The Star of the Sea (39 page)

‘That never happened,’ cried the cripple, and then: ‘Do I look like a man with a farm of land?’

‘You were put off the land you stole by your decent neighbours and the Liable Boys of Galway, more luck to them,’ insisted the first. ‘And it did happen. For I used to sell kale with my “oldfellow” in Clifden. So didn’t I hear all about it in the town! Land robber! Murderer! Priest hater! Judas!’

‘That is not me. You have the wrong man, I swear it.’

It was only by dint of self and Leeson producing our firearms that utter calamity was avoided and even then I had occasion to fear for my own life as we contrived to take the miserable cripple out of that place.

He is at present lodged in the lock-up by reason of the threats against him. And whatever transgressions may lie in his past – as do lie in the pasts of all men and women, or at least in their hearts and the profundities of their consciences – I pray none will put their hand on that poor man again; for his life will be ended on this ship if they do.

I believe that is all I have to say.

This day I met with Evil’s footman, whose name is Shaymus Meadowes.

If I seed my gal talking to another chap I’d fetch her sich a punch of the nose as should plaguy
¹
quick stop the whole business. The gals – it was a rum thing now [I] come to think on it – axully liked a feller for walloping them. As long as the bruises hurted, she was always thinking on the cove as gived ’em her … When the gal is in the family way, the lads mostly sends them to the workhouse to lay in, and only goes sometimes to take them a bit of tea and shugger. I’ve often heerd the boys boasting of having ruined gals – for all the world as if they was the finest noblemen in the land.

London street trader to the journalist Henry Mayhew Name unknown

¹
‘Plaguy’: a slang abbreviation of ‘plaguily’; i.e., as quickly and violently as a plague. – GGD

C
ONTAINING FRANKEST AND
NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED R
EVELATIONS OF
L
ORD
K
INGSCOURT’S
SECRET T
IMES; CERTAIN OF HIS
H
ABITS AND HIDDEN
A
SPECTS; HIS
N
IGHTLY VISITS TO CERTAIN
E
STABLISHMENTS WHICH WERE BETTER
NOT FREQUENTED BY
G
ENTLEMEN
.

‘Those whose ambitions exceed their abilities are fated for disappointment, at least until they grow up. Those without ambition are also sentenced. A man with no enterprise is lost…

David Merridith, letter to the
Spectator
(7 July 1840) on the subject of ‘Crime in London’.

Emily and Natasha Merridith had risked their father’s rage by travelling to London for their brother’s wedding. Lord Kingscourt’s absence had been explained away by a fortuitous coincidence. The coronation of Queen Victoria was taking place the same morning and every member of the House of Lords had been commanded to attend the ceremony. Laura’s parents had quite understood. In fact they had seemed rather proud of the fact and her father made a point of mentioning it in his speech. ‘The Earl, you will all know, is detained elsewhere.’

John Markham proved a most generous benefactor. His wedding gift was a five-and-a-half-year lease on a townhouse on Tite Street in the fashionable borough of Chelsea. Nothing less than
the very best was good enough for his beloved only daughter and her husband. For all the time the newly-weds spent in London they did not need eighteen rooms and a coach-house in Chelsea, but Mr Markham insisted that was not the point. Their home would be ready when they wanted it.

For two years they travelled, the Viscount and his bride, to Paris, Rome, Greece, Florence, further afield to Turkey and Egypt, collecting bibelots and works of art wherever they went. Venice became a home away from home; they lived there in a suite at the Palazzo Gritti through the bitter winter of 1839, and it was there that their first son was born, in December of that year. Friends from London came out to visit. There were trips down to Amalfi and north to the lakes. Lady Kingscourt had a tasteful eye and an expert’s knowledge, an imperturbable eye for a bargain. She knew about paintings, sculptures, books. She had eleven thousand guineas per annum from her family. She bought a lot of books.

Morocco, Tangier and Constantinople were visited; Athens again; a summer in Biarritz. When they ran out of destinations they drifted back to London, moved into their large and comfortable house. It was immediately remodelled to Her Ladyship’s design, with the latest fine wallpapers and gilded mouldings. Paintings were hung; objects put on display; a Renaissance fresco she had purchased in Fiesole was installed on the ceiling of their bedroom for a time, and then dismantled and moved to the study. (Its leering devils and writhing sinners tended to worsen her husband’s nightmares.) A regiment of servants was soon employed to attend to the Merridiths and their treasures. Experts from the National Gallery came to make sketches. The Keeper of the Queen’s Paintings wrote an article on the collection. Laura began to host her celebrated evenings.

Poets and essayists and novelists and critics would turn up in gangs on a Wednesday night: usually hungry and always late. They stood around the buffet like gnu at a waterhole. Money, or the lack of it, was their favoured theme, not beauty or art or mysterious lakes. The guest list was a roll call of belletristic London. To be invited to the Merridiths’ was to know you had arrived. G. H. Lewes of
Fraser’s Magazine
, Thomas Carlyle, the journalist Mayhew, Tennyson, Boucicault, the publisher Newby; even the famous and envied Mr Dickens who sat in a corner looking
morbidly depressed, biting his fingernails when he thought nobody was looking. A cartoon was published in
Punch
magazine of two writerly gentlemen in turbans and smoking jackets stabbing each other with bloodstained pens. The caption said a lot about Laura’s careful efforts: ‘By Jove or by Allah! Only one invitation to Lady Kingscourt’s “evening” has come. Enough to make an Etonian behave as an Afghani.’

Laura bought the original and had it mounted and framed. She hung it beside the mirror in the downstairs guest lavatory, which carefully chosen location offered several benefits. Most callers would see it at least once in the course of any evening, but they would think her too fashionable to care about it much. If you cared you would have hung it in the hall or the drawing room: the places where the Viscount’s Connemara drawings were hung. The Viscountess understood the nature of style.

For a while they enjoyed a certain quiet happiness, an everyday contentment which was not often questioned. Their son was a beautiful baby, pink and strong; the kind who causes policemen to stop on the pavement and coo into perambulators like elderly nuns. But quite soon after the new family returned to London from Italy, something strange had begun to happen to David Merridith.

A clawing unease crept into his days; the restlessness and anxiety he had known as a child. Marrying Laura Markham had driven it away, but
being
married was somehow allowing it to return. He began to feel dissatisfied, was prone to depressions. People gradually noticed he was losing weight. The sleeplessness that had plagued him since boyhood worsened. The greater the congratulations for his enviable existence, the more obscurely discontented the Viscount became.

Part of it was boredom, the sheer lack of purpose. The life of a gentleman of leisure did not suit him, it made him feel useless and vaguely ungrateful: the ingratitude making the uselessness sharper. His days were entirely empty of anything important. He would fill them up with plans to improve himself: to read all of Pliny in chronological order, to learn ancient Greek or take up some pastime; to do something good for the poor, perhaps. He visited infirmaries, joined philanthropic committees, wrote a lot of letters to newspaper editors. But the committees never seemed to get anything done and
neither did the endless and repetitious letters. The making of plans consumed much of his time, but there never seemed to be time to follow any of them through. His journals for those years reveal innumerable beginnings: long walks in the park; unfinished books; abandoned projects; unrealised designs. A life of wishing the days away. Waiting, perhaps, for his future to start.

His wife was a good woman; beautiful, gentle, with a gift for joy which he had often found inspiring. Given the choice she would rather be happy, and with a childhood like Merridith’s that was something attractive. Their house was elegant, their son happy and healthy. Neat as a uniform laid out on a bed, the life of David Kingscourt of Carna; but often he felt their marriage was a kind of masquerade. They didn’t converse as much as they used to; when they did, the subject was always their child. The boy’s father became contentious, more ardent than before. He found himself becoming a man he disliked: correcting the servants on matters of grammar, picking fights with waiters, with guests at the house. Views he had never held he began to assert furiously. Soon no evening was complete without a disagreement.

They broke with some of their long-time friends. He was advised by his physician to stop drinking, and did so for a while.

The couples comprising their innermost circle were also new parents; crazed by parenting. As happily, devotedly besotted by their children as Laura was by Jonathan, and as Merridith was not. At dinner tables and in opera boxes he would find himself grinning at the latest citation of neonate genius, the heartiness of appetites, the firmness of stools, while secretly wishing he was anywhere else. He did not feel superior: rather more of a failure. How marvellous to be a father as befuddled as that; drunk on the wine of paternal love. To scrutinise the contents of your progeny’s diapers like a Roman soothsayer pronouncing on the runes. He loved his boy but he could not love him that much. Often, in shameful fact, he found fatherhood a millstone. The noise of nannies clattering through the beautiful house had an irritating tendency to interfere with his plans.

He came to have an image of Laura and himself as actors in a play somebody else had written. There was courtesy in the text, it was mannered and restrained. A critic might have given an admiring notice. She spoke her lines; he spoke his own; rarely did either player
interrupt or fluff the script. But it didn’t feel like an actual marriage. Rather it came to seem like living on a stage set and wondering whether the audience was really out there past the limelight; and if it wasn’t, exactly whom the performance was for.