The Husband

Suspect: Ezra Welford

Age: 69

            Wealthy businessman, Ezra Welford, made his fortune with confectionary, producing popular toffee, pastilles, chocolates, caramel and humbugs in his York factory and selling it in stores all over the country. Despite his financial success, however, Ezra feels incomplete without a knighthood. For several years now he has been angling for that acclaim, but to no avail. Unfortunately, he is not a man of good manners, patience, grace or dignity, and since he so stubbornly believes that he is always in the right, he cannot be taught. His desperate, clumsy efforts to fit in with aristocratic society tend to push his chances of ever being accepted by them even farther away.

            He married Lady Isolda Skefflington when she was eighteen and newly returned after four years living in Bermuda with her half-brother, the Marquess of Skefflington. She was everything Ezra wanted in a wife -- elegant, connected, impeccably well-mannered and of ancient pedigree. The Skefflingtons have an entire page in Burke's Peerage. So he fully expected their marriage to open more doors and smooth his upward path.

          

  Much to Ezra's aggravation, however, things have not quite turned out the way he planned. Everybody loves and admires Lady Isolda, but her husband still struggles for respect from the upper classes. Adding to his frustration, the three children she gave him have turned out most disappointingly, causing him nothing but indigestion. The grand manor house he built on land purchased from the Marquess of Skefflington is widely mocked as ugly and pretentious, and, to be frank, since he has nothing in common with his fine lady wife, her noble presence at his side is little more than salt in his wound, a reminder of his own failures and everything he will never be.

            Isolda is still, after more than forty years of marriage, something of a mystery to her husband. Her frail health irritates him, because he sees it as an excuse to avoid his company— a suspicion enlarged by her ladyship's preference for certain members of staff to whom she confides. His children are ungrateful, unhappy and show him little respect, and the household staff, he's quite sure, look down their noses at him. He is, in many ways, a stranger in his own home, where everything is his wife's "province".

           

Now that she's dead, everything will change. Could something have happened during the garden party, in the festering heat of that afternoon, to put him over the edge?  The guests on his lawn were drinking champagne, but Ezra, preferring something less sweet, bubbly and "fancy", sent the stuck-up butler indoors for a bottle of port. It might not be the proper time of day for his favorite tipple and it might not look refined, but on this hot day he was beyond caring. He decided he would drink what he wanted to drink, eat what he wanted to eat, say whatever he wanted to say, and they could all put up with it. Or leave.

            There comes a time in every man's life when he's simply had enough.

            Perhaps this was Ezra's day.

 

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(Image used here: Portrait of Frank Duveneck by Joseph DeCamp 1916 and Still Life: Two glasses of red wine, a bottle of wine, a corkscrew and a plate of biscuits on a tray by Albert Anker)