A Victorian Gent (The Making of a Man Series, Book 1) Read online

  Book One: The Making

  of a Man Series

  Digital edition published in 2015 by

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  A Victorian Gent

  Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Wareham

  All Rights Reserved

  Contents:

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  By the Same Author

  Introduction

  A Victorian Gent: Naïve Dick Burke is hoodwinked into marrying a man-hungry aristocrat’s daughter who just seven months later produces a son! It’s the start of a long humiliation that sees Dick flee to America as the Civil War looms. Siding with the Union, the bloody conflict could be the making or the breaking of him, as could his alliance with Elizabeth, an attractive and feisty American businesswoman.

  Author’s Note: I have written and punctuated A Victorian Gent in a style reflecting English usage in novels of the period, when typically, sentences were much longer than they are in modern English. Editor’s Note: Andrew’s book was written, produced and edited in the UK where some of the spellings and word usage vary slightly from U.S. English.

  Attention Kindle Unlimited subscribers: There are currently no plans to include the other books of this series in Kindle Unlimited.

  Book One: The Making

  of a Man Series

  Chapter One

  An Unexpected Delivery

  The “Bugger, sod, damn and blow it!”

  Richard Burke slowed for breath, aware that the outburst, long though it might be on passion, lacked authority. He had never learned how to swear and seemed to have no natural talent for blasphemy or obscenity. He pressed on, urging the nag in the doctor's gig to greater speed and reflecting that he lacked a natural talent for most things, including, it would seem, for fathering his own child.

  He turned down the lane, stopping to open the gate into the park and following the driveway across to ‘Burke’s’. He had run from his own house, had not stopped in the half hour since first fleeing in revulsion at the sight of his roaring blond-haired first-born, fresh from his bride’s womb. It was near midnight but the side-door was always unlocked, access for cook who lived in a cottage with her gardener husband. His rage took him up the stairs two and three at a time towards his father’s study.

  The Old Man would still be up, he napped a couple of hours at night, the same of an afternoon, never more. He would be half-drunk, or would have one of the maids stripped off in there with him – Dick remembered walking in on such before, him totally innocent; that had brought one of many back-handers down on him.

  There was yellow light under the far door. Dick ran silently down the passageway, the thick scarlet Turkey muffling his boots. He pushed the heavy timber open, walked in without invitation or salute.

  “What do you want, boy?” his father growled, looking up from a neatly ordered stack of papers at his desk, reaching for a glass of gin-and-water. “Oh! Calved down, ‘as she? What was it?”

  “A boy, Father! Blond-haired and big built, a baby after seven months of marriage and weighing ten pounds, Father! This was in her when we married – it is none of my making!”

  Dick almost wept with his last words, the humiliation raw in him. His father laughed uproariously, tipsy at this hour.

  “Well, Dicky-dido!” The insulting, obscene, nickname had been his father’s favourite for years. “So what? Did you think Lord Carteret would marry his first-born to a merchant’s get if he could find any better? At two week’s notice? Don’t be a fool, boy!”

  “But… she’s a whore!”

  “No, not her, my son, never took a penny in ‘er life. She just gives it away!”

  His father had always been arrogant, contemptuous of anything scandalous – it seemed utterly out of character that he should take this outrage to decency into his family.

  “You’ll be made a baronet in two years, as soon as you’re of age, that’s why, you bloody young fool! Carteret ‘as the influence that will add to my money, and your son might get to be a lord. Think what that will do for the firm!”

  Burke was a dealer in tallow, soap and hides, had made a hundred thousand before branching out and dipping his finger in many another man’s pies. He would be worth a quarter of a million in less than another ten years, he had boasted.

  “But, he is not my son, Father, he is not a Burke,” Dick weakly protested.

  “The next one will be, so long as you’re man enough to keep ‘er at ‘ome. As for this one, well… childhood is a chancy time, accidents ‘appen, sickness strikes – like as not ‘e won’t grow up!”

  The implication sank in slowly, shocked Dick – he had vaguely thought of setting his wife aside, getting the abominable child out of his sight, but not murder. He avoided the question.

  “You knew she was loose, Father?”

  “God, boy, the whole county’s known that since she was twelve! She was playing mothers and fathers with the stable lads – all six of them – before she was 'alf grown. Carteret’s grateful to ‘ave got ‘er off ‘is ‘ands at all, let alone with so little scandal – ‘e ‘alf-expected ‘er to set up shop for the whalers in the main square in Poole!”

  “You rotten bastard!” Dick remembered that word, it seemed apt. “You knew what she was and dumped her on me so you could make more money!”

  “Mind your tongue, Dicky-dido! If you’d been ‘alf a man you’d ‘ave told me to go to ‘ell before taking that slut on. Don’t blame me because you’re a milksop!”

  “You piece of shit! How could I know what she was? How could I know you would do that to me? But one thing I will tell you, Old Man, milksop or not, you will make no profit from this. I’m going! You can’t make a baronet of a man you can’t find!”

  “You? Go? Where to? What would you live on? You ain’t never earned a penny in your life, nor you don’t know ‘ow to!”

  “I could. Anyway, you haven’t given me my quarter’s allowance yet.”

  “I’m not bloody likely to, neither!”

  “That’s right! Just like the Jew you are! They were right when they said at school that your name was more likely Baruchstein than Burke!”

  Possibly the insult touched too sensitive a nerve; Burke exploded out of his chair, swung round-armed at his son. Dick ducked, jumped to one side, watched aghast as his unsteady father stumbled and fell head first.

  The Old Man lay unmoving; Dick was sure he was dead. He looked around for the bell-pull, opened his mouth to call for help.

  The Old
Man’s keys were in plain sight on the desk.

  The prone figure groaned, mumbled, moved a little, slumped back, face down on the rug, dribbling into the scarlet wools. His breathing was thick, heavy, dragging; Dick knelt down, heaved him onto his side so he could get his breath. His cheeks were as scarlet as the carpet, his face seemed twisted; his left arm and leg twitched, the right side was still; his mouth drooped at the corner.

  One eye opened and the Old Man tried to move, thrashed feebly, fell back again, half-paralysed, unable as yet to lift himself. His physical power was broken, the great, muscular body destroyed.

  “How are the mighty fallen!”

  Dick chuckled, a most unchristian satisfaction filling him to see his enemy so low, literally at his feet, and all by his own actions. Dick need feel no guilt, he was innocent of his father’s blood – fit, healthy and destitute.

  “I am your heir – you said you would make a man of me so that I could be. You ain’t dead yet, but you will be, and your money will be mine!”

  His mood changed, fell back into self-disgust.

  “Dirty money! Keep it! See if it can make you a whole man again!”

  He turned away, reached for the door.

  “Sixpence in my pocket. The tanner I kept.”

  A dinner of bread and cheese cost tuppence, and would not fill the powerful body he now carried.

  “You owe me, you old Jew! And you’re finished! It’s mine, or it will be soon – call it an advance, Old Man. Call it what you want – you’re finished!”

  He picked up the wallet, extracted the short, thick-barrelled key with the intricate wards, the one that opened the strong-box in the cupboard in the far corner. “You’re finished,” he repeated, “but I’m not.”

  The box opened quickly, showed an upper wooden tray grooved along its length to take four rows of sovereigns, two hundred of them. Under the tray was a grey wash-leather bag with a draw-string, and a roll of notes neatly tied with a waxed thread. Gold and paper alike went into the purse, double knotted and into an inside pocket, the box closed and tidily put away, the key back where it belonged. He ran down the back stairs to the stable yard, banged on the groom’s door.

  “Chilvers, get a saddle onto a good horse. Now!”

  Godbegot Chilvers was barely a year younger than Dick, his bastard half-brother, and obeyed without question. He was a good horseman but he was deeply stupid, little more than a simpleton, did not dream of asking questions.

  “Thunder be well set up for a gallop, sir. Do ‘ee want ‘er?”

  Thunder was a strong five year old, a long way from the placid nags on which he had learned equitation, but he was the Old Man’s pride and joy – it was worth the risk, and he was fairly sure he could handle him.

  “Put him up. Pistols, too.”

  Godbegot ran.

  Highwaymen or footpads were uncommon, especially in rural Dorset, but he would hate to lose the money he had come by – he chuckled to himself, surprised to discover that he could still laugh.

  The Newbury road ran north east just a few miles from Burke’s and Dick was cantering along it inside the hour.

  He breakfasted in a small inn a couple of miles south of Newbury, ate a heavy meal but drank sparingly of the small beer that was all they had. He opened the purse, needed the money to pay his shot.

  There were twenty notes, sixteen at one hundred each and four for fifty; the strongbox had contained two thousands, an immense sum, kept against emergency, obviously, possibly a descent of law officers? The notes were drawn on a variety of banks, mostly from Bristol and London, but one from Poole and another from Winchester. Although Dick was quite unaware of the fact, this would make him far less easy to trace; eighteen hundreds of notes on the one bank surfacing in the same town over a period of time would be conspicuous, but the notes of a dozen different banks would be lost in the flow of trade, as no doubt his father had calculated.

  The notes gave him his freedom – invested, their income would bring in twice as much as a labourer earned, would put a roof over his head, food in his belly, though leaving little for books or life’s elegancies. Alternatively, he could use them for something, though he was not in any way sure what, but something might turn up… after the way his life had been destroyed in the past twelvemonth, anything was possible. There were no certainties, not any more – no right, no wrong; no good, no bad; just living, if he could be bothered.

  - - - - o - - - -

  Dick had been sat in his room when the letter from his father came. As senior boy in the school he was entitled to the single bedroom in the attic where the servants’ quarters had been before Mr Bunnett had turned his residence into an ‘Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen’. The other fourteen shared three larger rooms, six, five and three in rank of seniority, determined by the fees their parents were able to pay. The boys ranged in age from eight to eighteen and in intelligence from semi-moronic to Dick’s near-brilliance.

  He reluctantly put aside the Concordance he was consulting to aid his Divinity studies; God was far more rewarding than his father, but not noticeably more powerful. He had never received a letter before, was consequently suspicious of this one – anything from his father had to be bad news.

  He read the letter in growing puzzlement, reread it, dwelling on its sentences one by one but failing to extract any great significance from them. Father had moved house; they no longer dwelt in Blandford but in a mansion in the countryside some ten miles northeast. He had ‘snapped up’ a place – house and deer park – and had renamed it ‘Burke’s’; somewhat arrogant, that, but not ill-sounding, ‘Mr Burke of Burke’s’ had a ring to it. When he came home it would be to Burke’s – well, that was fairly obvious, one might have supposed. There were no greetings or enquiries after his health and progress, but he had expected none; his father had never cared for him, he knew that full well.

  He put the letter away, returned to more congenial reading.

  Next day all was as normal, the familiar, enjoyable unchanging round that had taken up his last twelve years. A slice of bread and butter and a cup of tea, all that his short, spare frame demanded of a morning, served to him at table by one of the junior boys, then four hours of elegant translation, hunched over his desk and working towards the end of his Homer. One day he would produce something for the printing press – after Oxford, when his touch was light enough and certain; Father could pay for a thousand copies of an Iliad to be printed, with his son’s name as translator discreetly shown – he would surely be proud of that. Divinity followed in the afternoon, Mr Bunnett’s unbeneficed brother, the Reverend, sat at the high desk, fat and fifty and smiling benevolently.

  All of the boys congregated in the single classroom, working, or struggling, at the same subject, though at greatly varying levels. Dick sat at the front, sublimely ignoring the others, lost in his writing, coming out of his abstraction only when the Reverend administered a beating, a weekly occurrence and always a source of amusement to almost all of the class. The Reverend used a thick ruler some thirty inches in length, his target the bare bottom of one of the younger boys; he was always bright red in the face and breathing very heavily when he had laid on his half dozen quite gentle strokes. Manvers said he had lost his curacy because of doing that to choirboys, years back, but Dick had not understood why and had preferred not to display his ignorance by asking questions.

  Twice a week the boys were taken out of the classroom to ride, equitation being a necessary art for a gentleman to master, Mr Bunnett said, and on Saturday afternoon they danced, equally necessary. Other than that Mr Bunnett’s only concern was ‘deportment’, by which he meant speech – no rustic ‘arrs’ or elusive aitches for his young men, they should all have mastery of the new accent that distinguished the gentry from the hoi polloi.

  Dick had loved his life at school ever since being dumped there a week after his mother had died, himself six years old and far the youngest of the boys. He had been home twice a year ever since for a few weeks in w
hich he crept about the house in terror of his huge, unforgiving father, unable to comprehend what he had done wrong, or how, but knowing that he must have.

  Whenever he was at home he found that he hated and feared his father, and despised himself for his weakness, but at school he could forget him. His only memories there were of his mother, of her loud laughter and general noise and sudden outbursts of affection. He supposed his mother had been ill for a long time, for she had often fallen over or gone to sleep suddenly; occasionally she had vomited.

  It was a card evening, one of the three nights a week when two of the boys, Dick always one, played a couple of hours of whist with the Bunnetts. It was another genteel accomplishment, it seemed, and one that Dick found a keen enjoyment in – he played an exact, scientific game, using his strong memory and ability to quickly estimate the odds to come out a winner more often than not. The brothers seemed uneasy, brought the play to an end just after nine o’clock, dismissing the fourth but bidding Dick stay. The Reverend busied himself with his pipe whileamong his elder brother took snuff, sneezing in a very timid, schoolmasterish fashion and making a performance of blowing his nose.

  “Well, Master Burke,” Bunnett had always been very formal, “your days with us are at an end. Your father has written to us to say that you must play the man’s part hence. You go tomorrow with my best wishes.”

  “And my blessing,” the Reverend rumbled, deep in his throat, close to the tears that so easily overset him.

  That explained the letter, his father telling him of his new home. It had been bad news, the worst possible, he was to leave the comfort of the life he knew for the terrors of the unknown at Burke’s – he was to be a man, but he far preferred to be a schoolboy.

  The carriage came at ten the next morning, found him packed and ready, farewells to the Bunnetts said; he had not bothered with the boys, none were friends. There were four horses in front of a new travelling chaise, a luxurious, closed carriage, a self-awarded coat of arms on its doors. They were job-horses, Dick noted, recognising the local post-boys, but it was still a most expensive and impressive equipage. By a quarter past he was bowling down the road, a steady eleven miles an hour where the surface was good, the spring countryside passing him by.