‘How I wish to be on those oaken, India-rubber running boards, hanging from the iron rails as this bullish car cuts the gaslit gloom!’

Richard mused fanatic in his mind Britannic as the chugging Barrett Car descended to the Inner Harbor, into gloom impenetrable issuing from water mist, steam foundry stacks, ocean going steamer stacks docked at wharf and riding at anchor. The lights of a destroyer above the rifled turret gun, the furled sails of a proud and outmoded clipper ship and the back-lit Union Jack upon Crown Hill were all that was clearly visible to his naked eyes. The reek of sooty coal, the sting of wood smoke, the belching of super-heated steam competed with the storm season humidity to choke one’s breath. One’s lungs were as afflicted by this pestilential desolation as the sight was dimmed.

‘To ride the deck of a swift sloop on the open ocean, or fly in a hot air balloon would be so grand!’

Onward O’Neal piloted the carriage around the dismal harbor, past red lit windows were harlots beckoned, “MiLord, a sweet ride awaits with this nameless bride!”

‘Oh, My, what a debased state women can fall to!’

A towering mսlatto in top hat and cape knocked his pimp cane upon a gaslight post of cast bronze, “MiLord, an Octoroon maidenhead awaits your conquest—a fit handmaiden for your Mum… lettered to a wince, memorized all of Luke and of Milton too…”

Onward O’Neal coaxed the great snorting beast, Blackie shoveling with precise and careful scrapes of his shovel behind the carriage, the footman warning off the gathering pimps, bawds, ruffians and a gaggle of sailors gawking at their passage:

LaFono in knit cap and dastard cape, all in black, snarled, “The brakes are given us a fit, best stand clear, mates.”

A Liverpool accent slurried from some sailor’s yap, “Regards to the ill-served lord what has such tramps fer footmen.”

Tyler Pope, too proud by half to be a servant, could be heard scampering up above, followed by the worst edification ever to announce a Barrett’s progress, “Foogin’ limey bastard, Boss Barrett bullies ‘ill brain ye simpler den you izz,” and a toss of some article evidenced itself by the play of feat above, echoed by a thudding impact and a mumbled gurgle, punctuated by his new most savage servant’s boast, “Another Exeter Alley brick ‘ill clear da next yap o ‘er chops!”

And a shower of bottles, tin cups, and a brick or two, thudded about the oaken, iron, bronze, India-rubber and brass car that could not quit this gloom quick enough for Richard’s sensibilities. The air was then cut by the stentorian roar of that voice that had commanded the last ten men under his command at Mogadishu to fix bayonets and charge the breach: “Out, Of, The, Way—A Barrett goes this Way!”

“Coachman, full steam!”

The grinding of gears, the shoveling of coal, the belching of the boiler stack and the curse of Lafono as he kicked some sailor under the wheels thrilled Richard. Curses and blows rained all around—and the great, “K-bump-Krunch,” of a sailor being wrecked to ruin under the tons of rolling fortitude brought a sinister chuckle from LaFono and a hearty “Haloo!” from Tyler Pope. That most frightening prince of the gutter then swung his grinning face down to the window, regarding Richard upside down holding himself aloft, it must be presumed, by hooking his knees on the runners and rack above, hopefully not defiling the brazen pole of the Union Jack hanging their in some serpentine curl of his bare feet. In this inverted posture the footman exclaimed, “Boss Barrett, a gift from yon’ limey scum!” and handed a barely drunk bottle of rum through the open panel window.

“Well done, Footman Pope, well done,” he acknowledged, and handed the bottle of regulation Pussers Rum to his Sergeant, “Into rations for the men, Sergeant, if you will.”

“Indeed, Sir, right spoils of war. May it be that what sailor filched this from the Quartermaster’s Stores be he since under our wheels.”

Richard nodded, as he knew better than to speak his thoughts, ‘Most improbable, yet most true of sentiment.’

A horse and buggy careened out of their way bearing a finely dressed lady bobbing like a top within, her coachman struggling to maintain his country horse.

‘Please, Lord, do not let that coach go down the way we came, I Pray.’

“Baltimore Street in our rear at last, Sir—most hazardous and unsavory,” informed Color Sergeant Major.

Richard watched as the witless country coachman took his good lady down that terrible street they had just quit at such a hazard. Hanging his head out besides Tyler Pope, who he somewhat envied for his youth and brash enthusiasm, he looked after that carriage as it passed the corner street light and faded into the gloom of which their car had so recently contributed.

‘I understand, now, why the true Gentry hate us so. What of that woman? Will I ever know? Have I contributed to her demise by way of this belching car that takes me so arrogantly on by?’

Richard tried to stop worrying as Pope gently pushed his head back into the car, “Mind the gaslight’s, Good Knight.”

Sure enough a gaslight nearly brushed the carriage and would have brained him or at least removed his service cap.

Fixing his cap, which he had no recollection of donning, Richard was stricken with more than the guilt over the damsel and the fate of the rude drunk sailor, but with doubt, for his steel trap brain had clean forgotten a rote act, the kind of which he had been proud to note in the ever expanding encyclopedia of his mind.

‘Have I now begun to fail, for my mind to shrink, to forget?’

“Now, Sir, none of that. Save your critical view for the enemies of The Queen, not, for her most loyal servant—the Britannic Sun Building ahead, Sir, to your left, well and nigh lit like day by such a gaslight array.”

The Sergeant had the forward view, he the backward. In a few more chugs the great newspaper concern so proudly built above the gallows where the Maryland Militia captains once swung fairly, brazenly glared. [1] Gas light lamps ringed the gallows shrine, lining the Walls of Reason, masonry sculpted in the manner of scrolls, the gate before the gallows with oaken doors carved in the image of a book. The iron domed roof shone like a minaret in the steam clouds of night, no stars dotting the undercast sky, but many a lamp lining walls, illuminating windows where men could be seen in suits at their desks. Above it all, formed like a great cloth flag, even the ripples affected by wrought iron, in blue, red and white lights, shone the Union Jack!

Richard and his Sergeant both saluted at once the symbol of their manifest loyalty, to Queen Gloria, the Virgin princess who bestrode a world, and Great Britain.

He could recall, though he never did hear, the axiom that Grandpa Blake Barrett was known to quip whenever he saluted the Union Jack: ‘Not a soul ever named Her Good-to-Middling Britain, by God!’

With some pride he noted that the foot men both hung from the right rail, his left, being backways seated, and that they saluted, one to his frump gutter cap of gray canvas and his elder to the knit cap that encased his Gaelic skull.

‘Even my rough and ready scrums, born under our thumb, salute The Mistress of the World.’

…

Notes

-1. The seven captains from their seven companies and an eighth, a poet and economist who had risen the rabble down here in imitation of restive Boston some 250 years ago, had swung. The gallows had ever after been painstakingly preserved with red paint, brass rails added, and New Year’s Eve marked with sham hangings of great, sad and comic faced poppets for the children.