Feral Park (63 page)

Henry Peppercorn married Georgiana Younge, who had promised to retire her ferule, but each allowed for a ceremonial paddling of their behinds as they departed the church for the honeymoon carriage, all in attendance at the wedding being provided a small swatter with which to strike the covered buttocks of the bride and groom as they went down the line in merriment and mirth.

There was also a triple wedding for the three Misses Henshawe, each to the object of her everlasting affection: the oldest, Nancy, to Lieutenant Wallace Alford; the youngest, Eliza, to her osculating Prince Charming, otherwise known as Mr.Aubrey Waitwaithe, who was later to become a Berryknell solicitor of good standing; and the middle sister, Sophia, to Mr. Trapp, who, although there were some objections to her marrying far beneath her station, was a good man overall and kind, and who, having been freed by the arrangement in the Feral Park drawing-room and pardoned of his original crime through the offices of Sir Thomas in negotiated exchange for the erasure from memory of his own capital offence of opening dwarf mail, was to settle with his new wife in Smithcoat and assist Mrs. Pickler in her good work there.

And what of Mrs. Taptoe’s servants, Tripp and Umbrous Elizabeth? They married and did not, in fact, leave the parish, but remained in service to their longtime employer, all of them moving into the Super House which was improved and expanded to make more room, and Mrs. Taptoe put things to rights there and saw that the superannuated residents were better attended and that an apothecary came every week and exercise was regularly taken and that those who passed into the next world were laid to rest with a proper and respectable funeral service. Mrs. Taptoe was happy to have found a permanent purpose to her life, and in time her able administration brought in other retired servants from throughout the parish in need of a final address. The place was expanded further and became “Servants’ Rest in Feral Park,” and Henry Peppercorn received a commendation from Parliament for his munificence and charity in founding it and putting much of his remaining fortune into its maintenance. The Drays, to repay Peppercorn’s earlier kindness, and now financially solvent due to Mr. Michael Rolly Quarrels’ liberality, gave a great deal of money to its upkeep as well. The Parliamentary commendation was approved in spite of Lord Godby’s objection that it was without merit and the firm belief on Godby’s part that elderly servants should be placed in a charnel house so that there should be no expense of transport when they expired.

As for the aforementioned Michael Quarrels, he gave Cowpens Acres to his cousins Marie and Rose Ellen Dray, each of whom would never marry, but neither of whom would repine on this account, for they would live comfortably until the end of their days and even visit their sister in Boston on three occasions, and eat well. Mr. Quarrels did keep Moseley Manor for himself and for very good reason: so that it should be turned into the Quarrels Asylum for the Imbecilic, Insane, and Limb-deficient. The founding of the new asylum came after the closure of Stornaway upon a vote by the board of governors rocked by revelations of Dr. Goulding’s abuse of the inmates and Sir Thomas’ abuse of the inmates and two other governors’ abuse of the inmates, along with the abuse of a nurse and the asylum milk cow.

All of the residents were brought to Moseley Manor, now denominated in short “The Quarrels Asylum,” and there they were treated to kindheartedness and sunlight, many of them having not seen the light of day for a good number of years. Some, thinking that they had died and were now in Heaven, were given to spend their first day in their new home peeping into the pantries and wardrobes, looking for their angel wings.

The cousins Gemma Dray and Michael Quarrels married, even though they had only three intact limbs between them, and Mr. Quarrels continued to paint, and Mrs. Henshawe was allowed to stay on to keep the asylum accounts along with Bella, who had been rewarded for her kind service to Mrs. Henshawe and the Misses Henshawe by being placed on the governing board—which included, as well, Mr. and Mrs. Epping, the latter to conduct classes in trimming bonnets with colourful found objects.

Sir Thomas Turnington, ruined by a host of revelations as to his cruelty and depraved nature, was divorced by his wife and rejected by his daughters, and was forced to repair largely to his club in London, where he took all of his meals and slept in a chair. He was occasionally visited by Charles Quarrels, who came in disguise, for he was now, himself, a fugitive, the Parliament having passed a bill, which was reluctantly enacted by the Prince Regent, who had grown tired, in any event, of profligacy and wanton Epicureanism and self-indulgence, to outlaw all monkey parlours in the kingdom except for those which employed real monkeys, of which there were precisely none that could make a go of it for the lack of patronage. But at the time that the law was passed Charles owned shares in several London parlours of the former ilk, which stood in violation of the law for a time before they were shuttered. As for Charles’ mother, Lydia Quarrels, she returned to the lodgings in Chelsea which she had previously occupied and in which she had little space to perform her arm and leg stretches without bumping into a wall, and eventually threw herself upon the mercy of her sister-in-law Julia Dray and asked for forgiveness for her ill treatment of her, and after absolution was given, was granted an occasional stay at Thistlethorn and the hot meals and fresh linens which came with it, and became most retiring and placable.

Aunt Drone did not marry Dr. Bosworthy, for as much as he delighted and flattered her, she could not wed a man who drank his own urine and who participated in other equally odious scientific habits (although amongst the
commendable
ones was experimental surgery upon Mr. Maxwell’s eyes—a very good thing—which left the right one sightless and perpetually tearing, but the other ocularly perfect, and this was enough to keep the butler comfortably employed at Feral Park). Still Miss Drone was happy to see her friend Dr. Bosworthy when he came to the parish for his twelvemonth visit, and the two were to maintain a close friendship throughout their remaining years.

Aunt Drone’s presence in Payton Parish for each of those years was permanently sought by both Anna and her father, and she would have settled there permanently in the company of her longtime companion Miss Pints, had not the latter accepted an offer of marriage from Mrs. Pickler’s nephew Mr. Samuel Denny. The couple, joined not only by the affinity of their cleft palates but also by a fusion of their hearts, lived together at the Pickler House and assisted Mrs. Pickler in providing protection and safe passage to each fugitive from the Bloody Code who appeared at the back door, except for the perpetrators of murder and a few other acts of moral turpitude fully deserving of execution, the number of eligible offences under the Code being reduced over time by a reform-minded majority of the members of a Parliament, which, like Dr. Bosworthy, had grown tired of living in a punitive lunatic society. Miss Pints, because of a plague of health problems which descended upon her in her middle years, did not survive to senectitude, but nonetheless found great pleasure in each and every year that was gifted to her by fate, and upon her death bed, as legend has it, she spoke with perfect clarity these inspiring words: “How deficient is feral man in body and intellect but how perfect in that pure soul which is breathed upon by God, our Father.” It is said that the tears shed by Aunt Drone whilst attending her former companion in those valedictory moments were so copious that her sockets became desiccated from that day forward. For the rest of her life she found it necessary to moisten her eyes artificially with a solution of water and glycerine, which was of Dr. Bosworthy’s concoction and for which he later secured a patent.

May Dray married her instructor Luigi Januzzi and went to London to play the pianoforte in concert and then toured England and the Continent playing for all the crowned heads and even a good many who did not wear crowns upon their heads, and was in her last years a traveling companion of the “Swedish Nightingale” Miss Jenny Lind, whom she also accompanied upon the concert stage and with whom she engaged in occasional patter, to the delight of audiences who had never seen two women of refinement jollying one another in fine gowns. Her travels included even a trip to America, where she played in Boston and Philadelphia and in Providence on the Island of Rhode (which is where she visited her former paramour and teacher Mr. Shyman, who gave her a gift of stockings, and in her grateful acceptance of them, she shewed that she harboured no resentment toward him for breaking their engagement and temporarily ruining her life).

With the success of the daring and forward-looking dances at the Feral Park Fête Galante, Mr. Colin Alford refitted his school as an institution that would teach
only
those new dances that were not being taught elsewhere in England, and in the first week he received over one hundred applications from every corner of the Kingdom, including hand-delivered suppliances from both Mr. Nevers and Mr. Groves, who wished to learn a dance from the Levant wherein men moved in close affinity and touched shoulders. Colin was happy to oblige. Colin was also happy to oblige the romantic entreaties of one who sought a permanent (and exclusive) affiliation with him, and with an eagerness to finally tame himself and “settle down,” he pledged his heart to the muscularly-calved Maurice Taptoe (who had not mentioned in his letter to his mother the gender of the one whom he had loved so rapturously in America; it was a man: a blacksmith with large forearms, for Mr. Taptoe thought nothing more agreeable than a forearm which resembled a calf), and Maurice pledged
his
heart to Colin Alford, and the two men remained attached to one another for the balance of their days.

Mrs. Dray kept herself until her death a busy participant in the lives of her three daughters, sometimes attending May’s luggage and correspondence during a performing tour of France, at other times helping Gemma to wipe the face of a drooling incompetent at the Quarrels Asylum, or at other times, still, listening alongside her daughter Anna Alford in the parlour of the Alford Cottage in Berryknell as Anna’s husband Perry read aloud one of his newly published poems, which always had more than a little to do with his deathless love for his wife. Laudanum never again touched his lips and absinthe never again hers, and sober and clear-headed they would both remain, except that they should allow themselves some rum punch on Christmas Eve. Perry Alford did not soar to lofty literary heights as he had previously hoped, but he came not to mind it in the least. Tennyson soared and yet in Perry’s assessment was never more than a mediocrity upon the page; so he was to conclude, in the end, that the concept of literary immortality had its shortcomings.

Most importantly, Anna Peppercorn Alford was happy—happy to be wedded to the man she most dearly loved, happy to continue to assist those round her in need, and happy to savour all that there is to the condition of being human: to strive to put to rights those things about the race that want correction, to acknowledge the basal animal instincts that can never be fully tamed, and to revel in those intoxicating moments of unalloyed joy that define and commend the species.

As for the gipsies and the dwarves and the conies, all were allowed to live and flourish and some to eat grass and hop about and make babies, some to trap and fish and waddle, and some to fashion jewelry and knit scarves and make water upon the abbey ruins, and the reader is to sort out who did what.

Regarding Lord Godby, whom the reader may have noticed never fully appeared upon the pages of this book, but who, instead, lurked like a gothic specter just outside its palings through retail and reference, the ogre died at a not terribly-advanced age of fatal apoplexy brought on by choking on cold beef, and without seeing the passage of a single law against the Jews of England, so that many were left on English soil for Dickens to disparage most deplorably in his otherwise commendable prose. There were very few seats filled at Godby’s funeral even though he was a peer. As he was perhaps the most odious man mentioned within this novel, the reader will probably agree that it was best to keep him at a safe distance.

Finally, the reader may be curious to know the identity of the mysterious intelligencer who whispered confidences into Mr. Peppercorn’s ear and inspired him to write his book
Payton Parish
retailing all that went on “behind the masks, beneath the tables, and within the dark corners of the rusticated, provincial lives” of those who claimed the parish as home. The reader may be surprized to learn that it was none other than Betsey, the Feral Park kitchen and milk maid, who had a facility for making herself unseen or under-noted, even though she was ubiquitous, and who was generally so glum and disheartened after telling each new bit of gloomy tattle to Mr. Peppercorn that he was required to knead her shoulders in a deep and penetrating manner to relax and restore her, the rub also being a good thing for another reason: carrying full milk pails hither and thither is a sore and taxing business.