1988: Mallard Dynastic Project, Collected Papers
Arthur Frederick Blandy, D.Phil. (Syd.), sometime Fellow in Genealogical Studies
Viscountess Vorpel (Viola, if one persists in informality, though I see no reason why the gravity of history should be denied its honorifics),
I feel compelled, with my customary reluctance for public self‑defence, to correct the extraordinary misapprehension circulating since the appearance of your Preface. Your portrait of me—however amusing to cocktails and columnists—has established a grave confusion between roles. I am not, nor have I ever been, your editor. The word implies coquetry with subjectivity, a kind of literary midwifery for wandering egos. I am, if accuracy still commands any respect, the compiler of the Mallard Dynastic Record: a work of chronological, genealogical, and factual rectitude embracing not merely your singular adventures but the entire flight, as it were, of your ancient line.
Let it be clearly noted that my charge extends over millennia. I trace the origins of the House of Mallard to the proto‑aquatic cults of the Euboean littoral (c. 1200 B.C.), through their monastic resurgence during the Cistercian ferment, and onward to the domestic aristocracy of the Edwardian twilight. Against this vast landscape of lineage, your personal doings—however luminous, however prodigal in anecdote—occupy a paragraph, a divertimento, no more. You occupy, if I may speak academically, the marginalia of eternity’s ledger. Imagine my consternation, then, when your preface gives the impression that I, humble servant of the archive, was hired as your valet of verbs!
I will not disguise the personal injury of it. For nearly ten years I have cross‑referenced eight generations of irregular birth certificates (some written in what appears to be candle‑grease), compared seals surviving only as wax echoes upon 13th‑century parchment, and reconstructed domestic transactions with a patience bordering on paralysis. Without exaggeration, I have spent more of my life measuring the discrepancies between Vorpel memory and Mallard fact than you have spent in either. To describe my interventions as “corrections” is in itself an understatement—they are acts of preservation.
Permit me to point out—since no one else will—that your recollection of family history differs radically from record. You insist, for example, that your grandfather drowned ceremonially in Lake Como at the stroke of midnight; yet the municipal ledger of 1902, corroborated by the Como Tribune, reports merely a “gentle collapse upon a ferry step.” Similarly, your assertion that the lineage stems “from a dragon‑haunted priory in Selsey” finds no support in the Domesday abstracts, though I confess the image has its narrative uses. Shall I allow these flourishes to enter the canonical archive unexamined? Can posterity be expected to wade, unaided, through such romantic sediment? A compiler’s conscience forbids it.
I am not ashamed of fastidiousness. Truth—indeed, Truth with its heraldic capital—is not a parlour ornament to be rearranged among whims. It is the spine of the record; without it, our dynastic volumes would fall into the pulp of memoir and gossip. When I correct your dates, I correct the calendar itself on behalf of history. When I redact an anecdote, it is not censorship but structural hygiene. I will have none of these new “post‑modern” notions that a family’s story must breathe and err like a Greek god with moral eczema. The Mallards shall remain coherent or not at all.
You suggest, Viscountess, that I have “straightened the seams” of your confusion, converting embroidery to evidence—as though that were a failing. Would you have me leave the dynasty dishevelled for the amusement of posterity? To compile is to rescue; to footnote is to forgive. Order, dear lady, is not the enemy of imagination; it is its undertaker. I have never confused you with imagination.
Besides, I am constrained by oath, statute, and conscience to synchronise recollections with the certified annals. The Domus Draconis Codex (Volume IV, Article 7) explicitly forbids “chronological fancies or interpolations liable to distort succession.” You accepted, when collaborating (however briefly) with the project, that every spontaneous utterance was subject to verification. I remind you of your own marginal note, scrawled in turquoise ink across folio 237: “Oh, Arthur—make it appear correct.” If that is not editorial consent, I am at a loss.
If only you knew the rigour I endure. Do you suppose, for instance, that reconciling the lost Mallard indentures of 1743—half devoured by some Hampshire rodent—was a holiday lark? Or that clarifying your mother’s attendance at the infamous Venice Symposium (she attended, by the way, as observer, not speaker; the proceedings prove it) was an act of idle mischief? Each correction defended your honour more stoutly than your recollection ever did.
Still, I accept that you live in what I might charitably call the “oral tradition.” You make poetry of error and seduce with ellipsis. Very well. But a compiler cannot live by insinuation. The entire edifice collapses if he yields to charm. I must verify even the charming. Do not resent me for honesty in service to posterity, for it is a lonely post.
I have often thought our respective callings differ chiefly in temperature. You prefer your truth warm and pliable, like wax between conversational fingers; I prefer it set, decipherable, enduring. You are a goddess of gesture; I, the janitor sweeping up after revelation. If history remembers us both, it will note that one of us embroidered the dynasty while the other hemmed it.
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