Part I: England

Part I: England

I was born and raised on a little farm outside of London, south of Queen’s Road and a short ways past Rye Lane in Peckham Rye on the east side of the Borough – it’s called Southwark now, isn’t it? – but I daresay the metropolis has overrun that part of the countryside by now. It was many decades ago, back when London was considered the World’s Greatest City. The Industrial Revolution had, by then, taken a firm root in England, a dark wave that lazily rolled toward the tiny cottage that was my home with all the patience of a thing that knew it could not be stopped. Back then, from the loft of the barn and through the eyes of a child, the black cloud that seemed to hang over London was a disconcerting thing indeed, but the city seemed still very far away. Someday in the distant future the farm would be swallowed up in a sea concrete and asphalt, but that I was never bound see.

My family was not wealthy by any means. We owned little and could afford even less, a household that struggled to save enough for new shoes, but we were a happy lot and very near to each other. My dad had inherited the farmstead, which barely covered a dozen or so acres of land, from his father, who had inherited it from his father, and so on and so forth. The house, a little two-story building, with whitewashed clapboard and a crumbly brick chimney, was small and a little haphazard and sometimes a slight crowded with five heads under its roof, but it was restful, and more importantly it was and still is home. A ‘Home Sweet Home’ placard could never have found a more perfect door to call its own. My mum had a modest vegetable garden just to the north, and there was an old red oak tree in the backyard with an ancient swing made from a plank of wood and two lengths of manila rope. The barn and corral were east of the house, across the short expanse of dirt and fine gravel that was the road, and beyond that were the fields.

I was the second of the three children in the household, with a brother come ahead of me and a sister come after. We were each separated by several winters, Michael being five years older than I and Sara being four years younger, but the difference in age did not do a thing to diminish our closeness. Like peas in a pod we were, and I still fondly believe that some of the very best days of my life were spent with my two siblings. Of course we had our little squabbles and our discrepancies as all siblings do, but generally speaking our relationship was a peaceful one, carefree and full of simplicity in all of our childish naivety, when we were content to believe in everything magical and know nothing of the world past the old grey fence at the farm’s borders.

Despite our closeness, however, the three of us were all very different from each other. Sara was shy as a mouse, a freckle-faced little girl who was frightened of spiders, but had it not in her heart to kill one. She was quiet and somewhat lackluster, plain as muslin and faint-hearted, a shining beacon that could draw bullies like moths to a flame. I remember quite frequently Michael and myself giving the neighbour boys a trouncing for making our baby sister cry. She was always cross with us afterward, for she hated our rowdiness and boyish need to settle things with our fists rather than our heads – boys will be boys, as they say. And Michael, he was an emperor on a conquest. His dreams were bigger than his social situation, and though he had much ambition pertaining to his own personal interests, he had little motivation concerning anything else. He was witty and assertive, but he was also extroverted and somewhat selfish, and he possessed the certain arrogance that comes with being the oldest child in a household.

Being the eldest son, Michael was next in line to inherit Dad’s land, though he was dreadfully upset over our parents’ decision not to leave the farm – in an era when factories were quickly rendering the conservative farmer obsolete, Mum and Dad were hard pressed to continue working the land for miniscule earnings, and they often sat alone at the table in the evenings to talk of the prospect of moving to the city where work was plentiful and incomes grander than a farmer’s meager wage – and he grumbled to me when we were young that he found the farm insufferable, all the chores and the physical toil and the getting dirty and the like. Someday he was going to be rich, he told me, and he would have a manor in London, and everyone who was anyone would know who Michael Ravencliffe was.

I never did like the city as a child. It intimidated me. There was too much noise and too many people, and I had heard the most awful stories of young boys and girls who had gotten their hands caught in the machines that they cleaned. London’s streets were dirty and congested, bounded with the featureless faces of crowded townhouses, the air thick and dark with the factories’ haze. It was no place to raise a family, and family comes first, Dad always said. No, the city was no place for me, and I always thought that it was a terrible shame that I had not been born before Michael, for I would have been quite content to inherit the farm from our father when it was my turn.

It took me twenty years to acquire even an inkling of taste for the city, and that was only when I chanced upon Elizabeth Bailey at the Covent Garden in London on April fifteenth of 1801, an accidental meeting that marked the moment when my life would be forever changed for the first of many times to come. It was a Wednesday. Beyond London, the sky was the bluest I have ever seen it, a rich, pale azure that not even the feathery cloud wisps could dull, and there was the faintest of breezes, which smelled vaguely of coming rain and the promise of a grand growing season. Dad had sent Michael and me to the Garden to fetch a few sacks of wheat seed for the fields and a new plow harness for one of our two horses, and of course Mum had given us a list of various foodstuffs, all of which could not be homegrown. It was a typical trip with old Eldin, a good-natured dapple grey Percheron with a love for green apples and fondness for children, tethered to the wagon, treading warily through the cramped streets of London. That is, it was a typical trip until I spotted Elizabeth beyond the bordering colonnades of the Garden.

She gave me pause like no woman ever has. Like the Princess Royal in bourgeoisie garments she was, the living embodiment of an angel divine descended from Heaven and walking the mortal lands with hair like silk spun of gold and skin like porcelain. In looking upon her, I might have sworn that the air was alight and shimmering and dancing around her as though she was followed by her own flock of starlight, and indeed the woman was in possession of a face and an elegance that even the most resolute of men might have died for… I could wax long and poetic about how entirely Elizabeth captivated me, but alas, it is like salt in an open wound. I do not care for speaking of her for any length of time, but I fear this story will not be complete without her mention or the terrible ill feeling that follows.

Had Elizabeth not caught sight of Eldin, whom she was quite taken with – she said that she had not once been upon horseback, not even as a little girl, and that she dearly dreamed of going riding one day – she would have never cast a scruffy country boy like I a second glance, much less approached such a man. She was the youngest daughter of a wealthy merchant banker, and had three older sisters, Victoria being the eldest at twenty-six years, then Charlotte at twenty-two and Caroline at twenty-one. The two latter were quite amiable, but too desperate for a man’s attention, flirtatious and affectionate, but clingy and bothersome, and Victoria was just about as stringent as they come – it was no wonder she was still single – and like the girls’ mother, who had passed away many years earlier, she believed strongly in arranged and respectable, if unhappy, marriages. But the girls’ father was not a stern man. He often insisted that I call him by his given name, which was Bradford, though I never did. He was quite a jolly fellow with a loveable temperament and an incontestable devotion to the joy of his four daughters, and thus he approved unquestioningly when his littlest girl began to show friendly interest in this poor farm boy.

Elizabeth and I spent much time together in the following months. I don’t think that I have gone into London as often in the whole of my life as I had between the April and September of 1801. There was a time when we snuck into the then-new British Museum where we appreciated the exhibits by Sir William Hamilton and Captain James Cook, and spent hours in the library pouring over the hundreds and hundreds of books and printed plays until escorted outside by a watchman. Elizabeth had found it quite amusing that I could scarcely read for my lack of formal education, and she delighted in playfully flaunting her skills. There was another time when she asked if she may join in a game of football with my brother and a few of the neighbour boys, and we all rather laughed at the idea, but decided to humor her. I had never seen a more oddly beautiful sight than she gallivanting about in the mud, barefoot, her skirts up in her hands. She was surprisingly athletic for a pretty city girl who had never kicked a ball in her life. My team lost that day. Elizabeth was not on my team.

We reveled in our respective differences, learned from them, and used them as leverage to bring us closer. I taught her to ride. She taught me to read. We confided in each other all of our deepest, darkest secrets, and shared the workings of our minds until we were utterly confused about who liked what and disliked whom and who said what and when and why. Despite our separation of social standings, I felt Elizabeth was nearer to my heart than even my own family. She fast became my dearest friend in the world.

It was a dreary October Sunday despite the warmth of the autumn sun. Elizabeth was lingering outside the doors of the small church house where my family and I attended mass, a coach waiting for her at the other end of the path, a fine and rather noble-looking pair of roan mares at the front. Victoria’s face was in the little square window, her wide-brimmed hat – it was quite the colourful thing, decorated with reds and golds that rather nicely mimicked the shades of the fall – doing naught to brighten her scowling visage. I fancy she was glaring at nothing and everything in particular, the dirt road, the white picket fence, the well in the churchyard, the fading clapboard, the pigeons in the bell steeple, my rather drab ‘Sunday Best’ which was little more than a pair of worn grey trousers and a white cotton shirt.

My initial delight at being surprised to find Elizabeth at our weathered little church house was quite swiftly quashed when I saw the sadness on her face. How very unhappy she looked that day with the corners of her mouth turned down and a glassy dullness in her usually dazzling hazel eyes. I remember becoming quite upset upon discovering that she had been crying, the shimmering remnants of a pair of fresh tear stains marring the porcelain perfect curves of her cheeks. Oh, but it was simply heartbreaking, so poignant that I wanted no more than to gather her up into my arms and hide her away from the world that would make her so sad. When she spoke, she began with that clichéd ‘I don’t like long goodbyes so…’. She told me that her father had taken a job as manager at one fairly affluent bank in Bristol, and that she and her family were moving to the port city, west across England with more than a hundred miles between us. As I watched her coach roll away, I felt as though I was watching my heart disappear before my eyes.

Without her, it was as though my life had no direction, no purpose, and I quickly faded into a lethargic apathy as I lost the one thing that I had began to look forward to, so utterly miserable as I was. We wrote to each other, certainly, but there is so much that handwriting lacks which human touch can convey. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that my parents and Mr. Bailey were acutely aware of my and Elizabeth’s respective unhappiness in being separated, and I quite suspect them of orchestrating the events of the New Year. They understood, perhaps better than anyone else, that their children were hopelessly in love.

On January second, not a word to precede her arrival, Elizabeth unexpectedly returned to London. She appeared on my snow-covered doorstep in mid-morning, as beautiful as ever in a dark blue gown with white fur trim, and all but fell into my arms, weeping with joy. Dad excused me from chores for that day, and Elizabeth and I spent the remaining precious hours of the day sitting by the fire and talking and laughing until our sides were sore. To that point, January second, 1802, was the best day of my life, but soon that day was replaced by February sixteenth when Elizabeth agreed to marry me, and that day was replaced by March third when we were wed, and that day was replaced by May fourteenth when she announced that we were expecting our first child.

By the time December came to greet us with a chill in the air, Elizabeth and I were six months living in a cozy red-brick house, which had been her father’s wedding gift to us, on the outskirts Bristol. The dwelling was quite a bit larger than my tiny, whitewashed farm cottage, most certainly, and it felt infinitely bigger with only two heads versus five under its roof. With two storeys plus an attic, three bedrooms, and an ostensibly sprawling floor area, it seemed to me as though I had the whole of the universe to stretch and grow and raise my budding family. The sitting room was a particularly wonderful space, what with its warmly toned walls and its ample sunlight and its high ceiling and its well-worn furniture and a dazzling crystal light fixture that hung above the sofa like my own private star. I spent much of my time there, on the chesterfield, dreaming about all that was and would be; my wife and my baby, my present and my future.

And the piano! It was here, in this high-ceilinged sitting room, that I came to embrace the wonder that was music. I had always, always dearly loved music, but I had never played a piano before, and yet, after a quick finger-jaunt across the keys, I was plainly staggered to find that my hands seemed to know without knowing where to go and what to do, how to produce the most delicious of sounds, as though the music had been inexplicably trapped within the confines of my uneducated mind and had become unchained in the simple depression of a key. The sudden wash of freedom was spectacular. Like flicking a switch, twenty-one years and some months of unexpressed musical genius poured from my fingertips, each chord and register tickling every crevice of my brain with a delight so fathomlessly pure that I could never hope to put it into plain words.

Shortly after Elizabeth and I had moved in, I secured employment at a small leathercrafting business, earning one and a half pounds an hour for working hides. It was hard, dirty, smelly work, but such was the kind I had been doing for much of my early life; I had no complaints. I had money enough in my pockets that winter to take my first steps into a jeweler’s shop. Trinkets and charms and ornaments like those that I saw in the store’s displays had previously been far beyond my means – neither Elizabeth nor I had a wedding band to formalize our marriage – and I truly had no clue how to go about buying such things. In looking at the three- and four-digit prices, I felt absolutely lost. I had never spent more than thirty-five cents at one time, let alone two or three hundred pounds. The very notion was ridiculously foreign. All the same, a little gold pendant in the shape of a cross, priced at two hundred ninety-five pounds, caught my eye and it did not want to let go.

Yes, things were moving with almost unbelievable ease. In fact, things were moving with such ease that it had not occurred to me that I had not seen my family since I had left London over six months earlier until I received a letter from Mum begging me to come home for Christmas. ‘My own complete happiness and the home-centered interests which rise up around a man who first finds himself master of his own establishment were sufficient to absorb all my attention.’ That is the most perfect of ways to describe the situation, as detailed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his famous novel The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. I felt wretched for having neglected my parents and siblings. I felt utterly wretched, and I pleaded with Elizabeth, who was by this time a little over seven months pregnant, to spend Christmas in London. She simply laughed, kissed my forehead, and said that it was the least she could do to repay all that I had given up in leaving.

By December eleventh of 1802, I was home again, and to be back in that little farmhouse I was in raptures. Everything was just as I remembered it, the ‘Home Sweet Home’ placard on the door, the old patchwork cushions on the couch, the almost constant aroma of ginger cookies and linen. But there were also some things that had changed. My two most beloved childhood companions seemed completely transformed. I suddenly noticed that Sara was no longer my baby sister, having all but abandoned her mousy girlishness and had grown into a fine woman that was drawing a multitude of would-be Romeos to the door. And Michael, he had become strangely quiet. He had always been a rather loud man, and so this odd silence of his was all but overwhelming, as though my presence stole his voice and averted his eyes. It wasn’t until that time that I felt I was being torn asunder from my brother and sister, both literally and metaphorically, but I could not understand why. I remember that the winter had been uncommonly cold that year.

It was four days later, on the fifteenth, when a blaze broke out in the barn. Annabelle, my sister’s pony, had bumped a lit lantern from where it had carelessly been left balancing precariously on the fence at the edge of her paddock, and it had tumbled to the straw-strewn floor of Annabelle’s pen. Dad, Michael, and I hastened to the burning building, but there was nothing we could have done to quell the blaze. The whole of the barn was in flames. Nevertheless, we three were able to save the majority of the livestock. Annabelle did not make it out with the others. She was still alive when I had finally found my way to her through the maze of flames. I intended to lead her to safety, but in her utter fear she kicked a cloud of burning ash into my eyes. The burst of colour was incredible – first a brilliant white, and then an orange-red, and then sparks of blue and green and purple. It went on and on, a kaleidoscope of shades across the spectrum, and then all at once everything became black.

I later learned that Dad had been the one to pull me from the burning barn. For saving my life, I was thankful to him – alone, in excruciating pain, I would never have been able to find my way out of the building before it burned to the ground and took me with it – but at the same time I was not so grateful, for to evermore live out my remaining years in perpetual darkness was a fate worse than death. But I could not find it in me to blame anyone, not Dad, not Annabelle, and certainly not Sara when she cried into my shirt with such heartfelt apologies for forgetting about the lantern that had started the whole mess. It was no one’s fault.

A doctor visited me only once, a day or so after the fire. Mum later told me that after he had removed the damp blindfold, which covered the burns about my eyes and managed to pull them open despite my agonized protests, all he had done was shake his head. He offered me an anesthetic to ease the pain, and he went on his way. The pain was quite incredible, I remember that all too clearly, and I could do little more than scream in agony around the piece of leather that Mum had forced between my teeth until the laudanum literally knocked me out. Those first few weeks of recovery when I was confined to my bed, relentlessly disoriented and oblivious to the passage of time, doctored by my mother as though I was but a child again, I was thoroughly unhappy. My Christmas was one celebrated in gloom. The little cross that I had bought earlier that month had become an empty gift; I had dearly wanted to see what it looked like on Elizabeth.

On the twelfth of February, 1803, my daughter was born in the same room where I had myself been born. Emily’s entrance into the world had been precisely the occasion I needed to let go of my dejection at being blind. I spent the best part of my time with her, laying on the floor beside her and enticing the most adorable of giggles from that tiny bow mouth, holding those miniature hands which could barely wrap themselves around my fingers, whispering kisses and little promises as she fell asleep against my heart. I could never have imagined the flawless elation that overcame me in holding such a tiny human in my arms. It is, perhaps, the most exquisite feeling in all the world. I would not have minded having another. I would not have minded at all. Nonetheless, you can imagine the immense sadness I felt in understanding that I would never know what my daughter looked like, aside from the brief and unimaginative sketches that my family provided for me. Oh, little Emily looks so much like her dad, they said, black hair and blue eyes. You see, unimaginative.

After nearly two months, I was finally beginning to function like a normal human being again. The pain was gone, though I was quite put out to learn that the burns around my eyes had turned into unsightly scars; mostly, friends and family refrained from making any outright comments, but their silence was worse in its heavy connotation than words said allowed could have been. Even Elizabeth, who was fantastically supportive during my recovery, patient and uncomplaining, her love remaining steadfast and unchanging in the face of my ordeal, seemed hesitant to talk of my eyes and the surrounding scars, even when I expressly asked her if she would tell me what they looked like. ‘Come, Devin. We’ll not speak of such things,’ she said. It was a question I asked only once.

As a Christmas gift, Dad had fashioned a makeshift cane for me, and though it was little more than a polished branch, it was effective in helping me to move about without stumbling or tripping, and I cherished it with all of my heart. In fact, I still have it. It’s hiding in one corner of my home behind the coat rack if I’m not mistaken, though it’s terribly worn with age. Still, the sudden lack of things that I could accomplish alone was disheartening. Though I could traverse the house from corner to corner with little trouble, I could no longer go outdoors without a hand to hold. Though I could trot up and down the stairs, I could no longer ride a horse without someone to lead. I could not read, I could not write, I could barely manage to dress myself. Dad would not let me stoke the fireplace, Mum would not let me help her in the kitchen, Elizabeth would not let me walk about with Emily in my arms. Granted, all of the things they would not let me do were things during which I could harm myself or others, but still, their fussing and nagging hurt deeply. I often felt as though was less than a whole person.

It began the evening of April fourth with a quiet discussion that rapidly escalated into a war of words, and it ended with a resounding clap as Elizabeth’s palm connected with the side of my face. My surprise was so great that any thought of retaliation I might have had instantly dried up and blew away in the hurricane of my disbelief. Emily was crying in her cradle across the room when Elizabeth, sobbing, ordered me to get out. I did, without a word of argument or apology. It had never occurred to me… What if I could never kiss her again? What if I could never touch her again? How would I ever go on?

The tomblike silence of that night fell upon me like a mantle as I lay awake on the sofa, and it stirred my imagination with frightening notions not like it had since I was but a small child. The wall clock seemed terrifyingly loud above my head, each second like a clap of thunder in my mind. Were there voices in the gusts that rattled against the window panes? Were there footsteps in the creaking of the house as it settled? Perhaps there were. Somehow, such a setting is appropriate for what was destined to occur during those awful hours of darkness.

The eerie stillness was broken with a terrible cacophony of shattering glass and splintering wood on the second floor, then the sound of feet, and for a moment I could only listen when Sara shrieked in fear. Mum’s and Dad’s voices were next to cry out in terror. And then Elizabeth screamed, my name a piercing wail for help as it passed her lips, and my heart leapt into my throat as surely as I leapt to my feet. I was determined to dash to her rescue as any man would have, resolute and fearless, but the god-awful, heartrending cries of a dying infant stopped me, and I stood frozen dumb with horror at the bottom of the stairs. It seemed to last for an eternity, the screaming, and when it had finally ended… I have never heard such terrible, heavy silence. It was so unbearably loud that I wanted only to hide in a corner and cover my ears until it was over. I sank down in despair upon the steps, and that is where I stayed until Mrs. Padden, a neighbour lady, found me the next morning, huddled against the wall at the foot of the staircase, trembling and crying.

And therein lays the source of my anguish. I have indeed identified my heartache, but confronting it is a task in itself. It has been barely over two centuries since, and I have yet to find the courage to brazen out the ghosts of my past. Had my family not met the horrible end that they did, perchance it would be a simpler thing to deal with the pain of losing them. Had I been able to save them… Still, so many decades later, there are many things I lament – that I was never given a chance to feel Emily grow, that I could not tell Elizabeth that I was sorry, that I could not hold her one last time, and that I could not have protected them when they so desperately needed me to. I should have died with them, and yet here I remain, bitter and guilt-ridden in my own self-inflicted suffering.

The one thing that continued to baffle me for months on end was that they had never found my brother’s body, for the police carried only five lifeless forms from the house that morning. Now, I had always liked old Mrs. Padden, with her bobbing grey curls and her little round spectacles and her warm, thin-lipped smile. I had always liked her, ever since I was a boy when my siblings and I would spend the afternoon eating shortbread cookies and drinking tea on her back porch, looking out over her garden, counting the golden orioles that came to nibble on the grape jelly and apple slices that she left for them. Before the morning of my family’s deaths, Mrs. Padden was just the friendly old lady down the road, but then, as I stood with a blanket around my shoulders and her comforting arm around my waist, I fast came to appreciate her for being as sturdy as a rock when I needed someone to lean on.

I made my home on her chesterfield for the next four weeks, wrapped up in an afghan with my knees drawn up to my chest, clutching an old throw pillow which had gone somewhat flat with age and passing the days in a state of half-awareness. I cried all the time. I cried when I heard Mrs. Padden singing in the kitchen, I cried when she brought me chicken soup and ginger cookies, I cried when she said good morning, I cried when I heard those golden orioles outside the window, I cried when I thought of the flowers in her garden. I cried so much and over such trivial things that I could have sworn the throw pillow was becoming heavy with my tears, that my eyes hurt like they were burning again, that my chest ached with the slightest of sobs and my stomach churned with the need to be sick. I was so unhappy. I was so dreadfully unhappy.

The first of May. It was a Sunday, one that I suffered alone and in silence, curled up in the armchair beside the front window in Mrs. Padden’s sitting room, listening to the rain patter softly upon the land beyond the pane. It was the rare kind of rain that fell plumb without the wind to drive it, the kind that laid a melancholy hush upon the world and steeped the soul in a heavy sorrow as surely as it soaked the earth. ‘It is the light at the end of the tunnel as it might be seen by him looking out somberly at the shower, the picture of hope a dying man might turn away from, realizing that hope is something else, something concrete you can’t have.’ John Ashbery, 1927, from Houseboat Days. Call me an emotional old sod, but I’ve never much cared for the rain. What a funny thing for an Englishman to say…

Then, with the wall clock tick-tocking loudly in the stillness of Mrs. Padden’s empty house, with my mother’s rosary lying untouched and unwanted upon the end table, with only my memories for company and the silence for comfort, I could not help but feel… forgotten. Often I had been assured since their deaths that my loving parents and dear sister, my beautiful Elizabeth and my sweet Emily had all been taken to Heaven, each in the arms of an angel, to rest for all eternity in the everlasting joy and divine light of God’s own domain, and yet… in the darkness I alone remained. What had I done to deserve this immeasurable cruelty? Hadn’t I said my hundred and fifty Hail Marys, my hundred and fifty Pater Nosters? Hadn’t I gone to mass every Sunday? Hadn’t I prayed at every meal and every night before bed? What had I done wrong? Why had God left me?

A short while after Mrs. Padden returned from church, there came a knock at the door, and whose voice but Mr. Bailey’s reached my ears. Oh, but how I wished that I could simply sink away into the chair at that moment, just melt into the rough corduroy fabric and disappear without trace, but I could do little more than pull my knees up to my chest and bury my face into my throw pillow. How could I ever so much as dare to face him? How could I ever apologize for the terrible things that happened? Words would never be enough. Tears would never be enough. But Mr. Bailey, gentle and understanding Mr. Bailey, drew me up from the chair and into an embrace that was so heavy with forgiveness and sympathy that I simply burst into tears and wept upon his shoulder until I was verily swooning with exhaustion.

It was painfully obvious to me, despite my lack of sight, that he was forcing every smile and every chipper word as he spoke to me later that afternoon. I think he knew that I was desperately, desperately in need of someone strong and sensible to lean on through this troubling time. As compassionate as ever, he insisted that I stay with him in Bristol – he had more than enough room for me in his five-bedroom home – and I am thankful to the depths of my heart for his kindness, but I am saddened to say that his efforts were for naught. My dreams were haunted by the horrifying screams of a dying infant. Often-times I woke in the middle of a restless night, crying hysterically with my arms outstretched for my little Emily only to find that she was not there, and still her terrified voice filled my head, so loud, so real that it verily drove me to madness. Hopelessly and incessantly depressed, I drank myself to the bottom of every bottle that I could find within Bristol’s borders in optimism that as my senses dulled so would my wretched emotions, but that glorious respite never came.

The night of May nineteenth was warm, as is common during the summer, and was made warmer by the six or so pints of lager and the bottle of whiskey swimming around in my stomach. I had drank enough that evening to fill my usually lucid memory with a fog which parted only rarely to give me brief glimpses of the bloody fool I was making out of myself, singing at the top of my lungs and clapping my hands off rhythm, laughing loudly and making bawdy comments and kissing the waitress. For all my love of the drink, I hate it terribly, for it steals from me all respectability and restraint, but oh, how happy I am, if only for a short time. It is nice to be able to laugh from time to time.

It was very early in the morning, and old William Wright, the owner and barkeeper of the Apple Tree on Broadmead, escorted me out of his pub and down the front steps, tutting softly under his breath, but I was so dreadfully inebriated that I could hardly stand on my own let alone stumble home, and so I sat on the curb. I must have fallen asleep at one point, because I woke feeling nauseous, and was sick in the gutter. In the shuddering relief that followed in the wake of my flip-flopping stomach, that disgustingly wonderful feeling of calm when you simply seem to hang on the edge of awareness, I heard the strangest thing.

Michael.

When my half-drowned mind finally caught up with the sound of his voice, I was utterly ecstatic. I was so very happy that I could have cried. In those first moments of delirious joy, it was as though I had lost all ability to speak and understand perfect English, for I was screeching and blubbering like a man insane, and I couldn’t even begin to comprehend the words that were leaving Michael’s mouth. I didn’t care. My brother was alive. I wasn’t alone anymore. But then, once my floundering intellect caught back up with my euphoria, I realized with almost painful confusion that something was dreadfully wrong. His voice, it was like ice, harsh and cold, jagged-edged, devoid of that warm, witty humor that was distinctly Michael. There was no Michael in the frigid sound that met my ears, and the things he said, they chilled me to my soul.

He told me how pathetic I looked, a drunken blind man who had no will left to live. He said how I should beg him to end my misery, to send me to the ground where I could be with Elizabeth and Emily. He stopped and contradicted himself then, and declared loudly and with a vigor I had not heard in him since before I had told him of my engagement to Elizabeth, ‘But wait! That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want to be with your darling wife and your precious, little Emily, don’t you?’ I’ll be honest. I was frightened. If I said no, I was lying, but I was afraid that if I said yes, he would kill me. However, Michael never gave me a chance to answer.

He went on to say that I had been undeserving of a woman of Elizabeth’s perfection, what with my lack of worldly ambition and excessive comfort in living in so-called squalor. He insisted that I could have never provided for her, given her what she needed, what she wanted, not like he could have. Elizabeth, he said, should have belonged to him, for she was the stairway to his expensive dreams, a wealthy woman who possessed all the means to push him to the top, and Emily should have been born of his blood, not mine. ‘But you flew your own kite,’ he said, his voice all but dripping with venom. ‘Brainpower, little brother. You were always the bright one, and sweet Elizabeth jumped at the one thing that I could never beat you at. And that’s why I took her from you.’

Had he no compassion? Had he no shame that he could speak such vile words and not care for the tearing of my heart? How could he? Where had my brother gone to be replaced by this man, this contemptible creature? His words rocked me right to the core, terrified me and humiliated me and hurt me like no words ever before them or after. For months after we met Elizabeth at the Garden we had randomly joked about whom she fancied more, and I had always thought it was just that – a joke. It had now been made painfully clear.

Michael had been in love with her.

When the initial terror had finally subsided, I was left only with rage, raw, seething and thundering rage. My brother. My own flesh and blood. He had taken everything from me. Everything! And I hated him. I hated him with every atom in my body, right to the very core, so that I thought I might burst into angry flames with the loathing that was burning at my insides. In a fury I lashed out at him. True to my rough-and-tumble country blood, I had always been a fighter, but that was the first time in my life that I had not felt my fist connect with where I had intended it to, and as hard as I tried I kept missing. Michael was nowhere and everywhere all at once, like a ghost. He laughed at me when I stumbled and fell down upon the sidewalk, thoroughly and utterly confused.

‘You’re wasting your time, little brother. You’re not trying to catch a human anymore. I finally have a handhold on my dreams, and our family had been just the bargaining chip that I needed,’ he said, and though I could not see him, I knew that he was smiling. ‘One must pay a hefty price for being reborn… as a vampire.’

That shocked me in such a way that I could have sworn my heart had stopped beating, and I imagined I would die right there on the sidewalk. Had I not already sat down, I would have fallen down, for my legs had gone weak and my head had began to feel faint. I was a god-fearing man, a practicing Christian in an era when stories of vampires and other such demons were running rampant throughout Europe, and I believed all too seriously in the existence of such fiends. The thought of my own brother selling his family’s souls to become such a thing had me instinctively crossing myself.

Cackling aloud, Michael left me then. Whether or not I wished it, my decision had already been made for me. Be it was a rash choice, settled upon in an ill and overwhelmed state of mind, I cared little. I was going to kill him. Unfortunately, I was at a loss for how to carry on with this new situation. Michael was a vampire, a servant of Lucifer, and he was blessed with unholy powers that I could not hope to match alone, unarmed, and uneducated. I told my story at churches across the countryside, but the priests turned me away with cries of blaspheme. I sought out hunters and so-called experts on the subject, but I had no money with which to pay them. I fast became the Fool of Bristol, a man so tormented by the loss of his wife and daughter that he had gone stark raving mad. Vampires. Codswallop.

For months, I hid behind the brick walls of Mr. Bailey’s home, locked up in my second-storey bedroom with the shades drawn and the comforters pulled up over my head, feeling every inch as insane as the whole of the city believed me to be. I was plagued by paranoia, consumed by terrifying notions of demons and evil things lurking about in the shadows, afraid to sleep and yet afraid to crawl out from under the covers lest the monsters under my bed seize my ankles and drag me down into their eternal, nightmarish existence. Elizabeth’s sisters came to treat me with open and unrestrained loathing, for they felt I had brought indignity and humiliation upon the respectability of their family, a pockmark on their and their father’s good name. I can’t say I blame them; the rumors and otherwise spiteful gossip convinced even me that I was just a fool of a man driven to madness by his own demented imaginings.

It was the seventeenth of July, a quiet Sunday despite the miserable howling of my brain. I had sat upon the edge of my bed since sometime after five o’clock in the morning, silently nursing a headache and a churning stomach, a three-quarters-empty bottle of vodka in my hand as I listened with careful interest to the slow awakening of the house. Victoria was the first to rouse from her sleep, her bedroom door swinging open on well-oiled hinges shortly before six o’clock, then clicking shut again, those angry-sounding heels snapping loudly upon the hardwood floor as she passed my room and descended the stairs. Mr. Bailey was the next to patter past my doorway, his sock feet padding softly but with that cumbersome thump indicative of a heavier frame. And then Charlotte, who was barely a swish of air and linen ghosting through the hall if not for her fist pounding three times on Caroline’s door, followed by a braying command to get out of bed and get ready to go to church.

They never asked me to go with them anymore. I spent my Sundays alone, knelt at the bedside with my mother’s rosary hanging between my palms, but not a psalm nor a prayer could I speak. Michael’s vile declaration – a vampire, a servant of Lucifer! – had stripped me of my faith, has been the straw to break the camel’s back; I had nothing left to say to the god that had abandoned me so completely.

Caroline did not wake until shortly before seven o’clock, a wonder considering the volume of Victoria’s voice at the foot of the stairs, screeching at her younger sister to hurry lest they be late for mass. The slow, drowsy movement of her comparatively small body rustled in the bed sheets, a sleepy sigh passing her lips, followed by a satisfied moan as she stretched out delightfully aching limbs. If you are reading this and thinking frantically to yourself, ‘Oh, no! He didn’t!’ Well… I did. ‘For all my love of the drink, I hate it terribly, for it steals from me all respectability and restraint.’ Sleeping with Elizabeth’s sister is a prime example of the power alcohol has to rid me of my morals.

When Caroline left me, she left me in a state of overwhelming sadness, one that had been slowly gathering toward its zenith since I woke that morning with an aching belly. Upon the quiet click of the closing door, the tears came, a veritable torrent of tears accompanied by loud, gut-wrenching sobs. Oh, how terrible I felt, the absolute lowest of the lowest of men. I was sick with shame over what I had done. Elizabeth’s room… Elizabeth’s bed… There was nothing I could say, nothing I could do to atone for this one unforgivable failing of mine. Burning the sheets would not make me forget. Leaving the room would not make me forget. Confessing my sins would not make me forget. Always, I would hear my own voice in my head, crying Caroline’s name in a moment of ecstasy.

By the time Mr. Bailey and his daughters returned from Sunday mass, my bags were already packed and waiting at the door. I was slumped miserably in an overstuffed armchair in the sitting room, with one arm cradling my top hat, the other my cane, picking at my nails in time with the ticking of the clock. I was clean-shaven for the first time in weeks, and I had tied my then shoulder-length hair back with a ribbon. I had polished my shoes and donned my Sunday Finest and, for the first time since Elizabeth’s death, I had fastened her little golden cross about my neck, determined never to remove it, its weight a constant reminder of the woman I had loved and lost.

Mr. Bailey, who I believe was as convinced as every other human being in Bristol that I was stark raving mad but refused to admit it aloud, hopped over my luggage, put his hand under my arm, and gently raised me from my chair. “Devin, my boy, I think you ought to go back to bed,” he said, his voice soft, like a father consoling his child, but I removed his palm from my sleeve. I had already called the carriage; I would be leaving as soon as it came around to the front. Mr. Bailey sounded stricken, his daughters oddly silent until Victoria broke in with a hasty, “Let him go, Father. He’s caused naught but trouble here anyway. We’ll be better off the further away he is.” The words stung as surely as I expected them to, but I would not give Victoria the pleasure of seeing my pain. The carriage stopped at the bottom of the steps; I gathered up my luggage and left without so much as a goodbye.

Two days later, the sounds of London filled my ears. The whole of the world lay open before me in the scent of the wind on the River Thames, an endless sprawling of opportunity, a chance to shed the past and erase my pain. A clean slate. A new start. Ah, London. The city that I had hated as a child had never felt so welcoming as it did then, standing at the West India Docks, suitcase and cane in hand, a one-way ticket to Calais, France in my pocket.