1859: Lord Alban Fitzartur
Private papers
I have today been reminded—by my solicitor, of all prosaic messengers—that within the year I shall come into my inheritance. Whether it arrives through my late grandmother, my distant aunt, or the collective confusion of both, no one appears quite certain. The Mallard genealogical tree, like all trees left to overgrow, now resembles a topiary in the shape of lunacy. At any rate, the process requires only my continued survival, and that, I flatter myself, is within my powers.
The sum is to be something in the vicinity of £200,000 income per annum, derived from various properties so geographically scattered they might as well exist in myth. It is a curious sensation to be informed that one will soon be “comfortably burdened”. Comfort, in my experience, is rarely so numerically expressed. Still, I shall not quarrel with fortune merely because she arrives wearing the wrong cousin’s name.
My circumstances differ from my father’s in one notable respect: I am not shackled by that gaunt legal ghost, primogeniture. My elder brother has absorbed the title, the estates, and the ancestral conviction that ownership requires solemnity. He can keep them. I, unencumbered by entail, may lose one name and adopt another with impunity. The family has always collected them—Duke this, Baron that—like medals from wars it never fought. There are more Mallard titles than Mallard heirs; I shall simply steal one of the spares should I ever need to impress the uncurious.
It is a comforting sort of independence—to belong to consequence without being consumed by it. I fancy myself, if not a black sheep, then at least the decorative variety—the kind embroidered on the family tapestry, gazing impudently away from the rest of the flock.
So here I wait: suspended between insolvency and embarrassment, a reluctant chrysalis of respectability. In the meantime, I mean to study the city, the stage, and mankind, all of which possess more vitality than the peerage. Money may provide liberty, but observation provides adventure—and I have the feeling my life’s play, still behind the curtain, will be worth the wait.
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