London was gray and overcast with plenty of large puddles on the ground. Rushing along the streets, crowds of citizens moved like schools of fish or flocks of birds, their walking methods deriving from their body types and shaped by their social upbringing. The city had long been a center of commercial activity, by which thousands made an excellent living. Usually among the ambitious there was always the secret hope that they might too strike it rich, and that gave the city its unique striving character. The strivers of London could strike it rich at any time, but they could not disobey the primacy of the upper classes, whose wealth and position insulated them from the tides of life.

In a classic move that Shakespeare would have admired, Ian Ramthem seduced a female clerk working for Bartleby’s and took her job. Now he sat in an easy chair smoking a cigar, his hand on another woman’s rump, his eyes heavenward as if protesting his innocence. Not only was his success compounding, becoming more rich and stable than he could have dreamed, but the trajectory of this achievement was also altering. Sometimes, however, as Shakespeare also knew, prosperity was illusory. Two executives at Bartleby’s, both of whom Ramthem admired and feared, sat above him in the hierarchy. In the hothouse atmosphere of London’s fiercest barristers firm, the top priority was arranging the commercial end so as to prevent a total collapse of the firm in these difficult times.

Clients — some aiming for revenge, others for justice — came to Bartleby’s to get the job done. For the newbie accounts categorized as “promising, but uncertain,” Ian Ramthem was the man for the job. It was a developed skill and dramatically tested Ian’s natural abilities and tendencies, but it was a deliberately obscure job description and gave him leeway to make his own deals within the confines of the firm.

In the slickest move a con man could have pulled off, Ian embezzled five thousand pounds from a trusting chap with the aim of paying him back through a Ponzi scheme. There was a silent suspicion on the sucker’s part that he was being played, but that didn’t keep him from handing over his money. With greater success came increased access to the hottest young ladies of the firm. These women — a few working for entertainment, others for money — came to admire their new barrister as a man of confidence and slickness.

Over at the competitors’ offices (most of them smaller than Bartleby’s), the stated goal was moving to America so as to avoid the crushing competition of the City. Often, however, as they found out to their deteriment, escape was circumscribed. Ian Ramthem and his boss Ted Nugent, both of whom the newspapers described and popularized, knew about their competitors’ antipathy for hard work, their slipshod legal tactics and their ways of underpaying top talent.

While lawyers and executives outside Bartleby’s were working hard to overcome their disadvantage vis-a-vis the dominant firm, Ted Nugent was plotting, in his own inimical way, the military-like campaign which would outflank the opposition with the delicacy of a chess master who saw all.

Not only was the campaign working, giving pause to the naysayers who had doubted it from the beginning, but the fruits of this effort were also multiplying. Nugent had never been satisfied with merely being number one; like Genghis Khan, he wanted all his opponents to lose. This was a ballsy approach to employment at legal firm, as rigorously logical as a mathematician’s ideas on algebraic computations.

There was a solid hope that Nugent would fail, but that thinly veiled aspiration was a loathsome little pipe dream. Dozens of stock investors, all of whom Nugent exploited and manipulated, gambled tens of thousands of pounds apiece — their life savings — on what Nugent called “the most exposed and open submarket of all markets.”

Meanwhile, in the poorer houses of London, the simple aspiration of the weak was getting the needed money so as to buy food and minor sundries. While barbers and longshoremen were getting up at the crack of dawn to go to hard labor, a young boy named Danny Klever was putting together the school revolution which would propel him to the top with the velocity of the bullets that Napoleon’s troops had fired.

In vaulting over his prison-like social class, Danny boy laid the groundwork for the working-class revolution that was blocked and fought over after the Crimean War by upper-class twists across London’s highest strata. A microcosm of London’s “best” — some fishing for compliments, others for favors — opposed the child prodigy’s ascension into the elite. It was a brutal war and deadly efficient, but it was a hopeless cause and subtly doomed to failure.

On occasion, however, as gifted children often find, an ally arose among the rich and influential to aid the poor child’s progress. The typical rich man’s family, most of whom the patriarch spoiled and coddled, became ultra-soft over the years, giving way to new classes of men (“the nouveau riche”) which were more capable of ruling than their predecessors. Crucially, vitally, the man who came to the aide of Danny Klever had actually been born poor himself.

The overwhelming question on Richard Jenkin’s mind (he who Danny Klever was aided by) was whether Danny would have the foresight and strength to leverage his position into dominance. His brooding dark musing, just in character and forcing an honest evaluation of the boy, imposed on Danny a kind of inevitable logic which was picked apart by the rich day by day as they struggled to contain him.

The Napoleonic Wars’ climax that had been fostered in 1812 by a handful of paranoia-equipped French businessmen and fervent patriots dreaming of European empire, by 1841 had morphed into a stalemate that had lasted longer than any tie in modern-day history.

In meeting his mentor, Danny Klever delayed the inevitable surrender that was pushed upon and pursued during the youth’s school years by his betters in high society.

Richard Jenkins rode around town in a couch pulled by four fiery black horses acquired from Arabia during a lull in tensions between Britain and Persia. It was a beautiful couch and definitely exceeded speeds up to 20 kilometers an hour, but it was an expensive liability and quite reluctantly had to be discarded.

There was an infectious impression that Jenkins only helped others to benefit himself, but that was patently false. More accurately, he helped out society by elevating the chosen few to their natural positions (positions which had been denied them by chance and circumstance). When the time was ripe, these wunderkinds were unveiled to great applause and approbation for a world which would come to believe in miracles.

Above the streets of London, in the gloomy, prison-like atmosphere of the Tower of London, the sole mission was escaping the Tower’s guardians so as to rejoin regular society. In a cruel twist of fate, two princes had long been imprisoned in the tower in order to keep them out of the way of aspiring upstarts expert at plotting coups.

Not only was life challenging for the young princes, becoming more desperate and depraved than they would have believed in their halcyon life, but their gaolers were also tending toward greater cruelty and impatience toward the princes in their charge.

Prince David was cold, humiliated by the rapaciousness of others. The risks of this dire state of affairs were an early death, abuse at the hands of guards, rape in the middle of the night, and the theft of his few remaining belongings, which had been given to him by his grandfather, Arthur de Morte, as part of his inheritance.

The cruel Count Morosse looked in on the sleeping Prince David one morning, objectively analyzing the prince’s condition and determining whether he should survive much longer. Reinforced through the years of the Count’s rapid rise was the tacit acknowledgement that the honor and victory of his family house must be maintained at all costs, even if he had to murder princes to seal it up. The Count had been playing power games for years. This was a long-term game, as fearfully dangerous as Caesar’s aborted plans to seize control of the Roman Empire.

Count Morosse was a product of his times and ambitiously bettered himself at the expense of his lessers, but he was a learned man for all that and obsessively recreated new opportunities to educate himself as an audodidact. There were a few problems he could think of that undermined and could destroy his grand adventure. Given the Count’s strength in interpersonal negotiations, he resolved to extend his network of contacts as far and wide as possible.

The Count’s wife was gorgeous, fortunately assorted by the randomness of biological history. She and her many sisters — some deriving from fortune, most from the working class — divided their time between London and Berlin, the latter of which featured in their lives as the center of intrigue and social climbing that they so desperately loved.

The solid stable Morosse marriage, which had been the talk of the town during the 1830s, was weakening. Within his mansion’s delightful luxuriousness, the Count confronted the human problems of keeping his wife amused and making sure she didn’t destroy his fortune. The mansion sat on a square plot of land just outside of London, happily receiving its share of sunshine and standing as a monument to good taste. Imprinted in the perimeter of wealth’s cherished sanctuary was the Machiavellian principle that the power of the lord must be maintained at all costs, no matter what the moral qualms.

A small pond designed for frogs, which had been a feature of most nouveau riche mansions on the outskirts, was thriving. Deep in the liquid depths of the pond’s welcoming shelter, the frogs dealt with the basic biological tasks of reproducing themselves and striving to avoid nasty predators.

While Count Morosse and his wife were arguing about which decorations to pick for their new ballroom, Richard Jenkins was planning a tour of Italy which would take him from Florence to Rome with the elegance of the Roman Emperors who lived the original good life. Over the next few months, especially in exchange for the pleasantness of youth’s company, Jenkins showed some tendency to favor the young prodigy Danny Klever. At times Jenkins found himself ruffling the boy’s head with vast affection, feeling a love for him he could never get from his natural sons.

Jenkins’ vast family of nine sons and three daughters — some preying upon their father’s generosity, others upon society’s general tolerance of the very rich — were going with him to Italy. Richard Jenkins himself — head staying well out of the clouds — only had one son who he could count on, William Robert Jenkins. The favored son and his father, both of whom Count Morosse knew from his public dealings, were treading on dangerous ground.

At times, especially in reaction to Morosse’s schemes for ultimate power, Jenkins the elder acted to impede Morosse’s progress, but not to halt him completely. The costs of this half-measure were animosity by Morosse toward Jenkins, alienation of significant segments of the ton and a growing list of expenses that had to be financed from other ventures.

There was a very real danger that Morosse would act violently against Jenkins if he persisted. Jenkins was oblivious, coddled by the softness of his lifestyle. For hereditary lords, status in society was guaranteed and systems of support were intensely in effect: systems of support came to the rescue often and heavily and weak lords could be picked up from their stances on their knees. How hard Morosse drove himself was evident in the man’s life-changing tiredness after the 1840s.

Morosse was ambitious, buoyed by the rapaciousness of London society. His grand masterplan, which had been the only thing stopping the Tories from ruining the country during the Crimean War, was being implemented. Like a deranged king, wandering the countryside in search of a medieval Diogenes, Morosse was the kind of man who would sacrifice anything for his delusions.

Morosse and Jenkins met once before the latter’s scheduled visit to the Continent, an encounter which few commented on but which the wise and practical noted in their diaries. At the time, Morosse was hosting a lavish banquet (his wife had been instrumental in planting the suggestion in her husband’s mind) and Jenkins was one of the invited guests. He sat next to Ian Cromwell, a direct descendant of Oliver Cromwell and the man most regarded to take the next prime ministership.

While Cromwell and Jenkings were chatting happily, Morosse was entering the worst conversation of his life which took place among his wife’s pointed silences with the awkwardness of the worst lower-class pub that boomed with fights and stupidity. Cromwell and Jenkins could interact effortlessly all day long, but they could not charm the enigmatic figure of Count Morosse, whose wife and children had nailed him to a spiritual wall long ago.

The pointlessness of life was well exemplified by the low-level chit-chat which Morosse eavesdropped on from his position at the head of the table. Although there were no official sanctions against it, it was known that atheists were a despised minority among high society and were given few privileges when it came time to doling them out. Morosse’s personally held secret that there was no God, which had been a fixture of his belief system ever since he was a precociously intelligent boy, was very revealing. It was a nihilistic viewpoint and obstinately intruded on his personal life in every case, but it was a realistic one as well and took him places others feared to go.

As the dinner party was going on, young Danny Klever was at school studying hard. Given Danny’s dependence on Jenkins, he had no real choice but to follow the older man’s tutelage. There were many problems that jeopardized and could end a young man’s education. Danny was tempted to cheat on his quizzes and tests multiple times but in the end he decided not to risk it. This was a smart approach to school, as universally beneficial as Isaac Newton’s ideas on reality’s events.

In another part of London, at the same time, Ian Ranthem could soon be chosen to climb the corporate ladder. His potential was a problem for the girls who loved him, in that his sexual market value would climb vastly higher than theirs, jeopardizing their relationships. In a desperate move that told volumes about her state of mind, Jenny Amis sold her entire collection of shoes and bought an encyclopedia set to give to Ramthem.

Accepting the expensive books in the office with good grace, and carrying them to the back storage room where were kept all the records and files going back years — he had only been allowed to put things back there for a year — Ramthem gave Jenny Amis a tiny noncommittal peck on the check. In the past, things had gone missing: the reason for the owners’ restrictions on employees. There had been a garbled report that a criminal mastermind was stealing items, but that might have been a paranoid’s imagination.

Jenny Amis was so pleased with herself that she immediately told all her friends about her genius dating strategy to snag a high value man. She thought about it a while and a slow grin surfaced on her average-looking, none-too-intelligent face. Not only was Ian falling for her, becoming more fixated and jealous than ever before, but her friends were also boosting her value by giving her sexy new dresses to wear and teaching her how to flirt. Jenny flounced to the nearest pub after work that day, ordering a pint of lager for herself, even though she wasn’t a big-time drinkers. She looked around. Not only was the bar filling up nicely, losing its abhorrent stuffiness as the hours passed, but the bartender was also getting more into his work.

Lower-class scumbags — hands grasping for warm beer, stupid eyes darting aimlessly — wondered about the beddable girl in the corner of the bar who kept to herself. One scumbag was so confident that he staggered over to Jenny and promptly vomited over her shirt. This was an ineffective approach to Victorian dating, as clumsily ridiculous as Emily Bronte’s ideas on the seduction of men.

Jenny recoiled from the vomit and the man, jumping up off her stool while slapping him a hard one across the face. In an unapologetic move that described her contempt, she spat on his boots with the fury of the North American grizzly bear that would charge any interloper. After she was done, the man’s friend wandered over curiously to see what was going on. Jenny put her hands on her hips and glared at the man and his friend, both of whom were drunk as lords on cheap alcohol. She had long been suspicious of the lower classes (even though she was a member herself), hating them for their lack of money and status. There was still lust on the first man’s face over such feminine features as Jenny’s trim waist, her wide hips and a bosom that swelled enticingly to all lower-class men.

Ian Ramthem was gradually building up a pool of capital, much of it coming from his day job and earned by the blood of his fingers. In the upper tiers of society, the major concern was advancing one’s image so as to always appear higher than one’s nearest peer. How much charm one had, the ways one deployed it, and the lulled suspicions of one’s competitors were destined to mold and shape the ultimate form of one’s social life.

Immediately after leaving the bar Jenny ran to the nearest coach-for-hire, not fully completing the psychological and emotional recovery that would enable her to face Ian as a woman. The night air hummed with magical potential, while Jenny walked alone through the dark, an unusual occurrence blinding her to the danger of her choice. A criminal appeared, either a mugger or a rapist. He spoke to her in guttural tones, making clear demands. The emphasis was on submission and yielding more than monetary gifts. The criminal began to beat her across the face and chest, hurting Jenny badly. With her spirit crushed down and willpower destroyed, Jenny hung her head and cried.