When Celia cums, ’tis earthquake hour. The bed vibrates like kettledrums
It is a grand display of power when Celia cums.
When Celia farts, my hasty nose
Sniffs up the fragrance from her parts
Shamed are the violets and rose when Celia farts.
– Aleister Crowley
A pious man22 of the church once said of black magic, quite rightly I believe, ‘The lowest depths of black mysticism are well-nigh as difficult to plumb as it is arduous to scale the heights of sanctity. The Grand Masters of the witch covens are men of genius – a foul genius, crooked, distorted, disturbed, and diseased.’ It has been the folly of many less wise than he to equate any study that veers from the Scriptures of Christ, to be labelled as black magic. I repeat here, it is folly.
*
It is now almost time to go from here and expose myself to my true age in the mountain pass. I have known of others of a similar age turn to dust there. Few of them swaggered, most of them tip-toed, perhaps unwisely to their end.
And so to likely self-slaughter I shall stride. But not before an almighty brawl with Death in an unseen sphere. I shall smack him in the nose again en route. At the very least, I shall scarlet the fucker’s beak.
And if I can survive the pass, there are plenty who would murder me by the time I reach Cambridge. There are those against whom I am going to rally the most unyielding and smartest of mobs. There is a new generation of those whom I have defeated, slighted and cheated in the past; governments, Nazis, agents, cuckolds.
But in 1900, I was about to enter a world where one was unsure as to who wished to fire the bullet, tie the noose, why and when. I felt untouchable, but was spry enough to know I might soon be in real and perpetual danger, and that my complacency was a function of my lordly spirit and not of reality. I would need the finest of teachers to survive and thrive. Yet again, fortune was mine.
And so now I appear as a shameless cliché. My feet are in sandals and I wear a long sack robe of ridiculous comfort. My hair has long since departed, though I do so much enjoy the deportment and stature offered by a hat of extravagant girth.
I rise and stroll from the lea through the gardens towards the perfect yards with their simple dwellings, fountains and altars that then lead to the wilder pastures. I seem to inch there as if I do not want to arrive at my destination. It is as if I know this time is precious and truly Holy. I speak to myself and am aware that I am perhaps acting eccentrically as I chuckle, I reprimand and admonish parenthetically, I nod sage agreement at irregular intervals as if I am having several conversations at once. Perhaps I am. Throughout and despite the oddness, I maintain an appearance of an overriding sanity, for I am, after all, a remarkable, transcendent and calming giant; a Kurtzian Lord. I pass a chubby, picturesque child playing with stones, who gargles a grand joy.
‘Solitude is such a glorified and authentic pastime,’ I say. She smiles and nods.
Ten hours to go.
Sir Horace Dandylyon was now personal physician to the Palace.
On my first afternoon back in London, he and I spoke predominantly of Churchill.
‘You will meet Winston in good time. For now, I will remain his post boy. Spies are everywhere, and the less you two are seen together, the better,’ he revealed, as we sipped flutes of champagne in his club in St James.
‘Of course.’
‘But there is something else we need to discuss.’
He touched my arm.
‘The Queen is unwell,’ Dandylyon said.
‘Long live the Queen,’ I dutifully replied.
‘Her illness can never be known, for, as I will presently explain, it would risk her crown. The Empire would be rattled just when she needs to be strong.’
‘But she will go one day soon. She is no goddess.’
‘You do not fully understand what I am saying. Let us sit.’
We walked out onto one of the broad stone terraces on the second floor of the club. Other than the two of us, the spacious balcony was empty as we sat. Dandylyon elaborated on the Queen’s condition.
‘She has an ailment of the blood. There are wider implications for they tell of bigamy in the palaces. We should all remember what happened in France.’
I said nothing. After a brief pause, he spoke again.
‘What do you know of haemophilia? And also of porphyria?’
‘Sicknesses of the blood and the nervous system?’
‘Precisely, and that is all you need to know. What is more important to know is that Her Majesty suffers from one and not the other. Not only is there is a robust school of thought that says Queen Victoria and Albert are both of bastard stock, for there are abundant clues now exposed to science and to me, but there has also been an abrupt cessation of paternal and hereditary syphilis in Albert’s case and the introduction of the inherited haemophilia in Victoria’s. Not only are they first cousins – and this alone is of little consequence to England or the realm, but they are both illegitimate. And this is.’
He nodded, and then stroked his beard, releasing a raft of sweet bakery air.
‘Her father had a procession of young and ripe mistresses for nearly three decades that never resulted in any offspring. His sexual relations with the Queen’s mother were lustless and putridly stale. This would no doubt raise the chances of a random mutation and introduction of haemophilia from perhaps fifty thousand to one to a far larger number, tending towards infinity. The Duchess of Kent,23 I am afraid, had illicit proclivities too. When Wellington said that he had even witnessed ‘some familiarities’ between Her Majesty and Sir John Conroy, he was, as usual, quite correct.’
Dandylyon paused. He spoke with a tone that implied it would very soon have a very personal impact upon me.
‘And not only did haemophilia appear, but porphyria suddenly disappeared. Conroy was her father. The revelation of all this would be disastrous, and inevitable were our enemies ever to find out. It would be far more damaging than their finding out that I supplied her with far more than her fair share of cocaine, heroin, brandy and laudanum. Or how I witnessed her when she’d had too much of everything; abject, growling, needy, unprincipled, magnificently soulless and absolute fun. Bless the old bird.’
This was London in 1900, the Great Binge24 was at her pie-eyed peak. The unwashed were far more intrigued with Jack the Ripper and vampires than narcotics available on every corner, but a rattling of the very core of the legitimacy of the Crown and the realm could spell diplomatic disaster around the world and quite likely the swelling of an angry mob of pitchforkers on Constitution Hill. The doctors of the royal families of Europe would certainly have had all the same medical information and clues within their grasp, but would they have the nous of Dandylyon to deduce the implications. Yes, it would reflect badly upon their houses too should the bastard Queen be revealed, and of course, they had all almost crumbled together under the revolutionary skies of ’48, but England would be injured the most. It was time therefore to meddle overseas and strike first.
Why? Because to attack truly is the sturdiest form of defence, and to obfuscate and deflect attention can be enough to befuddle those pitchforkers. MI-1 were keen to instigate wide-ranging and covert operations across all continents. ‘The more the merrier,’ Winston said.
But where and how?
In Africa, Winston planned to develop anti-Prussian alliances with the French and Belgian colonials, even the Dutch, for he suspected their path of least resistance would be to side with us when it all exploded. European policy was a microcosm of Africa’s, as we jockeyed for anti-German positions with each ally; friendships that could be quite pivotal. The enemy of one’s enemy shall be one’s chum. In Australia and New Zealand, MI-1 would instil and promote a logical and gravitational fear of the Japanese dropping down upon them, and in doing so would cement that corner of the Empire, so geographically crucial to London, while also ensuring some brave and mighty fucking muscle in the scraps to come. In the East, we aimed to keep Tokyo, Peking and Moscow inward-looking and navel-gazing. I would find myself at the fulcrum of the coming war there.
I would find myself at a similar pivot in the United States25, though there I would be meddling in their peace. In India, of course, we had given them cricket; the opium of the Raj, and that would keep them busy with boyhood dreams of glory with cork or willow. If only it were all so simple, and yet, of course, all of this confirmed that we lived in the most textured and magnificent world.
There would be many ways we would meddle over the decades, but, for me, it would begin with the procurement of a (perhaps) mythical aphrodisiacal drug with precipitously potent effects; ones of manly desires of the flesh and great pacifism. This narcotic had been spoken of in fairy tales by Prudences over the centuries. Had it fuelled Caligula and the Romans? Had it taught the Greeks to sodomise? Had it got Christ into trouble with whores, earning him the silent respect of the Romans in the process? Apparently, Churchill was thrilled when he heard of it. If we were able to get our hands on this, and poison the right wells and spike the relevant champagne cocktails, then vast slaughter could be prevented, and minds could be changed towards our point of view. Children were even said to be immune to it, other than it made them supremely tranquil, content and marginally less hungry. This stuff was to be found in nature in the hinterlands and jungle floors of the country we know in modern times as Sri Lanka, my darling, darling land.
And so, I was given my orders, my tickets to Ceylon and the firmest of manly hugs from Dandylyon and a kiss from Prudence. I counted my blessings in many arenas, but this man and woman had become the sturdiest cornerstone of my knowledge and my life. I was now going on my first solo mission, and there had not yet been a thrill anywhere close to matching this one. I resolved that I would do them all proud, Papa included. As if all of this excitement were not enough, I was about to meet perhaps my greatest love.
Robbie and I met, by chance, in the mountains of Ceylon at the ambassador’s estate outside Maha Nuwara. Seeping with gin and tonics, we played billiards until dawn for small change under a tilting fan. It was April 1900, and I was in my fin de siècle pomp. We were both in our pomp. Robbie’s father was there as a guest of the ambassador, they had schooled together at Eton and, both with an overactive sense of nostalgia, had remained hush-hush lovers ever since. Robbie appeared quite bored, and superbly willing to undertake an adventure, far more easily than I had ever hoped while I plotted over our memorable games that daybreak. ‘Oh goody,’ was Robbie’s response when I suggested a stroll in the rainforests. That I used those two same words myself whenever mischief was offered seemed symbiotic and more than fitting. Robbie wrote a note to father that was left at the bar.
Accepted most thrilling adventure. Off I trot into the jungles, Papa. Too tempting to refuse. Back whenever.
Yours, R.
And so, we discharged ourselves from the ambassador’s company with nothing but a few wagered coins in our pockets, tilted hats upon our heads, and two pint glasses of icy gin, as if we were in the Crown and Anchor in Covent Garden and off into the alleyway for a slash. We walked through mile upon mile of tea fields until we came to the temple. Its approximate location had been confirmed to me by a Maharishi as my ship had throbbed and pulsed down the Suez Canal weeks before.
We spoke of our childhoods, as I glanced with consummate calm and tempered intrigue from time to time to observe the petit and angelic features of my new chum, the small button nose, verdant eyes with lashes, as long and sturdy as spider legs, hair lightened by the sun but waxed with a comforting and coconutty pomade, the leanest jaw and unblemished teeth. Robbie spoke with the authority of an older and wiser type, but the calm with which the words were delivered removed anything as gross as pomposity. This was a lesson I knew many believed I could learn, but I was, after all, acting a role, for I was a Pimpernel. Robbie spoke of a love of Sicily, Blake and warm rain.
‘But do you prefer Blake to Milton?’ I asked as a strong breeze, even despite the cover of jungle, started to push at our backs.
‘I prefer Paradise Regained to Paradise Lost.’
‘You do? Why?’
‘Well, it is clearer. It is more optimistic. And I root for Jesus. Jesus wins. But it is the Jesus we imagine, not the one force-fed in England. Regained’s Christ is the lovely fucker, who picked his nose, refused to bathe and laughed with strumpets. I think what strikes me most though is how Milton’s poetry has matured, and he does not seem to try too hard anymore. He is at peace with himself, and this happiness shows and transmits itself.’
This sounded so familiar to me.
‘Are these your own thoughts? Or those of some sage who schooled you?’
Robbie remained silent, and that seemed to be its own answer and the one I wanted. The quiet was then comfortable, until broken, ‘I would be happy to give you plenty of my own thoughts, if you wish, you cheeky bastard.’
And we laughed and stumbled on, aided by that friendly breeze. When it dropped and the accompanying howling abated, I asked Robbie, ‘How old are you?’
Robbie did not answer. Just smiled.
Upon our arrival at the monastery, we were welcomed as liberators, as marvelled guests, as gods. There, young Robbie and I smoked opium and lost days, weeks perhaps. The monks, with hair down to their midriffs, tended to us and smiled at our conditions.
When it was time to move on, they wished us well and we departed. We left the temple not by the way we had entered. We walked on. Of course, we did.
We passed through jungle and climbed hillsides. We bathed in streams and respectfully eyed a couple of intrigued tigers. We sometimes walked barefoot with abandon, and once a plump snake slipped from our path ahead. Our faces were creaseless and portrayed a juvenation and an intrigue that far surpassed nosiness. We spoke of what we would do if we did find our treasure. We spoke of what we would do if we invoked the Devil. We spoke of beautiful women. I spoke of my reluctant and adolescent yearning to kill, if ever required. I was but a boy. I attempted to coax my pal to speak of ill-lit wishes, but naught came.
That next day we felt a distinctive tackiness underfoot, the one precisely told to me by Prudence. We had indeed found what we were looking for, and we set up a quite basic camp with a measured mix of excitement and trepidation. I had heard it was a hallucinogen of vast potent, an incapacitating agent of precipitous disturbance, an aphrodisiac of frightening gradient (it is true, for that evening I tried to coax a lynx from a tree, and I remain grateful-ish that she remained a shy yet humbled and honoured coquette). It was a toffee-cumresin-like substance that emitted a distinctive odour of fried onions. This was the other clue that we had indeed arrived at the right spot.
At dusk, we lit a fire, not for warmth, but to aid the absorption of the drug, it was best taken warm, apparently. An amount to cover a thumbnail was recommended for first-timers. I ensured Robbie had approximately this. Robbie saw me take this same amount, though I took much more, of course, when Robbie wasn’t looking. I was thrilled to find out that Robbie had done the exact same thing. We prodded at the jungle floor with sticks and scratched armpits and arses, waiting for something to happen. I held my breath to accelerate a blood-flow. Robbie did several dozen push-ups, as I pulled myself up on branches to prompt the narcotic to take hold.
And then it happened.
We saw blurred etchings of the future that week as we melded into the trees, unsure if those rabid frothings we heard were our own or from the volcano beneath our leavened torsos and rafted souls. Each of us emitted a gentle aura of turquoise, lilac and death-white.
We sat against the trunks of trees, euphoric and immaculate. Our thirsts were sated merely by chewing on leaves, and our silence reigned magnificently.
Three young monks joined us in our revelry. It seemed that they might have followed us with intent. They found much more of the resin with ease, for they had walked this path before. They told us this in their own tongue, which we understood with clarity within the lucid and memorable high. They were neither forbidden to come here nor would be frowned upon when they returned. Their choice remained the utmost force both for them and for their peers. Their choice, their Will. Upon this matter and all others, we found a unanimous and hallowed accord. They then copulated skilfully, tenderly and yet like amorous monsters, as we chums ate more and more toffee, picking it out of our teeth as the boys, in front of us, sought impressive sacrilege, athletic profanity and astonishing desecration. They, too, shone with a turquoise, lilac and death-white aura.
It was rare, perhaps previously unknown, for me to turn down such banquets of flesh. (Oh goody! Young monks might have sufficed where my flirtatious, naughty and quite luscious jungle tree-cat had offered so much.) But out of respect for my new friend, Robbie, I would observe; a process which bubbled and boiled my loins to a transcendental spectrum of vividity; a process I encouraged and stoked and watched with a concentrated vigour equal to my stares across the verdant jungle floor at the gloried permutations of sodomy and fellatious pleasure in progress before us. We both refused to look away from the Bacchus, as rain poured upwards from the jungle floor and to the thirsty skies, and we appeared as laughing skeletons, only our hearts visible in our chests while hundreds of monks came to observe the week-long coitus. I shelved the peak of my aroused rigidity for after our farewell, as the men either elevated themselves up to vantage points of high branch or lowered themselves to the cushioned, leafy earth. They seemed to melt into the jungle as would have (and perhaps had) a thousand chameleons, and some days it was only the rich and connoisseur’s detail of their fecund and ribald chatter about the exhausted and eager boys that allowed us to know that they were there at all. I had simply no idea how long we had been there. This would only be gauged by when I arrived back in civilisation.
The toffee had allowed us glimpses of the future, images that would stay with Robbie and me both, and allow us to resolve our life paths, mine at least for the next twelve or thirteen decades. We would have no choice, having seen what we had seen. We had to save England, and accomplish this in our bespoke and most well-suited manners. We were two different characters, and so our methods, while being equally audacious and effective, would follow separate, yet dovetailing paths. Robbie’s were quiet, unassuming and helpful, mine were brash and public. I shall elaborate presently. Ours would be wholly brave and unsensible paths of glory, as I realised why we had been welcomed as liberators by the monks, for they too had taken the toffee and knew of the future of the world. And our pivotal place in it.
In the magnificent afterglow, we scrubbed each other’s backs in the waterfalls; in solidarity against the power of and in tune with the strong drug, as well as in unison against a fearsome future, like hard, crooked Welsh miners of concrete spine at the end of fifteen hours of hard labour under the earth. My chance meeting with Robbie had indeed been a fortuitous one, for we complimented each other quite perfectly. I knew that Dandylyon and Prudence would approve of my new recruit, who had agreed to be complicit in my immediate task of finding that wondrous hallucinogenic toffee substance, as we traversed those lordly mountainsides. I had been offered the latitude by my mentors to add soldiers, conspirators, allies and compadres in exceptional circumstances, and these were indeed exceptional, for we searched for a drug to manage, medicate and pacify mankind. My sound judgement – as to whom I recruited – had been proven by my silence and our exchanged parchment on that train from Russia to Waterloo.
As we washed each other with the innocence of siblings, I suspected already that I was in love with Robbie. I knew it was more than the aphrodisiac, coursing through me still, though the drug – and our abstinence – clearly aided and abetted my sentiments. The waterfalls were loud, so I shouted in Robbie’s ear, allowing more skin to touch. We were surrounded by lush and tall Indian tuberoses, wrapping us in the most delicious smells. Crazed birds sang and the skies were deep blue between the emerald leaf.
‘Were you afraid?’
‘I am not sure. I was fearful of something, but I was not afraid. I am not even sure if that makes sense,’ Robbie shouted. I think that’s what I heard.
We stepped away from the full force of the cascades, and were able to hear each other far better. I was also afforded a better look at the nude front of my friend, who continued, ‘There were details, faces and cities that were and still are remarkably clear, but I am struggling to see how it fits together in any kind of order, path or trajectory. I might need to take some more. It was quite astonishing fun. Did you have the kind of epiphany you were hoping for? Were you afraid?’
‘I barely know where or how to begin,’ I said. ‘I can recall the most minute detail in some moments, but these are defined for me, dated throughout the century, as if I were able to see the front page of The Times for decades, and each time I see a headline, I am part of the story. War, love, euphoria, misery, ignominy and glory. Precisely what I might have predicted of my existence. But I could never have foreseen the clarity and the measure of each sensation. But tell me of the small parts that you did see of your future?’
Robbie did not answer for a while, and then spoke, ‘My life will be seen through a woman’s eyes until the end of a Great War. Then my life and my world will be that of a male. My visions do not seem to have the clarity of yours. They are murky, patchy. What does this mean, Aleister?’
I sensed trepidation and fear for a few seconds before the glory of our previous days filled our beings again.
‘I am not sure. I know that I must go to China. I know that this is where my next mission shall be. I know that I have succeeded in my first. I have met you, and I have found the narcotic. Will you agree to work with me? Help me? If you do, I can let you in on the most magnificent secret. And we might have the most ecstatic time of it. Please.’
I knew what the answer would be, for I had seen such complicity in my visions. I was to send Robbie west to rendezvous with Prudence in Constantinople.
I saw how green Robbie’s eyes were, as we stood enveloped in jungle and waterfall and silence and mutual worship.
‘Rather! Father has been encouraging a vocation anyway. Let’s make the old bastard happy. But keep him guessing first. You’re on!’
How could either of us turn back now? Robbie moved forward in the shin-high pools of crystal froth, and took me in her arms, where I remained for many minutes, after which, she whispered, ‘I am sixteen.’
She was a game bird; my Ms. Roberta Honeydew. Yes, Robbie was a lass. I had known this since she revealed her boyish disguise by the Ambassador’s billiard table, by having grabbed my left wrist and thrust my paw onto her womanly vitals. It then became quite obvious she was a lass, and I was bewildered as to how she might ever have passed as a bloke. Her hair was cropped at the sides and back, like any young lad’s, her slight frame was bosomless, her arse cheeks those of any athletic scamp I had seen at university. Her voice was magnificently hermaphroditic; if one wanted to hear male, one heard male. She certainly played billiards with the dexterity of a seasoned colonel. However, if one had felt her fine pubis, then the secret was out, and if there was one thing I was able to do to the level of godliness, well, that was to keep a secret. I was a Pimpernel en apprentice. Robbie too fitted the bill of being able to maintain a lie, a trait perfectly in keeping with what I had planned. Her ability to shape-shift between the sexes might also prove to be an intriguing arrow in one’s espionage quiver.
And so we slipped away to the forests fuelled, for we had foreseen our immediate destinies, and then on to different ports to facilitate our departures in different directions. I was robust in my determination to suck all from these coming years, prescient of looming events and aware that the world was facing a century of bloodshed and murder, and with it a diminishing of our generation and our continent’s astonishing binge. This was our heaven. This was our youth. Our time. Our now.
Dandylyon and Prudence had told me that I would likely receive clues to my next assignment in the visions from the resin. Again, latitude was mine, and all they asked for was a regular and coded message to a nearby embassy or consul. If I were stranded and needed advice, the goo would act as my spirit guide.
Robbie and I knew our fortunes were independent but intertwined. Our goals were England’s. Our methods were marvellously immiscible: hers the virtuous, brave and righteous; mine the proudly tainted, mischievous and obsidian. Both were straight-backed and audacious. Both puked at piety.
We parted and embraced with a measure that was exact and profound in its measuredness. One went north to the naval base of Kankesanthurai, a vast spit off Jaffna, whence trade to and from India passed; and one went east to the fishing port of Oluvil in Ampara, for we knew that our individual arcs were to begin here. That naughty and demanding resinous jungle-floor toffee had told me so, and yet we were both pleasurably and obediently cuffed, lectured and enslaved to the stuff.
As we left that orgiastic island, my pockets and my mouth were stuffed with the ecstatic goo. My hat held priceless ounces, and over my shoulder, a monk’s liberated robes carried a hefty seam of the stuff. Just the gunk under my fingernails and between my teeth could have fuelled much revelry for a fortnight.
Robbie swanned west across mill pond and cerulean waters of bliss, while I went east only to hit a monstrous cyclone that left three crew members dead. The captain did not have to commit their bodies to the ocean floor, for they were likely already there. He might however have spoken of a cursed fat-thumbed Englishman who had shackled himself naked to the mast, halfway up to the crow’s nest, and who had done so before the eye of the awesome beast hit us. He might have whispered of the madman’s maintained arousal throughout the storm, for he had remained visible to the befuddled and impressed skipper. In my pidgin Sinhalese, I had explained that I would appease nature and be her first sacrifice, if required. This did not explain the three who perished during those two days and two nights of quite sensational terror.
I only became aware of the extent of the typhoon as we approached Singapore – our torn ship was still afloat by some miracle of physics – and the undulating and euphoric impact of the devilishly persistent toffee eventually began to subside. The intensity of the storm had, without a doubt, maintained and lengthened my transcendental and hallucinogenic magic carpet ride. Once untied from the mast, with a predominantly flaccidated and aching member, my launched seed washed by nature from my thighs, knees and feet, and robed in a strip of tattered sail, the sparking of a very large roll of hashish and dampish tobacco was to allow for a quite magnificent landing. The passengers were a mottled bunch of circus acrobats, British Army lads, resourceful whores and wayward spice-sellers from the Silk Road. They and the crew chatted, attempted to avoid all eye contact and bowed their submissive, deferential and possibly concerned heads as I passed them all on deck in a dense-ish cloud formation of pacific rafts of burned weed. Wisdom comes in many forms, and theirs was a visceral and disciplined one, and one that averted its gaze from this spirited being.
I understand those who say that one should never mix business with pleasure. They are, however, in the wrong business. The resin in my pockets, under my hat, in my stuffed and folded robes and even under my fingernails was not only for recreational purposes. This drug was also the cornerstone of my new career. What a lucky boy I now was.
I left England to meddle in politics, always with peace and England’s illustrious fortunes and those of her allies in mind. Now I dabbled in provocation and acted as peacemaker, wherever it would benefit Whitehall. My apprenticeship would begin in the seedlings of the Boxer Rebellion. Dandylyon and I had exchanged relayed telegrams, via the British embassy in Singapore. He was thrilled to learn of the discovery and of the potency of the stuff. He wrote back.
PERDURABO. STOP. DO AS YOUR HEART AND WILL TELL YOU. STOP. SEEK MING OF RED MIST IN QUFU, SHANDONG PROVINCE. STOP. THE BLINDFOLDED CHESSMASTER SHALL PLAY WITH HIS QUEEN.
Northern China was hostile turf. The regular notes between Robbie and me, whose delivery relied upon a well-established network of Orr’s spies, tell of how I founded a mob of practised pugilistic warriors, and named them ‘The Righteous and Harmonious Fists’. And then later, how I convinced them that their expertise in calisthenics would make them impervious to bullets. I was the only foreigner they would suffer, for their goal was to rid China of all Western devils, as well as to overthrow the Ch’ing dynasty that had ruled for a quarter of a millennium. The international force that was soon sent to China to quell the northern rebels was a semi-honourable, semi-self-interested and thoroughly mixed one – American, Russian, British, French, Italian, Japanese, Indian – and it was through this very alliance of my own urging that war was quelled in Europe for the next fifteen years. The satisfaction of introducing several problems or obstacles (which here were mistrust between European nations, pending war and famine across China, my immediate future, progress and success as a spy) to each other and walking away with a single unfettered solution (a union of sex, drugs, love, peace, mischief, alliances and revolution) with zero by-product or waste shall please me to my final days. Well, this was one such unmessy process.
I worked the other side as a double agent too. The Empress Dowager Cixi sat on the throne of China, and was the true target of the insurgents. She was a seasoned mare, some might say elderly, but she exhibited adequately juvenile tendencies for her and this Englishman to eat toffee resin together in late 1900. Her well-brewed loins, more than five decades older than mine, were favoured upon me, as I marvelled at her while heavily influenced by the narcotic, and glad I had been so, for she was a ferocious and quite excellent lover. I can still hear her wide range of released guttural purrs and pleasured yelps. Her Majesty was such a marvellous vocal musician, while being strummed; a fine, fine trick to pull off. During these moments, she liked to shriek and yell the lyrics of ‘Hoichi the Earless’, an odd choice as it was a song of Japanese legend.
‘Why do you sing in Japanese? You seem to venerate them so,’ I asked her.
She answered in Mandarin.
My understanding of the language was in its infancy, so she kindly translated for me into perfect English.
‘I sing it so no one can understand my agony or my joy,’ she said to me as we bathed one day, my taut skin intertwined with her loose rolls. The Oedipal overtones of sticking it to my mother one last time were not lost on me.
*
The Boxers – in Mandarin, Yihetuan, or the Militia United in Righteousness – trusted me throughout, but when I returned to their insurgent slopes with a broad man’s fistful of her jewellery and her marginally tarnished silk underwear (both given by her as gifts, I must add), then I was heralded as a truly lordly type, and my status was legend. The females (and some of the more rebellious rebels) eyed me with an even more twisted and aroused countenance and I duly satisfied their curiosity. And so, the siege of Peking that lasted for just under eight weeks was a mock one, arranged in advance by Her Majesty and me. The city was filled with food and medicine for the duration, and the number fifty-five was decided upon by the difference in our ages, much to her amusement, and only ever shown in private.
Her Majesty would get her wish for greater support from her generals and the provinces, notoriously unruly, especially so under the reign of a female. Those who plotted against her would be exposed like cockroaches in the light, and rightfully slaughtered once the mild faux scrap was over. I got what I wanted with a European alliance that aided peace closer to home until the Great War, and I learned how to fuck a queen. It seemed to sum up what this spy lark was all about. Drugs, sex, royalty, chess-like machinations and, of course, POWER.
I smile, for I could, given I had started a mini-war just to divert it, be quite the diplomat.
I was saddened to leave China, but I knew there was a job to be done, and my departure would allow for that most beautiful of things, which is returning to China.
The spy is imbued with a Protestant work ethic, and there is always work to be done.
‘Where will you go next, English boy?’ she asked me.
‘Africa.’
‘Will you come back here to your decumbent and eager queen?’
‘Even if you were to give me all the tea in China, I would not stay away, Your Majesty.’
‘Good. Now go. And leave me a handful of that goo by which to remember you.’
She allowed her robes to fall, and I was unable to prevent myself from falling on her one last time.
She had eaten the toffee, could see the future, and knew I was not coming back.
Thus, the power-meddling continued as Robbie and I straddled Africa, and wrote to each other of the early clashes with Dutch farmers by the Cape, marshalling much of the gold out and away before the nonsense escalated into the Boer War.
(Excerpt of letter sent from me to Robbie via the British ambassador in Cape Town.)
Our navy lads are experts in the imperial exchange of precious metals, loaded to the brim in return for fools to govern them. We take Africa’s treasures, and we exchange it for a conveyor belt of jauntily striding, marginally inbred Harrow types, marching off the gangplank into cushy roles of national governance. These imbeciles never quite convince their underlings whether they are befuddled or loftily gifted. Our trawls of precious metals are vast, and we shall be gone long before another and larger fight for mere land shall start.
My crew and I toast, chew and fuck, as we take angelic winds on white tops and with the speedy, racing fins of friendly and aroused sea mammals, keen to come along for the ride, past turquoise and teal reefs and on to Southampton and Deptford. For Nature knows where the good times are to be found. We are spending days and nights with Bacchus once more.
D & P tell me that half a million very hard Australian and New Zealand men are arriving there at the southern tip of the great continent to fight the war for the Empire26. Meanwhile, ours remains a magnificent fleet, an armada of frigates, battleships, clippers and tall ships. Anything we can commission and will hold gold, we set to wave for Blighty. WC is thrilled.
I wanted to also let her know (but was unable for security reasons) that the skipper of one young, lithe, lissome, slim-hipped and girthily masted beauty, the Wi-Wira, was then under instructions to head to Ceylon, and to the town the English now call Kandy, where instructions were waiting for him and his hand-picked and trusted deviants to walk into the mountains to procure resin with the aid of the abetting, fornicating monks. The skipper was instructed by the Admiral of the Fleet to keep it coming to my recently acquired mansions, one by Dulwich Common and one by Loch Ness called Boleskine. And to keep his gob shut, for here, potentially, we had a new weapon of love to fight a century’s worth of wars.
It is a measure of the low regard in which homosexuality was held in England that despite a fair amount of lapsed time between those days and my last male lover, the rumours had taken root, sprouted and were flourishing. Buggery was something practised at public school, and not beyond. Every schoolboy, it seemed, knew this. The stain of such acts performed after Eton and Oxbridge was a tough one to shift, it seemed. Of course, the hypocrisy executed by the paedophilic lawmakers in Westminster was as rancid as it could be, for their craft had included also the creation and maintenance of the workhouse, the dark satanic mills and would soon turn to mass slaughter in the trenches.
And yes, I had polluted many women by now, but most of these had been overseas and beyond the eyes, ears and gossip of my British audience. Dandylyon had heard the first mutterings of my reputation back in Cambridge and London, and urged the right thing be done to quell the vicious chatter of acts that were still highly illegal. And so, on 9 February 1903, I took a wife, with whom I was not initially in love, but soon would be my first true Scarlet Woman.27
An interesting sort called Gerald Kelly was introduced to me, a friend of Dandylyon’s in the Golden Dawn and an engaging and intelligent man of Irish stock whose childhood was spent in the comfortable streets around Paddington Station. His sister was the most important thing in the world to him, and he had shuddered when he learned of his parents’ wish to have her wed off to society in an arranged and sham marriage. Gerald dared not face his parents’ ire and risk being disinherited, but knew full well that the Golden Dawn possessed adequate power in a thousand forms to supersede his own father’s mauve intentions. Kelly, Dandylyon and I luncheoned at our club, and realised, then agreed that there was another one of those wasteless solutions at hand. Word of my sodomous exploits might be hushed, and Kelly’s sister’s utter sadness averted, for I would allow her freedom, cash and friendship were she to accept. Agreed, it was an arranged marriage, but one that would allow her the full latitudes and scopes of emotional liberty and financial comfort, and in reality thrust her forward into a realm of discovery that not only suited her, but was a remarkable catalyst for me. Yes, Rose Edith Kelly soon became the most remarkable companion, and one that allowed my spiritual enlightenment and my initial flourishing as a god and all for the sake of England’s stability, but I shall tell of this presently. First, we would (quite conveniently and never reducing either my desires or fondness for Robbie) fall in love.
Diary Entry
19 February 1904
The country needs our marital union, for an artifice to cover the rumour of my unshackled pansexuality, my dabbling in the darker arts, and my work for WC supersedes all. Rose Edith and I sat today by our wintry lawns in Dulwich, preparing for our honeymoon to the near East when I received notice of pending instructions for the next conflict from D.
Rose Edith is most understanding, a quite attractive feature when coupled with her steely stare and outright willingness to be molested in seemly and unseemly fashions. I marvel at how she teaches this clumsy and chunky-thumbed Beast in the nuances of adoration, for she is a very different lass to the most elastically responsive Queen Cixi. Perhaps all that time with lads has left me comically inadequate in the care required to please a lady. Believing in the evolution of the species requires one to evolve constantly oneself too. It is only fair, after all.
24 February 1904
Our honeymoon must wait, for D & P have informed me that I must now leave immediately. Rose Edith, all cascading strawberry curls, lime-green eyes and milky skin – my very own thrice daily serving of pico de gallo – remains so understanding of my duties to England, while not knowing the full extent of my employ. I hope she (yes! the cat’s mother) shall soon, but I am prepared to live with a Pimpernel’s secret.
R, from her current location of Minsk, and I shall leave for Tokyo and Moscow respectively before Japan and Russia’s mutual hostilities begin. I am to take the identity of one Count Vladimir Svareff of 67 and 69 Chancery Lane.
I remind you that we (MI-1) had resolved to keep Russia and Japan inward-looking, and so when war began between them, we felt some responsibility to help quell it all. No one wants to see a million innocents starve or be slaughtered.
15 March 1904
The hunger and blight in those awful days in both cities remain a stain upon humanity. A child should not have to eat the flesh of a parent to survive. There is little wonder the psyches of nations are damaged. Daily, we now urge and encourage the exoduses of thousands to citadels where food is more probable, and to the coasts for fish.
When appropriate, we do what we can in administering the low supplies of resin, for the toffee not only suppresses hunger for weeks, but is rich in nutrients for the blood, and is known to propagate deviantly long spells of rampant lust and an admirable desire for coition, but also removes any hatred towards one’s fellow man or beast. If there were a cow or pig to be slaughtered, the beast would remain safe in the paths we take through those largely barren lands. It is often necessary for children to witness the lust of parents and neighbours, but we are saving lives by the hundreds of thousands. Maybe it will do them good, far better than seeing their parents beheaded, and no child is ever harmed, fondled or touched, for the narcotic is a righteous one. A pacifist movement flourishes; municipal orgies are a common sight. One glimpse at the love-strewn hillsides and those brackish generals know where we have been, and yet there are those who refuse to be caught in our treacly trap. But treacly toffee is as treacly toffee does, and, when we poison the wells with it, we ensnare dozens, scores, hundreds, thousands in our sticky web, and then conversion to love by digestion is just minutes away.
The Russo-Japanese war would last three days under nineteen months. Had it not been for our narcotic intervention behind the lines of both factions, the conservative estimate in London reckoned that the conflict would have lasted for a minimum of fifteen, perhaps fifty, years. I shall never forget the obvious admiration on a young compadre’s face as we watched three battalions of cut-throat warriors fellate and sodomise each other on the awed shore of the Yellow Sea, as bemused enemy spotters viewed from their vessels, bobbing on the waves in rhythm to the coastal shaftfest. And rather than wash ashore and slaughter the love-makers, the navy observed, the captains met to consult, before they gawked for three more days and then to the cheers of the sailors below and on deck, set sail for home ports, to their families and to peace, unsure whether to speak of what they had seen. The seamen told tales of how the exhausted and spent revellers on the dunes had even waved their newly erstwhile foe a fond farewell, a farewell that some had interpreted (perhaps in their own eager minds) as an invitation to reignite the quite unforgettable man-revel on the sands.
War was over. Go home, boys.
Maintaining a presence in two spots was a skill mastered by that first Scarlet Pimpernel, and I now mastered this art not from one side of the English Channel to the other, but straddling vast continents – China, Loch Ness, Dulwich, Moscow and next North Africa – all in the name of subterfuge. My ability and licence to spend three days in a first-class train sleeper from Moscow to Waterloo injecting the finest heroin seemed a remarkably efficient use of my time, while conveniently scratching that particular recreational itch.
In the late spring of 1904, my burgeoning darling Rose Edith, five months pregnant with our first child, and I honeymooned in Cairo where she soon revealed her astonishing gift in the shadowy arts. Dandylyon really was the finest marionettist for how on earth would he know of the latent skills of Kelly’s previously and marvellously benign sister? How did he know she possessed the vision and would be the conduit to allow this Beast to become a god? Well, this happened in Egypt, as we dripped and rolled and smoked hashish and laughed and sat for yoga. And knew, deep down, a reckoning with our precipitous futures was nigh.
It all began in our impressive and sweeping hotel chambers, fit for an army of camels to enter the kingdom of heaven, and lit with the blessed afternoon sun through the dust of the streets and desert, casting yellow, violet, teal and orange on blanched walls through thick stained glass. My aim was an avowedly frivolous attempt to impress her with an invocation, a rudimentary and basic attempt to rid ourselves of some random invisible spirit,28 who was supposed to make its presence known before its harmless and trauma-free departure. However, Rose Edith saw nothing but did, quite intriguingly, fall into a definite trance. Good girl! It was then that she repeated the words clearly and several times, ‘They are waiting for you. They are waiting for you. They are waiting for you.’
These were the words of Rose Edith, who possessed scant knowledge of religion or Egyptology.
A noise came from her that upon repetition appeared to be annunciating two syllables – Boo and Larg.
‘Boulag? Boulag? Do you mean the Boulag Museum?’
I was pretty sure Rose Edith had no idea of this site. I immediately resolved to take her there that very dusk. I was still confounded, so I asked her to speak with the god Thoth, and for the spirit’s intent to be more specific.
‘Who is waiting for me? Who is sending this message?’ I said.
‘Horus,’ she answered firmly in the manly tone of a construction worker, so at odds with her gentle and maidenish tones. ‘Horus.’
I brought her out of the trance, the same way that an aroused beast might have; executed with an impressively impassioned clumsiness.
As we cooled, I spoke, ‘My dear. You must show me Horus. Take me to Horus.’
‘Who is Horus?’
Rose Edith could not recall the name from her trance.
Within hours, we were walking around the museum. When we passed many of the common images one sees of Horus in Cairo, I began to prepare myself to dismiss any true clairvoyance, in its true sense from French of seeing the light. Perhaps after one hour, she stopped, with no prompting, in front of an ornately decorated funerary monument, the Stele of Revealing from the twenty-sixth dynasty. It showed a priest called Ankh-af-na-khonsu presenting a sacrifice to Horus. I shuddered, for not only did I see the Stele of Revealing as a clumsy nod to the Book of Revelations, but the museum had assigned to the astonishing relic the number 666, that number, my number from the Scriptures of my blissful childhood and the number assigned to me by Mother. I knew I now had to listen to Rose Edith. And so we stayed for weeks seeking out further enlightenment, a project of which Dandylyon and Prudence thoroughly approved, and were supremely keen to know of its results.
On July eighth, ninth and tenth of that year, Rose Edith dictated to me for precisely one hour each day the three parts of the verse and book I called that first great work, The Book of the Law. Or at least, she believed that she did. She sparked some of it, I suppose. She told me that the source of the text was a spirit called Aiwass, who was my holy guardian angel. I was taking large amounts of very strong drugs, and may have scripted far more of the text than Aiwass was (allegedly) dictating through Rose Edith. This shall always remain a fluid question as to who was more responsible for the book. Rose Edith was quite happy to be taking the credit, and at this stage in her pregnancy, she ingested no drug other than the clouds of scorched marijuana that perpetually encased her husband.
Critics and cynics may have scoffed, but there were many disclosures in the text that could not have been forged. Rose Edith’s channelling of the clues to lead us to the Stele was only the beginning for her; her solving the ridiculously complex mathematical and literal puzzles that The Book of the Law lays out could only have come from another. The four of us – our growing foetus, Aiwass, Rose Edith and I – we were truly immaculate and elegant in those thrumming and whirring days and airless nights in Cairo, astride the saddle of that most beguiling continent. And throughout I had the quite distinct feeling that this was all being manipulated, with personal benediction and political foresight, by my dear guardian, Dr Horace Dandylyon, and that whispering nurse-witch. But with a manuscript written and a honeymoon enjoyed to quash rumours of cock, we left.
My wife, our fruit in her womb, and I left for Scotland. On July the twenty-eighth, life exhibited her ability to startle even the likes of me when Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley was born at Boleskine House, my new country estate at Inverfarigaig by Loch Ness.
I had bought Boleskine House, a sixteenth-century mansion, at Dandylyon’s urging. His precise instructions were for a place to perform a quite precise ritual; a Golden Dawn ceremony known as the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, taken from a grimoire called The Book of Abramelin. The first essential element was a house in a more or less secluded situation. There had to be a door opening to the north from the room in which one makes one’s oratory. Outside this door, I was to construct a terrace covered with fine river sand. This had to end in a ‘lodge’ where the spirits may congregate. The precise purpose of this ritual was to invoke one’s Guardian Angel.
After a lengthy search, Boleskine was found to fit the bill quite perfectly. It required at least six months of preparation, celibacy and abstinence from alcohol (but not drugs). It also included the summoning of the Twelve Kings and Dukes of Hell, to bind them and remove their negative influences from the magician’s life. Incapable of remaining celibate, I would leave before the process was complete, and some of my detractors suggest that the incomplete spell released a negativity there in the lodge, but they remain fools, who know less than bugger all, for she was a fine home with many magical memories of joyous times.
I had grown to love Rose Edith so, and I believe she loved me. She was so much fun, but when one sups with a devil, one should do so with a long spoon. The vast highs we enjoyed over the next year masked her pain, I see this now, but they also enflamed me to write superb filth.
I was prolific. White Stains had been published soon after I found the resin, and now came more pornography. In these months with Rose Edith’s mauled torso, perpetually bruised from my thumbprints, and rarely out of or far from my grip, I completed Snowdrops From a Curate’s Garden. I wrote Necrophilia in one weekend, though it was not to be available for another fifteen years. The title seemed to offend the humourless English, for I was seen in certain strata as not only a mischief-maker of increasingly questionable repute, but a member of the ragtag Scottish Mountaineering Club. Those who needed to know the truth knew. I was the Scarlet Pimpernel and revelations thereof would mean my destruction. My life was built on lies, and any wish to have people think better of me had to be banished. This was my daily mantra, for I was well on the way to being that ‘wickedest man in the world’.29
White Stains was first published in Amsterdam by Leonard Smithers, that pioneer of English pornography and contentious literature, who also worked with Wilde and whose books had filled Pollitt’s shelves. I white-stained the original print-run of one hundred copies. They were a magnificent sight. When British customs took them, I denounced them as bastards. Of course, Dandylyon had sanctioned the seizure on the ship from Rotterdam. The volumes arrived at Boleskine within the week. The couriers carried each one to my library and placed them with the maximum care on my book shelves. They even called me, ‘Mr Bishop, sir,’ with a worthy deference, for I had used a nom de plume for White Stains. George Archibald Bishop was the fictional author, a neuropath of the second empire. Bishop was, of course, that cunt Uncle Tom’s family name.
In the controversial book, I was of the opinion that any sexual aberrations were psychological in nature and I turned to artistic expression to make the point. I invented a character, a cloth-headed poet who went all wrong, and who began with normal innocent enthusiasms, and gradually developed various vices. He ends up being stricken with disease and madness, culminating in murder. In his poems he describes his downfall, always explaining the psychology of each act. I merely humanised the filth, and I believe to this day that is what the mucky sods that bake, preach, police, teach, drive trains, politick and farm the land really wanted. They are all secret or public monsters, flowers of Eros and Evil, no better than broiled hounds in summer with their twitching noses up another’s special flesh. Magnificent perverts all, but in equal measure, fucking hypocrites.
And so with bodily joys and other worldly highs, my poetry flourished for the first time from my true self, and not from that florid posing nitwit, who flounced around Cambridge. It felt so bloody good to tell the truth, even if I was still playing a part, because this new identity, that of a filthy pig, now folded in on my own to an enlightened perfection.
Void of the ecstasies of Art
It were in life to have lain by thee,
And felt thy kisses rain on me,
And the hot beating of thy heart,
When thy warm sweat should leave me cold,
And my worn soul find out no bliss
In the obscenities I kiss,
And the things shameful that I hold.
My nostrils sniff the luxury
Of flesh decaying, bowels torn
Of festive worms, like Venus, born
Of entrails foaming like the sea.
Yea, thou art dead. Thy buttocks now
Are swan-soft, and thou sweatest not;
And hast a strange desire begot
In me, to lick thy bloody brow;
To gnaw thy hollow cheeks, and pull
Thy lustful tongue from out its sheath;
To wallow in the bowels of death,
And rip thy belly, and fill full
My hands with all putridities;
To chew thy dainty testicles;
To revel with the worms in Hell’s
Delight in such obscenities;
To pour within thine heart the seed
Mingled with poisonous discharge
From a swollen gland, inflamed and large
With gonorrhoea’s delicious breed;
To probe thy belly, and to drink
The godless fluids, and the pool
Of rank putrescence from the stool
Thy hanged corpse gave, whose luscious stink
Excites these songs sublime. The rod
Gains new desire; dive, howl, cling, suck,
Rave, shriek, and chew; excite the fuck,
Hold me, I come! I’m dead! My God!
With Rose Edith, our physical union had seemed to transcend all that I had known before, and it now sat astride all of those experiments and forays with gents and lads. Yet I knew soon that it was merely the jungle goo and my Scarlet Woman’s unfathomable attraction to magick and the spells that were driving us to an insane and unmanageable passion. It could not go on, at least not there in Scotland. We were starting to attract unwanted attention, and then visits from the local constabulary after the nosy bastards with field glasses at Urquhart Castle across the lake spotted us and reported us after some mildly illegal horseplay at dusk. Dandylyon wrote to me at that time (no coincidence, I am sure) with a mission, and I had to go to Burma.
In late 1905 when I was preparing to depart, I made a despicable and selfish decision. I could not live, I thought, without Rose Edith and Lilith, so as part of the excuse of taking them as a perfect cover for my meddling, they accompanied me on my mission. And it was there in the heat of that cursed land, that my daughter died of enteric fever the following year.
Sleep I forget. Her silky breath no longer fans my ears; I dream I float on some forgotten stream that hath a savour still of death. My angel was gone for ever.
*
Even this selfish oaf I was pretending to be, rather well I think, was permitted to display his understanding that fatherhood is a threshold infinitely more defining than any secret society or even any invocation. It stands alone in the discovery of the self; the cliché is I am afraid true, as clichés can annoyingly be. The elevation is as joyous as it is precipitous, for the loss of a child never leaves, and what appears to be the most selfless of journeys, almost by definition, is in fact a thoroughly selfish one, when one is left feeling sorry for oneself for fifty years, as one’s child suffers no more and feels no pain. They were my days that were blighted, my shivers and my screams in the nights, my masking of the terror in more and more and more cocaine. Selfish, selfish. Me, me. My. I. More.
When Lilith passed, Rose Edith was already pregnant again. And so, it was a blessed time for ME when Lola Zaza Crowley was born in December 1906.
Lola! Now look me straight in the eyes.
Our fate is come upon us. Tell me now.
Love still shall arbitrate our destinies
And joy inform the swart Plutonic brow.
The bloody awful thing for me, even then, was that I named Lola after a mistress I had taken, while all I really wanted between the masking effects of my rampant aphrodisiac from the Ceylon jungle, was to bed my young Robbie, my tight, young virgin, my dream.30 That solitary sentence contained three I’s, four my’s and a me from this selfish bastard.
After Lola’s birth, Rose Edith wished to compensate for her quite pure lifestyle during the gestation of our second child. Here her addiction to heroin began. I fear now these excesses may have been instrumental in her demise. She should not have gone toe-to-toe with me. I possessed a large store of the jungle resin in my basement, and in my science laboratory, huge hip-high sixteenth-century Ottoman vats, plentiful with opium, morphine, cocaine, chloroform and marijuana were stocked up by a monthly delivery. The clay pots that had cost a unreasonably hefty sum at Sotheby’s were all regularly blessed in dark-ish midnight ritual, more to convince those of a flimsier constitution who would ingest stacks of the stuff that they would receive an umbrella’d protection from the more perilous and thornier effects of the potent powders and liquids. This perceived defence against their destruction was just hogwash, a placebo, for the strongest (and sometimes the weakest) link in that chain is always the mind. Indeed for me, these drugs were always paths to a higher consciousness that allowed me to play God en route. I see now that they merely allowed for Rose Edith to escape from the misery I was blindly and selfishly building for her with those exact same selfish fucking drugs of mine. I also believe that had she been elsewhere, she would have been even bleaker. It was just the way she was. I weep for her regularly, my fond love.
What a horror I must have appeared, and yet I was saving millions of lives with my time of youthful mischief, as I liberated the minds of swathes of the planet, ended wars early, prevented conflicts from happening, stopped starvation, encouraged mass, frenzied, lengthy and leavened copulation. That fine fellow, Sir Percy Blakeney, be partially and politely damned in my shadow, because Pimpernelling was a new art now. And I was more Scarlet than any blighter, who had ever lived.
And in truth, still only a strutting apprentice.
22 Augustus Montague Summers (10 April 1880–10 August 1948) – English scholar and perhaps the closest equivalent we have to Abraham Van Helsing.
23 Queen Victoria’s mother.
24 The Great Binge describes the period in history, covering roughly 1875 to 1914, when drugs and alcohol were readily available and marketed to all, even children.
25 I shall tell more of this almost immediately.
26 We had lost the first Boer War (1880–1881), but prevailed in this second one (1899–1902).
27 I use this term not in any pernicious way, but throughout my life there was a stream of ladies who were more than mere affairs, they were disciples, accomplices and partisan sidekicks of the finest hue. It was my term of endearment, and the entrance requirements were, indeed, high. There were elements that could not be learned, but also some that had to be.
28 A spell called ‘Sew to Sylphs’.
29 Moronic words from the clods at the Daily Mail.
30 That sweetest of events with Robbie would be over ten years and a world war from now.