The Edwardian Englishman
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to obtain control of his friend, Courtenay’s, millions. Jevons does not mince words
in confronting Sir Bemard with his guilt—“your demoniacal ingenuity almost
surpasses the comprehension of man” (147) Jevons declares, and he later teils Ralph
“that crafty old scoundrel was possessed of the ingenuity of Satan himself—He was
a veritable artist in crime” (148).
The revelations conceming Sir Bemard’s diabolical guilt are explosive in
their implications and potentially damaging to the assumptions no doubt held by
many in Le Queux’s readership about the legitimacy of male prerogatives in general
and the integrity of upper-bourgeois male authority in particular. For one thing, Sir
Bemard’s murderous cupidity derives from the very heart of the upper-class
Professional establishment, and not from the urban criminal working-class. In Sir
Bemard, we have the knight of the realm, the renowned head of his profession,
healer to princes and Countesses, as ffaudster and murderer. Hardly the usual
suspect. The implication is that the upper-class and aristocratic order is itself
weakened (there are even implications about ‘race degeneration’ in this) and is
losing any automatic claim to the moral and ethical superiority and leadership that it
may once have enjoyed by right. To make matters worse, the villainous Sir Bemard
has also been guilty of using ‘bad Science’ to achieve his wicked ends; his research
specialty is nervous disorders (particularly what he terms “absence of will, partial or
entire” in women), and he had used his perverted Science in this field to manipulate
Mary Courtenay, to take control of her will, as it were, to direct her to carry out the
murder of her husband. The destructive and culturally disruptive associations of Sir
Bemard’s criminal activities run wide and deep, impinging not just on the security of
the upper-bourgeois Status quo, but also on gender codes, the professions,
essentialist readings of social dass, and on the legal and law-enforcement
establishments.
The Seven Secrets ends with a telling example of the upper-bourgeois world
closing ranks and conspiring in a classic whitewash and cover-up. Le Queux
arranges matters so that Sir Bemard (with “the brand of Cain upon him”) suffers a
convenient and fatal heart-attack moments after his exposure by Ambier Jevons. As
Ralph puts it, “thus were the Central Criminal Court and the public spared what
would have been one of the most sensational trials of modern times. The papers on
Monday reported ‘with deepest regret’ the sudden death from heart disease of Sir
Bemard Eyton, whom they termed ‘one of the greatest and most skilful physicians of
modern times’” (147). With this, of course, the law is excused the unpleasant duty of
hanging a knight of the realm, and the upper- &