Daniel Friedman - Riot Most Uncouth

The Hellespont is one of the most treacherous straits ever documented by cartography or mythology, and Leander swam across it every night to rendezvous with his lover. Hero hung a lamp in the window of her tower, and its light guided him to her.

I remember my mother telling me about Leander and Hero as she tucked me beneath my tattered blanket in the rooms where we lived in Aberdeen, before I inherited Newstead. Mad Jack had already been gone a year, but my mother told me he was coming back, and I believed her. She told me love is a beacon, like Hero’s lantern, and just as Poseidon’s rage couldn’t keep Leander from his beloved, my father’s affection for us was mightier than any force in nature, and it would bring him inexorably home to us.

This is how boys are shaped into the men they are to be. When I was small, my mother told me bedtime stories, and when I grew older, I spent my sleepless nights drinking and lying to myself.

But here is the truth: On the third of May in 1810, I visited the place where Hero’s tower stood, and I looked into the treacherous strait between the Aegean and the Propontis. It was mostly white-capped churn slamming against jagged rocks, and from my perspective, there was only one rational thing to do. I stripped my clothing off, and I walked into the water.

In my youthful imaginings, Leander was propelled by his ardor the way a strong headwind and a full sail drive a boat. I pictured him skimming across the waves like a lusty porpoise; his engorged ventral appendage slicing through the surf, and the pale-green sea froth lapping at his swollen purple bollocks.

The actual experience of swimming the Hellespont is somewhat different. The waters are swift and treacherous and black, even when the sun is high. The surface current and the undertow run in opposite directions, so if you push too deep trying to cut through the ten-foot swells, the undercurrent will drag you into the depths, and hold you there, and squeeze the breath from your lungs. The distance from the European side to the Asiatic is only about a mile, straight across, but the current is so powerful that I traveled a distance of between three and four miles on a diagonal to make it from one shore to the other. If you aren’t a very strong swimmer, the Hellespont is an easy place to die. Trying to swim across it is an insane thing to do; nobody with any sense of prudence or moderation would ever even attempt it. My aim was to prove such a feat was possible, a thesis that was subject to some doubt until I accomplished it.

It took me an hour and ten minutes to make the crossing. Though the weather was warm, the fast-moving water was frigid, and I lost feeling in my extremities halfway through the swim, when I was quite far from either shore. Finishing the journey sapped me of my strength, and, unlike Leander, when I dragged myself onto the beach, I was in no condition to express any amorous urges. I just sprawled on the gray sand and vomited seawater for a while, and I was quite ill for several weeks afterward.

When I was a child, my mother told me the story of Leander and Hero, but she didn’t tell me all of it. It wasn’t until I got to Harrow that I learned how it ended; how all the legendary love stories end.

Leander made his swim each night throughout the summer, but when the seasons changed, the waters grew more violent and unendurably cold. I swam the strait in the daytime, and I could clearly see my destination on the European shore. Leander swam at night, when the sunless sky melted into the dark water. With the waves tossing him upward and the current sucking him down, he had only Hero’s guttering lantern to show him which way was up, and which way to swim. When the raging winds blew her light out, he lost the shore, lost his equilibrium. He lost hope. And the sea swallowed him.

Hero saw his drowned body wash up on the beach, and full of grief, she threw herself from her window and smashed against the rocks.

Mad Jack said that death is only for fools, and maybe it’s foolish to die for love like Leander and Hero. But maybe it’s also foolish not to dive into black waters if there’s a perfect girl waiting on the other side. Maybe it’s better to die for her than to live without her.

And maybe it’s foolish not to dive into black waters if there’s a chance to explore the sparkling shore on the other side of them. Maybe it’s foolish not to run and swim as far as one can, to push oneself to the limits of one’s physical capabilities, to make a grasp for the horizon.

Vampires must shun the light and cower in their crypts. Where’s the fun in that? What good is eternity if you can’t spend it dashing after the rising sun? I’d rather my candle burn briefly but brightly than dwell eternally in darkness.

I must have drifted to sleep on the grass, for when Knifing’s singsong greeting roused me, the stars had changed.

“My congratulations, Lord Byron!” the investigator shouted at me across the heath as he approached.

I lifted myself into a sitting position, which caused me no small amount of pain. “For what?”

“For your deliverance,” he said. “For your vindication. For your exoneration.”

I squinted to see the thin, dark form approaching from the highway, some two hundred yards distant. Knifing had come in a black carriage pulled by black horses, and driven by a rather severe-looking gentleman clad, predictably, in black. I thought this was a fitting conveyance for the wraithlike investigator, because it looked like a hearse. Then I realized it actually was a hearse; Knifing had come out with the undertaker to collect the remains of Fielding Dingle and his driver. I was unhappy about having to ride back to town in the same vehicle as those ripening corpses, but it was better than riding in the prison-carriage, so I decided not to complain.

Instead, I asked: “Am I no longer suspected of murder?”

Knifing jauntily adjusted his bush hat. “My God, no. That preposterous proposition perished with its ponderous proponent.”

I was nursing a rattled skull and a belly full of rotgut whisky, so it took some calculation on my part to figure out that he was talking about Dingle. Knifing seemed bizarrely chipper for a man who had been summoned from bed in the dark hours of the morning to examine the corpse of a colleague who’d been shot in the face and crushed beneath a stagecoach.

“You said you’d march me to the gallows, regardless of my guilt or innocence, to assuage your clients’ uncertainty.”

The investigator let out a peal of his singular, unpleasant laughter, and I realized why the carriage-horse’s death-wail had sounded so familiar. “That’s certainly something I’d say, but it’s not something I’d do. I’ve got standards, you see, and you’ve got lawyers. Such threats were only a ploy; a stratagem designed to intimidate you into disclosing facts, and to scare you away from my crime scenes. Arresting you is something only Dingle would be fool enough to do, and in fact, it’s something Dingle did, before Dingle died.” The alliteration set him off into his disconcerting giggles again.

Though it caused some pain in my sore neck, I turned my head to see how Angus was reacting to his hero’s strange behavior. The constable’s eyes were bulging and his mouth hung slightly open. I wouldn’t describe his expression as one of astonishment, however; Angus just always looked like that. “Are you drunk, Mr. Knifing?” I asked.

“That’s quite a thing for you to ask me,” Knifing said, and then he made his horse-scream noise, because he was so amused with himself.

“Have you seen the corpses, sir?” Angus asked.