“What?”
“Hush, Herbert, as it is not your turn to speak. Second, you will oblige me in setting up schools for these children, keeping them occupied while their mothers are at work. You will also feed these children one meal a day—even on Sunday, when henceforth no one will work the Symington mills—with meat served to the children twice weekly.”
Symington’s ample belly shook as he began to laugh. He laughed so heartily, and with such enjoyment, that soon tears streamed from his eyes. “Are you daft?” he choked out between bouts of mirth. “Why would I do that?”
“I do not believe I had finished, Herbert,” the stranger said quietly once Symington’s hilarity subsided, which it did when he remembered the cocked pistol. “You will roll back the laborers’ shifts from fifteen to fourteen hours and present every worker with a mug of beer at the end of each shift. You will employ a doctor for your workers. You will also increase all wages by ten percent, beginning tomorrow. I think that’s it—for now.”
The cocked pistol was no longer of any importance, for this man, this arrogant stranger, was talking of dipping into Herbert Symington’s pockets, the depth of which were more important to him than his own soul, let alone his corpulent corporeal body. “The devil I will! Coddle the bastards? Fill their bellies? And cut their hours? How am I supposed to make a profit?”
“Ah, Herbert, but you do make a profit. A tidy profit. Enough profit to afford this coach, and that most lovely new domicile you have been building for yourself this past year. You’re to move into it early next month, I believe, and have even gone so far as to invite a few of the ton to join you in a party to celebrate your skewed belief that fortune and breeding are synonymous. I’m delighted for you, truly. Although I would not have chosen to use so much gilt in the foyer. Such ostentation smacks of the climbing cit which, alas, you are. You know, Herbert, I believe I detest you more for your mistreatment of your workers because you were one of them not so long ago.”
“Who are you to judge me?” Symington bellowed, not caring that his voice echoed inside the coach. This man had seen his house, been inside his house? How? But if he had been, then he should know how far Herbert Symington had come since his long-ago years in the Midlands. “Yes, I was one of them, never so bad as the worst of them, better than the best of them. Smarter. More willing to see what I needed and take it!”
“Yes, Herbert. You did. But you chose to make that steep climb on the broken backs of your fellow workers, screwing down their wages, damning them to damp hovels, disease, and crippling injuries,” his accuser broke in neatly. “And now you call them the swinish multitude and keep your heel on their throats so that no one else might have the opportunity for betterment that you had. Do you have any idea of the hatred you are fomenting with your tactics? You, and all those like you, are creating a separate society, a generation of brutalized workers turned savage in their fear, their hunger, their—but enough of sermonizing. We are nearly at our destination, Herbert, as your monument to your greed lies just around this corner, I believe. Observe. Soon you will be toasting your toes by your own fireside.”
As the stranger used the barrel of his pistol to push back the ornate lace curtain covering the nearest window of the now slowing coach, Herbert Symington looked out to see his nearly completed house, his pride, his proof of affluence, engulfed in flames from portico to rooftops.
“No,” he whispered, shaking his head, unable to believe the horror he saw. His house. His beautiful house! “Oh, sweet Christ! No!”
“The paper, Herbert,” the stranger said, coldly interrupting Symington’s anguish. “Don’t crush it so, or you might not be able to read my demands, for shock has a way of erasing recently learned specifics from one’s mind. What I have offered you tonight is in the way of a small exercise in consequences. In addition to the home you still inhabit in Little Pillington, I believe you have recently acquired a townhouse in London. Not in Mayfair, of course, but amid its increasingly fashionable fringes. And we must not forget those three lovely mills. So many possessions. So much to lose. Tonight’s lesson would prove enough for an intelligent man. Are you an intelligent man, Herbert? Or are you willing to risk disobeying me?”
“You bastard!” Symington growled, clenching his hamlike hands into impotent fists as the glow from the fire glinted on the barrel of the pistol. “Oh, I know who you are now! I’ve heard the stories. I know what you’ve done to other mill owners. So now you’re after me, are you? Well, I won’t bow down to you like the others have. You’ll hang for this, you miserable scoundrel—and I’ll be there to watch you dance!”
“That’s the spirit, Herbert. Down but not out!” the man said encouragingly as the door to the coach opened and the groom reached in to let down the steps. “You take that thought with you. Take it and hold it close to your heart, along with my list of demands. And, oh yes, thank you for the coach. It will bring a considerable sum, I’m convinced, proceeds which will doubtless fill many a stomach these next months. Once again, Herbert, good evening to you. I sincerely wish I will not find it necessary we should meet again.”
“Oh, I’ll see you again, you heartless bastard. See you and more!” Symington tried desperately to make out the facial features of his tormentor in the glow from the fire, but it was useless. He felt himself being pulled unceremoniously from his beloved coach before a well-laced kick from his former employee nearly sent him sprawling onto the gravel drive in front of the inferno that was once his house.
The coach drove away, the sound of delighted laugher floating back to mock him, and Symington angrily yanked off the ribbon holding the list of demands, bent on ripping the paper into a thousand pieces.
As he unrolled the single sheet, something long and soft fluttered to the ground and he picked it up. He held it to the light from the blaze before cursing roundly, flinging the thing from him, and turning to slowly walk the three miles back into Little Pillington.
Behind him, lying abandoned on the drive, a single peacock feather winked blue and green in the light from the blazing fire.
BOOK ONE
THE GAME BEGINS
The world is full of fools, and he who would not see it should live alone and smash his mirror.
attributed to Claude Le Petite
CHAPTER ONE
Society is now one polished horde,
formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores, and Bored.
Lord Byron
LADY UNDERCLIFF HAD BEEN sadly out of sorts for a month, or so she informed anyone who applied to her for the reason behind her perpetual pout.
She was incensed because her thoroughly thoughtless husband had adamantly refused to return from his hunting box in Scotland until the second week of the Season, thus delaying the annual Undercliff Ball, which, as everyone was aware, had been held the first week of the Season these past sixteen years.
Not that she could not have pressed on with her plans for the ball without Charles, for heaven only knew the man had never lifted a finger for any but his own pleasure in all his life. But her ladyship was very conscious of appearances, and opening the ball without her husband at her side would only cause speculative gossip, especially since that sad interlude the man had indulged in most publicly three years past with that absurd Covent Garden warbler.
Besides, Lady Undercliff considered herself to be a perfect wretch at recollecting names, and she had grown to rely on his lordship’s guidance during those tedious hours spent in the receiving line, complimenting friends on the birth of another grandchild or remembering to inquire as to the welfare of another acquaintance’s old-as-God Great-aunt Imogene.
And Charles knew she counted on his memory, damn his hunt-mad, philandering hide to perdition!