1
I had nothing and no one. Even my schoolmistress would not take me, for I was now not good enough for the likes of her, though she had been painted with the Whore of Babylon’s powder brush. At midnight, I banged on the door of the baker’s shop, over which my sister Bathsheba, her husband, and my niece slept. Bathsheba came out eventually and told me that Jesus would guide me, that I needed to give my soul over to the Lord and to repent of my sins.
“You do not know what you do now,” she said. “You believe you understand the world and its forces, but you have followed the ways of the flesh. You must repent, and look to the word of God. Forsake this carnal pastime, and make a scourge of your flesh.” She had recited my father’s words so much that they were her normal way of speaking.
“You are the godforsaken,” I told her, and left her there, in the dark of her doorway with these final words, “You will come to know the devil yourself one day, and your Lord will not pluck you from his fiery arms.”
I was nearly eighteen, and without a place to sleep.
2
That night I slept on the high summer grass, and stared up at the stars, or what could be seen of them. Even at night, the black smoke roiled in the heavens.
I spoke aloud to God, unsure if my youthful nature would keep him deaf to my pleas.
But I had an answer by morning, as to my question of what I should do next.
The railroad industry was growing rapidly and had been since my birth. The news of railway races, testing their speed and comfort, came to us weekly from Liverpool and Manchester. The plans of expanding the rails to all parts of the British Isles filled my dreams with exploration. On the continent, great changes occurred as well, and it all made me believe that we were entering a new phase of human existence, when there was nothing that could not be touched, seen, experienced. I wanted to be part of it. The industry around the rails was about to grow, and there were jobs to the north and east. Industries must advance, and I knew that I had talents with numbers and an engineering sense, as well as my newfound knowledge of literature and the past, which could be applied to this new world within the old world that would mean something important for me. We were entering more fully the Age of Machines, and I knew it was my opportunity to build a fortune.
At the mines in Newcastle, we’d had railway-like trams for mining. I had repaired them at times, and knew many aspects of their engineering that even the older men did not know. I knew I could somehow make my way in the world with the newer, more modern railways that would carry passengers long distances. I had an uncle in Manchester, so I’d been told, though I had never met him. I would somehow get there, sleep in his shed, and work in some capacity. I was good with numbers, and now had a decent education in English, with a smattering of Latin and Italian. Surely, I could find better work than shoveling coal or shearing sheep.
So I set off, walking, hitching rides with the less reputable carriage lines, sleeping beneath bridges, feeling, as one does at that age, the freedom of life. The freedom from family. The sense that the world is about to open up for you as you discover it.
The belief that it is a benevolent dictator, this life.
3
So I left all I had known, begged, borrowed, and stole my way to my uncle’s. When passing through a large enough town, and having no money to speak of, I went to the local Anglican church, which would have a comfortable chapel. I would go in and sleep on the pews until such a time in the morning I would be thrown out. In one such town, I was thrown from the premises early, and went to sleep among the graves. I brought out my brother’s bones, and, finding a fresh grave that had not yet been filled with its tenant, buried my brother at the bottom of the newly dug plot and covered this over with sod.
Lloyd had a Christian burial at last, at least in terms of location. Both my father and mother would think this a blasphemy, as they each believed the Anglicans were the most corrupt of all the heathen churches.
I slept well, atop the grave of a former magistrate of the town, and when I awoke, the local priest found me there and offered me a fine breakfast and three pounds from the poor box to help me on my way to my uncle’s home.
4
My uncle lived in the heart of Manchester, an industrial town that was growing and full of possibilities. Although others might call it dirty and boring, I found the streets of Manchester to be like the firmament itself: It was wall-to-wall possibility, and sometimes, that is all a young man with less than a penny in his pocket and a talent for fixing things needs.
Uncle Meyrick was now called Maurice, had taken the last name Gravesend, as was the fashion then (to modify a name that sounded too old-fashioned or perhaps even of a lower caste; it was becoming the norm to Anglify it as completely as possible). So I too became, not Iestyn ap Graver, but Justin Gravesend, and with the name adjustment, felt as if a whole new life were offered, with a whole new teat from which to suck.
Uncle Maurice lived in a hulking cottage made up of two rooms, with a kitchen in a separate small house outside. He welcomed me like the prodigal son. He had a heart as big as the city itself, and I knew my luck had changed when we met and he embraced me as if he had been waiting his whole life to see one of his nephews. He made some choice words about my father and mother, and then told me to go and bathe and he would buy me some new clothes for my new life.
When I had shaven and sponged myself in an ill-fitting tub, he returned with clothes that, to me, seemed spun from gold, yet they were ordinary work clothes of the time.
Uncle Maurice was a jovial drunk with a wide pink face and an excellent way about him that made few women love him but many men adore his company. He was a raconteur who enjoyed brandy and cigars, and had learned to cheat at cards without offending his partners. He made his living by running a tobacco and sundries shop near the waterfront. He lived partly off this, and partly from a yearly allowance from the estate of his great-grandfather, from which my family had been disinherited. He was generous to a fault, and I grew to love him as my own father.
He introduced me to men at the rail yard, who tested me for keeping books for the railway. Soon I was earning my keep and contributing to my uncle’s household. I even managed to send a little money each month to my mother. I had become worried about her cough (of which she’d written me) and that she might put some savings aside for her old age.
Now and then, my sister Bathsheba would write to me and tell me how badly I’d treated our father and how God wished for me to return to Him so that I might understand my sinful ways. I ignored her letters and would send her brief notes telling her that I was happy to hear about her latest child, my new nephew or niece, and I included a few pennies for the child’s upkeep. I held no animosity toward her, for I considered Bathsheba a lost soul in that horrible village, stuck in a life I had so gladly escaped. My other brothers and sisters fared better and got far away, some of them even going to America, others, to jobs in the Midlands, where new industries were just being born.
I enjoyed these several months, but before I was nineteen, Uncle Maurice warned me that I shan’t want to be adding numbers in a ledger book my whole life. “You need more than this, Just, you have a mind that’s better than your beginnings.”
He meant for me to enter the university, and so I submitted to the barrage of tests and entrance examinations, primarily oral, to attend. I failed some of them, but impressed the faculty enough that I was allowed two courses of study to begin. I had a talent with biology, particularly regarding human anatomy, which I could only attribute to my many hours gazing at my brother’s bones. So I was to study the natural world with seminars in anatomy and physiology and literature, although I would not end up as either a surgeon or professor, two vocations that seemed to require a wealthy family in order to rise within the ranks.
Within weeks, I had added more studies. I attended class in the mornings and worked the ledger books at night. My new classes included botany and biology, as well as astronomy, when time permitted. I began reading the new books then being published: the works of the American Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens’s The Personal History of David Copperfield, and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which affected me greatly. It was a world that was so different from the blackened skies of my childhood that I felt at times like I had died and gone to heaven. I found I had a genuine hunger for learning, as if it had been an essential nutrient deprived me, and I found there was more to learn than my ardent schoolmistress had even suspected.
Despite the roiling of the world’s events, news from America and the Continent of upheavals, and even the news from London, I hid from the world, into the literature I could find. The languages I could learn. Pages I turned until my fingers nearly bled, and my eyes blurred. I ignored the physical and grew a bit fat around the belly, but soon learned to fast and keep from gaining the odd stone or two by restricting my diet nearly to a prisoner’s fare. I added boxing to my repertoire of exercise, as well as a popular athletic game called rugby that I’d been taught by the rich boys at my college who seemed to spend most of their days in lackadaisical pursuits and narcissistic rituals. I admired them, to some extent, for their inability or interest in making money. They had no need of it, for they were the sons of estates and landowners and they were at university merely to pass the time before they’d return to the manor houses of their boyhood and work the tenants to their deaths. They spoke of war as if it were an extension of their favorite sports, and they had no fear of the future. Nor did they have a sense that it held possibilities. In this, I felt bad for them. Additionally, I felt a bit of grief when they spoke of our college, for they were the low end of their schools—their fellows and siblings had gone on to better universities, while they were stuck in Manchester, not quite bright enough to make it to Oxford. I, myself, felt that Manchester was the peak of the kind of education I could get, and it had more to offer than I believe these fellows knew.
While there, I read every piece of literature, learned Latin and French and German and Russian. I studied politics and the law. I found myself with nosebleeds from staying up all night several days in a row in order to keep working and keep studying. I was motivated by a sheer desire to never return to the factories and the coal pits and the farmlands and stink of sheep and the taste of two-day-old kidney pie or cold porridge or mutton stew left too long in the pot.
I wanted a finer life, and so I avoided more entanglements of the flesh, sure that some comely but desperate lass would pull down her under-things and press herself onto me in order to saddle me with children and a bleak future. I had seen it happen often enough to other boys from the colliery.
I wanted to be as far away from the black skies of my childhood as possible, and away from the father who threw me against walls to keep me silent and the mother who thought I would go to hell if I spoke one word against my father, as if he were Jesus Christ himself. I knew that there were people with money, the men who owned the mines, who owned the lands, whose sons went to Eton and Harrow and Darlington Rows, schools where the skies were clean and no one sickened from daily living. Those boys would go on to Oxford and Cambridge and the world’s universities, or were beside me at Manchester, while I, and my kind, would enter the dark mines and bring up the coal to heat the rich men’s homes.
I wanted to live their lives, and stay far from the one in which I had been dumped, like ash in a bin.
And so I finished my studies early, having been one of the most brazen and unstoppable of students, driven to master language and history and oratory, and become more than a keeper of figures and numbers, and move into the realm of which the rich boys I knew had no regard simply because it meant nothing to them: I wanted to be a master of the world.
5
When I was twenty-one, I lost my spiritual virginity. I met a man I shall call the Necromancer, who took me by the hand and led me down pathways into the human and eternal mind, and introduced me to the mystical union of those who influence the Earth, the Planets, and the Cosmos.
And he taught me about Magick for the first time.