“Good God. How awful. I see why Wynn doesn’t want people wandering in unobserved, then, but it’s still rather prisonesque. Not to mention, in the middle of nowhere, a twelve-foot wall surely looks more like a temptation than a deterrent.”
“In what possible way?” Gideon demanded.
“If you’ve built a huge wall, there must besomethingbehind it that’s worth the effort of scaling it. That’s what I’d think. If Iwere a burglar, of course.”
“That is an extremely Zeb-like response,” Gideon said, and there was a smile in his voice that Zeb hadn’t heard in a very long time. “I find it remarkably off-putting, myself. I’m not even sure what your grandfather was trying to keep out. Bad reviews?”
“Well, they can be hurtful,” Zeb said. “And he was more or less thrown out of good society forThe Monastery, which served him right. But I would imagine his other profession had more to do with it.”
“What do you mean? What else did he do?”
“He was a slaver.”
Gideon was silent for a second. “I don’t think I knew that. Did you tell me, before?”
“I didn’t know before. I never troubled to ask where Father’s money came from. But yes, Walter Wyckham, my grandfather, was a slave owner and trader. An active one, not just an investor: he owned four ships and two plantations, and heranthem. He visited his properties several times and came up with ideas to increase revenues. He wrote books about cruel evildoers receiving their just punishment while he was travelling back and forth across the oceans to wring more profit out of the people he kept in hell. That’s the money that built this house. The wages of sin, in the most literal manner imaginable.”
Gideon was staring at him. Zeb shrugged irritably. “If you’re going to tell me how many great houses were built or rebuilt or filled with wonderful art on the profits of slavery, I already know. Bram and Hawley don’t agree on much, but they wouldboth tell you that Art justifies suffering. The existence of a beautiful building filled with beautiful things is worth any number of nameless, unimportant lives lost on a plantation or down a mine. Our wealth might have come from regrettable origins, but that’s all in the past and there’s no point making a fuss.”
“You don’t agree?”
“If people want to achieve greatness through suffering, it should be their own damn suffering,” Zeb said. “And even if I did believe art justifies inflicting pain and misery on people, which I do not, Lackaday House is trite, cliched, and horrible. I’m not suggesting it would be all right if the house was beautiful,” he added. “Just that this ludicrous Gothic rubbish is whatever the opposite of icing on the cake is. The shit on the shoe.”
“Right,” Gideon said. “I see. How did you learn this?”
“A chap—gentleman of colour, from abroad—paid a call on me a few months back, asking if I could give him any access to family papers since Wynn and Bram had both refused him. He was trying to make a full account of what had been done in the Wyckham plantations, for posterity, because he says the British prefer to remember the part where we abolished slavery, rather than all the enslaving we did first. I couldn’t help, but I asked him to stay for tea and he told me all about it. About my family history, which was his own too, because his family, grandparents and great-grandparents, had been enslaved in Walter Wyckham’s plantations.”
“Oh my God.”
“Quite. We talked for a long time. Or, rather, he talked; Ididn’t have much to say. There is something really quite awkward about sitting there with a teacup as a man tells you how your grandfather enslaved and tortured and murdered his relatives.Ourrelatives, actually, because of course Walter inflicted himself on various women while he was there and left a number of children. Jerome—that’s his name—is actually my first cousin. His mother was Walter’s daughter. As cousins go, he’s infinitely preferable to Hawley.”
“I expect so. Dear God.”
“He was astonishingly decent about it,” Zeb said. “I’d have punched me in the face as proxy for Walter, but he just wanted to tell a Wyckham what we did. To look one of us in the eye and say,That was wrong.”
“And you heard him out.”
“It was the least I could do. Literally: I sat there like a pudding while he laid out why my grandfather should have been hanged from the nearest lamppost and buried with a stake through his heart. He didn’t say that last part. That was a conclusion I reached myself.”
“Right.”
“Anyway,” Zeb said on an exhalation. “Were we talking about that for any reason?”
“The big wall,” Gideon said, because he always remembered these things. “Why Walter built it.”
“Ugh. Yes. I sometimes wonder if all those English country gentlemen who built themselves big houses with long sightlines and high walls did it because they were afraid of people comingacross the seas for vengeance. I hope they were terrified. I hope that fear haunted Walter’s dreams every night of his rotten, stinking life. Oh, that will be the Wyckham curse, of course.”
“Sorry?”
“Supposedly an old woman who ‘worked’ for Walter cursed him to die at fifty, and he fell for it hook, line, and sinker. I bet that was a slave of his. At least she made him sweat.”
“And now you don’t want the inheritance,” Gideon said slowly. “Is this why?”
“Of course it is. I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.”
Gideon grabbed his arm, stopping as he did so, so that he pulled Zeb round. They faced each other under the lowering sky. “Do you mean that? Truly?”
“Were you not listening?”
