Titus, Titan.

I lived in the shadow of my father, I always had, and, unless I were to raise my own model village from empty fields and a flooding valley, or receive a knighthood from Queen Victoria, I always would. My father was the great Titus, a Titan to the people of his village. If only they knew the real man, the father he never was.

I tried to avoid his creation whenever I could. On occasion, however, a visit to the village was unavoidable. It was the 20th of September, my father’s birthday, and the anniversary of the Mill’s inception. Celebration had gripped the village.

I arrived late, hoping to miss any welcome reception. The coachman obliged to drop me off outside the village, and I walked into Tartarus on foot with the crowds, camouflaged. The village itself, while conceived as a radical solution to working class urban slums, was bland. Sandstone terraces ran identical in every direction. I always felt intimidated by the rigidity, those straight streets were my straightjacket. It was well-designed, I had to admit. Its lattice layout ensured it was easy to navigate. No curves could be found there. The same could be said of the people, too. Thin workers went home to their thin wives, who cooked thin soups for their thin children.

‘I have given them shelter, community, work,’ my father would counter if ever I raised this issue. ‘I have built them Almshouses for when they get sick and secured a pension for them when they retire. I cannot physically put bread in their mouths, I cannot give them everything. I am not a god.’ But I knew he wished he was.

The Mill was the pride of the village. It rose above the rows of houses, as dominant as the Coliseum, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Colossus of Rhodes. Although in truth, it could not compare to the Coliseum. I had fallen in love with Rome a couple years previous on my tour of the continent, and I could never forget that crowning structure in all its perfect antithesis: broken but unbreakable, grand but ghostly. It was the only location on my Tour where my imagination had needed no encouragement, with ease my eyes filled in the gaps in the walls and my ears echoed with the clash of swords and the roar of a bloodthirsty crowd. It was hard not to compare oneself to the men and beasts who lived and fought and died there centuries before. Byron had said it best: “heroes have trod this spot”. In what reality did I think myself worthy to tread the same dust?

Before me, Yorkshire’s own “Wonder” rose in four floors of endless windows in a structure of warm sandstone, perfectly symmetrical. Under the beating September sun, the Mill glowed divine in the murky valley: a beacon beside a city of smoke, a lighthouse in the dark, a diamond in the rough (the clichés were endless but true). The piece de resistance was the chimney. It was built freestanding just next to the Mill, a golden tower reaching over two-hundred feet. What it emitted, however, was far from golden. Due to the celebrations taking place there was no smoke seeping out, but on weekdays a foul black cloud would leak into the sky. In hindsight, that smoke was surely the cause of the valley’s gloom, a conveniently ignored by-product of my father’s wonderful creation.

I crossed the canal and passed the church to arrive in a large courtyard in the shadow of the Mill. The courtyard was heaving with thousands of locals and many, I judged from their accents, from further afield, who had gathered to hear an array of speakers, including my father. The Minister was finishing his speech when I arrived, and like a fox slinking between trees, I weaved through the outer edges of the crowd to get a better view. Due to my reluctance to ever visit the area, my face was not too widely known, but I wished to take no chances. The thought of hearing ‘You are just like your father’ made me nauseous.

‘And praise be to God.’

A ripple of ‘Amen’ passed through the crowd and sent a strange shiver through my body. Whether it was because the murmur had been spoken in unison, as if the crowd had merged into one host, or whether it was the simmering pitch with which it had been uttered, I could not decide, but somehow it had terrified me. These people would do anything for their god, whether he was real or not. Right on cue, as if God was punishing me for my lack of grace, my father took to the podium and the adulation rose to an unbearable crescendo. My father was a Sir not a Saint, I wanted to remind them all, he did not deserve this level of reverence. Their adoration for him infuriated me, how could they be so blind?

The beast spoke. ‘Good afternoon, all.’

Despite only arriving moments before, I realised I could not stand to hear his voice., his lies. I fled the crowd in search of tranquillity and found it in my favourite retreat, a quiet lawn below the church that gently descended to the canal. Resting my back against a silver birch in the warmth of the summer sun, I leafed through the pages of my book. I was reading Hesiod’s Titanomachy, the Greek poets account of the gods’ rebellion against their parents, the Titans, and Zeus’ overthrow of his tyrannical father, Kronos. If only I had the power of a god, I thought.

Books were a release for me. Where most men carried handkerchiefs, I carried a book. To thumb their delicate pages rich in words of stories and life, aroused me. I had written stories myself, poems and observations from my travels across Europe in the ruins of the ancient world, but I was never satisfied with them, they were nought compared to the great Classics: the Odyssey and the Iliad, and the great plays by Euripides and Sophocles and Aristophanes and the rest. They told tales of roaming heroes traversing the vast Aegean Sea, on their journeys to kill beasts and win renown. Oh, how I wished to have witnessed such a time, to have sailed with the Argonauts or to have stolen Helen, to have loved under endless blue skies in steamy Argos. Yorkshire, in all its murk, was a prison.

A family of ducks dipped and played in the canal, immersing their beaks below the surface. Their beaks were bright yellow, a vibrant yellow, golden yoked like Helios’ chariot. Similar in colour, I realised, to the walls of the Mill. The small creatures danced upon the water, uncaring of the world around them. They had no pressures, no expectations, they lived in peace and blissful ignorance. My reality was so different, my future was pre-determined. I quickly halted that train of thought. Was that envy I had felt? Had I really stooped to a jealousy of waterfowl?

‘William?’ A voice retrieved me from a pit of self-degradation. Fanny, my sister, was standing above me on the bank. Her higher position in combination with a golden ray of sunlight that lit her from the rear made her appear godlike. I wondered which goddess she was. A majestic figure with dark brown flowing hair and stormy eyes: Athena, of course.

She continued. ‘I thought I would find you here. I could not stand the crowd either, they treat him like a king.’

‘They treat him like a god,’ I replied. Fanny was the only one who understood me. After all, we shared the same father. We had spent most of our youth together, it was hard to make friends when your father was the King. The King, in his one redeeming act, had allowed us the freedom to explore the sprawling grounds of our hillside home. We often disappeared from reality for hours, roaming the woodlands in search of fairies or building forts and tree houses. Fanny had been my companion; we had voyaged through imagination and childhood alone together.

‘There is something you should know.’

The reluctance with which she said this unnerved me.

‘Father has found me a husband.’

A heat rose in my chest, perhaps it was an unvoiced scream, bursting and bulging to release. A silence prevailed in which I tried my utmost to restrain tears.

‘He is a businessman; he owns property towards Sheffield.’

That was miles away, I knew. Fanny would be gone for months at a time, perhaps even years. I did not know what to say, just that I had to say something, anything, to stop her. ‘No you are not going I will not allow it not alone anyway I shall come with you I will buy a home nearby and we can’ — but Fanny broke off my verbal spewing.

‘Oh, Titus,’ she smiled her warm, sweet smile. It soothed me, despite her using that name. Titus was mine as well as my father’s, but I hated it. He could create a village from nothing but not an original name for his son.

‘We cannot always be together, you know that. Besides, father needs you here. You are to take-over the business when he retires.’

‘I would rather die.’ I meant it.

‘I would rather you live.’ I think she meant it too.

‘Then I would rather he die.’

This time, she said nothing.

This was all my father’s doing, I realised. He had orchestrated the arrangement; he had chosen Fanny a husband as far away from me as possible. “You will turn into a girl if you spend any more time with her”, he used to claim. But I was Apollo and she was Artemis, we would endure this world together. I could not let him get away with it, he would not control every aspect of my future.

Whether she spoke more, I cannot recall. A trance had fallen upon me, and I was incapable of listening. My sister hugged me, tears forming in her grey sky eyes, my Athena. And then she left. I fell to my knees and a wave of misery launched from my chest and exited my mouth in a scream so painful it made my whole body tremble and convulse. Minutes or years passed in this state, and by the time my lungs were finally empty and my tears had run dry, the sun had gone down and I was left shivering in the dusk.

Dark thoughts arrived with the twilight and the return of my reason. I felt as though that was the last time that I would ever see my sister. I remembered Zeus, and his overthrow of his father. Granted, I lacked the power of a god, but my father was certainly no Titan. No, he was a gorgon, a minotaur, a hydra, not a Titan. Titus was a monster the world needed rid of, I needed rid of, and I would rise like Perseus, Theseus, Hercules, the hero. Perhaps then, in such glory, the son would finally be free of the father.

Was I really contemplating patricide? What would Fanny think of me, if she knew I was debating the murder of our father? She disliked him, that she had told me countless times, but she would never advocate for murder. Would she?

My knees began to ache. Disgusted at myself for even considering such an evil act, I returned to a seated position and my book. But I found it hard to concentrate, my mind was spinning, spinning like the wool in the nearby Mill, my father’s Mill. And the thought of my father again sickened me. Everything reminded me of him. The Mill was his, the church was his, even the ducks that swam free before me owed their home to him. And I, I was his too: his creation, his dynasty. All his hopes of the continuance of his business were upon me. Perhaps that was where I could hurt him, his business? Fanny was right, I was to take-over from him when he retired, or passed. If I could just quicken that process, hurry him to his grave, then I could tarnish his all-important legacy.

But deep down, I knew I could not commit patricide. I remembered the tale of Oedipus, and he had killed his father unintentionally. I could not live with myself if I did such an act. And most importantly, I realised, I would lose Fanny forever. No, there needed to be another way to hurt him, to punish him. And then it came to me. My father’s “Achilles’ Heel”, his one weakness. Me. He had put all his hopes on me, on me taking over his mantle. And what if I did? What if I, in my position of power, destroyed everything my father had ever created from the inside?

With this idea, I relaxed into my book once more and the story of Zeus and Kronos. The tremble that had gripped me had dissipated; the thought of my father no longer sickened me. I was free.