A Trail of Old Money
A young man born into wealth is our protagonist, and he spends his days, as we all do, observing the world around him. But despite having the wealth to buy a world as big as he likes, our protagonist's world remains small, no greater than the bounds of his house—a big house, bigger than most, but since his idle roamings never extend beyond the exterior doors, his understanding of the world remains, like his world, in quantity at least, impoverished. His observations eventually settle on particular guests in his home, a Count and Countess who, unlike him, have lived their lives well out in the world, and further still outside their means.
If this sounds like a weak foundation for a story, you'd be correct! Does A Trail of Old Money succeed despite its spongy foundation? No, not really. Why then does it exist? Hard to say. Sometimes an author needs to work through a worthless premise to realise its worthlessness. Perhaps that's a bit harsh. The story has its moments. And it's not a long story, after all, it can be read all in one go. Or, more likely, half-read and abandoned all in one go. But why mention it at all? Does the author have a soft spot for it? If so, that spot is in his head. No, the story is here because the author is not totally convinced it is worthless. Nearly convinced, but not totally. Anyway, as it is not available to be read beyond the excerpts below, it's not as if anyone is being inordinately tormented by it. And it does now have a slick header graphic that took a full hour to put together—surely that's worth something?
Following are a few excerpts from the novella...
Excerpt 1 ――
A glance at what I’ve already written tells me I have not yet properly introduced the Count. I would not want the reader’s first impression of him to be as he was, slouching gracelessly on the edge of an unmade bed. Let me explain at least how he and the Countess came to be guests in my home.
For lack of any real occupation I have become what could be called A Student of Old Money. The Count’s money was about as old as money comes. It is a fascinating exercise to trace the origins of a family fortune. Detectives and tax lawyers do this for a living, but only within the confines of their specific investigations. Mine, however, go back as far as I can reach. All fortunes, even those of the most respectable families, begin with villainy. Scratch a Lord with sufficient vigour and the ancestral blackguard shows through. In the case of the Count and Countess, the trail backward was extraordinarily long and complicated, and despite months of labour I had not yet exposed the fortune’s black heart. I’d reached an impasse and so, with the Count suddenly in my charity and unlikely to deny any reasonable curiosity, I chose to plumb him for answers.
The Count and Countess had visited most regularly when I was perhaps ten years old and no more than a spectator to their dealings with my father. Gibbon had at that time been reassigned from butler to reader. This was well before audiobooks, you understand—all the better families had a reader. My father was in particular need of one after having gouged out his own eyes in a mad fit while designing a new ceiling for his chapel. He did not trust anyone to read to him but Gibbon. Many professional readers, the Young Turks, as they liked to call themselves, practiced what they called Modern Reading—that is, diverging from texts and improvising as the mood hit them. This practice has mercifully fallen out of favour. Have you ever crawled excitedly into bed in anticipation of Jack and the Beanstalk only to endure three hours of rambling agitprop? “Oh, the beanstalk is a metaphor, is it? The Giant is a multinational conglomerate? Oh, please go on! Tell me more about my capitalist whip-masters, tell me more!”
Father would trot Gibbon out to read from, say, Samuel Pepys’ Diary. Or, sometimes, from my diary. The first time caught me off guard and left me humiliated and in tears. Thereafter, my diary became a compendium of nothing that could be used against me. Random lists of nuts and bolts. Raisin comparisons. Possible names for a pet duck. And, most importantly, absolutely nothing more about my hope to one day marry Susan Penhaligon and fly away with her in a hot air balloon.
Excerpt 2 ――
The Count slouched on his bed, head down—a broken man if I had ever seen one. Gibbon stood before him, poking the Count repeatedly in the forehead, causing him to teeter back and forth.
“This so-called Count is out of money. His fortune is spent. Throw him out,” Gibbon suggested.
I was not in the habit of throwing guests out of my house. Ordinarily when I tired of a guest I would just wander away and let the fellow figure out for himself that his invitation had expired.
The Count sobbed.
“Shut up,” Gibbon scolded, “Pack your things—your things and only your things—and get out.”
The Count dropped to his knees before me.
“Please don’t throw me out into the… the… world! Let me stay in the North Wing. It’s abandoned. You won’t even know I’m there.”
I can see how the Count had come to consider that part of the house vacant. But vacancy was the whole point of the wing. When I wandered through it, it was always wonderfully empty. I did not want to have to duck under the Count’s socks hung up to dry, or, worse still, have to duck under his tedious small-talk. And more dreadful still, what if he chose to fawn over me? “Oh, thank you, again,” he might say. “Thank you so much for being there for me in my time of need!” Obsequiousness makes my stomach churn.
“Surely his fortune is not entirely gone?” I inquired of Gibbon.
Gibbon addressed me alone; he would not offer the cringing Count the slightest glance.
“I have, this evening, pried from the Countess herself that this idiot has recently pawned the last of the gems that had been the foundation of his name.”
The Count whimpered.
“Gems, you say?” I responded, quietly. The old money had wound itself back to its start. And now it and the Count’s family name had disappeared as if it had never existed.
The Count eeped like the little trapped monkey that he was.
“Throw him out.” Gibbon insisted.
The Count shrieked and grabbed my legs. Now, really, man! This was altogether too much! I kicked him away and motioned to box his ears if he lunged at me again. I’d never boxed anyone’s ears, and I wasn’t even certain how to go about it. But convinced by my fists of some sort of impending violence to his ears, the insolvent Count slithered a safe distance away.
Excerpt 3 ――
The Countess dragged herself upright on the pew and gave her neck a few little cracks.
“I fell asleep. Where was I?”
Against my better judgement I told her.
“Ah!”
Her throat sufficiently rested, she picked up the story with gusto. Her pace sped as her family history progressed through the ages. All the greats were there—Bellerophon, Heracles, Meleager—all the great events were visited by her ancestors along the way—the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs, the abduction of Ganymede, the Judgement of Paris! The Countess plunged into the gory battlefields of Troy and then out the other side into an Aegean tempest, and onward to Rome! I couldn’t have followed her complicated narrative even if I had been paying attention. No, I’d tuned her out and instead lazily admired the sinisterly rendered field mouse on the ceiling fresco overhead.
I barely noticed when the story soared into the Christian era, through Byzantium and back out again, and then through the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. So-and-so begat so-and-so, then so-and-so met such-and-such fate, and so on. Even as mere background noise her tale was exhausting! I anticipated the Countess soon fainting for lack of oxygen.
As the sun slid over the horizon and the chapel darkened, her pace did eventually begin to slow. The passage of centuries slowed to the passage of decades, and then to years, then to months, then weeks and days. The slowing of her narrative was accompanied by a softening of her voice, the calming effect of which might have put me to sleep had I not suddenly realised that she had finally reached the events of yesterday and today.
“… at which point I asked you if you remembered the story my husband told you about the picture in the greenhouse. You told me that you did. I saw no reason to get up from where I lay, because the pew was uncommonly comfortable and besides, I was still annoyed with you for hitting me and I wanted to treat you with similar disrespect by denying you my beautiful eyes while I spoke. I then related to you my family’s history, starting with…”
I sat up.
“You aren’t going to start from the beginning again?”
The Countess had lain down at some point during her narrative sprint. She got up on her elbow and peeked her presumably beautiful eyes at me over the back of her pew. She was now just an eyeless silhouette. I was likewise, I suppose, to her. She eventually lay back down again.
And so, I lay down, too.
The dastardly mouse kept staring at me.
“Sorry about hitting you,” I finally offered. “You were hysterical and it just seemed to me at that moment to be the right thing to do.”
I was glad to get that apology out of the way. It had been gnawing at me for a while. Even though the Countess did not answer, did not actually accept my apology, I considered the matter closed.
The full text of this novella is currently available by appointment only.
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