God Carlos (21 page)

Hartley's father was not unsympathetic to the plight of his second son. Himself a second son, the elder Fudges had at one point in his life been on the threshold of a similar dilemma when, through the mercy of God, his older brother, the first son, was struck dead by smallpox, which in those days killed 400,000 Europeans annually. Unfortunately, the first son had only recently gotten married and left behind a pregnant widow who spitefully gave birth to a son. This undeserving infant would have inherited it all, leaving the elder Fudges penniless, if God had not smote the pretender with a lethal dose of diphtheria. That was how the elder Fudges had escaped the fate of Hartley and become the first son and why he was outwardly such a pious man who always acknowledged the power and wisdom of God. It never occurred to him that with infant mortality hovering around 50 percent, what had happened to him was no more than the indifferent grinding of statistics and had nothing to do with the intervention of a homicidal deity.

If Hartley had been born to a fabulously wealthy family, he might have dabbled in some occupation or sideline as a gifted dilettante. He might even, for the fun of it, have tried his hand at running the family's business, if there was one. The problem was, however, that he was a gentleman of some means, but of not enough to make working an option. A gentleman of his day could work only if he didn't have to; if he worked because he had to, he was no gentleman. It was a fine line to walk and an ethic that put the second son in an impossible position.

 

* * *

 

Hartley Fudges thought he had a profound philosophical mind. But the truth was that he was as profound as a beanpole. He read a little but misunderstood a lot. What he shared with many Englishmen of his class was an expansive inner world populated by the mythological figures and events that had been beaten into him at Eton.

The public schools of England, then and now, stamped their graduates not only with the same way of speaking, but with a remarkably similar worldview. Many years after Hartley Fudges had come and gone, anthropologists studying ancient cultures would come to the hypothesis that language not only affected thinking, it also altered reality. This was indubitably true of the upper-class English mindset and its art form, poetry. Both were pillars of the same exclusive country club—the upper-class point of view—to which intruders were not invited. When John Keats (1795–1821), who had no upper-class credentials, began publishing his poetry, his work was derided by one brainless critic as "the Cockney school of poetry." Today, the dope who wrote that patronizing review is unknown for anything except that stupidly wrong opinion.

For Hartley Fudges, what mattered deeply was that the surface gestures and conventional symbols due to his rank be observed. Being a member of the aristocracy, he demanded that the courtesies due to him and his rank in society be respected and upheld no matter how scruffy the circumstances. He once flew into a snit because a whore he was screwing under a bridge in London refused to call him "My Lord" or "Earl" Fudges or any other honorific to which he was entitled. Instead of the proper nomenclature, she was calling him any vulgarity that sprang to her common mind as he held her pinned and wriggling against the damp roughness of the stone undergirding the bridge.

"Lord have mercy," she gasped in the crease of his neck as he pumped her vigorously.

"No mercy," he hissed.

"I'm not talking to you," she squealed. "I'm talking to God. Take that thing out of me or I'll scream for my pimp."

"Not until I'm finished," he panted without a pause.

She blasted a scream in his neck and within seconds Hartley could hear the footfalls of someone scrambling toward them.

"'ere, Milord!" a male voice said gruffly. "You're hurting 'er. Stop what you're doing or I'll hit you with this rock." And he raised his hand holding the rock high like a club.

With a sudden jerk, Hartley freed himself from the woman, pulled up his pants, and stalked off from under the bridge.

"Thank you, Milord," the man called after him as Hartley disappeared into the night.

"
Milord
my ass," the woman spat bitterly.

Hartley Fudges considered himself a Platonist, a follower of the Greek philosopher. Not that he had mastered the thinking of Plato (427–347 BC). To tell the truth, he found every kind of philosophy a bit on the fuzzy side. He rather liked the idea of Plato's myth where the cave dwellers mistook shadows cast on the walls by a fire for reality. But, really, he could not say he actually understood what Plato was getting at. However, he also knew that a young gentleman needed a stand in philosophy—a point of view, as it were—that he could talk about in polite company. So when anyone asked him anything philosophical he was ready to answer as a Platonist and had memorized appropriate passages here and there of Plato that he could quote.

The problem with blinking philosophy was it was so vague and hazy that even when he got the surface impressions of an idea right, he often got its underlying meaning wrong. Ask him a question about anything and he had an answer. But his answers were without understanding. He knew many pretty facts and figures but they were stacked up in his head like stuffy books in a reference library that everyone quoted but no one ever read.

This much was plain to Hartley: Plato claimed that every object in the world had its perfect equivalent in another world. A comb in this world was a mere imitation of its ideal counterpart in the next. Every horse on earth was the imperfect copy of the ideal horse. It was the same with every stone, every plate, every cow, every dog, and every necklace. Somewhere in the other world was the perfect prototype of which the earthly model was an imperfect copy.

Exactly where this other world was Hartley did not know, but neither did Plato. Yet Hartley and his classmates liked knowing about the old Greek and his philosophy, even if they thought the whole business a bit dotty. But never mind, it was better if the upper class knew highbrow things that the lower classes did not; knowing a bit about Plato definitely helped make clear the difference between Milord and Milord's butler.

A damp morning was sponging down the windows of the mansion by the time the two men were ready to go to bed. They made their way through a cavernous ballroom which was being cleaned up by a number of weary servants under the watchful eye of a uniformed butler who bowed slightly as they walked past.

The elder Fudges was more openly fond of his second son than of his first, whose name was Alexander and was filled with his mother's pretensions. "Do you know, my boy, what I would do if I were in your shoes?" he said in a paternal voice. "I would go abroad and try my luck in the colonies."

Hartley responded with a raucous laugh.

"And where exactly would you go, dear Papa?"

"In a word, Jamaica."

They mounted the grand stairway and made their way up to the second floor, where they would sleep in ornate bedrooms. On the walls were paintings of more ancestors, all staring out from inside rectangular gold-gilded frames in the stilted poses and humorless expressions usually found in a rogues gallery. Neither man took notice. They had seen them many times before and fully expected to one day take their places inside picture frames hung on the wall. The father, at least, was assured of his wall perch because the death of his older sibling and his older sibling's son had given him the benefits of primogeniture. Hartley, on the other hand, had only a faint chance of ever hanging on the wall.

"Jamaica, eh?" he murmured just as he reached his bedroom door. He was about to ask the old man why that colony but he decided he was too tired to listen to the long-winded explanation that was likely to ensue. So he simply said, "Goodnight, Papa," and slipped into his room, closing the door softly behind him.

Hartley changed into his pajamas and climbed into an enormous four-poster bed whose bulk and heft dominated the shadowy room like a sneer does a face. He did not wash or brush his teeth. This was 1805. Modern toothpastes would emerge later in the 1800s, and the oral custom of the day, practiced by some people but not by Hartley Fudges, was to keep the mouth clean through the use of chewing sticks much like a dog today with a bone. The dentifrice whose chalky and tangy taste we begin and end the day with would emerge in the mid-1850s, but the chewing stick had been in use as early as 3500 BC in fabled Babylon.

Moreover, for all its imposing size, the family mansion did not have indoor plumbing and Hartley did not feel like splashing himself with water in the pitcher and wash basin that a butler had left on a nearby table. The room was jerkily lit by a candelabra, which he blew out just before he crawled between the sheets with the grime of the night's revelry still clinging to his flesh.

Within ten minutes he was fast asleep.

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

 

An aristocratic Englishman such as Hartley Fudges was both born and made. Nature had produced a rough draft, social engineering the final one. He had been raised by a series of grim nannies, who potty trained him, bathed him, and kept him clean enough to be turned him over to his parents briefly every day so they could play with him like a newly bought dolly. He was characteristically dressed in lacy outfits decorated with flounces and embroidered hems, as was the custom of the day, and sent to public schools, which, in spite of the name, were really private, expensive, and exclusive, where he was grounded in both Greek and Latin mythology in the original languages. He would attend a university whose lectures were given in Latin. The big accomplishment would be to get in—for once in, getting out with a degree, barring commission of a felony, was virtually assured. His education would not be useful, but ornamental like an epaulette, and would help identify him as a member of the upper class.

That Hartley Fudges was now twenty-three was something of an accomplishment. It was not easy being a child in nineteenth-century England. Infant mortality was staggering and chances were good that you would not live to see your first birthday. Being a child made you smaller and weaker than adults but earned you no special treatment. If you stole anything and were caught, you were hanged in public just like any hardened adult criminal. The modern concept of childhood as a period of innocence did not exist in the eighteenth century or early nineteenth. It was written in the merciless scripture of the day that sin was sin regardless of who committed it, whether an old man or a young child. For example, in 1801 a twelve-year-old boy who stole a silver spoon was hanged. This was not an isolated incident, a case of justice running amok. Instead, it happened regularly. In 1816 a ten-year-old convicted of shoplifting died on the gallows. And in 1831 the same gruesome penalty was applied to a boy found guilty of arson.

To be born in nineteenth-century London was also to be a target for every random hoodlum living in the largest metropolitan pig sty on God's good earth. It was to step across the foyer of heaven and into the main chamber of hell. Every grubby germ, every nihilistic virus, every thuggish parasite, every microscopic blob of infection and disease was out to kill you. Typhoid, cholera, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis stalked your cradle without mercy. The medical profession was next to useless in protecting you. It didn't even believe in the existence of the microbial world or in the mechanism of infection, and its standard treatment for virtually every illness was to open a vein and bleed you. This was as useless as trying to stop the doomed
Titanic
from sinking by flushing one of its toilets.

Partly responsible for the prevalence of infection and disease was the chief method of locomotion throughout the sceptered isle of England, namely the horse.

The horse was an instrument of domesticity, entertainment, militarism, and everyday transportation, and its fecal imprint was evident in every major city and borough throughout the empire. In 1780 some sixty thousand horses clip-clopped daily through the streets of London. By the mid-1800s, eight million horses a year were annually crossing London Bridge. Raw sewage poured into the River Thames, the source of drinking water for the city, from over sixty sewers. Side by side with housing areas existed slaughterhouses and hog pens where daily butchery was done openly. Drains commonly overflowed, plastering the ugly brown stains of sewage scum on the walls of houses and buildings. In some parts of the city, raw sewage was dumped from the windows of houses onto the streets below. You could hire a crier to precede you on the street ringing a bell and crying, "Hold your hand!" Over the entire city a noxious stench from this nastiness hung like a pestilential miasma. Paradoxically enough, the English feared what they desperately needed the most—fresh air and a bath.

Finished with his schooling, Hartley Fudges would face the world as an English gentleman and be identified as such by his elegant manners and his received pronunciation. His classical education concluded with the grand tour, where the young man was sent for a year or so to sample life in other European countries. (Europeans had a taste for periodically slaughtering each other, but between wars they also liked to visit the foreign battlegrounds of earlier bloodletting.)

Hartley had only just returned from his own grand tour. He had done the usual circuit of France, Germany, some of the Balkan countries, ending up in Amsterdam where he spent the final three months of his tour courting a rich young Dutch woman. His wooing was interrupted by a summons from his father, who forced him to come home by cutting off his supply of money, which was and is a time-honored way of curbing the self-indulgent wanderlust of young masters. Suddenly penniless, young Hartley had no choice but to return home.

One month after he arrived in England, his Dutch love sent him a Dear John letter announcing her engagement to a German. Hartley's response was to laugh and hurl her letter into a blazing fireplace. Since returning home, Hartley had spent most of his time wooing the widow Bentley. And now that she'd decided against him, he had no idea what he would do next.