I was born at the foot of Mount Blanc, in a scourge of an inn, barely more than a stable, delivered by the local fishmonger, who declared that if there ever were a scalier and fouler smelling specimen, then he had not encountered it. Indeed, I entered this world an unsightly child, hard-featured, possessing of a harelip. It was my misfortune to have been sired by persons of the most degenerate manner. In short, I was a beast hatched from the dirt.
My language bothers you, I do realize. As I am also aware of our Lord’s commandments. I follow them and trust in them as a sailor follows and trusts in the wind. Honoring my blood is not the issue. The issue is one of honesty. A gentleman is never a gentleman lest the words he gives the world carry the weight of the truth. Truth be told, my parents were abhorrent. No other word in the King’s English could serve the vermin better. Yet to roll out the tapestry of my life, we must weave first their tawdry tales.
My father, the one legged thief from Devonshire, never baptized but carrying the name of Nigel Millington, spent the majority of his life in the antipodes. A mangy lad with a baffling catalog of diseases to his name, he was nothing less than an embarrassment of sores. In a single year alone, his body harbored scurvy, lupus, foot and mouth, consumption, syphilis and a bevy of rashes that gave his skin the complexion of an artist’s palette. Art, however, was not synonymous with my dear father. Whoring his way through childhood, he developed a habit for morphine by the age of eight and a fancy for the accoutrements of Oriental concubines before his voice even registered alto. Schooling, music, the joys of staged tragedies; these things were of little concern to him. Of the Greeks, he knew only their backward approaches to love. Of the Romans, he knew only their bacchanal urges for dizziness and regurgitation. Of our hallowed Shakespeare, he knew only one line of verse, an all but lost blunder from the rarely performed Rocco IV. I quote, “Buggering is the noblest hobby, a gold dawn folly of bosom and rod. What say you, ladies, to a ripe harvest of my bastards?” My father was known to utter these words almost daily.
At the age of sixteen, caught with a bloom of pilfered kidney pies in his knickers, he was given the choice of gallows or exile. He chose the latter, though during my cursed childhood I often wished he had surrendered to the quick dangle. Daresay, it would have stolen me from this world, but it would have also spared the souls of many innocents. Heaven is portlier for the actions of Nigel Millington.
His exile was to be in Van Diemen’s Land, that contemptible pock of an island populated by murderers and thieves. On his transport my father took with him his wretchedness and one other thing, a durable pouch of gunpowder. Every morning he swallowed that pouch and every evening he expelled it, so as to keep it from the prying eyes of his uniformed hosts. The trip, a yearlong voyage of tacking the Atlantic and rounding the Cape of Good Hope, took many lives. My father’s was not among them, and his treasured companion, that vulcanite pouch, can count itself in similar luck. Traversing his intestines with the regularity of the dawn, it acquired a fleshy countenance. Fiery and lethal, it became one with the man, not a foil, a reflection. A man requires a savior when the dire shadow looms and a savior that Chinese snuff was perpetually birthed.
Within moments of stepping foot on the exotic Australian soil, the reprehensible Millington jumped to the task of his own rescue and his criminal instincts burst forth in the form of a terrifying explosion. Tossing the sullied sack of sulfur and coal upon the glowing tobacco of one Lieutenant-Colonel Dalloway, my father gave it his best Guy Fawkes and set ablaze the milky flesh of his captors and half the human cargo that for a year counted him as a friend. Then, manacled and undernourished, he scrambled into the scrubby bush of the Great South, knowing not where to go, only knowing to go, and never to look back.
