“I’m afraid it’s rather sordid,” Charles said. “I don’t think the details would be of much interest.” He smiled at Kate, and she read the message in his eyes. Edith would neither understand nor believe what had happened, and as for Bradford -

Bradford frowned. “What that fellow Ashcraft did might have been technically illegal, but in my opinion, he was morally justified. The function of the police is to keep us safe from dangerous men. They must use whatever means are necessary to ferret out terrorists and lock them away.”

Charles said nothing. Kate opened her mouth to object, but closed it. Charles was right. The Marsdens were among those who feared social change because it might threaten their way of life. Argument would not persuade them otherwise. She might as well save her breath-here, at least. There would be other, more productive opportunities to speak out.

“I heartily agree with you, my dear,” Edith said in a sensible tone. “They must use whatever means are necessary. Society must be protected at all costs.”

Bradford smiled and his tone lightened. “As long as law and order are maintained, the country will prosper-as we have prospered, my dear.” He cast an approving look down the length of the table, his glance lingering on the magnificent choker Edith wore around her neck. “And if they want revolution,” he added almost carelessly, “they shall have to face the consequences. That’s all I have to say.”

Edith smiled at Kate and signalled to the footman to pull back her chair. “Shall we, Kate? I’m sure the men are going to talk about politics. We’ll go to the drawing room for coffee and our own little chat. I’ve a new silver coffee set I’d like you to see, and I’d very much like your opinion on the draperies. They were quite expensive, but I’m not sure that the color is exactly right.”

Suddenly Kate had had enough. “I’m so sorry,” she lied, “but I have the most terrible headache. I do hope you’ll forgive us if we say good night now.”

A few moments later, Kate and Charles were in a cab, on their way back to Sibley House. “I trust your headache is better,” Charles said, looking at her with a grave smile.

“It was a silver-coffee-set-and-expensive-draperies headache,” Kate confessed. “I did not think I could tolerate another minute.”

There was a longish silence. At last, Charles said, “I heard from Hardwicke Rawnsley today, Kate. He’s just back from taking a look at the land I propose to give to the Trust, and is entirely in favor of the transaction.”

“Well, I should think so,” Kate said with a little laugh. “Canon Rawnsley did not strike me as the kind of man who would look a gift horse in the mouth-especially when there are more magnificent horses to be had in a few years.”

Charles reached for her hand. “You’re sure that you approve of my giving Somersworth to the Trust? It’s not the sort of thing that Bradford or Edith Marsden would understand, and I’m sure there will be others who feel I am letting down the side by giving it up. Shirking my duty, as it were.”

“Shirking your duty?” Kate put her hand in his. “I should say you are doing your duty, my dear. The Trust will be here long after you and I are gone, and perhaps a way will be found to make Somersworth available to all the people.”

“Perhaps.” Charles’s eyes lightened. “And we might look on it as a small gesture in support of the revolution.”

When Bill and I learned that Jack London, the noted American adventure writer, had visited the British capital at the time of the coronation of Edward VII, we decided that he would play a major part in the book that we had in mind. We had read and enjoyed many of his stories; we knew that he was a self-avowed Socialist; and we knew that his book, People of the Abyss (written during the months of August, September, and October 1902), was a scathing critique of the slum conditions in the East End. Although we didn’t know much else about him, he seemed to be a perfect character for our novel-a major American writer, in the right place at the right time, with strong political sentiments of the right sort.

But as we began to read about London ’s life, other aspects of his character began to overshadow his writing and his radical political beliefs. The man brimmed with exuberant life and sexual energy. He was greedy for experience, for fame, for money and all the things money could buy. He was the center of the universe for himself and for those who loved or desired him, often to their detriment. On the train trip from California to New York, a few weeks before the beginning of our novel, he fell into a railway-car sexual affair with a “sweet woman” with whom “nothing remained when our three days and nights were over.” He claimed never to have loved Bess (the woman to whom he was married at the time of this novel, the mother of his two daughters) and walked out on her in July 1903, claiming that she was turning him into a “house animal” and his home into a “prison.” He had already begun an ardent affair with Charmian Kittredge, who learned to sail, box, decipher Jack’s handwriting, offer judicious stylistic suggestions, and corrected and retyped his typescripts-all the prerequisites, one imagines, for a successful relationship with Jack London. But when Bess filed for divorce, she named another woman, Anna Strunsky, whom Jack had also loved (and quite as passionately as he now loved Charmian) in 1902. Bess’s error was corrected, and (despite several miscellaneous new affairs) Jack and Charmian were married in November 1905.

As Jack’s enormously energetic life went on, many other conflicts emerged within this complex and self-destructive man. But at the time he appears in our novel, his greatest energies (outside of his writing) seem to have been devoted to finding the love of his life, his “mate woman,” and that is the way we have portrayed him. While his sexual relationship with Nellie and his romantic attraction to Lottie are entirely fictional, we believe they are an accurate portrayal of Jack London’s uses of women, and that they show him as he was, at once passionate and manipulative.

London loved hard, lived large, and died early, before his fortieth birthday, his life a study in contradictions. As a Radical Socialist, he was eager for the revolution, but he pursued the capitalist dream to the last day of his life, accruing as much as he could and spending far more than he earned. As a writer, he had a stunning and disciplined talent, but his other appetites pulled him away from his work; as he said himself, he preferred living to writing, and while his readers gobbled up his stories, his critics felt that the more he wrote, the less memorable was his writing. As an adventurer, he genuinely loved the wilderness of the sea and the frozen North; as a skilled self-promoter, he knew that to sell his books, he had to sell his adventurous life. (Unlike other writers of his era, he would be very much at home in our time.) But it is these complexities and contradictions that made Jack London large, large as the world, larger than life, and that is the way he will be remembered.