PROLOGUE

THE DESK AT WHICH Henry had laboured for some fourteen months was not a desk at all but an upturned East India Company crate. By day a thin, shifting column of light fell through a slot cut high in the wall, compelling him to frequently rise and reposition the splintering box in its pursuit. By night candles of whale grease provided his only illumination. Not long before, his journals, books and almanacs had constituted a private library that might equal any gentleman's on the island. Now the unbound papers piled about the cell's stone floor amounted to his sole earthly possessions. All else had been snatched away.

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     Henry had known few better places to write. The gaol walls guaranteed preservation from the temptations beyond. His responsibilities were none and obligations few. Food, clothing and shelter - the necessities that consigned most men to a life of labour below their talents - were provided free of charge. His gift for ingratiation had secured the luxury of a private apartment , free of the inane chatter of some incorrigible cellmate. And his friends in the printing business ensured his inkwell never ran empty and foolscap was in good supply.

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     The only other place Henry had experienced such freedom was aboard ship, where the sea formed a sort of prison and life itself was suspended in brine until port was reached. Having long before discovered that his proclivity was toward the monastic or the excessive, but nothing in between,  he found the imposition of the former condition uncommonly liberating.

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     Incarceration had also allowed time for the wound at his neck to heal. After a few weeks he had found himself able to sit upright to work for lengthy periods. In the year since, he had been presented with numerous opportunities to escape his situation.Instead he perched at his crate and dissected his life's deformed corpus, pruning away the layers of delusion and vanity to probe what he termed the seat of his disease.

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And the deeper he delved the more determined he became to remain in seclusion until his task was complete. 

Henry did not seek absolution.The heap of close-written pages upon his crate was not a plea to the Divine for forgiveness. Perhaps by force of example they might serve to warn others of the folly of overestimating one's powers, but nor was the his goal. 

     

His object was to show himself a man capable of redemption, whose many sufferings had wrought their purpose in exposing his ills, permitting their cure. And, by showing himself to be such a man, win back the heart of his wife and obtain a life free of servitude. No person, not she, his rivals or the authorities, could fail to be impressed by his scrupulous self-inspection and the sincerity of his penitence. And Eliza surely could not read his words without admitting the incomparable depths of his love.

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The book - for Henry had already persuaded one of his better-placed associates to bear the expense of publication - would not bear his name as author. Nor would it appear anywhere within. But none familiar with the merest scene of his life would fail to recognise him in the story's protagonist.

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     By presenting his life's tortured journey in the shape of a novel, Henry hoped that he might also obtain reward for the trials of composition. Was it not reasonable, his narrator asked, that a man who spent many long and wearisome hours on such an employment, whose chief dependence was on King and Country, might seek some fair remuneration for his time? And was it not in keeping with the pride of authorship to also hope for some small measure of recognition?

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     Henry had long considered literature the best employment for a man of his talents and education. His catastrophic failings in every other endeavour confirmed it. Perhaps Quintus Servinton might even find an audience with the English public, who displayed an unshakeable thirst for tales of crime and retribution, real and imagined. The events of one recent novel, The History of George Godfrey, bore a striking resemblance to his own experiences. The difference was that his narrative carried the force of fact. Like Godfrey, his misery had been born of ambition and greed - yet even now might there not be some money in it? Others had missed teh chance to profit from their notoriety, strung up on the gibbet before being admitted to the ranks of the wildly popular Newgate Calendar. A transcript of Henry's own trial even appeared in the latest edition.

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     Not all he had written was true. Certain adjustments had been required. He had invoked the artist's godly rights over time and place, substituting fictitious names and taking care to obscure the real nature of certain characters and events. The thin veil of fiction he had drawn would provide a measure of camouflage. The authorities would find nothing to encourage suspicion or justify further punishment. Even his enemies would puzzle at their gentle treatment. But those who knew the truth would find it burned even more brightly by omission.

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     He had saved his most unrestrained powers of invention for Eliza, transforming her into a woman of such singular angelic virtue that no heaven was fit to receive her. Rendered chaste by his pen, her every deed, even those that caused his greatest anguish, had only been prompted by the most pure of motives. In his desperation he had even found a means to construe her betrayal, the cause of the white castellated ridge of dead tissue below his jaw, as an act of love perpetrated only to obtain his own freedom. His final flourish was to supply Eliza with a vision of the gleaming future they would share.

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In order that she might not miss it, no matter how few pages she was inclined to read, Henry had provided a glimpse of the happy ever after at the book's very beginning.

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    Henry knew it to be fantasy. After the most meticulous examination of all that had transpired, after all had been balanced upon a fulcrum of truth, Henry concluded that his life had been entirely at the mercy of an unknowable Providence. His sustaining doctrine had been there was no such thing as sheer chance. But the more he studied the events of his own life the less convinced - and the less sanguine - he had become. Too often it seemed he had been prey to cruel and unavoidable circumstance.

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     Yet while he may never have been master of his destiny, Quintus Servinton would allow him to be creator of his past. 

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