shouldn’t I pick up skulls that lay in plain sight a few steps farther on? If it was right to uncover relics with the toe of my boot when I glimpsed them protruding from the earth, why was it wrong to seek them out actively with shovel and crowbar? The inability to make such fine distinctions has forever been my undoing.
I once believed that my graveyard rambles were the first steps to a career in science. Our home lay under the massive cliff of the Anatomical Institute on River Avenue, where scholars were not only encouraged to give the closest scrutiny to such beguilements as skeletons and naked bodies, but were also held in the highest respect for doing it by everyone but Mother, who called them lechers and necrophiliacs.
The students of art and medicine were a more than usually high-spirited bunch, it’s true, and it’s true that they sometimes trespassed through our property with suspicious bundles or vomited on our front steps, but Mother, as she did against so many things, had a special grievance against the Institute. The building that blocked our sunlight until midday and disgorged rowdy trespassers at all hours was formerly the palace of the Glyphts, and she was a Glypht.
Unless you come from Crotalorn you have probably never heard of that tribe, but whenever I mentioned my name to a stranger in my native city, it provoked a look of thwarted recognition, usually succeeded by one of embarrassment. Nobody said, “Oh, you’re the fellow whose family was massacred by an unknown intruder when you were a baby, aren’t you? As I recall, only you and your mother were spared, unless she was the one who did it. I myself am inclined to think your father was guilty, for who but a moron would believe that his body was carried off by the killer?” Gossip, even more than the crime itself, may have caused Mother’s mild unhingement.
I am called Glyphtard Fand, my late or absent father having been associated with a much-decayed branch of that truly Great House, but Mother was correct when introducing me, to my embarrassment, as Lord Glyphtard. The title derived from her great-grandfather, who was governor of Orocrondel, a post that in those days meant being a broker for pirates. It was he who built the palace, but his son gave it away, and we lived in what was formerly the gardener’s lodge. Although a queer statue of her grandfather dominated the lobby of the Institute, the students surely remembered his philanthropy far less often in their prayers than Mother did in her daily maledictions. To hear her talk, you’d think he had left his heirs naked in a thatched hut, but the gardener of the original estate had been an important man, marshaling an army of slaves and artisans, and he had lived in fine style in a mansion with twenty spacious rooms. Real lords from the Houses of Crondren or Vogg, dwelth teammates whom I have brought home from time to time, have seemed impressed by the magnificence of our lodge.
It was a faded magnificence. The roof leaked all the way down through four floors to the cellar. Opening any one of the thousands of volumes from our library, you would find inside the covers a wet wadding like cheese curds. The smell of rotting carpets and soggy wood filled the house, for we couldn’t afford to repair the chimneys and burn off the damp. The half-dozen or so servants who remained were really pensioners: if one of them spent a full day doddering through a dimly remembered pantomime of household chores, Mother would have to spend the next week nursing her.
I learned at an early age that we had little money, but money was a subject discussed only by the sort of louts who came around to bang on our door and demand it. I thought my fortune lay in science, not realizing then that it was just a pastime for unworldly cranks. If knowledge was power, as the cranks maintained, and if power was money, which was self-evident, then knowledge should bring money. The gentlemanly education I enjoyed, parsing
I once believed that my graveyard rambles were the first steps to a career in science. Our home lay under the massive cliff of the Anatomical Institute on River Avenue, where scholars were not only encouraged to give the closest scrutiny to such beguilements as skeletons and naked bodies, but were also held in the highest respect for doing it by everyone but Mother, who called them lechers and necrophiliacs.
The students of art and medicine were a more than usually high-spirited bunch, it’s true, and it’s true that they sometimes trespassed through our property with suspicious bundles or vomited on our front steps, but Mother, as she did against so many things, had a special grievance against the Institute. The building that blocked our sunlight until midday and disgorged rowdy trespassers at all hours was formerly the palace of the Glyphts, and she was a Glypht.
Unless you come from Crotalorn you have probably never heard of that tribe, but whenever I mentioned my name to a stranger in my native city, it provoked a look of thwarted recognition, usually succeeded by one of embarrassment. Nobody said, “Oh, you’re the fellow whose family was massacred by an unknown intruder when you were a baby, aren’t you? As I recall, only you and your mother were spared, unless she was the one who did it. I myself am inclined to think your father was guilty, for who but a moron would believe that his body was carried off by the killer?” Gossip, even more than the crime itself, may have caused Mother’s mild unhingement.
I am called Glyphtard Fand, my late or absent father having been associated with a much-decayed branch of that truly Great House, but Mother was correct when introducing me, to my embarrassment, as Lord Glyphtard. The title derived from her great-grandfather, who was governor of Orocrondel, a post that in those days meant being a broker for pirates. It was he who built the palace, but his son gave it away, and we lived in what was formerly the gardener’s lodge. Although a queer statue of her grandfather dominated the lobby of the Institute, the students surely remembered his philanthropy far less often in their prayers than Mother did in her daily maledictions. To hear her talk, you’d think he had left his heirs naked in a thatched hut, but the gardener of the original estate had been an important man, marshaling an army of slaves and artisans, and he had lived in fine style in a mansion with twenty spacious rooms. Real lords from the Houses of Crondren or Vogg, dwelth teammates whom I have brought home from time to time, have seemed impressed by the magnificence of our lodge.
It was a faded magnificence. The roof leaked all the way down through four floors to the cellar. Opening any one of the thousands of volumes from our library, you would find inside the covers a wet wadding like cheese curds. The smell of rotting carpets and soggy wood filled the house, for we couldn’t afford to repair the chimneys and burn off the damp. The half-dozen or so servants who remained were really pensioners: if one of them spent a full day doddering through a dimly remembered pantomime of household chores, Mother would have to spend the next week nursing her.
I learned at an early age that we had little money, but money was a subject discussed only by the sort of louts who came around to bang on our door and demand it. I thought my fortune lay in science, not realizing then that it was just a pastime for unworldly cranks. If knowledge was power, as the cranks maintained, and if power was money, which was self-evident, then knowledge should bring money. The gentlemanly education I enjoyed, parsing
Similar Books
