The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its avatar and its seal - the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.
- The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe
Charles Astor Prospero LeMont lay in a heavy wooden deckchair, ensconced in lavish but decaying furs, staring out from the third floor veranda of his Newport home at the cold, foaming breakers of the North Atlantic. It was late in the evening, past ten o'clock, and of the vast ocean before him only flecks of reflected moonlight could be distinguished. Of course, his eyesight was not as keen as it had been. Like his father, and his father before him, Charles' eyesight had deteriorated significantly from the age of the thirty onwards. Sometimes he flattered himself - flattery of a perverse kind - that it was the sort of genetic affliction which came inevitably to any great dynastic family; in a way, the price of long-standing, era-straddling wealth, like the infamous Hapsburg jaw.
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In fact the LeMont genes were free of the taint of consanguinity, and moreover their wealth stretched back just three generations, to Charles's grandfather, Warren Hillock, who made a small fortune in agricultural machinery exports. He then moved from his Fort Wayne birthplace to Detroit, had married the daughter of a fellow small-city magnate, and then together they moved west to Chicago. En route, 'Hillock' became 'Hill', and then later 'LeMont', which Warren claimed was merely a reversion to the form of his family name which his European ancestors, arriving at Newfoundland, had abandoned in order to ingratiate themselves into a largely Anglophone colony. How had Warren LeMont, first and foremost a businessman, achieved this feat of genealogical detection? Quite simply, he had not. It was entirely an invention which his new, and equally socially ambitious, acquaintances had not sought to question. (Had he applied himself to the matter, Warren might have discovered that a number of French emigrants had lived alongside men and women of the Miami tribe very near to the site of modern-day Fort Wayne, as recently as the mid-eighteenth century. How much more believable that the "LeMonts" had settled there in Fort St Philippe des Miamis, anglicising their names when the British took the fort in 1760 (only to lose it themselves three short years later).)
Charles's middle names were almost as rich a fiction as his grand European heritage. Not one of the LeMonts, nor any of their Hillock forebears, had ever met an Astor, let alone married one. The absurd "Prospero" was the work of Charles's dear departed mother, Roberta, who was a Shakespearean actress in her youth and who had found fame - albeit not widespread - in her role as Miranda in a production of The Tempest, which had toured several theatres in Chicago. It was in one such theatre where her lavish blonde locks caught the then keen eyes of Randolph Charles Astor LeMont, a Dartmouth student, back at his parents' Chicago home for the Christmas break. They married soon after; Randolph's father's apprehension at the prospect of his son marrying an actress were dimmed somewhat when details emerged of the sizeable inheritance which would - on the passing of her ailing father, a New York financier - settle upon her. The middle name for their son of "Prospero", Miranda's ducal father, was a reference not only to her beloved, and last, theatrical role, but also to what she perceived was the coming together in marriage of two great, ancient blocks of wealth. (What she did not perceive was how much greater her own block was than her husband's.)
And so came Charles into the world, bearing his mother's good looks and his father's intellect and ambition. But he surpassed them both. It was Charles whose social and nuptial manoeuvres and commercial acumen brought the name of LeMont - erstwhile faintly ridiculous, arriviste, unrefined - to a standing which almost rivalled for sheer gravity the McCormicks, the Dudley-Winthrops, the Du Ponts.
It had begun with Charles taking over the management of Anglia Wolfe (Medical & Industrial Chemicals) Inc., a small business employing fifty men, headquartered in Wisconsin, and in which his grandfather had, fifty years earlier, purchased a majority shareholding from its founder's son. There was nothing remotely exciting about Anglia Wolfe. Wall Street had not heard of it, and its annual dollar revenues were in the low quadruple figures. As its unabridged name implied, Anglia Wolfe was in the business of producing chemicals for use in industrial processes, and also, to a smaller degree, in medicines. It was this latter pharmaceutical stream which Charles grew. A team of seven researchers was employed, highest percentile graduates of the Life Sciences programme at Wisconsin-Madison. Intellectual property lawyers were engaged at significant cost. For the first five years of Charles's tenure, Anglia Wolfe accumulated enormous losses, and it survived only through the patronage of the wider LeMont group, itself under the singular control of Charles's father. But even Randolph had had his doubts. Anglia Wolfe's revenues were unchanged; what, besides some obscure chemical patents, was there to show for so long and so weighty an investment? For what purpose had the LeMont group continued to subsidise this unremarkable corporate pygmy of the American Midwest?
The arrival of H1N1 changes all that. The magic letters. H1N1, better known as Spanish Flu (King Alfonso of Spain having famously fallen prey to it). In the year that the First World War drew to a hesitant close, Spanish Flu swept the globe in two great waves, trailing its black, suffocating veil over the populace. The bullets and chlorine of Flanders, atrocious though they undoubtedly were, paled in comparison; for every one man to fall in the Great War, ten fell to H1N1. In North America entire hangars were appropriated to treat sufferers: beds lay side-by-side, mile after mile, like graves. Elsewhere in the world, where such facilities were unavailable, people simply died in the street, choking and haemorrhaging from every orifice.
A winning combination of luck and foresight placed Anglia Wolfe in pole position to take advantage of the chaos. Alone amongst larger pharmaceutical rivals, Anglia Wolfe had stockpiles of advanced inoculative vaccines and medicine for the treatment of pneumonia (that being the blade in H1N1's armoury). Very soon the stockpiles had been sold off, and new medicine was being produced - and exported - as fast as Anglia Wolfe's machinery would allow. Rivals' drugs were generally found to be ineffectual, and those US firms whose recipes resembled Anglia Wolfe's own were rapidly embroiled in legal proceedings.
When the dust settled, it was calculated that Anglia Wolfe had made for the LeMont Group a dollar for every man, woman and child killed by the H1N1 virus, worldwide. The LeMont family wealth peaked at an extraordinary high.
On his parents' passing Charles sold the family's estate on the shores of Lake Michigan and built a mansion in Newport, overlooking the sea. He named it Coquille, after the French word for 'shell', and the spiralling pillars and shimmering, almost nacreous roof tiles did indeed lend it the appearance of having gestated in a vast oyster's shell. In terms of its size, Charles had outdone even the nearby Breakers, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt. Coquille was four storeys high, with relatively few, but respectively extremely capacious, rooms. The house seemed to sprawl and swell in every direction like some beautiful, grotesque, bottom-dwelling crustacean, dredged from the seabed and lain on the clifftop, sinking under the weight of its shell. One might charitably have bracketed Coquille with such architectural rare gems as Slovenia's Gruber Mansion and Westphalia's Palaces Augustusburg and Falkenlust.
In truth, it was more eclectic than any of those masterpieces, and less tasteful for it; the portico was arguably Byzantine, the garden follies Oriental, the interiors a catalogue of mainly South American but also some North African fin de siècle. Of course, nothing was executed with quite the time and skill it required. The magnificent frescoes which danced along each vast and bending ceiling - gods and goddesses, frolicking as they are wont to do - were a little stark, a little fresh, even a little amateurish. The marble busts which dwelt in each alcove along the Hall of Mirrors were cack-handed reproductions, churned out by the hundred in a factory on the outskirts of Milan, and sold to wealthy dupes - mainly Americans.
Nonetheless, Coquille caused quite a stir. Several US magazines concerned with wealth and the associated lifestyle, considered it to be the greatest residential property built in North America for a decade. Visitors travelled from all over the State and beyond to stand and its tall, cast-iron gates and peer through the beech tree greenery at the magnate's folly beyond. Details of the house's dimensions, along with several grainy photos of its remarkable interior, featured in the back pages of one or two European newspapers as a matter of interest.
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Presently, there no were no tourists crowding the periphery of Coquille's ten acre plot. It was late Autumn, and unseasonably cold. Charles had the house to himself, as he almost always did. The servants lived in a separate lodge elsewhere on the property, joined to the basement of the main house via a subterranean passage.