It was to this end that I had, in the first instance, invited the young Lord Beckworth to my friend’s lodgings. Lord Beckworth had expressed to me, when we had met earlier that year, at the house of a common acquaintance, a progressive Manchester manufactory owner, his great admiration for the work of my colleague and, more importantly, his desire to support, or even to sponsor, the continuation of his endeavours. My old friend was, at first, reluctant to be beholden to any third party in the way, convinced as he is of the need for independence in all matters. However, I managed to persuade him that he would be in no way compromised by any arrangement with this enthusiastic nobleman, and that the work itself was important enough for him to seek help from the most unlikely of sources.
Beckworth had his manservant with him, a dark, handsome-looking fellow called Parsons. The conversation that afternoon started out amiably enough with the character of a harmless politeness, but very soon it became strangely weighted with a darker and more sinister nature. Formalities had been observed with a certain jocular awkwardness. My colleague made a seemingly harmless remark about social class, I think it was an attempt to include Beckworth’s butler, when Lord Beckworth announced, one could almost say blurted out, as if wishing to unburden himself of a dark and terrible secret: ‘Privilege, sir, is a curse!’ My friend nodded and gave a vague and expansive gesture, as if agreeing that this ‘curse’ extended to us all, but the visitor shook his head vigorously and continued:
‘No, sir, I speak not of a general curse, but a very specific one! The hereditary principle, the very fact of primogeniture that one might call a bane on the world of men, is for me a very personal scourge.’
‘What?’ My friend retorted, frowning.
‘It is a matter of bad blood, sir. Parsons here is forever entreating me to deny the blight on my family name, but I cannot, sir.’
Beckworth looked for a moment at his manservant, who shrugged.
‘Well,’ said the butler slowly, ‘I have always wanted my lord to find blessings in life, also.’
Beckworth smiled briefly at this, then his mood darkened once more. And, as the early evening light faded, with a foreboding he recounted, the ‘curse’ of the Beckworths. It was related to us that the first lord of this unfortunate house was a certain Ralph Beckworth, of yeoman stock, who had found employment in the household of James I. He was, by all accounts, a good-looking youth and he soon became one of that king’s many ‘favourites’. He gained his title and no small fortune, but did so without merit or breeding but rather from an exploitation of the baser instincts. Ambition, lasciviousness and a general moral incontinence that had secured him an elevated station in society, all conspired to corrupt him fully once he had attained his rank. His were the temptations of power, without the necessary moderations of genuine nobility. His debauched revels became legendary and culminated in a terrible scandal. It seems that in 1625, the first Lord Beckworth, now grown ugly and malicious in appearance, had taken a shine to a young footman in his employ and no doubt wished to make him his own ‘favourite’, just as he had himself been despoiled as a young man so many years before. The footman, however, was not as compliant as his masters had been, but despite defending his honour with vigour, found himself imprisoned by that degenerate peer in an upper chamber of his Great Hall. Lord Beckworth and a crowd of flatterers and hangers on sat down to a long carouse, as was the nightly custom. The poor youth upstairs was likely to have his wits turned at the singing and shouting and the terrible oaths which came up to him from below, for they say that the lightest words used by Beckworth, when he was in wine, were such as might damn a man who used them. As it was, that evening there were loud declarations that he intended to exercise upon his unfortunate servant a droit de seigneur of the most appalling and perverse kind. The hapless footman, no doubt in utter despair at his fate, threw himself out of the upstairs window to his death on the cobbled courtyard below.
After this awful incident the first Lord Beckworth grew melancholy and brooding. He quickly developed an utter terror of high places, a vertiginous fear of falling. Not of heights so much: we know after all, that vertigo is not the fear of heights. It is a fear of depths, of a fall. And it manifests itself not as a fear, but rather a compulsion, a desire even, for a return from the insubstantial loftiness of our aspirations, back down to earth, as it were. And it was, with this awful realisation, that the first Lord Beckworth went into a long decline, a descent into gloom and enervation. Cursed by a strange madness, he climbed up upon the roof of his Great Hall and hurled himself down.
Our young noble visitor then went on to recount the litany of his cursed family. The next Lord Beckworth had been part of the Royalist defence of the castle of Banbury, a stronghold that had been of strategic importance in the Civil War, or what my old friend would have insisted was the ‘English Revolution’. In any case it seems, in a lull in the battle between Roundhead and Cavalier, the second Lord Beckworth had thrown himself, without apparent reason, from the battlements to his death.
The third Lord Beckworth had lived in exile until Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, and then had tripped and broken his neck on the stone staircase of Windsor Castle. The fourth lord was thrown from his horse during a fox-hunt; the fifth, a commodore in the Royal Navy, was captured by Barbary pirates and made to ‘walk the plank’; the sixth fell from scaffolding whilst inspecting repairs to the Great Hall; the seventh slipped and plunged to his death from a precipice while on a walking tour of the Swiss Alps and the eighth, after an assault by footpads on Blackfriars Bridge, had been hurled into the treacherous waters of the Thames.
‘And my own father,’ concluded our guest, ‘the ninth Lord Beckworth, was killed in a ballooning accident five years ago, leaving me this awful inheritance. The family curse is a joke to many. We are known as the “Leaping Lords”.’
He gave a hollow and humourless laugh as he ended his story. I have to admit to feeling an almost disabling bafflement at the conclusion of this extraordinary narrative. My colleague maintained a more thorough and hard-headed attitude to the bewildering unravelling of this supposed ‘curse’. Knowing him as I do, I observed that expression of effrontery on his countenance which manifested itself whenever he found himself confronted with any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that contradicted his precious materialism. His method, after all, was a method of elimination: he always sought to eliminate the impossible in order to arrive at the truth. And yet, as the street lights were being lighted that evening, I saw my esteemed friend for once on the defensive, ‘on the back foot’ as prize-fighters are wont to say.
‘Well, your class is tainted with superstition,’ he muttered, as if trying to make sense of what he had heard. ‘You’re, you’re feudal, barbaric. I’m sorry, I don’t mean this as a personal insult nor a slur on your character but just -’ his gestures for a moment looked helpless, as if he was signifying the very search for meaning, ‘a, a psychology, isn’t that the word? Maybe this “curse” that you speak of is merely that.’
Our young nobleman merely nodded at this and the conversation quickly turned to more practical matters. He invited us both to his townhouse in Mayfair the following day and bade us farewell, as my friend and I had an evening appointment.
I remember feeling an absurd sense of lucidity in the artificial illumination by gaslight of the darkened streets we sauntered south into Soho for our assignation that night. The words that our noble visitor had uttered that very day still affected me deeply, their insistence reverberating in my mind with a contagious fear. I was somewhat reassured to find that my old friend, despite his abundant intellect and rationality, had been no less impressed by the strange unfoldings of the story of the Beckworths’ curse.