9 Circles ...judgement follows thereafter

9 Circles

…judgement follows thereafter

Dick Bauch

Smashwords edition

Contents

Prologue

Three beasts

Limbo

Lust

Gluttony

Greed

Anger

Heresy

Violence

Fraud

Treachery

Purgatorium

Acknowledgments

About the author

One instinct wakes in us far too early. It’s the one that tells us that we are much more than any other creature and that we, and not them, have a purpose. It’s the instinct that makes us ask: why am I here?

We don’t learn the answer in this life. If we realised that at the beginning, I wonder if we would have bothered asking at all. We would stop worrying about what’s up ahead and just live it instead. It doesn’t work out that way, we go on being anxious and forget to enjoy the moment that is then.

My mother promised me a wonderful destiny. She consulted the astrologers when I was born and it was them who told her it would be so. Even by an early age we’ve seen enough clues that tell us we can rule out the stars. They are too far away and besides there are as many bad men born on any day as good. My father and that other prophet share May 22. My birthday is December 25 and I’m not like that one.

Father preached that life is deadly and only the tough survive. Success came from good breeding, hard work, well-chosen friends and the best connections. He’d equipped me as best he could, he said, and all I needed to do was work. People respect only work because talent is overrated, unless it's backed by money. A cold hard heart would be my best friend.

After early failures, my gaze turned inward. I didn’t seem constructed the way a son of his should be and I wondered if I’d been badly put together.

The heart I inherited from my parents might have had the wrong shape. It beat too fast and always felt too warm. My brain seemed an odd organ too. I controlled my destiny, I was told, and only my choices shaped my future. But could I trust the decisions I made? Even though I was faster than the others I had to learn simple lessons time and time again. A stove handle is always hot yet I would often forget.

We know we should make an effort at life so we look for the formula to live it. I couldn’t find it and in the end, I could only keep my fingers crossed and hope there was a god of undeserved good fortune. I prayed that someone else would become the one-legged man begging in the square. All that worry was for nothing!

Let me tell you a big secret. The moments of our birth and death are fixed. We are born and die exactly at the appointed times. Nothing we do in between those moments can change them.

We spend our time pursuing all things we were told are important. Most of us only find out too late that we’ve chased the wrong thing.

We have nine chances. They become harder as we move closer to the centre and the end. We can only go forward, there’s no way back.

I know the answers to most of the big questions now, all of us waiting in here do. I’ve made the trip before and I should have remembered.

Let me tell you how it worked for me.

Three beasts

Ido share a birthday with Isaac Newton. I am in fact living proof of his law, every action having an equal and opposite reaction. Nature reacted oppositely to my arrival. Snow fell heavily for the first hundred days of my existence and the cold almost took away my mother. I made her hang on. I didn’t want her to go because she was the only happy at my arrival.

Nature didn’t welcome me, nor did my father. He was always close by watching and waiting for something to happen. I recall the time my friend fell from a first-floor window. We were playing and he simply stepped backwards out into space and landed heavily. I stepped onto the window and stood at the very ledge. I peered down to see how my friend fared but instead found myself marvelling at the flexibility of the human body. His cheek-bone was in the wrong position which gave him an amusing quizzical stare. ‘How about that!’ he seemed to say. An arm was twisted behind in an impossible position. A leg was sideways. Others arrived, including my father, and they began to tend to the boy. Father looked up and saw me as he expected he would. It hadn’t been my fault but he would blame me anyway. I stared distantly down at the scene, not knowing which emotion to show him.

Very little challenged me through my school days. I was always ahead of the class and others would wait for me to answer our teacher’s questions before bothering to have a crack themselves. I didn’t care to make friends among the boys. Apart from my interest in escrime, their sports and male rituals bored me. We’d talk and I’d pretend to be interested in the things they were, but I much more enjoyed the company of females.

My first amorous adventure was with the mother of a school colleague shortly after my fifteenth birthday. There were many more after that, sisters and mothers and birthday gifts.

They were generous with their favours but in return wanted what I couldn’t give. They expected that I repay them with my future, that we would be an exclusive pair forever. Refusing them that was difficult at first but breaking their hearts was easier than playing daddy. They couldn’t believe I didn’t need them, there’d be tears and sometimes they’d hide. Only a brute, they said, would do that to them when they had given so much. They’d seek attention by breaking things they pretended I gave them. We’d haggle like a couple of fishmongers at a market. ‘I’ll do this you if only you will do that.’ I’d pretend to go along with it to see what my benefit would be but abandoned the negotiation before a deal was struck. One went to tell on me but she was an older woman and my mother ordered her and the problem away from our front door. I denied the entire thing anyway.

They would become ill or withdraw from society all together. If we saw each other again we’d pretend to be strangers. Confused and worried husbands and fathers couldn’t understand the cause of their wife’s or daughter’s sudden illness. I’d ask after their beloved and utter some words of encouragement, ‘I’m sure they’ll be soon back on deck’.

There was entertainment, drama, tragedy and a brutal and inevitable ending in all my first affairs. The doomed never begged with Sposa son Disprezzata or Amore e Morte but in every other way it was just like an opera.

Ah yes, that was what I would love forever, the opera. To me opera is life without all the boring bits. Existence speeded up. Opera’s best moments are about death, passion, anger and loss which the players always accept with a detachment that looked natural to me. Opera showed me what might lie before me and how I should best live that moment when it came. Opera ordered my needs. It helped me balance the carnal by losing myself in the aesthetic. Opera taught me the finer points of the game of living.

Where my love of opera sprang from was a mystery to my family. When I asked my father, an important barrister by the way, to be taken to a performance, he feigned having too much work. My mother pleaded the same busy schedule even though the staff did all her daily chores for her. That left going along with school chums or a current lady friend, but it was pointless asking any of the former and far too dangerous to invite the latter. I kept at my parents, suggesting they would be forever sorry if they extinguished my fragile interest in culture and the arts. Society would damn them for raising a brute. I pointed at backward boys of my age when we were out, threatening that’s what I would become without cultural refinement.

Most parents would have given in long before mine did. They held out for two entire seasons but finally a concession was made and I was permitted to escort myself. They paid for a cab to take me, wait and return home. That was the best option really, I’m very good company.

My very first evening performance was in June. The evening air held a perfume and a promise I would remember. I was alone in the night for the first time. People and places stood just out of the light, far more beautiful as shadows. Opera houses, I would learn, are always located in the most interesting of neighbourhoods.

My first solo foray was to Médée, at Her Majesty's Theatre. In that moment between the lights dimming and the curtain’s rise, my heart raced. The players appeared two-dimensional in the filtered gas light.

Miss Thérèse Tietjens was Médée. At first I thought her bosomy, soft, hausfrau corpulence miscast. Suddenly, her icy laugh made me shudder. She’d been indicted for the murder of Dircé and cared not. I held my breath lest I miss a word of her cold confession to the murder of her own children. On balance, a diva with a voice seamlessly spanning three octaves should have the right to murder anyone or commit any crime she desired.

Her performance aroused me and I remained in my seat hoping for another glimpse of Médée. When that hope faded and the other patrons had left I found my cab. A one-legged man waited near the carriage door begging for coins. I would have if I could, but I had no money to give him. He muttered ‘bastard’ under his breath. On the journey home, I gazed at the ladies on the street. Some glared brazenly back with a sullen promise of everything I’d already had. I’d never pay for it.

I was addicted to opera. I did the things I thought would please my parents enough for them to reward me with more shows. At the end of each performance I would scheme about ways of getting to the next. Opera became more important than school. School taught me what I was expected to do but opera showed me the things I wanted to do. Opera showed me there was a life different to that one waiting for me at home. I could be part of the other side of existence. I wanted to be the snake that bit Euridice, the knife Sesto plunged into Tolomeo, the lie that Ariodate used to fool Arsamene and Romilda. I wanted to be Cerberus finally admitting Orfeo to the Underworld. I understood the masked novice nun, Angèle de Olivarès, wanting to enjoy her last freedom before taking final vows. She lived a life parallel to mine.

A soft summer night always waited for me outside the theatre. I remembered the promises it made as I sped to Médée. How could I return home without knowing what was calling me there? At the end of a performance Le Domino Noir I wandered the back streets around Covent Garden. Only the street ladies and their future clients were out so I wandered away from them, searching for something else. Angèle dallied too long and missed her chance to get back into her convent before the gates closed and so did I. I don’t recall where I went but hours flew by like seconds.

I was two hours late returning home and, predictably, cross examined. A late performance and a slow coach difficult to find in the crowds, I could choose to explain my tardiness any way I liked. Despite my very plausible explanation father was having none of it. He warned me about getting home on time and about breaching his trust. He put his thumbs behind his lapels and leaned down over me as I had seen him do to the accused in a trial. I threw myself onto the mercy of the court and I promised him and my mother that I would do better. I knew immediately I didn’t mean it.

A month later I heard Adelina Patti in Roméo et Juliette. The angelic purity of her sweet, high-lying voice and remarkable range barely hid the lust she felt for Signor Mario. I wandered the streets as Mario that night and only remember some of the things that happened. I could remember if I tried, but why bother. Doing it was more fun than remembering and I knew I could easily do it all again.

Of course, Father and Mother were displeased and there were predictable recriminations. I’d promised to do better, they repeated over and over. They had given me their trust, wasn’t that important to me? I oozed charm and explained that I’d met some friends by accident, which was a little true, and we’d lost track of time amusing each other. That also was the truth. Father hadn’t believed any of it and said so.

From the moment I’d decided to stay out late I frankly hadn’t cared whether they would believe me or not. If they punished me by forbidding my opera excursions, it would be they who suffered. Keeping me indoors would be harder than letting me go out. What else could they possibly do?

My father did what every angry parent wants to do to every recalcitrant son. It was an extension of what he’d been doing all my life. It’s what people do with things no longer wanted. He sent me away.

It didn’t matter. I welcomed the move to Cambridge and was secretly surprised he sent me there. I’d already decided to read law and there was no better place. I never told him of my ambition because he would have questioned and argued against it. Because I desired something it was straight-away wrong, irrespective of whether he wanted it for me as well.

There is a ‘right thing to do’. No one had ever taught me what the ‘right thing’ was. Possibly because it was a difficult subject to teach, it was easier for parents and teachers to assume that everyone instinctively knew. There were lines I wasn’t supposed to cross and limits that I was expected to observe. If others knew where they were I don’t know how they learned them. I’d never been able to pick them out. My why I wanted to read law, if asked, was that if I became expert in the law it would tell me where life’s boundaries lay. If it were legal the it must be the right thing to do and by extension it must also be moral and ethical. Besides, if my father’s circle was anything to go by, doing the right thing usually resulted in a comfortable, long and prosperous existence.

I pretended to suffer under my father’s harsh decision and begrudgingly accepted that it was in my own best interest. To sustain me I was given an allowance of £300 per year, my own apartment and sixty miles of clear space between me and him.

I threw my energy into learning university life.

One learns most things from observing one’s peers so I emulated what I saw my fellow students doing. I assumed that whatever they did was what a fresher was expected to do. I found new friends at inns, pigeon matches, race meetings and billiard rooms and quickly learned the games they played there.

I might have made one or two minor mistakes along the way but none of them too bad. After all, they were perfectly legal! They say the best lessons in life are from one’s mistakes but I wondered how you know it’s a mistake until you make it. You don’t of course. And really, if I made a mistake, it was made first by my older peers who should have known better. What my father later called extravagance, dubious pleasures and discreditable acquaintances were simply symptoms of my attempts to adjust to life outside the family home.

The real lesson learned by this young independent man, student of the law and the right thing to do, was that not all life experiences are contained in three acts and resolved in the final scene.

Young ladies attended Cambridge as well. University administrators reluctantly acknowledged that many females were clever enough to be university students. For the better part the students who attended Girton College were decent girls that one could invite to those formal events we male students were expected to attend. Like the dreary May balls. Female students, I discovered, also loved the races and that’s where I met Constance.

She was also in exile from a comfortable family. When they had exhausted every other option for managing her they sent her to Cambridge. The similarities didn’t end there. She was miles ahead of the rest in her classes and she didn’t shy away from a little adventure. Her one major weakness was that she didn’t care for opera although she was musical and played a piano well when she was bored with everything else.

As I had been schooled early in matters of the heart, so had she. We shared our experiences and held little back. She didn’t try to claim me as my teachers had. She was prepared to share me with whatever other interest I found. This was the first woman I ever considered my equal and it sometimes felt as though I was wooing myself.

Constance’s one ambition was the enjoyment of the good life. I spoiled her with extravagance in gifts, choices of dining establishment and all the time I had left over after study. She rewarded me with freedom and pleasure. I remained light-headed for her well beyond the length of time I had tired of the others and she was obsessed with me.

Alas, five pounds and fifteen shillings per week doesn’t buy many life lessons for two. By Sunday there were only pennies left over from my allowance and there were still days before it was topped up again. The temptation to try and win the shortfall was irresistible. Everyone loved a tiny flutter on the results of that race or this match. Invest a few pennies in the hope of winning pounds. My friends and I would make tiny wagers with each other and settle all our bets on Sunday morning at ‘University Tattersalls’.

What started with a shilling wager, just to make it interesting, became a pound and then a fiver. I was in profit to begin with, all the more to spend on Constance. The easy success also made me bold. I imagined my £300 income becoming £400 or even more but a run of unexpected results suddenly had me down £23. I thought I could get it back with larger bets but that left me £32 in the red. When I couldn’t pay up at the next Tattersalls, one equally hungry and annoyed creditor suggested I introduce myself to Spot. ‘He’s easy to find. Just look for the three brass balls’.

Spot Sanderson ran a lombard just outside the college. When you visit a moneylender for the first time you bring along an expectation of how your benefactor will appear, and of the very bad deal he will offer. Everyone knew that these lenders were no more than government-licensed fences. They were up to their eyeballs in crooked schemes and plots, everyone knew that too. Gay’s Peachum from the Beggars Opera was who I thought I’d meet.

Spot himself was nothing like I expected. Instead of a hook-nosed curmudgeon or a slightly slimy Shylock, I found a welcoming, tubby and grey-haired uncle sitting under an icon of Saint Nicholas and surrounded by his loot. A whole orchestra of musical instruments was stacked in one corner. Behind him tall cabinets held silverware and other unseen treasures.

I don’t know why he was called Spot. An expression doing the rounds related to ‘spotting me some cash’, but there could also have been a physical defect he hid out of sight. I didn’t even understand the significance of three brass balls hanging outside those shops. When I asked about them my friends joked that the three balls mean Two to one, you won't get your stuff back.

My very presence in his shop announced my mission but he smiled a hospitable welcome and enquired, ‘how can I help you my young man?’ There was no snarled, tongue-twisted mid-European accent but a soft, cultured English gentleman’s tone.

‘I have a short term need of some money.’

‘A not uncommon situation for young university gentlemen to find themselves in.’ Spot noticed my empty hands. ‘Is there an asset you’d like to offer as collateral?’

Normally those chaps operate by lending money in exchange for an object of value that I would leave with him. The theory was that I redeemed my goods when I returned the money with interest. I had looked for an asset to bring but no physical object I owned was worth much. I had no collateral to offer but my breeding and my future.

‘I have my study books, some furniture too heavy to carry and some clothes. Apart from those, I have only my name and my word. Which of those things will you give me the most for?’

That drew a curious sigh. ‘And what are you studying?’

When I told him he became a little more attentive. ‘Excellent! I am a great respecter of gentlemen of the legal profession. Its followers, in my experience, take their obligations very assiduously. How much do you need?’

‘Forty pounds.’ It doesn’t sound much but it’s a lot when someone is demanding it and you don’t have it.

‘A substantial sum.’ He pretended to be thinking and then looked businesslike. ‘No doubt a student of the law would be familiar with the instrument known as the Promissory Note?’

I nodded and he went on. ‘You are clearly a gentleman and one day soon you will be a gentleman lawyer. I normally don’t do this but if my intuition is correct I think your signature might be all the security I require. You look young but I’ll take your word that you’re old enough to give it.’

He waited a second for my reply. I didn’t give one but he didn’t press the question. I sealed our deal with a shake of his soft hand. ‘Agreed!’ he said and the benevolent smile reappeared.

After giving him all my details Spot wrote up his note and I left the shop with an advance of £40. Spot’s bill required repayment in three months as £54. I was tempted to calculate the interest rate but I had £40 in my hand and paying the fellow I’d wagered with seemed more important right then. £32 of the advance went to pay my losses. I took Constance out and disposed of the remainder as extravagantly as you can with £8.

Five days of university living almost fits neatly inside five pounds and fifteen shillings so somehow it melted away each week. After rent, dinners with Constance or another and gifts there was barely enough for a crown flutter on that week’s sure thing, much less for saving. Nothing was left by Sunday.

I pushed mental reminders of my Promissory Note deadline away. I could always worry about it the next day, or the next. I don’t know how but suddenly the three months had slipped by and Spot’s £54 was due.

I explored my limited options. When I asked my wagering colleagues their opinion, to a man they urged me to find some way to pay Spot. Those who had been around the college the longest were the most earnest in their advice. Nasty things happened when you got on the wrong side of Spot. Someone, somebody else had met, had heard from another person about a borrower who hadn’t returned Spot’s money. There was an event and suddenly the recalcitrant borrower wasn’t to be seen around the college any more. The implication was that the delinquent didn’t run off. He’d been nabbed, carried off, dragged away and dealt with in some ghastly fashion. Someone else saw this poor fellow being met by three large men on his way home. The rest was college folklore.

There was a sinister detail to the story that made it more real. The danger wasn’t from Spot, who didn’t look as though he would hurt a fly. Someone else did all the debt collecting, persuading and disappearing. This someone else lived just for the chance of doing bad things.

My legal logic helped me analyse the dilemma in this way. I owed Spot Sanderson money. Spot Sanderson had a legal paper he’d had me sign. Spot Sanderson, therefore, was a respecter of law. He would follow conventional civilised society’s practice. He’d issue a legal warning, there would be an embarrassing negotiation surely and I would have to pay the debt on agreed terms. If, on the other hand, Spot’s debt recovery procedure really was to