I, Hogarth by Michael Dean

Author:Michael Dean [DEAN, MICHAEL]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC000000, FIC014000, FIC041000
ISBN: 9781468307177
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2013-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

17

THE HACKNEY deposited us at the church of St Mary-le-Bone, opposite the bosky Marybone Gardens, in the parish of Marylebone, a haunt of Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera. Marylebone was where the gamblers were, gambling dens piled upon each other by the hundred, but I took no gambles this day. My Jane was a racing certainty!

This church, St Mary-le-Bone, was London’s leading for secret marriages. The ceremonies were exciting because the building was so near collapse that every ceremony may have been its last; the happy couple, or indeed the deceased or the newly-baptised, mewling baby, might be buried under flaking plaster or tumbling masonry as the edifice finally gave up the ghost and sighed down into the ground.

I had given the Reverend Winter two guineas for his offices to make us man and wife, but as we entered, Jane and I, the reverend, suitably outfitted in white vestments, was still occupied with the customers ahead of us. He was racing towards old age, this reverend, fuelled by wine or gin to judge by the redness of his nose: a pair of eyeglasses risking the hellfire at its tip.

The Reverend Winter’s teeth having long ago departed his mouth, his undershot jaw delivered the marriage service with so much spluttering that it appeared to be announced by a water sprite just breaking the surface of a river.

Jane giggled, then simpered, suddenly looking something like her own tender age, just old enough to make this stolen union legal, if truth be told. I held her hand while we embraced the scene, gathering it into us for future memory.

The bizarrely assorted couple before us evidently still had some way to go before words spluttered by the Reverend Winter would unite their beings as one forever. And, oh, how odd they were, this couple:

A callow youth in fashionable, yellow silk frock coat, frothing with lace at throat and cuff, his pale hauteur powdered on thinly, not to outlast the day: ladies and gentlemen, I give you the groom.

The bride was an ancient crone in a thick ivory-white girl’s wedding dress and strange white chapeau arrangement dangling off her head, a thin-lipped smile of triumph masking a lack of teeth, and her wrinkled, flat breasts peeping out, like antique water gourds: half empty now but still strapped to the saddle after a long horse ride.

Also, she lacked the full complement of eyes, the poor dear, having only the one. This facilitated the groom’s gazing at the crone’s pretty maid, as she adjusted the ancient’s dress, on her blind side. This damsel-bride was old enough to be the groom’s grandmother, but, I would have hazarded, rich.

Jane was fighting down giggles as happiness let her be childlike. She nodded at the full basket of food her mother had provided. And indeed, why not eat as we watched our predecessors in the factory of holy matrimony? So we did.

Jane carved the ham with a knife thoughtfully provided by Lady Thornhill; we stuffed ourselves with that, the turkey and the rest of it.

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