Daniel Friedman - Riot Most Uncouth

As I stood over the battered wreck of Leif Sedgewyck, though, Richards’s expression was anything but friendly. The spate of recent violence was ruining his business, and I was contributing to it.

Apologetically, I grabbed a handful of Sedgewyck’s white-blond hair and dragged my foe out the tavern’s front entrance. In the better neighborhoods of London, the streets were illuminated at night by gaslights, but such luxuries had not yet come to Cambridge. A few of the buildings nearby had oil lamps hung next to their doors, but those weak, guttering flames barely cut into the darkness of the thoroughfare.

“What do you want with her?” Sedgwyck said. He still hadn’t found a proper voice in his bruised throat, but he was managing to whisper. “Will you give her what I intend to? She deserves more than your passing fancy. I would make her my wife.”

But this wasn’t about Olivia anymore. She had deceived me and played a role in my humiliation. My desire for her had been as furious and urgent as a summer storm, and it had passed just as quickly.

“Are you vrykolakas ?” I asked him.

“I am Sedgewyck,” he said.

“Are you vrykolakas ?” I repeated. “Are you a vampire?” I grabbed him by the hair with my left hand, and punched his head again with my right.

He looked up at me with wide eyes. The white part of one of them was turning pink from the injury I’d inflicted upon it. “I don’t know those words. Please, no woman is worth this trouble. I don’t want to die. Stop hurting me, I beg you.”

“What do you know about Mad Jack? Does he live?”

“Mad Jack?” he said. “I don’t know who that is. I will admit I plan to propose marriage to Olivia.” He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and produced a gold betrothal ring. “I’ve made arrangements with her father and accepted her dowry only last week. I can tell you, her parents will be most disappointed if our promised nuptials do not occur.”

I kicked him in the stomach again, and he curled up into a ball. “Why would you marry Olivia? Her father possesses no inherited title. A match with her confers no respectability upon your family.”

Sedgewyck spat more of his blood onto my shoes. “The arrangement with Felicity was my parents’ doing, not my own. I found the prospect of marriage to her untenable, and made other plans. My father’s ideas of the social order are outdated-so are yours. There’s no respectability left in moldy old titles granted by the ancestors of a king who can’t even control his own colonists. The aristocracy is hollow. You people are a bunch of beggars. If I’d wed my fortune to the rotten Whippleby estate, Felicity’s damned fool family would have spent my father’s wealth on foppery and excess and valets and maids to powder their arses, and we’d all have a share of their noble poverty in half a generation. Money confers respectability in this new age, Lord Byron, and if you marry money to more money, you get a lot of respectability.”

“So you hung Felicity by her feet and bled her like a sow.”

“I swear to Christ, I never did. I only meant to jilt her, to break the engagement. And maybe have a roll with her first; I’m only a man, and you can surely understand the urge. But someone else has killed her. Truth be told, I thought it was you.”

I believed him. Sedgewyck was not the monster I’d read about in my ancient vampire tomes, nor was he the sort of monster that could have slain Jerome Tower in hand-to-hand combat. This was a man who, despite an advantage of six inches of height and twenty-five pounds of mass, was groveling in the street before me, begging for mercy. He was a coward, and that was why he had been unable to end his engagement with Felicity even after he’d lost interest in her. His grief over her death had been false; a polite charade, since mourning was appropriate, given their arrangement. But he hadn’t killed her. He lacked the capacity to solve his problems with violence.

Vampire or not, however, he was a most loathsome creature.

“I want you to leave town, Leif Sedgewyck.”

“I will, I promise, at first light.”

“There are plenty of stagecoaches available tonight. I see no reason you should wait.”

He rose to his feet, wincing and clutching his injured belly. I squared my shoulders and raised my hands, in case he wanted to swing at me, but he didn’t even seem to think about it. He was unmanned and pacified.

“What about Olivia?” he asked. “She deserves better than you.”

“Perhaps she does,” I said. “But you’re worse than I, by birth and by merit. Moreover, you’re useless in a fight. You’re no solution to her problems.”

He looked at the ring, and then he slipped it into the pocket of his waistcoat. “Very well,” he said with a bitter laugh. “It seems you have beaten me.” His eyes were turning dark where I had punched him, creating deep hollows against his pale skin, and there was blood in the spaces between his teeth. He looked exactly like a vampire ought to look.

He stalked back into the bar, and I heard him ask Richards to send for a driver. Thus, I had one fewer problem. I considered returning to Olivia, flush with victory over her suitor, to claim her as my own. But I doubted she’d approve of my disposition of Sedgewyck, and anyway, I was angry with her.

I went looking instead for sweet Noreen, Mr. Sedgewyck’s pretty housemaid. He would likely no longer be in need of her services, so she was thus available to service me. I didn’t love her, but she would do for the night.

I first learned about love when I was eight years old, from a governess named May Gray. Her job in the daytime was to look after me. At night, she was a whore. As someone experienced with numerous practitioners of both professions, I can safely say she excelled at neither. She smelled like whisky, and her breasts tasted like old sweat, and she was as quick to raise the strap as she was to lift her skirt. My feelings about her have always been conflicted; though I was never passionate about her, she aroused and awoke my nascent passions for proper and liberal application elsewhere. I suppose I appreciate the education she provided.

Real love, though, would wait another two years, until I met Mary Chaworth. In the interim, my great-uncle, the fifth Lord Byron, passed without surviving issue, and my mother and I moved into Newstead Abbey.

Mary was a distant cousin of some sort; the Chaworths lived near the Byron lands, on the edge of Sherwood Forest, and the convenience of proximity had been the seed of a number of love affairs and marriages between the two families. Mr. Hanson thought she was a fine girl, and he encouraged me to quickly betroth myself unto her. Together, he believed, we might build a productive and upright life. My mother agreed, and conspired to foment a match during the summer vacation after my first year at Harrow.

The day I met Mary, though, she was only really interested in one thing:

“Can I see the sword?”

“What sword?” I asked. We were eating a picnic lunch in a disused sheep-tract between Newstead and the Chaworth lands. We’d found a lovely little rise crowned with a diadem of trees, and we sat on the shaded grass to eat cold chicken and drink hock and soda-water. These pastoral environs, according to my mother’s theories, were conducive to burgeoning romance. I still had seven months, at that time, until my eleventh birthday.

“The sword your dad used to murder my grandfather.”