The Half-Hidden (Part Six)

By Marc-Yves Tumin

After the memorial service, several of the guests took a turn in the garden, and I, for one, swept the beacon of imagination across times past, where, in those same precincts, Madame was wont to abandon her arm to Monsieur, as he expatiated upon subjects of moment.

I conjured up the image of a postprandial flotilla of grandees, rocking gently at anchor, as the couple, in their refulgent prime, circled the flagstone wharf, eliciting deference.

While I escorted their shadows, some removal agents were engaged in cataloging the contents of the library, and a box of books and ledgers caught my eye. In it was a small, green quarter-bound volume printed in Paris.

Riffling through its pages, I understood why the author had assumed the nom de plume of "NN." Such a work was not to be enterprised lightly. Its title was "L'Histoire du Mordred et les Conspirateurs," and it could have been a Festschrift of malfeasance extending to the Middle Ages.

It illuminated the exploits of the Questuaries and their coevals, not to mention their formidable namesake and mascot, and chronicled a cadre whose members were up to their steeples in louche behavior.

There was an engraving on the frontispiece depicting the Questuaries at the court of Henry the Eighth and their decoration by no less than Oliver Cromwell. It told how the plunderers had set up offices in Manchester and Liverpool, when chivalry wore a rose.

There were accounts of drawn-and-quartered rustics, the spoliation of monasteries, the Parliamentarian expeditionary force, the Model Army's decimation of Ireland, and the red-letter days of the Protestant succession.

In addition, there was a chapter on a plenipotentiary sojourn to the Emerald Isle, where letters of marque permitted the Questuaries to profit from the misery of cottagers through evictions and the auctioning of their property.

During one particularly rude evacuation, a family of smallholders was found to have given shelter to a group of Traveling People. With Catholicism prohibited, that family was compelled to worship at a diminutive wheeled-church, situated in an intertidal zone, beyond His Majesty's suzerainty. And there was a description of one of their congregation, an Irish rebel who'd recognized a lost Gypsy girl, carried her to the littoral sanctuary by the sea, and was cut down by Crown Forces on its steps.

The Questuaries had a purulent, pecuniary interest in the sale of indentured servants - starving Irish shanghaied as they staggered off the boat at Liverpool - as well as in workhouses in Manchester. And the standpatters turned a tidy profit on each leg of the tripartite trade between Europe, the West Indies, and Western Africa, transporting guns and cloth to Senegal and plying the Middle Passage from the Dark Continent to the New World.

Their swift slaver, Mordred, skimmed the coast of Senegal, engorged with natives, marched in coffles to the seafront barracoons, and packed off to the Americas under no flag.

From the West Indies, the Questuaries exported rum, sugar, and molasses, and from Virginia, tobacco and hemp. Ultimately, as merchants from Rhode Island filled the shoes of the entrepreneurial Old World, the Questuaries ingratiated themselves with the crème de la crème of Newport society.

Conterminously with the suppression of the intercontinental trafficking of human beings, the Questuaries hired slave ships on credit and sold them to trusting investors whom they betrayed, reaping substantial bounties for each manumitted prisoner.

During the French and Indian War, and, some years later, when the British appealed to the colonists to remain loyal to their sovereign, the Questuaries supplied armaments to both sides.

Lastly, generations from the Treaty of Paris, the Questuaries ran guns to the Southern secessionists in their War Against Northern Aggression. And as the Gilded Age drew to a close, the thumping quids of the Questuaries - whose sessions were prorogued only for lawn parties - were expeditiously discharged and their glinting teeth buried in the haunches of the legislative bodies of governance, tearing off parcels of favors, which they converted as if clipping stock coupons. Indeed, as our story unfolds, the complotters were organizing a scheme to enter the lists of the judicial branches.

Upon putting aside the green book, I closed my eyes and was besieged with nightmares wherein the Gypsy girl's grandmother huddled before a crystal ball in a darksome wayside inn, the child and her unusually large moggy beside her. The granny was surveying the Questuaries, convened at a long table, men whose countenances resembled those of a gang of resurrectionists. Oddly enough, the demonic Mordred was seated there, too - his silken top hat beside him - draped in a black caped Inverness coat, crimson lined, with an inverted pleat down the back. He sported a blackthorn stick and was smoking a cigar and grinning.

And thus, that fateful afternoon, while Danielle's parents were in Newport with the Questuaries, it was the chief phlebotomist, chained and muzzled, that the child heard chuffing. It was Mordred, the Butcher of Manchester, with a head like a jack-o-lantern, "The Walking Death," in the words of the maid from Saragossa.

(Continued next week)