Harrimun Grenville Ceolmund
Harrimun Grenville Ceolmun had been bred in the manner his family expected: polished manners, an education at a respectable university, and a swift admission to practice in London by 1905. He kept chambers that smelled of leather and old paper and took cases with the quiet confidence of a man who believed the law to be a noble calling. His father had been a magistrate, his mother a force in parish charities, and the Grenville name opened doors at the Athenaeum and at vestry meetings. He married Catherine at twenty-eight in a service that read like the beginning of every good, proper life. For years the community regarded him as reliable—someone to be recommended, someone to be trusted with wills and estates, who could translate complexity into the reassuring plainness his neighbors sought.
Yet beneath the veneer Harrimun's life was fraying. A taste acquired at a club—yellow opium smoked in the dim hours after a failed dinner—became something he leaned on when the briefs multiplied and clients grew impatient. The drug eased his anxieties only briefly and left him fumbling at trials, arriving late to consultations, and increasingly dependent on junior clerks to keep the practice afloat. At home the picture was worse: Catherine, once companionable, found amusements elsewhere and was seen in company that did not concern itself with her husband's standing. Rumor braided itself with fact until it posed a more dangerous threat than any opposing counsel; whispers in the drawing rooms and at the bar became a pressure sore against Harrimun's reputation. He kept his name on the brass plate and his voice measured in court, but the hours between business and bed were a battleground—papers unpaid, clients cooling, and a marriage that offered neither solace nor alliance—and he was left to choose which ruin to attend to first.