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James Moriarty wanted nothing more than to belong. He wanted to find his place in this world, and he wanted it to be better than the one he had been promised. After everything he had been through, it had seemed like a miracle to end up at Oxford, finding himself in the very room that none other than Bucephalus Hodge claimed to be filled with the brightest minds in the country. James had not looked around and pictured those around him as the future scientists, prime ministers and whatever else they might become. He pictured those titles only for himself. One day he would be someone, if he played his cards right.
It would take a lot of work. It had already taken a lot of work. He had been dealt a terrible hand. Born the daughter of poor farmers, in a time where there was barely anything to farm, he had realised quickly that this life would leave an emptiness in his stomach that could never be sated. His parents did not feel their hunger anymore. They had grown so used to it that it had become a part of them they could no longer imagine separate from them. James swore, even then, though he was not more than a child, to never grow compliant like them. Even if it meant he had to bide his time. He had not received an education in his younger years, which James had not realised until he had been older, because he had been the only person who had grieved it. His parents hadn’t regretted not being able to send him to school, as they had with his younger brother, because little girls did not need to go to school. Barely anyone in their village knew how to read and write. Once he had been old enough to realise he was not just wasted potential, but instead had never even been potential in the first place, it had stung, right in his empty stomach. If this life had not been meant for him, then how was it fair he still wanted it so badly, so painfully?
In some ways, his family’s death––may God rest their souls––had been a liberation. A heavy stone that dropped on the chain which had kept him chained to this infertile, fruitless land. He had discarded his former self without any thought. He had not grieved for himself, because he had yet to become anyone worth grieving. He had slipped off the scratchy dress that had grown too tight the summer before and, dressed in his late brother’s Sunday best, had set out to conquer the world.
The world resisted his attempts, or was, more likely, largely indifferent to them. He relied on the generosity of others, eating what they had to spare, sleeping in places they did not care enough to shoo him away from. Thinking back to that time, he thought he should have been grateful. At the very least it would have been what would have been expected of him. Instead he grew resentful. He hated being at the mercy of others. He hated when they denied him the things he wanted, the things he needed. A farmer kicking him out of his barn as if he had anything to lose by letting him spend a night in the hayloft, or a maid tossing the scraps of food to the pigs instead of giving them to him. He felt like one of the rats scurrying in the shadows, diseased and despised and so, so hungry. To live a life dependent on the good will of people was to live a sad life, devoid of any pleasure. Pleasure was for those who knew where to find it, and how to ask for it. It was for people who were sure of their place in the world. And if James did not have such a place, then he would find himself one.
He started sneaking into school. He built himself a life. He was now James Moriarty. His father’s name. It did not fit right, quite like his brother’s clothes it was too small for him. He told himself it would be alright. He was just borrowing it, and would give it back when it no longer served him. In the same vein, he did not bother changing his last name. His irishness clung thickly to every syllable, it would be a ridiculous farce to try to force it from him. And perhaps it would be nice to keep it. A memory of where he had started, something to look back on when he was all the way at the top.
It was that thought that kept him going, that made him learn letter by letter, number by number. All of this would one day be nothing but a memory, easier to relive from a place of comfort. The day he wrote his own name for the first time something changed in him. When he saw the scrawled letters there, put on the small slate with chalk by his own small hand, his name started to fit him. To belong to him. James Moriarty. His father had stopped existing to make place for him.
When he had learned how to read, he started devouring whatever he could find. Books, plays, poetry, of course, but he would also halt under shop signs, taking in each word, or spend ages in front of the train station, studying the departure and arrival times. A whole new world of knowledge had opened its doors to him, had welcomed him in. He would not be so rude as to refuse the invitation. Knowledge suited him, stuck with him. He realised it quickly, as quotes he had read somewhere kept haunting his thoughts. Perhaps he had an advantage, since his head had been void of anything of value, memorising the words of great minds came easy to him now. Perhaps one day he would be able to write like them. Like the great Seneca, or Shakespeare himself. For a while this was his dream. He had been given the gift of language and so language became his life. Then his knowledge of mathematics grew and suddenly he found his world rearranged. No longer was he concerned with shop signs, but with probability, with interest charges, with accumulation. He thought bankers were quite brilliant, having tamed math to be a work horse doing their bidding. They held everyone’s trust while, at the heart of it, being concerned primarily with increasing their own fortunes and not so much with protecting those of others. With every new thing he learned, his world became larger and made more sense. Things were arranging and rearranging themselves constantly and he watched it happen with fascination.
James made great progress at school. Everyone assumed that was because learning came easy to him, but that wasn’t the truth. The truth was that he simply cared more than the others did. One half of the boys was aware they would never have any use for the things they learned, because they would never get far in life anyway, while the other half didn’t need it because they would get far on their father’s name and money alone. Though James did not know a lot of those boys. They went to private schools, too good to dirty themselves amongst the common folk. James loathed and envied them. He knew, deep down, he was like them. If only he would have had the privilege of being born to a higher station, he would not have wasted a single breath on the first half of boys who were supposed to be his peers. They were the rats. Everyone was either a rat or someone who tried to avoid rats whenever it was possible. But James was born on the same streets, foraged for the same things, food, shelter, attention as they did, shared classrooms and bedrooms and fantasies with them. But unlike them he was not content with only dreaming.
James would never call his scholarship a stroke of good luck, even though he was well aware that luck did play a part in his obtainment of it. This had to be true because luck had a part in most everything in life. That he had lived while the rest of his family had succumbed to sickness and starvation had been luck. That no teacher had barred him from the classrooms even though he sometimes failed to answer questions about his living situation to their satisfaction had been luck. That no one had ever managed to realise that James Moriarty was a ghost, a daughter dressed in her father’s spirit, had been luck. That the school he had attended granted scholarships to universities to their best and brightest students was also, in a way, luck. More than enough schools did not. It had been no luck that he had been the boy who ended up winning though. He had never worked this hard for anything in his life. This scholarship, just as learning how to read had been, was the key to a new world.
It became the easiest thing in the world, to tell people he was James Moriarty, student at Oxford University. He had half forgotten the name his parents had given him, just another gift that had not been good enough for him to keep. Unlike the name James, which had proven its worth, his old name had been discarded when it had no longer been useful to him. It had, if he was honest––which he rarely was––never been useful to him. As a child it had held him back, then it had been a dark shadow, clinging to him in a way he found he couldn’t shake. Even as he had outgrown his brother’s clothes and had started buying his own, boy‘s pants and shirts, then men’s, his first suit, the waistcoat lying flat against his bound chest, it had dug its teeth into his neck, shaking him like an animal. He had tried to ignore it. Perhaps it was the only thing in his life that had ever caused him to feel guilt. The little girl he had to kill so he could live. It was not her fault. She had been just as hungry as he was now.
He forgot all about her as he arrived in Oxford. There was no space for little farm girls in its impressive, old halls. So James locked her away, drowned her in whiskey and let the droning voices of professors fill the place in his mind where she had used to be. He would need to stay focused if he wanted to keep his place here, which he did. Finally he was exactly where he had been meant to be all this time. The studies were easy enough to follow and finally he was surrounded by the boarding school boys that he had always envied. To his surprise he found them insufferable. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he always had the fear they could smell his poor standing on him, like a stink that clung to him and that he would never be able to wash off, no matter if he scrubbed his skin red and raw. No matter how new and well kept his clothes were, if he kept his shoes perfectly shined, if he imitated their ways of speaking, of moving. His tongue refused to obey, to give up the words on which it had been raised. He could try, could get better at it, but whenever he got too excited, too agitated, too careless, he slipped up. It was an unforgiving world. He simply had to be unforgiving back. He stopped wasting his time trying to please and imitate them. He was holding himself back, he told himself, trying to be like them, when he should be aiming to be better. When he should be proving he was twice the man any of them would ever be. So this became his new goal and he worked at it steadily.
It was in Professor Thompson’s class on mathematics where James Moriarty’s life changed in a way he could neither have predicted nor prevented. All because a young scout could not keep his mouth shut and simply had to correct the professor. He had the audacity, James had to admit that, and clearly he also had the brains. It was a surprising, but not unwelcome fact that James was fascinated from the first second. The young man did not appear to be of low standing, his speech was way too eloquent for that. And yet he found himself in the position of a scout instead of sitting in one of the chairs in the classroom. James was fascinated by him because he could see himself in him. A twisted version, all backwards. Born with everything, now left with nothing, while James had started with nothing and now had everything. He wanted to find out how this had happened. How had he, presumably one of those insufferable rich boys, found himself in a position below James? Surely there was a story to tell there. Now all James had to figure out was how to make this scout tell it to him.
After the lesson had ended and the room had emptied, the scout snuck in to solve the equation left on the blackboard. Even though there was no one left to impress, or perhaps because of that fact, James could not help but stay and watch him. He felt hungry still.