Corcitura

Chapter 1: Beggars at the Gate

 Chapter 1: Beggars at the Gate

“Call me Penniless!”

Oh, yes, Eric, that’s lovely. And what are you going to say next? Which way to the Pequod?

I flung Moby Dick aside. Obviously, there was nothing between the covers of that book that I could lift and modify to suit my purposes. Maybe if I’d read more than the first five pages, I’d feel differently, but that kind of logic was neither here nor there.

Time for round two. I grabbed one of the other novels I’d strewn across my bed. I hoped I’d have better luck with this one.

“A grand tour won’t be a grand tour unless we’ve got gobs of money to spend.” Hmm...a bit patronizing, that. Thanks for nothing, Louisa, I thought, tossing Little Women across the room. This filching of famous first lines had seemed like a fabulous idea when I’d thought of it two hours ago, but I could see that it was getting me nowhere fast.

Deflated, I reached for the last novel, my final hope for inspiration. Ah, yes, here we were. Jane wouldn’t let me down. I could never go wrong with her. “Ahem...It is a truth youthfully acknowledged that a young lad in possession of little to no fortune should want infinitely more than the lot he’s got. I know I’ve never given either of you any particular reason to trust me with even five quid, but let’s put that unfortunate past history behind us, shall we? After all, you must spend a little to reap great rewards, right? Well, that being said, Mother, Roddy...how about you extend to me those three hundred pounds?”

Botheration! Not even plagiarizing Jane Austen was going to get me what I was after. That tack was all wrong. Roddy was like clay; he needed to be pummeled till I got him into the right shape—the giving shape, which would take some work, since he’d always treated me more like a poor relation to be tolerated than a stepson.

I swung the mirror back up and straightened my necktie, then thought better of it and mussed the cloth till it hung at a suitably dissolute angle. There was no need to look modish when I was about to go begging. I was deluding myself if I thought this was going to be easy. Even after practicing for months, the approach was still lacking, and I’d run out of ideas. I had no idea how we were going to convince our parents to give us the money, yet we had already gone too far to quit now.

Seven months ago, Stefan Ratliff, my closest friend since childhood, had hit upon the scheme of using a grand tour as a cover for our own exploits. Educational pursuits were fine for the average man, but we two saw this as an opportunity to indulge in as many extravagances as possible as we tramped from one capital of Europe to the next. It would be a final lark before we said farewell to youth and became men of the world that fall, at which time Stefan and I would both become inmates at Oxford.

Only now did I realize that Stefan had somehow passed the baton to me without my knowing it, putting the onus on me to prove the soundness of this venture to our parents. I was the one who had to do the coaxing. I was the one who would be offered up as the proverbial sacrificial lamb. Imagine having to tell Roddy that this grand tour was the best idea since the Reform Act of 1867. No wonder Stefan balked. Still, it was a rum trick if there ever was one. I’d make sure to get back at Stefan soon, once we were underway and far from home, of course. There’d be no sense in murdering him outright, not with all the scandal it would cause in the papers. I’d wait till we reached Paris, then do away with him in the Tuileries Gardens and blame the murder on the ghost of Robespierre.

So cheered, I sat down on the edge of the bed and mulled over my misfortune. I wasn’t as preoccupied with getting my parents’ consent to travel abroad as I was with convincing them to lend me capital. Money had always been my chief problem.