Honor's Kingdom (50 page)

“Neither do I. Henry seems to know quite a bit, though. Had part of his education on the Continent . . . which may not have been the very best idea. Anyway, he doesn’t think young Whistler will amount to much. Says his work looks like paint pots hurled at a canvas. Of course, with Henry one never knows if it’s actually his own view one hears, or if he’s echoing his London acquaintances.”

We walked a bit, and my thoughts ached toward home of a sudden. London was a fine city, in its way, but my heart was across the ocean in dear, old Pottsville. I hoped the war would end soon. Meanwhile, I would content myself with a voyage back to our shores. With a new addition to our family, of whom I hoped my wife would not disapprove.

A carriage clattered past, drawn by high-stepping grays.

“Speaking of Henry,” Mr. Adams said, with what sounded suspiciously like a paternal sigh, “I find myself dismayed. May I solicit your advice, Major Jones? Given that you’re not entirely removed from the situation?”

“Yes, sir. Certainly, sir. Of course, sir.”

“It seems that Henry has grown enamored of the Perkins woman. Who, frankly, might not prove suitable for him in every respect. Not least in regard to her . . . greater experience of the world, let us say. I worry that Henry may do something foolish.” He stopped in the middle of the pavement to face me, with all a father’s worry beleaguering his face. “You enjoy some acquaintance with Miss Perkins, I believe. What would you recommend I do?”

I pondered the matter for a bit, since I wanted to be helpful, and the great clock of Parliament began to strike the hour. Loud as the sound of guns it was.

When the tolling was done, I said, “Why not introduce Miss Perkins to Lord Palmerston?”

Twas the second time I heard Mr. Adams laugh out loud.

FACTS AND DEBTS

FUN IS FUN, BUT FACTS ARE FACTS. WHILE THIS STORY is not true, I have sought to be true to history in every detail, save three. A historical novel, if written successfully, can fill in the human gaps left by the historian’s footnotes, but the novelist should be as faithful as the historian to the setting. Thus, I feel obliged to expose the liberties I have taken.

First, the vessel that would take the name
Alabama
sailed from the Birkenhead yards at the end of July, not at the end of June, 1862.

Second, Inspector Wilkie, of the Metropolitan Police, would not have enjoyed the freedom of action allowed him in this book, nor were the London police at their best in 1862. The rigorous, slightly bumbling bloodhound familiar to us from countless films and period novels is really a late-Victorian and Edwardian type. Commissioner E.Y.W. Henderson, KCB, only began much-needed professional reforms (and allowed the police to grow mustaches and beards; previously, Wilkie’s side-whiskers had been the limit) after taking office in 1869, and the famous Scotland Yard detective really appears with the development of the Criminal Investigation Division in 1878. Mid-Victorian writers created skilled detectives in their fiction well before plain-clothes sleuths were accepted members of the London force, an early example of life imitating art.

Lastly, I made one small alteration to the practices of the nineteenth-century House of Commons . . . but I will leave that as a riddle for Anglophile readers.

Any other errors of detail are unintentional, and represent a failure on the part of the author.

I must say a few words on sources, from sheer guilt at profiting so richly from the work of other men and women. Beyond a lifetime’s interest in the literature of the period, I have been lucky enough to visit London many times since I first checked into a threadbare hotel off Baker Street in 1970, as a young, aspiring, and very bad musician (so bad my only recourse was to join the Army). But the London we visit today is a very different city from the London of 1862.

The quarter century from about 1850 on brought enormous changes to the London cityscape, as more rail lines cut through, slums were demolished, the Embankment was constructed, bridges were replaced, the first underground tunnels were dug for horse-drawn buses, and the elders of the unique patchwork that is London began, reluctantly, to pay a bit of attention to sanitation (it didn’t take immediately). In 1862, London was struggling out of its antique cocoon to become the first metropolis of the age, leaving the city of Dickens behind to become the city of Trollope. The mid-to-late Victorian period did more to give us the London we know than did the Great Fire, Christopher Wren, and the Georgian delight in building combined. It changed the scope and scale of urban life forever, much as the new suburbs of North America are doing today.

There are, literally, countless sources on the London of that period, not all of them in agreement. Of the many works consulted (and looted shamelessly), I must mention the two I found most valuable. First,
The Times,
so long the greatest newspaper in the world and now sadly eclipsed by a number of American and Continental papers, was a magnificent resource, offering everything from railway timetables to lengthy reports of Parliamentary speeches (their eloquence a painful reminder of a time when brilliant men still thought politics worth the trouble). The
second source was the work of the incomparable (that is the only appropriate adjective) recorder of urban life, Henry Mayhew, whose
London Labour and the London Poor
appeared in book form in 1851. No other journalist or scholar has yet rivaled Mayhew’s description of the men, women, and affiliations that compose a working city. While a number of things cited by Mayhew changed between 1851 and 1862—some slums were cleared, a new building was constructed for the Billingsgate Fish Market (at the same location) and the adjoining docks were pushed back, and some of the odder professions dwindled—Mayhew remains the first source and inspiration for anyone who wishes to write about mid-nineteenth-century London. I have plundered his work with gratitude.

As to Glasgow, there are many fine works available, but not one is a substitute for walking that resilient city’s streets. Today’s Glasgow is a vivid, muscular, spirited place, a sort of Chicago-on-the-Clyde, with hustle and great character. It has survived dreadful social (and architectural) experiments with a robust sense of humor. It deserves as many visitors as Edinburgh, its prettier, shallower sister. Specific reference works worth recommending are
The Second City
by C. A. Oakley;
Glasgow, The Forming of a City,
edited by Peter Reed;
Glasgow’s Doctor, a Biography of James Burn Russell,
1837-1904,
by Edna Robertson; and, above all, the magnificent period photographs of Thomas Annan, recently collected by James McCarroll under the title
Glasgow Victoriana.

For those who like their Civil War undiluted, I would recommend several works on the secret struggle for Britain’s favors and on the underappreciated, vital Charles Francis Adams. The most useful are
The Journal of Benjamin Moran,
1857-1865,
edited by Wallace and Gillespie;
Charles Francis Adams,
by Martin R. Duberman;
Great Britain and the American Civil War,
by E. D. Adams;
The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe,
by James D. Bulloch; and
Confederate Finance and Purchasing in Great Britain,
by Richard I. Lester.
The Education of Henry Adams,
written in the third person by and about Henry Adams, is an acquired taste that I have failed to acquire. On Disraeli and
Gladstone, there are numerous biographies available, but fewer on Palmerston, who was, to me, the most interesting of the lot. Old Pam may be criticized for a hundred things he did or failed to do, but he was never afraid to enjoy the banquet life spreads before us.

Lastly, I must thank a few of the living. My editor, Jennifer Fisher, though merciless as only those of auburn hair can be, is patient, diligent, wise, and incisive. Carmen Capalbo, the copy editor on this series, would have been accorded “hero worker” status in the old Soviet Union; the copy editor’s job is always vital and too often unremarked. And then there is Sara Hanks, an English rose transplanted wonderfully to the soil of America, who took time from the thorny legal profession to save me what embarrassment she could by weeding misshapen speech and improper terms from these pages. Remaining errors of nineteenth-century English usage lie at my feet alone. Sara’s efforts were as gracious as they were helpful, and she never told me directly that I was a fool (Lonnie, you done pretty good for a boy from Arkansas).

AUTHOR’S NOTE, 2012

I’M EXCITED ABOUT THE RE-PUBLICATION OF THE “BY Owen Parry” series of Civil War mysteries and am grateful to Stackpole Books for undertaking it. The novels featuring Abel Jones have attracted a cult of followers, and the most frequently asked questions I field as I travel and talk on other subjects are versions of “When’s the little Welshman coming back?” While I hope to add new books to the series in the future—after fulfilling other writing commitments—I’m glad Abel’s able to huff and puff and pontificate through these first six novels again. His character was always a joy to write.

Of all the books in the series,
Honor’s Kingdom
was the most pure fun to write. Although it demanded a monstrous amount of research—despite my lifelong interest in the British Isles of the mid-nineteenth century—even that was interesting, thanks to the wealth of marvelous writing from and about the period (that said, I’m afraid I learned more about sanitation in 1860s Glasgow than any non-Glaswegian ever need know). The setting gave me no end of opportunities to confound our hero, Abel, with impertinences, misunderstanding, conspiracies and the general intractability of humanity, and having just returned from a long research project in India, I was happy to add fresh authenticity to Abel’s reminiscences regarding his service in “John Company.”

The novel won the Hammett Prize, but the real reward is that so many readers have told me how much they enjoyed it.

And I do hope I wasn’t too unfair to Benjamin Disraeli: An accomplished novelist himself, Lord Beaconsfield was born to be resurrected on the page for our amusement.

—Ralph Peters, aka Owen Parry, March 3, 2012