Chapter 11 The Knox
The Knox
Early February
The society’s annual masquerade ball is upcoming, and I simply can’t wait.
It’s been far too boring for far too long.
Just dinners and dinners and cocktail hours and dinners.
Boring, boring, boring. I need another dinner like I need a hole in my headhouse.
All my esteemed rooms with their valuable furniture and priceless artwork, and hardly anyone to enjoy them.
I’ve begun to grow dust in my corners, though Rose does an admirable job of keeping up.
We’ve had our own respectable number of deaths here at the society through the years: overdoses, murders, suicides.
Double murders. Staged suicides. The most delightful and ingenious murder methods have been carried out, from bondage-gear choke holds to frozen-steak bludgeonings to castor bean poisonings (disguised in a salad).
Knox members have dabbled in the, ahem, aftermath as well; who can forget the delectable autopsies that Dr. Thurgood performed on stolen cadavers in my basement?
It’s hardly surprising, really. I’ve existed for more than two hundred years in Beacon Hill, with the wealthiest of wealthy members. Sometimes things simply need to be taken care of—or rather, disposed of.
It’s the way things are done. It’s the way things have always been done.
But things have changed so much in Boston that William Knox would be turning over in his grave! So much more riffraff, even here, in exclusive Beacon Hill. It’s a shame.
The issue, it must be said, lies at least partly with the educational system: Schools simply don’t teach the proper subject matter these days.
But they cannot carry the blame alone. The city itself has buried its fascinating and lurid past. Few Bostonians today realize that the city was built in no small part due to opium.
All the venerated institutions that were funded by this drug trade—well, they’d rather you not know.
Perkins School for the Blind? Supported generously by its namesake Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a merchant—and slave trader—whose opium dealings made him one of the wealthiest men in America at the time.
Or how about Mass General Hospital and the Boston Athenaeum, which also raked in significant monies from the Perkins brothers?
Harvard University, McLean Hospital, the Bunker Hill Monument, and the Forbes House Museum, to name a few, inhaled opium riches, too.
So many of Boston’s elite were participants in this glorious and sordid trade: the Cabots, Cushings, Lowells, Forbeses, Kirklands, Delanos, Welds, and, of course, William Knox.
But ever the good patricians, these leading philanthropists funded opium winnings into building mills, railroads, steamships, mines.
And let’s not forget the robust tax revenue generated from all this that paid for our state police and fire departments; it allowed for the construction and repair of our roads, our courthouses, our schools.
Put simply, our fair city on a hill would not be what it is today were it not for that, ahem, smoke. And my illustrious and well-appointed rooms where these wealthy men gathered.
Now, may I ask, where is all this in the history curriculum? Why, I heard some Boston schools don’t even use physical textbooks these days. My word.
But I digress.
All I know is this: At the Knox, we make no pretense of what we are.