. And when those eyes met mine, he looked down, for he was over six feet tall; a gargantuan freak of a man.

“Pardon me,” he said. “I do hope I am not interrupting anything private.”

“The lady and I were having a conversation,” I told him.

“Oh, Byron.” Her hand brushed my elbow. “Mingle with your guests. Don’t be an ungracious host.”

“I would never think of misbehaving,” I said. “But Mr. Sedgewyck is not a guest. It is unseemly for him to attend such an event while he is in mourning, it would have been crass of me to disturb his grief with an invitation, and I would never be so rude as to force the coarse company of this disreputable Dutchman upon my distinguished friends.”