MM's Remarks on Installment 17
Allow me the opportunity to recast the story to this point, as Captain Hawksbeam reminds me of Lady Xenia's previous lover on Barbados, Marius Van Veldt, the octaroon who made his fortune exporting that sweet cane to Blighty, but whose ancestry prevented his entrance into the society of the landed gentry. It was he that first took her, under the vault of the heavens, while the moon was slowly consumed in a lunar eclipse. It was the very eclipse during which her intended, St. John Sykes-Partington, was to ask her hand in marriage. How was she to know that, while her initiation into the pleasures of the flesh at the hands of that rough and dusky man, whose whole being seemed to tear her ivory-white body into successively smaller pieces until, finally, she cried out and was remade Woman, at that very moment wild dogs were tearing Mister Sykes-Partington to pieces in his isolated mountain observatory, the very observatory where she should have been at that moment, observing the celestial event through St. John's precious reflecting telescope? And how was she ever to guess, until she discovered the encoded correspondence and broke its cypher that the dog attack had not been a case of fate's wicked caprices but rather had been arranged by Carlyle Smollett, Lord Bloodsweep's (God rest his soul!) traitorous business manager, a man whose wickedness was exceeded only by his brilliance at the Exchange? Had it not been for this encournter in the curing station deep in Van Veldt's cane fields, an encounter precipitated by a message delivered by her hearty maidservant, Mary, who, though raised in the filth and miasma of the Isle of Dogs, had risen to become not only an asset to her mistress but also an ally, in fact to all the noble Bloodsweeps. Was it mere chance that had caused Van Veldt to send this note? She had felt his eyes upon her, had blushed at their boldness. A weaker woman would have wilted under that smoldering intensity, a gaze that seemed to peer into the very depths of one's soul and discovered one's inner secrets. Yes, it was passion...but was it something else as well that made Marius send that note? According to the islanders, Marius Van Veldt possessed some sort of power of sight, attributed to the caul that had covered his head at birth. Lady Xenia cared not for the idle speculations of the natives, and was even less interested in their bogeys, their superstitions, their zombies and were-beasts. Still, she had noticed a certain otherworldliness which hung about Van Veldt, and had responded to the messages he seemed to send to her heart with her own unwavering looks, but she began to wonder whether Van Veldt did indeed possess some ability to see into the future?
But these speculations were idle...Van Veldt supposed ability to prognosticate failed him when he was captured by French privateers and thrown in their abhored prison, La Fer, on that rock in the harbor of Martinique, presumably never again to smell free air or peer upon the visage of Lady Bloodsweep. Viscount Samson Marley, her deceased father's younger, bastard brother, as she later learned by letters from Azimba, the coalblack servant Lady Xenia had taught to read and write while in Barbadosm, had claimed that Van Veldt had perished in a hurricane and had then taken command of his cane fields on the basis of a suspect will, drawn up and witnessed by two dead solicitorsm, Arthur Locksley and Francis Blackwater, men whose bones supposedly now sat at the bottom of the Sargasso Sea, visited only by the scuttling denizens of the deep. Lady Bloodsweep had escaped the pirates due to her own courage and dear Mary's forethought, and, now aware of the machinations of Smollett, and, as the stolen encoded letters sent her by Azimba had revealed, Viscount Marley, had had to flee to her aunt's estate in Jamaica, where she had to take on the guise of her veiled deaf-mute sister, Ermintrude, who was, in reality, hidden in a convent on Lake Geneva, translating the apochryphal epistles and perhaps guarding a secret that might save the Bloodsweep line from extinction and poverty. Alas, her aunt, grown old and somewhat senile, had allowed her step-daughter the Hon. Sarah Tyburne to arrange a marriage for Ermintrude with a Baron Estabrook, a man whose fortune was built on the Chinee opium trade. Xenia, unable to reveal that she was not actually Ermintrude for fear that word would reach Viscount Marley, who assumed Lady Xenia had perished in the hurricane and who would doubtless stop at nothing to see her dead was forced to accept the arranged marriage. And, if I recall, that is why our dear Lady Bloodsweep is traveling to the Malabar coast to a marriage to a cold tyrant whose heart moves only at the sight of money. I look forward to volume 18...will Van Veldt escape? How will Lady Xenia regain the wealth of the true Bloodsweeps? What new torments and pleasures await her in India, at the hands of Estabrook. Is Mary with child? Will Ermintrude be discovered?
But these speculations were idle...Van Veldt supposed ability to prognosticate failed him when he was captured by French privateers and thrown in their abhored prison, La Fer, on that rock in the harbor of Martinique, presumably never again to smell free air or peer upon the visage of Lady Bloodsweep. Viscount Samson Marley, her deceased father's younger, bastard brother, as she later learned by letters from Azimba, the coalblack servant Lady Xenia had taught to read and write while in Barbadosm, had claimed that Van Veldt had perished in a hurricane and had then taken command of his cane fields on the basis of a suspect will, drawn up and witnessed by two dead solicitorsm, Arthur Locksley and Francis Blackwater, men whose bones supposedly now sat at the bottom of the Sargasso Sea, visited only by the scuttling denizens of the deep. Lady Bloodsweep had escaped the pirates due to her own courage and dear Mary's forethought, and, now aware of the machinations of Smollett, and, as the stolen encoded letters sent her by Azimba had revealed, Viscount Marley, had had to flee to her aunt's estate in Jamaica, where she had to take on the guise of her veiled deaf-mute sister, Ermintrude, who was, in reality, hidden in a convent on Lake Geneva, translating the apochryphal epistles and perhaps guarding a secret that might save the Bloodsweep line from extinction and poverty. Alas, her aunt, grown old and somewhat senile, had allowed her step-daughter the Hon. Sarah Tyburne to arrange a marriage for Ermintrude with a Baron Estabrook, a man whose fortune was built on the Chinee opium trade. Xenia, unable to reveal that she was not actually Ermintrude for fear that word would reach Viscount Marley, who assumed Lady Xenia had perished in the hurricane and who would doubtless stop at nothing to see her dead was forced to accept the arranged marriage. And, if I recall, that is why our dear Lady Bloodsweep is traveling to the Malabar coast to a marriage to a cold tyrant whose heart moves only at the sight of money. I look forward to volume 18...will Van Veldt escape? How will Lady Xenia regain the wealth of the true Bloodsweeps? What new torments and pleasures await her in India, at the hands of Estabrook. Is Mary with child? Will Ermintrude be discovered?
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