Horatio Raffles, Esquire

Chronicler of Crimes Too Curious for Common Eyes

Welcome, dear reader, to this modest repository of scandal, scholarship, moral injury, and entirely necessary disclosure.

I am Horatio Raffles, Esq., formerly of Yorkshire, briefly of Oxford, reluctantly of Bath, and for many years the attendant, witness, recorder, apologist, critic, correspondent, and occasional human shield of Sir Paulin de Burchill, Baron, libertine, investigator, social calamity, and one of the few men in England capable of turning a murder inquiry into a philosophical argument conducted partly in Latin and partly without trousers.

These pages contain such accounts as prudence would have suppressed, cowardice would have burned, and good taste would have edited beyond recognition.

Fortunately, I possess only one of those qualities, and even that has weakened with age.



About the Author

Horatio Raffles, Esq. is a former tutor of classical letters, a gentleman of nervous constitution, and the long-suffering chronicler of Sir Paulin de Burchill’s most notorious investigations.

Dismissed from respectable academic employment under circumstances best described as interpretive, Mr Raffles entered the Baron’s service in Bath and soon discovered that ordinary household duties were to include laundering blood from cuffs, preserving compromising correspondence, identifying false Latin in clerical proclamations, and recording murders committed in the name of virtue.

His chronicles document not only the crimes themselves, but the more instructive horrors surrounding them: the committees that bless cruelty, the pamphlets that train mobs, the sermons that sharpen knives, and the polite society that mistakes its own appetite for righteousness.

Mr Raffles writes from Weston-Super-Mare, where the sea air assists the lungs, if not the conscience.





A Note From Mr Raffles

I did not set out to become an author.

Authors, in my experience, are either vain, hungry, politically endangered, or in possession of debts sufficiently muscular to overcome shame. I have, at different times, been all four, though never with the athletic confidence displayed by Sir Paulin, who treats debt as a conversational opening and shame as something that happens to other people.

My original intention was merely to keep records.

A name here. A phrase there. The hour at which a witness lied. The manner in which a bishop avoided looking at a corpse. The precise point at which a roomful of respectable citizens decided that murder was less troubling than impropriety.

That is how the matter began. Then the papers accumulated. Then the bodies did likewise.

Then Sir Paulin said, with that intolerable lightness of his, that history is merely gossip that has survived long enough to acquire binding.

I found I could not entirely disagree.





The Libertine Chronicles

The Libertine Chronicles are not romances, although acts of romance have occasionally obstructed the evidence.

They are not sermons, although many sermons within them have proved criminally useful.

They are not confessions, although more than one confession has been extracted under conditions I hesitate to describe outside a locked cabinet.

They are, instead, the true and unexpurgated accounts of those crimes, scandals, seductions, purges, pamphlets, tribunals, disappearances, theatrical incidents, ecclesiastical manoeuvres, and civic insanities through which Sir Paulin de Burchill and I have had the misfortune to pass.

Each volume concerns a crime. Each crime concerns a body.

Each body, if properly read, exposes an institution standing too close to it.



On Sir Paulin de Burchill

It is fashionable to describe Sir Paulin as a libertine, which is true in the same sense that fire may be described as warm.

He is a man of appetite, yes, but appetite is the least dangerous thing about him. His true offence is accuracy. He sees hypocrisy with a clarity that makes polite society itch beneath its powder. He understands that virtue, when arranged by committees, often enters the world carrying rope.

He investigates by listening where others pronounce, touching where others recoil, and asking the one question every institution fears:

‘Who benefits from calling this righteous?’

I have seen him in taverns, bathhouses, courts, chapels, theatres, brothels, council rooms, and drawing rooms dense with perfume and concealed malice.

He is almost always overdressed.

He is almost never surprised.


For New Readers

Begin where all regrettable associations begin: with a masked gathering, a dead actor, a city eager to condemn, and a Baron inconveniently present.

There you will find Bath in all its splendour and sewage, its bells ringing, its pamphlets multiplying, its citizens discovering how quickly judgement may become entertainment.

You will also find me younger, more obedient to form, and still under the charming delusion that a notebook merely observes.

It does not.

A notebook chooses sides the moment it refuses to close.



Selected Works

The Doctrine of Saint Restraint

Being the first account of Sir Paulin de Burchill’s collision with Archdeacon Parr, moral panic, public righteousness, and a corpse arranged to instruct the city.

A tale of masks, martyrs, pamphlets, theatre raids, missing holy instruments, dangerous laundry, unreliable virtue, and the unfortunate discovery that murder becomes far easier to tolerate once it has been given a sermon.

The Crimson Cabinet

A collector’s house is a confession arranged on shelves. The objects do not lie. The labels do. In this second account, beauty is examined until it confesses to theft, empire enters the parlour through silk and statuary, and Sir Paulin discovers that distance is the most elegant laundering device cruelty has ever invented.




Correspondence

Letters may be addressed to Horatio Raffles, Esq., provided they contain either useful information, sincere literary admiration, legally actionable scandal, or payment.

Moral objections should be folded neatly and inserted into the nearest bishop.