Wealth of Darkness

I have long sought solace in the rich collage of images conjured in my mind when retreating to the black voids of my soul. While the dark conjures up thoughts of risk, evil and doom, I can brighten it with images symbolising safety, love, and hope.

But it hasn’t always been that way for me. 

The youngest of four, I was born into a respectable family in Scotland, with great wealth and a noble title. You can picture, I had a rather privileged up bringing. I fondly recall a wonderful childhood, chasing my brother and sisters around the fields of our estate on warm summer days; bright sunshine lighting up buttercups we held under each other’s chins followed by those hallowed words, Do you like butter? My youngest sister always said my skin mirrored the brightest yellow of anyone.

Reflecting now, there was always a shadow hanging over my family. As a child, you tend to see people in good light, not realising the malevolence in a single double-edged word said at the dinner table, a snubbed act of affection or a look so black lightening could have shot from the cloud it left behind. Whilst wealth made our life secure, it also brought out insecurity and jealousy in others lower in the order.

After being plunged into gloom and despair by the despicable actions of others, it is amazing how vividly hindsight can illuminate their true intentions. Now I can see how Uncle Bertram was determined to inherit my father’s wealth – my family’s wealth.

Now, snippets of conversations, mannerisms and his well disguised rage played over and over in my mind each time I closed my eyes or stared deep down the neck of an empty whisky bottle. In that murk, at the lowest ebb of my despair, I could finally penetrate through all the lies and misdirection and grasp what he had done.

Systematically, he’d dispensed of everything that stood between him and the family fortune - starting with my father.

Etched into my darkness is the horrified look on Mama’s face that dismal November Saturday of the season’s first pheasant shoot. Uncle Bertram came trotting back to the house, father’s limp body draped rain drenched across his horse. He’d been accidentally shot and there was nothing the surgeon could do. What I distinctly recall is the gamekeeper’s surprise as he didn’t think father’s injuries were that severe. The gamekeeper never returned to work; dismissed by my Uncle the next day.

Bertram’s older brother, my favourite Uncle Charles, passed several months later. A strong healthy man, he was a Colonel in the Royal Scots, who’d taken leave from the conflict with Napoleon upon hearing of my father’s death. A complete larrikin, he’d brighten up any room he walked into with his songs, wit, and loving smile. The surgeon said he’d overdosed on laudanum used to kill the pain of his battle wounds, though I’ve long suspected he was poisoned.

It was the next losses that hit the hardest. Since my father’s death, Uncle Bertram had tucked my sixteen-year-old brother Lyle under his wing, mentoring him in the skills he’d need as the new Laird. While they were both out inspecting the estate on horseback, my brother, an expert rider I should add, had fallen from his steed when jumping the craggy burn. So brutal were his injuries, my uncle forbid us from paying our respects one last time.

All this was too much for my mother who’s melancholy spiraled following father’s loss. One day my sisters and I returned home after a comforting walk across the fields and she’d departed too; Gone to The Retreat, the surgeon told me.

With my brother and mother now out of the way, only I stood between Uncle Bertram and the family entitlement. 

When I find myself holed up in the shadowy recesses of my mind, I convince myself it was because he liked me, or because I was so young that he didn’t kill me too. In my darkest moments, I find myself wondering whether I’d have been better off if he had. I certainly would have suffered less. 

He did manage to do away with me though. At the age of eleven, I was kidnapped by men I know to have been hired by my uncle and smuggled under a false name aboard a convict ship bound for the new colony. They called it the good ship Hibernian, however my experience was anything but. Crammed aboard and corralled into dank cages below decks starved of sunlight, it seemed every day of our transportation we sailed through rough storms. If life on the ship had been tough, nothing in my privileged childhood could have prepared me for what lay waiting at Sydney Town. 

Hard labour, dressed in the harsh yellow and black uniform of a convict, quarrying the stone that built the new town. My days were spent toiling in the leeward shadows of The Rocks and my nights locked in the boys’ gaol. In my transportation and servitude, I faced unimaginable terrors. The authorities knew about the bullying and other appalling abuse that was routinely dished out to us boys. They did nothing about it.

Through my robust willingness to survive, it was in the darkness of my cell I first found my solace. No longer was it scary or a place of dread but a blank canvas where I could escape my pain by painting images of joy in my mind; flashes of the life I had loved and love I had lost. I began wishing for the night time or that short break in the day where I could close my eyes and fill my head with blissful memories of running through the fields and orchards with my brother Lyle and my sisters, hugging dearest Mama and sitting on Father’s lap in his study, fumbling with his pocket watch while he poured over estate affairs.

As I grew older and gained my freedom as a young man, I still found relief behind the curtains of my eyelids or sitting quietly after sundown in the room with the smallest window and thickest shutters. Freed from the daily tyranny of my gaolers, my visions reformed from images that helped me survive, to imaginings that might help me heal. Deep in my subconscious, I found new relief in dreams of revenge.

Although young when I lost my father, he had taught me enough to make me resourceful. That spirit stood me in good stead at a time of great colonial opportunity. By twenty-five I had become a wealthy landowner myself, growing barley and raising a large head of cattle near the burgeoning town of Coal River several days sail north from Sydney Cove.

I’d always loved being out in the fields on a summer’s day in Scotland and now freely galloping around the pastoral lands of the colony, the rays of the sun seemed even more uplifting. Some would say I should have been happy with my success but the dark that had become my comfort during my incarceration, had a propensity to twist itself. No matter how much I tried to focus on the achievements of my new life and the good memories of my past, those images became dimmed. My every waking and resting moment became flooded with a voracity to avenge for my family’s loss.

There was only going to be one way to quell these murky tides. Eventually, I could hold off no longer and procured a passage back to a miserable winter clad London. There I’d set about restoring my true identity and destroying my uncle. Reclaiming my fortune would have me tied up in the courts for a lifetime. I’d probably be dead with my uncle still in control of the family wealth, such were his deep connections and homicidal intents. But I had another, move devious plan.

For a whole winter, I laid low, blending into the suffering filth, stench and choking smoke of London’s Mint. The acrid, grey blanket of smog seemed to perpetually hang over this slum neighbourhood, often obscuring the dome of St. Paul's in the distance. It frequently made it impossible to even see across the narrow streets lined with uninhabitable buildings. A blend of blackened timber houses from times past, with their upper floors leaning precariously over their failing foundations, shored up by great beams propped from the centre of the light starved streets below. And once fine mansions, now crumbling relics with sewage bubbling up through the floorboards on the Thames high tides. 

Indeed, the Mint was truly a place of squalor; home to the most desperate of families, beggars, prostitutes and criminals. The clean air of my eucalypt lined pastures was half a world away yet driven by my desire for revenge, I still felt strangely at home in the shady demonic filth of the place. It was the perfect cover to hide from an aristocratic killer.

The bawdy British revelled in the delights of tittle-tattle, with newspapers and scandal sheets clamouring for the most lurid details on the bad men and women of Regency high society; sex, money and murderous plots were hot topics.

Throughout that long winter, I courted the interest of a reputable peddler of such scuttle, who fed the truth about Uncle Bertram into the public sphere. Once a week, I would leave the cover of my lodgings in the Mint and meet at one of the last coffee houses on Lombard Street. Over a pot of that insipid black liquor, I would recant an element of my story, embellishing elements that suited my cause. Each published article seemed to lift my veil of gloom, as society were enlightened with my uncle’s true character. As the cold bleak winter lifted, increasingly he became decried as a schemer, scoundrel, bigamist and near the end, they had even bought into the rumours he was a murderer.

Not content with just destroying his reputation, if I was to truly emerge from the shadow that had shrouded my mind for so long, I needed to look right into his soul to make sure he suffered for others pain. Always partial to a drink, his fall from grace had pushed him from his prized membership at Boodle’s Club, into the backstreet drinking dens south of the river. An associate of mine tracked him to The George, a busy inn just a minute from the river and a little more from my abode in the Mint.

The last time he’d seen me I was a boy about to be placed on a boat. Thinking me long gone or even dead in the colony, it was easy for me strike up a conversation with little risk of him knowing who I was. A shake of my quarry worn hands alone was enough for him to consider me from the working class of society.

Every night for almost a month, I’d find him at the bar and share in bottles of whisky until dawn, sometimes well into the next day. Anesthetised, he had a willingness to talk to the lowlife I pretended to be; sharing his evil thoughts, made worse by his vexation at being cast down by his society friends. Despite his frustrated search to find the source of his scandal, he couldn’t understand who knew these things and who’d want to do this to him. One thing was for sure, Uncle Bertram’s anger was barely abated by his consumption of malt; he was going to avenge whoever had done this to him and he wanted to make them pay dearly.

During our conversations, I shared with him the deep feelings of despair I had suffered in my life and my desire to seek revenge. Without reveal, I talked about the murder of my father, my uncle and my brother. If I had hoped to extract his confession to these, I was sorely wrong. His lack of emotion and compassion at my words just showed his contempt, and his brining every conversation back to his own plight merely highlighted his narcissism. This was the motivation I needed to spur me into the final act of my plan.

At our final meeting at The George, I recognised straight away that he was reaching his lowest ebb. The latest information published about him, as well some additional work I’d done over the winter, had attracted the interest of the Bow Street Runners. The law was finally closing in on Uncle Bertram. For a man who was used to controlling every outcome, no matter what it took, he found his corrupt influence had waned and the fear of his complete and utter demise was consuming his every thought.

We left the inn that night, stepping out into the horse yard to be immediately confronted by six Runners, ready to take him into custody. My uncle’s lack of admission wouldn’t alter the outcome much, after all they already had the confession of McCready, our shady family surgeon from Scotland.

Gloating about my success at bringing him down would be lost on a drunk being dragged away in chains. The prestige of my plans would wait until his final judgement hour. It took a lot for me to step back inside a dismal penitentiary but as I approached the wrought iron bars that separated me from my condemned uncle, the anxiety of doing so quickly gave way to the lust for my final act of vengeance.

Although he was understandably shaking somewhat, Uncle Bertram smiled as he greeted me like an old friend, thanking me for visiting him on his final day of life. He talked nervously and fast without letting me get a word in, but there was only one thing I wanted to say to him. The expression on his face turned to one of confusion, then shock as he looked at my father’s pocket watch that I purposefully fumbled in my hand; I had lifted it from my him that last night we’d drunk at the inn. 

“In thirty minutes, the noose that has been around my neck for fifteen years will be around yours,” I said. Before turning my back on him, I looked him in the eye and proclaimed, “I reclaim my right to be Viscount James of Balfour, youngest son of Douglas and rightful Laird of the estate at Glenbright.”

As I snapped the watch face shut, the ominous spring clouds outside the prison window broke briefly, a ray of sunshine piercing through, glinting off the case reflecting a golden glow onto my face. In that instant, I felt the light return to my soul for good.