Chapter One
Belle Brodie glances across the room at her desk.
It is in disarray, for yesterday she wrote several letters, which today must be dispatched.
She hasn’t discussed her plans with her friends.
Her closest confidante, Mrs. Elizabeth von Streitz, departed London three months ago to visit her husband’s family outside Vienna.
The Buckland sisters, with whom she frequently spends an afternoon gossiping over the scent of fruit scones still warm from the oven, are also unaware that she will be leaving.
This is despite their recent excursion across the English channel being part of what made Belle’s scheme seem possible.
Granted, the Buckland sisters might be high society darlings, and she, a former courtesan, but this is of no matter to Belle.
At heart there is nothing she believes she cannot do.
She first made her way in Edinburgh, as the city’s most elevated courtesan and a perfumer of some renown.
She has for the last two years forgone the former activity while relishing in the latter.
She mixes scents for many of London’s most prestigious ladies, for her expertise is not only in perfuming their bodies and their linen, but in creating scents that will encourage others to behave in certain ways.
‘Perfume provokes feeling,’ she often says.
Belle’s maid, Janet, knocks interrupting her reverie with a breakfast tray.
Belle’s favourite way to start the day is, of course, with tea and whiskey.
Janet lays the tray on Belle’s lap and draws the curtains as the peaty scent of the whisky mixes with the briny scent of the oysters and wafts across the bedcovers.
The sun streams into the room, cutting a line across the edge of the carpet.
‘Shall I send these, madam?’ Janet asks briskly, her hand reaching towards the missives on the desk.
‘Not yet,’ Belle directs. There’s still much to do, and she isn’t certain that the plan she’s made will come together.
She paddles her whisky in the glass and watches herself in the mirror mounted beside the window.
Her hair looks auburn in the summer sunshine.
The green dress Janet is laying out will set it off nicely.
She considers her slated travel. It’s not, to paraphrase the great Samuel Johnson, that Belle is tired of London, or, for that matter, that she’s tired of life.
But she’s curious and is looking for something different now.
Something contained in the stories she’s heard about the continent with its fabulous dress fabric and oil paintings.
Of French pastries, Italian coffee and risqué performances at the ballet.
And then, of course, there’s Byron.
She regrets that she never met the fellow, only relished his work.
The poet’s death has hit London hard. Two townhouses on nearby Haymarket have hoisted black flags since the news came.
Ladies in particular appear to have been affected.
Many who never met the man wear mourning dress, though Belle deems this a step too far.
Yes, Byron is the talk of the town, that’s for sure.
His memoir, you see, has been circulated among a chosen few.
Belle hasn’t read it. But though his life was unconventional, for he loved widely and wasn’t constrained by society, to put it lightly, she feels strongly that Byron’s life story should be made public. Many, she knows, do not agree.
Belle had been considering travelling in Europe in any case but the unseemly cafuffle over Byron’s manuscript has prompted her to go now, and go swiftly. For if his lordship’s trustees do decide to burn his words, she has a plan to save them.
Only a few streets away, in a five-storey townhouse at 50 Albemarle Street in Piccadilly, Byron’s trustees, a group of six men, who’ve spent far too long with each other over the last few days, have come to the very decision to which Belle so objects.
Despite agreeing at long last on the necessary course of action all six remain angry.
They are observed by a studious boy who’s been admitted to the drawing room by his father, John Murray, the owner of the house.
The eldest son, at sixteen years of age, he’s also called John, as is the family tradition.
For the last hour, since his father came home, John has loitered on the second flight of stairs, trying to make out the raised voices.
Now he stands beside the leather-topped desk in the drawing room, as still as a piece of fine furniture, as the men grapple with the two manuscripts which are the cause of the rumpus.
His heart thumps as they rip the papers from their bindings and cast them into the fireplace.
Thomas Moore, the Irish poet, looks as if he might cry.
John’s father’s face is dark. Mr Hobhouse, usually genial, flings himself with vigour into the task of tearing the last of the quarto and consigning it to the flames.
‘That’s an end to it,’ says one of the other gentlemen. A lawyer, if the boy guesses correctly. He’s seen him a few times since news of Lord Byron’s death reached London.
Young John met Lord Byron several times. His father publishes Byron’s poetry after all, or at least, he did. The men had a disagreement the last time his lordship came home.
The newspapers have printed obituaries, little of which chimes with the young boy’s experience of the famous poet.
The London Times called him a towering hero, though his lordship was of distinctly average height, and walked with a limp.
And as to being a hero – yes, he’d gone to Greece to fight for the country’s independence, before promptly dying, before the battle could even begin.
The London Courier, John recalls, had Byron as the greatest poet of the age.
That adage the boy has to concede may be true, although Robert Burns has his devotees, as does the late Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The papers also make mention of Byron’s estranged wife, though not in the same terms as his mother, Anne, does when she gossips with her friends about Lord Byron.
‘A monster,’ the women dub him. ‘He made his marriage solely for the money, poor Annabella Millbank.’
These disparities intrigue John. It seems Byron was crueller than even his mother and her friends supposed.
Even so, young John didn’t find the memoir as shocking as it would appear these six men have decided it to be.
Yes, alongside many of his father’s friends and acquaintances, he’s read the manuscript that’s now burning to ash in the fireplace.
One copy in Byron’s own hand, written in a notebook he purchased in Paris as he passed through the city; the second, a copy, was commissioned by Young John’s father a few weeks previously, for the original was becoming tattered.
‘It’s done. I’ll inform Annabella at once,’ the lawyer says, turning away from the flames. Falling in behind him, the others take their leave one by one, but John’s father doesn’t see them downstairs or even bid a solicitous goodbye. He merely nods gravely as they go.
The covers of the notebook are abandoned on a table beside the fireplace.
Mr Murray Senior listens to the front door closing downstairs.
He peers out of the window as the men part ways, one into a coach towards St James’s, the rest on foot: two along Piccadilly and two in the other direction along Albemarle Street.
Then London’s greatest publisher sinks into a seat beside the fire.
‘Are you all right, Father?’
Murray looks up as if he’s forgotten his son’s presence. The sun highlights the imperfections in the glass, casting irregular light onto the drawing room’s grey silk-lined walls. Above the mantle an oil painting of Byron stares down.
‘That fire will be your most historic memory,’ Murray says. ‘I was left with no option.’
John tips his head to one side. He’s not sure what his father means, for he does have the option. Legally, that is. He owns the manuscript, having paid two thousand guineas for it.
‘The lawyer referred to me a good half dozen times as a bookseller,’ Murray adds with a dash of bitterness.
The boy’s eyes move to the flickering flames in the blackened grate.
The Murrays are on the cusp of being gentlemen.
Day-to-day society accepts them as such, but when push comes to shove, they remain trade.
It feels a trampling kind of insult. All this despite Albemarle Street’s many visitors; his father’s gatherings of four o’clock friends, comprised of the city’s greatest minds, and, indeed, Murray’s ongoing involvement as the publisher of many landmark books.
The kind of books that are found on every shelf in England.
Jane Austen. Maria Graham. Mrs Rundell and her advice on domestic matters.
Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Byron, of course.
The door of the drawing room opens and Anne Murray enters. She’s a tidy, well-mannered lady, in public anyway.
‘Well?’ she enquires of her husband.
‘Burned. All his shameful, scandalous recollections. Gone. Every one.’
‘Both copies?’ Murray nods sadly. ‘It would have made us a fortune.’
Later, dinner is a sorry affair taken in the small dining room next door to the site of the burning. They don’t even set a flame to the candles, for it’s light until late at this time of year.
‘I can’t understand why you did it. I didn’t consider it so very shocking,’ Anne posits, stirring her celery soup without supping a single spoonful. ‘It’s not as if everyone didn’t know. He wrote about it in the poetry and the letters . . . ’
Murray gives a perfunctory nod. He’s read out Byron’s letters many times at the gathering of four o’clock friends. People found them scandalous; sometimes lacking in taste, but everybody wanted to hear what the great man had to say. London liked being shocked.