Repentance Vale

By Raymond Fraser

In this satiric tale of neo-gothic horror, Haliberton "Bertie" Beaumont, heir to the Beaumont shipping fortune, schemes to seduce the pretty young daughter of Matthias Gogg, a fundamentalist religious fanatic who secretly believes in human sacrifice...

"Keeps readers on the one hand laughing, while on the other appalled. Raymond Fraser can mix the absurdities of humanity into fine, plausible fiction.” – Michael O. Nowlan, The Gleaner

"A terrific piece of writing. Best thing I've read in years." – Bernell MacDonald, Author, The Monster of Moneymore

"I`ve never read anything like it. Brilliant!" – Neil Toner, Librarian

"There's no other writer quite like Raymond Fraser. His style is absolutely fascinating." – Cora Lillian Hudson

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raymond Fraser
• Release date: May 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476474083

Raymond Fraser

RAYMOND FRASER is a Canadian writer and the author of thirteen books of fiction, three of non-fiction, and six collections of poetry. His novel "The Bannonbridge Musicians" (1978) was runner-up for the Governor General's Award. In 2009 following publication of his novel "In Another Life" he received the Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for High Achievement in English-language Literary Arts. In 2012 he was named to the Order of New Brunswick for his contributions to literature and culture. Five of his books are listed in Atlantic Canada's 100 Greatest Books (Nimbus Publishing). His latest book is "Bliss and Other Stories" (2013). He currently lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Book preview

1

REPENTANCE VALE

By Raymond Fraser

Lion's Head Press

©Copyright 2011 Raymond Fraser

ISBN 978-0-9865183-7-9

Cover picture by Francisco Goya

Lion's Head Press

[e-mail]

http://lionsheadpress.blogspot.com

http://raymondfraser.blogspot.com

THE FAMILIES

The Beaumonts

Bartholomew Beaumont, scion of

the Humberland Beaumonts

Sir Leicester Beaumont, Bartholomew's son and heir

Lady Dora (Cuthbertson) Beaumont, Sir Leicester's

wife

Sir Samuel Beaumont, Sir Leicester's eldest son

Lady Lydia (Larsen) Beaumont, Sir Samuel's wife

Haliberton Bertie Beaumont, their son

Alisa Beaumont, their daughter

Richard Beaumont, Sir Samuel's younger brother

Erika (Larsen) Beaumont, Richard's wife

The Goggs and McGintys

Matthias Gogg

Molly (McGinty) Gogg, his wife

Rebecca Gogg, their daughter

Dominic McGinty, Molly's father

Magdalene (McGinty) Giggie, Molly's younger sister

Bedford Giggie, Magdalene's husband

PART ONE

The Beaumont Dynasty

PITTSFIELD

Pittsfield: a squalid mass of rough tarpapered shacks, lean-tos, and soot-covered centuries-old brick tenements. The streets unpaved, mud clogging the wheels of horse-drawn wagons as men curse and whip their stumbling beasts onward. Taverns at every corner, drunks sprawled in alleys and rough-looking whores working the night streets under the pale glow of gaslights. Hoboes, drifters, tramps of all descriptions, gamblers, pirates, highwaymen. Lumberjacks in from the bush and fishermen up from the bay and trappers down from the hills and sailors home from the sea. A typical town in the Maritimes.

Really, when you think of it, who better to tell the story than myself, Edmund Fitzpatrick, the hapless lover of Bertie Beaumont's beautiful sister Alisa, whose laughing face I'd first seen (or at least taken notice of) through the splattered slime of a raw egg? It was some thirteen years after the Repentance Vale tragedy that I ran into her in Ontario, when the full details affecting her family were still being withheld from the public. Alisa, the ravishing Alisa, who by this time had left the convent and was teaching in a Catholic primary school in Kingston. We had never known each other well, but had long been in each other's thoughts, as I shall indicate as I go along.

In our younger days neither of us had been ready for what we both desired. It wasn't only due to the class difference (which by the way she was later to throw in my face when in a mood to hurt me), but because of what happened to her brother Bertie, and the fact of its coming so soon after her grandfather Sir Leicester Beaumont's death, an event she must have unconsciously felt responsible for (she never consciously took responsibility for anything). At all events she suddenly turned religious, becoming as excessive in that regard as her grandmother Lady Dora had been, and upon graduating from high school renounced the world and joined the Daughters of the Virgin Mary Congregation—became a nun, in other words. I remember my feelings of sadness and frustration when I heard the news. There's not much you can do when the girl of your dreams becomes a nun, other than try to forget her.

However, her story didn't end there. Several years of cloistered life with its rigours and deprivations convinced her she didn't really have a calling, and so she left the convent and enrolled at university. She turned out to be a surprisingly good scholar, considering her lineage, and in fairly short order earned degrees in Religious Studies and Education. I can still hear her saying to me, as she did so many times, I'm not stupid, Edmund. I do have several degrees, you know. Of course I never said she was stupid, but she had what used to be called a complex on the subject. Because I happen to be blonde and pretty doesn't mean I'm dumb, she would say.

She was rich, beautiful—and built. One of her station would not normally be described as built, but it was she who said it. I'd come to see her in Kingston where she was teaching, and she said, Do you like my new T-shirt? And she lifted the front up to her neck and smiled, showing me she had nothing on underneath. Built, huh?

She was really quite the package. She possessed all the fascination, the sexual attraction of wealth and class, as F. Scott Fitzgerald so well described in his writings. Money, status, looks—and for flavour, a kind of screwy religious sanctity.

We went out to dinner that night, then to a bar with a dance band, and after that to her place. It was the beginning of a romance that lasted almost two years, off and on. She wasn't the kind of girl anyone could or would hang onto for long. I remember those first weeks above all, looking at her naked in bed and thinking, is this really happening, can this really be me? Young Edmund Fitzpatrick from the slums of Pittsfield, having his way with Sir Samuel Beaumont's daughter? It was like a dream become reality—before it turned into a nightmare. Her moods, demands, her infidelities, her ways of getting even for things I didn’t do—these still awaited me. In the meantime, however, I learned a good deal about her life and her family, information others could never have got hold of.

BLACK THUNDER

Though I must have known she existed, the first time I remember actually seeing Alisa was through the mucous mess of a raw egg splattered all over my face. She had been peeking in the door of the chicken coop and suddenly she was jumping up and down and laughing her head off. I was eleven then and she was five.

I was a friend of her brother Haliberton Bertie Beaumont, who was in my class at school. Bertie probably should have been at some private boys academy in England, such as Eton or Harrow, but his father, Sir Samuel Beaumont, thought a more common environment would better prepare him for life. Sir Samuel was an unusual man. He was head of Beaumont Shipping Line, Beaumont Pulp and Paper Industries, Beaumont Transport, etc., and consequently one of the richest aristocrats in the country, but he tended to associate with those well below his station.

It was not unusual to see him tearing across the fields of his estate on the great black stallion he owned, galloping full tilt and jumping fences with the reins in one hand and a quart of malt whisky in the other. He was oblivious to what people thought of him, his enormous wealth giving him that license. His companions were topers, gamblers, horsemen, bare-knuckle pugilists and the like, and it was with such friends he could be seen roistering in the squalid east-end of Pittsfield where the painted ladies of the night plied their trade. It was common knowledge that his more serious and responsible younger brother Richard was the one who actually ran the family enterprises. There was a saying among the common folk that Richard ran the shop while Sir Samuel ran the roads.

Sir Samuel's wife Lydia, Lady Beaumont, was nothing like her husband. She organized bazaars and benefits and other such charitable activities that rich ladies go in for, but she was careful not to become too familiar with the poor. I think the world of the common folk was still too recent in her own family's past for her to wish to be reminded of it.

Lady Beaumont possessed a great beauty and elegance, and she took considerable pains to maintain these qualities. She spent innumerable