The Family Mansion

by Anthony C. Winkler

  Lord Hemmings sighed and muttered, “I wish I’d thought this up myself before my older brother’s wife had borne him three sons.”

  “Do you think you can arrange it?” Hartley asked, staring intently at his lordship, who was a short, drab man on whom even the latest fashions in clothing seemed frumpy.

  “I have someone in mind,” said his lordship. “There’s no better shot in Christendom, and he likes the excitement of dueling. He could also provoke St. Peter himself if he had to.”

  The men shared another drink and huddled together to discuss the financial arrangements. For arranging to hire a marksman who would provoke the older Fudges to a duel, for which his lordship would orchestrate all the details and act as a second to the shooter, his lordship would be paid the sum of £500, with £250 to be paid in advance of the deed regardless of its outcome and the other £250 to be due only if the older Fudges were killed. Naturally, his lordship was expected to pay his chosen assassin out of the £500.

  “Five hundred pounds!” Hartley Fudges gasped.

  “Exactly so,” Lord Hemmings said coolly.

  This was a considerable sum of money, roughly $50,000 in today’s currency, and Hartley Fudges thought it an outrageous fee, but he said nothing except to groan and mutter something about being thrown by circumstances on the mercy of the moneylenders.

  His lordship thought it infra dig to discuss monetary arrangements. His firm principle was never to haggle. If Hartley Fudges had said another protesting word, Hemmings would have gotten up out of his seat and abruptly walked away after saying, “You’re beginning to bore me.” Those who lived in this particular slice of England knew better than to bore his lordship. So Hartley Fudges stopped his moaning and ordered another drink from a flirtatious barmaid.

  Hartley lapsed into a thoughtful silence. Then he began to squirm as if he were being overrun by biting ants and muttered in his beer that he would have the money before the end of the week. His lordship pointed out that once he had accepted the money and hired the duelist, the transaction would be a rung bell, adding that there would be no unringing it. Hartley Fudges chuckled at this witticism and the two men stared at each other appraisingly in the smoky confines of the pub before shaking hands tentatively like two distrustful horse thieves who had just made a crooked deal. After another drink, his lordship went away, squirming through the noisy throng and disappearing out the door while Hartley Fudges mingled here and there as if he were the pub’s proprietor. He was good at mingling for he had a knack for superficial relationships and seemed quite the bon vivant.

  No one could tell from his behavior that he just negotiated the murder of his brother.

  * * *

  For the next few days Hartley Fudges scoured the streets of London looking for a source of funds. He was already well known to most of the moneylenders, having transacted business with them in the past, and though chronically slow to pay, he had a reputation of one who would eventually repay a loan.

  After checking with his usual sources and being turned down by five of the lenders he consulted, Hartley was able to secure a loan from a Viennese expatriate using as collateral the only property he owned in the world—ten acres of prime land on the banks of the River Thames, a bequest from a dead aunt. The paperwork was drawn up and furtively executed and within ten days the money traveled from the lender to Hartley to Lord Hemmings’s pocket, and the bell was rung.

  On the evening when the symbolic ringing of the bell took place, Hartley and his lordship celebrated the occasion with a quiet drink in their favorite pub. Then they parted company, as without a squeak or a creak, the plot they had hatched between them was set into a silent and sinister motion.

  * * *

  The assassin handpicked by Lord Hemmings was an Etonian castoff whom everyone knew as Bottoms but whose formal title was the Earl of Bottoms. A burly young man with a disheveled hairdo and the distracted manner of an intellectual or a drug addict, Bottoms was another English second son who had not yet found his niche in life and whose calm and composed exterior suggested thwarted scholarship. One could quite easily imagine him tucked away in some fusty corner of a library poring over old papers on some esoteric topic, for he carried himself with the absentmindedness of an Oxford don that suggested tea and quiet evenings playing tiddledywinks. But, in fact, Bottoms was more of a ruffian than his appearance suggested, and he had already survived half a dozen duels, killing three men in the process, crippling one, and severely wounding two more. Two of these duels were fought over a woman, the other four over various social miscues, real or imagined, that required ritualistic bloodshed.

  Hemmings and Bottoms met one Sunday morning in a park near Westminster Abbey. It was no coincidence that Lord Hemmings chose to meet his handpicked assassin on the Sabbath near an ancient and famous church with bells reverberating over the sleepy streets of London, or that his lordship laid out the proposition for murder as churchgoers rattled past in carriages and streamed by on foot. His lordship rather liked the contrast between the sanctity of the day and the foul plot he was proposing to Bottoms, for he wanted to make it starkly clear that evil was involved in what he needed done. He preferred a willing accomplice who would feel no squeamishness after the deed. Experience had taught him that where evil is concerned, it was better to be frank than to shilly-shally.

  Bottoms and Lord Hemmings were of the same kettle of fish. Both were second sons who had been dispossessed by primogeniture. Both spoke the same precise received pronunciation and observed to the letter all the idolatries and idiotic grammatical practices of upper-crust speech. Both had had their heads crammed full of heroic stories and sagas from Greek and Roman mythology. Images and memorable lines of poetry littered the landscape of their consciousness like goose feathers on a golf course.

  His lordship was the first to arrive at the park, looking forlorn and lonely sitting by himself on a bench in the gray and early-morning mist. A few moments later he was joined by Bottoms, and the two men began a leisurely stroll through the park.

  “I’ve got an assignment for you, if you’re interested,” his lordship began, choosing his words very carefully.

  “How much does it pay?” Bottoms wondered, sniffing the air as if something smelled bad.

  “One hundred pounds,” his lordship shot back. “Are you interested?”

  Bottoms’s brow crinkled in a spasm that indicated he was thinking. He was flat broke at the moment and £100 seemed like a bountiful godsend. “I am,” he asserted.

  His lordship summed up the situation tersely; for the money, Bottoms would have to challenge someone to a duel and kill him. He put the case in the starkest terms, making no attempt to palliate the deed or explain the motive of his client.

  Their slow pace had covered no more than a furlong or two when Bottoms declared the assignment fun and said he would do it. “Fun” was the word that Bottoms always used to express a superlative.

  “Good!” declared his lordship. “I knew you were my man.”

  Just then the bells of Westminster Abbey began a stately tolling, signaling the beginning of services, and the cheerless pealing made the misty morning air quiver with an echoing tonality that brought to mind the somberness of death, eternity, and gloom. Almost as if it were reflex, both men gave off a shiver of dread and desolation like children who had just heard a ghost story.

  “What a life we live, eh?” his lordship said softly, sensing something grave and weighty in the moment.

  “Yes,” agreed the Earl of Bottoms inanely, “such fun.”

  CHAPTER 4

  For the next two weeks, Bottoms and his lordship dogged the footsteps of Alexander Fudges through the maze that was nineteenth-century London, looking for an opportune time and place to stage a confrontation that would lead to a duel. It was not easy, following him in his daily treks, for London was a rough-and-tumble metropolis flooded with a crushing throng of humanity that frequently caused the narrow streets to spasm with gridlock, bringing all traffic to a stan
dstill in a dense ganglia of vehicles and bodies. The polluted air rang with a constant clamor of business and industry as approximately 970,000 inhabitants along with some hundred thousand horses trod their way through narrow streets originally laid down by the Romans who founded the city on the River Thames in 45 AD. Added to the mix were hundreds of sedan chairs—single-passenger boxy compartments mounted on poles and carried by two men, one in front, the other in the back. These English rickshaws were first introduced in 1634 by Sir Saunders Duncombe and were still a popular means of getting around in 1805 London, weaving in and out of traffic with its bearers shouting, “Have care!” or, “By your leave, sir!”

  The two stalkers discovered that Alexander Fudges was a chronic clubbie who spent many hours of the day socializing in private ritzy London clubs, one of which provided him with a furnished room. He frequently attended meetings of various agricultural societies, where he heard lectures given by speakers on the latest methods of producing crops and fostering animal husbandry. Lord Hemmings and the Earl of Bottoms played a game of cat-and-mouse unbeknownst to Alexander. Yet in spite of their attempt at stealth and their persistence, the tracking lords would often lose their quarry in the thick London traffic and have to give up the chase for the day.

  Two lords following one lord through the streets of London in February 1805 was tedious and demeaning work—hardly a suitable occupation for a member of the peerage. Alexander, as the firstborn male Fudges, inherited all titles that had been conferred on his father, who was, in fact, a hereditary duke. The old man’s formal title was the Duke of Fudges, which the family had had for generations. But since the oldest son was also entitled to use that name, it was a custom for the heir apparent to be given a courtesy title such as Lord Fudges. Sometimes, to avoid confusion, the heir to a dukedom would take a lesser rank such as marquis or earl until the death of the father, at which time the son would assume the father’s name and formal title. In any event, under the protocol of English society, the cat-and-mouse game between his lordship, Bottoms, and Alexander was really “Lord Cat” and “the Marquis of Cat” trailing the “Duke of Mouse” and occasionally losing him in the vulgar crush of busy London.

  After watching their prey and his movements for a couple of weeks, Lord Hemmings and Earl Bottoms decided that they would stage a scene at the weekly meeting of the book club, a hoity-toity setting usually with at least one author in attendance that was held at a private club near what was then known as the King’s Mews—and had been since the reign of Edward I—but was later renamed Trafalgar Square. The Battle of Trafalgar would not be fought until October 21, 1805, when twenty-seven British ships of the line under the command of Admiral Lord Nelson would route a Franco-Spanish Armada of thirty-three warships off Cape Trafalgar. The Franco-Spanish fleet would lose twenty-two of its thirty-three ships. On the English side, not a single ship would go down to enemy fire, but in an incalculable loss, Admiral Lord Nelson, the brilliant maritime strategist whose tactics won the victory, would be gunned down by sharpshooters concealed in the mast of an enemy vessel.

  On the appointed day, the two young lords showed up at the club wearing their Sunday best and looking every inch the ideal nineteenth-century gentlemen. They sat inconspicuously at a table by themselves near the entrance to the club where they could observe everyone who came and left. The book of the month was a geography of the Orkney Islands, which lie off the northern coast of Scotland, and was written by an earnest, burly Scotsman who lived there. During the course of the writer’s talk, Alexander got up and headed for the bathroom, but to get there, he had to make his way past the table occupied by his lordship and Bottoms. His lordship nudged Bottoms and indicated the approaching Alexander with a jerk of his head. Timing his move just right, Bottoms, clutching a glass of wine, stood up as Alexander was passing the table occupied by the plotters, and the two men bumped into one another, the wine spilling all over the front of Alexander’s shirt.

  “Watch where you’re going, sir!” Alexander exclaimed impulsively. In reply, Bottoms smacked Alexander’s cheek with his open hand, hard enough to jerk the other’s head violently back.

  Friends of Alexander came rushing over to separate the two men. But it was enough. An insult had been given, and a blow had been struck that required satisfaction. A clutch of onlookers, mostly Alexander’s fellow club members, began babbling with excitement about what had happened. Among them were a dozen dukes, a handful of marquises, a brace of counts, every jack man among them historically entitled to be formally known as Lord This or Lord That. Pretending to be nothing more than a friend of Lord Bottoms’s, his lordship the Earl of Hemmings modestly introduced himself and volunteered to act as a second.

  It was a squalid, frenzied scene, and the hangers-on who crowded the table vociferously discussing who was blameless and who to blame grew animated and excited like children romping at a garden party. One man, an older chap, tried to cool the hot-blooded spirits by saying, “Come, now, it was an accident. That’s no reason to kill each other, is it?”

  Alexander looked hopeful that this was an honorable way out, but Bottoms snarled, “I’ll shake hands when I see his brains scattered on the grass at Southampton’s Park.”

  “Now, sir,” said the peacemaker hopefully, “if you knew the gentleman you intend to fight, you would like him, possibly even be his friend. Do you know him?”

  “I know him to be a clumsy fool!” snapped Bottoms.

  It was, summed up his lordship to the Earl of Bottoms as the two conspirators shouldered their way down a crowded sidewalk, almost too good to be true. Everything had occurred exactly as he had hoped. The duel would take place three days later at the crack of dawn.

  “I’d practice my shooting between now and then, if I were you,” his lordship suggested to the shambling, seemingly indifferent Bottoms who trotted at his side with a tipsy gait.

  “I’ll be ready, Hemmings,” Bottoms said confidently. “I say, how about advancing me ten pounds? I’m a bit short this week.”

  “No advances,” his lordship said sternly. “You’d only buy laudanum. Use the remaining time to practice your marksmanship.”

  Bottoms was protesting this decision and squabbling with his employer when he collided with a man trudging down the street in the other direction.

  “Look where you’re going, you fool!” the man snarled.

  “Sorry,” Bottoms said meekly. The man stood on the side of the road, glaring and shouting curses at them loud enough to draw the attention of onlookers. But he was a working man, and from his manner and dress, it was obvious that he came from the laboring class. To exchange insults or gunshots with such a man was unthinkable. So the two gentlemen burrowed through the throngs curdling the edges of the rutted roadway and ignored the insulting bellowing that sounded in their wake.

  It wasn’t a simple job being an English aristocrat in 1805.

  * * *

  On the morning of the duel the participants and their seconds woke up at five a.m. to prepare for their rendezvous with death. The duelists had nothing to eat because it was widely believed that food in the stomach made a belly shot especially deadly.

  Lord Hemmings and the Earl of Bottoms walked together to the dueling grounds. They strolled past beggars curled up asleep on the side of the road looking like enormous insect grubs. The two men didn’t say much. Hemmings at first tried the Earl with various topics designed to take the other’s mind off what possibly lay ahead. Finally the Earl of Bottoms said rather sharply, “Look here, Hemmings, you’re making me nervous with all your prattle.”

  “Sorry, old chap,” his lordship murmured, “just trying to help.”

  “Well, it didn’t help a bit. So do me a favor and keep quiet.”

  The two men walked in silence on streets so empty of life that their footsteps gave off a staccato clip-clop that made the foggy morning sound like a loudly ticking clock.

  Soon they were walking on the grass of the park and headed toward the particular spot next to
a grove of trees where duels were usually fought. They were nearing the grove when a sharp eruption of gunfire shattered the tranquility of the park. Two shots were followed immediately by a horrific groan and the sound of a body falling.

  Daybreak was just upon them and the sunlight was too dim to cast shadows. In the gloom they came upon a duelist sprawled out prone on the ground with his desperate seconds on either side of him. The wounded man was bleeding from the neck, the blood gushing in a torrent with every heartbeat while his friends vainly tried to stanch the flow with a scarf. Nearby, the fallen man’s adversary was putting on his coat, with the help of his seconds, and glancing with a mixture of curiosity and indifference at his victim.

  “Sir,” one of the seconds said to Hemmings as he and Bottoms drew near, “this is a private affair.”

  “These are public grounds,” said Lord Hemmings, “and we also have business here.”

  Bottoms and Hemmings withdrew to the trunk of an old yew tree. Just then the figure crumpled on the ground made a noise like a boiling kettle and sagged limply into the arms of his friends.

  “He’s gone,” one of the seconds whispered.

  The other burst into tears.

  “Help me with him,” said the second who had made the death announcement, and the two men gently lifted the dead man by the arms and legs and disappeared into the park just as Alexander and his seconds materialized out of the gloom. One of the seconds was the older gentleman who had tried to patch things up at the club.

  “Where are your seconds?” he asked.

  “I am he,” Lord Hemmings declared, stepping forward with a movement as genteel as his English.

  “It is customary for two seconds to be present.”

  “It may be customary, but it is not required,” Lord Hemmings snapped.