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The Perils of Flame-Colored Hair: Marjorie Bowen’s “The Bishop of Hell”
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The Perils of Flame-Colored Hair: Marjorie Bowen’s “The Bishop of Hell”
One must always keep their promises — even from beyond the grave…
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on July 15, 2026
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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Marjorie Bowen’s “The Bishop of Hell,” first published in the September 1925 issue of The Blue Magazine. Spoilers ahead!
England, 1790: Jack relates “the most awful story [he knows.]” For twenty years, it’s haunted him; he hopes that, with God’s mercy, writing it down and confessing “his small share therein” will bring respite.
* * *
Hector Greatrix was Jack’s “counsellor, companion, and prop in all things evil.” A relative of the Earl of Culver, he was educated for the Church. Due to his rakehell lifestyle, he was unfrocked, and comrades called him “the Bishop of Hell.”
Jack’s tale opens in 1770. Thirty-year-old Hector was magnificent, his beauty yet untouched by debauchery. His intimates were “villains,” a class from which Jack doesn’t exclude himself. The exception was Hector’s cousin Colonel Bulkeley, “austere, upright, and punctilious.” It demonstrated Hector’s hoodwinking ability that Bulkeley believed him “wild, unfortunate, and blameable, but in no way vile or dishonoured.” Bulkeley mediated between Hector and Lord Culver, getting the rake a handsome allowance which Bulkeley augmented.
Ostensibly, Hector was studying law, as was (actually) Jack. Jack, “the most reputable of [Hector’s] disreputable friends,” would accompany him on visits to his patrons. At Bulkeley’s house they met the Colonel’s young bride, Alicia. To the rakes, she seemed childish, insipid, with mere china-doll prettiness. Clearly, she and the Colonel adored each other. But Alicia had auburn hair, a shade for which Hector had a “curious and persistent passion.” Jack jested that Alicia was the most unattainable woman he’d ever set eyes on, and Hector responded: Take Bulkeley away for a month, and the little lovebird would flutter to any man’s arms.
Hector’s disregard for decency and honor repulsed Jack, and a string of suicides and questionable deaths drove him to seek better company.
The Bulkeleys’ marriage remained idyllic. Then the Colonel’s regiment was summoned to India for three years. That winter, Jack met Alicia in a London ballroom. She and her two children were staying with her married brother and so should have been well protected, but why then was she dancing with Hector?
Gossip soon paired the two. Jack appealed to Hector to leave Alicia alone. Alicia’s brother, alarmed, was guarding her from the rake.
He didn’t guard her close enough. When Hector fled England to escape his debts, he took Alicia along. The earl cut him off completely, and the illicit couple lived off Alicia’s small allowance from her brother. Bulkeley resigned his commission and returned to England. He wouldn’t pursue the adulterers, but if Hector returned, either he or Bulkeley would die.
Permanent exile wasn’t to be Hector’s fate. Lord Culver’s heirs died one by one. Lord Culver soon followed, leaving Hector to inherit his title and estate. Hector settled into an elegant Paris hotel. Alicia remained with him, though she’d suffered terrible humiliations and losses under Hector’s “protection.” She’d birthed three children, all now dead. Hector had never been without mistresses, often under the same roof with Alicia. To wring more money from her, he’d pimped her to a series of “lovers.” Summoned to Paris, Jack saw that the china-doll had grown voluptuous of figure, clever of dress and speech. Her tone was defiant but the look in her eyes was that of a “whipped dog.” Her desperate hope was that Bulkeley would grant the long-refused divorce that would let her marry Hector, and rebegin life as Lady Culver. Jack had scant hope for either man, but promised to speak to Hector on her behalf.
Hector swore that he’d never marry Alicia, the “harlot” of his own making. That wasn’t his concern now: his desperate hope was that Bulkeley would renounce his pledge to duel. But the Colonel was watching Culver House, awaiting the new lord’s inevitable homecoming. Hector feared losing to the martial expert. Pitiless, Jack declared that all England would call Hector a coward.
Eventually, Hector did come to London. He’d left Alicia in Paris with lies about his return. Jack saw Hector the night before his meeting with Bulkeley. He was with old boon companions, but far more sober. He wanted Jack to make his will but was too agitated to begin. Dismissing Jack, he promised: “If I go to Hell tomorrow, I’ll pay you a visit to let you know what ’tis like.”
Meanwhile, Alicia followed, planning to wheedle her way into Culver House during the duel.
Bulkeley dropped Hector with one shot, but instead of a mortal wound, he’d targeted Hector’s jaw, leaving his face hideously mutilated, no longer kiss-worthy. When Hector was carried into Culver House, Alicia’s presence so enraged him that he hurled her down the stairs. She’d die soon afterwards. The day she was buried, Hector effectively committed suicide by tearing off his bandages.
Endeavoring to forget these horrors, Jack went to a party. He came home late to a house oddly dark. At last he struck a light and saw someone sitting in a chair with its back to him. The visitor turned. It was Hector, his face veiled with crimson fire through which his eyes gleamed with “unutterable woe.” The flames rose above his head into a bishop’s mitre glittering with lambent jewels. As the spectre raised a hand in mock benediction, Jack fainted.
“This fiend had been forced to keep his oath—to discover to another scoffer the truth of Hell.”
What’s Cyclopean: It’s hard to credit that Narrator’s own head isn’t turned by Greatrix’s grace and strength, “tawny haired and tawny eyed,” elegant and engaging.
The Degenerate Dutch: Mrs. Burgoyne is “flat, childish, almost imbecile, almost incredible.” Why would one respect the agency of a woman who’s barely a girl? For that matter, what could matter about her as a person, beyond the hue of her hair? Her worth, and her degradation, come from sexual purity and then lack thereof.
Anne’s Commentary
They have always been with us, in life and legend and art, those wascally libertines. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary gives this overview of the term’s complicated history:
“The word libertine comes from the Latin lībertīnus, a word used in early writings of Roman antiquity to describe a formerly enslaved person who had been set free (the Roman term for an emancipated person was the Latin lībertus). Middle English speakers used libertine to refer to a freedman, but by the late 1500s its meaning was extended to freethinkers, both religious and secular, and it later came to imply that an individual was a little too unrestrained, especially in moral affairs. The likely Latin root of libertine is līber, the ultimate source of our word liberty.”
Greatrix’s clerical training came only because his father figured he’d have the greatest chance of advancement in that profession. Given his strong preference for vice over virtue, not even his considerable charisma could secure his place in the Church, nor could he have wanted to labor indefinitely under its pious rules. As a younger son, his other choices of a gentleman’s profession would have been the Army or Navy, law, politics, colonial administration, or medicine. A military career was not only regulations-heavy but included the risk of getting shot, to which Hector was averse. Politics was risky and expensive unless a relative had some seat securely in his pocket; also, it could also be so scandal shy. Going out to the colonies, too arduous. Ditto medicine, also there were all those unattractive sick people.
All the approved paths to earning his keep would mean enslavement to a Hector Greatrix! His superior spirit demanded to be set free, so he could be a libertine in the earliest sense of the word! Also, in the later meaning of a freethinker, a free-doer. As for what libertine tended to mean by the 18th century, how could one be too unrestrained in moral matters when one had the intellect and courage to realize there was no Heaven or Hell?
Luckily, Hector has a rich uncle susceptible to his charm and self-distanced from the tattle-tale whirl of London society. Even luckier, he has an honorable cousin who is still susceptible enough to think that Hector is naughty but redeemable rather than absolutely selfish and heartless. Unlike many rakes in novels of his own day and their descendants into our own, there isn’t a woman angelic enough to make him change his evil ways for love.
Hector and Alicia are understandable in the way of well-drawn stock characters. Narrator Jack is more ambiguous. He is honest enough to admit that he was no neutral observer of the most awful story he knows. He doesn’t even except himself from Hector’s villainous intimates. Well, not completely. A few paragraphs later, he describes himself as the “one of the most reputable of his disreputable friends, being, as I can truly say, more wild and young than vicious.” There’s yet sufficient good in Jack for him to resent Hector’s analysis of Alicia’s susceptibility. Hector may not believe in nobility or decency, but Jack won’t hear those qualities defamed, especially in those who’ve been so kind!
Hector’s a jerk. Jack is just jerk-curious. And maybe he’s seen enough. It has nothing to do with Hector sneering that Jack’s a “Puritan.” Hector’s sticks and stones can’t break Jack’s bones. His morals are offended, not his feelings; that’s why he starts withdrawing from his former friend. Besides, he has law books to read. Which books probably warn him to withdraw farther from someone whose name’s being whispered in connection with mysterious deaths.
Jack never confesses to any specific excesses he committed as Hector’s merely wild and young companion, but he writes at length about three meetings he has with Hector years later. In each he comes off as the voice of honor and decency. Hector must stop pursuing Alicia while Bulkeley’s in India! Hector, now that he’s Lord Culver, must not besmirch that esteemed title by being too great a coward to meet Bulkeley’s challenge. Also, he should do the right thing and marry Alicia. Hector, now that he’s returned to England and received a formal challenge, must go through with it. Hector’s panic-terror and rage must affect Jack; Jack slips and records how at Hector’s abject mutter of “Say I have a chance,” he smiles. So much for the rake’s “invincible courage.”
Hector gets payback in the story’s last scene, a brief but harrowing vision of the Hell both free-thinkers had dismissed as superstition. Its “Bishop” pays Jack that promised visit wearing his fiery mitre, but with untriumphant woe in his flame-veiled eyes. Or is there a touch of triumph in the mock benediction of Hector’s raised hand? Maybe it’s a “See ya later,” rather than a “Farewell forever.”
Either way, Jack does the time-honored salute to the unbearable by falling senseless. No worry, he must wake up, or he couldn’t have written down this most awful tale.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
That was, frankly, a lot less weird in my weird than I was hoping for. And based on the introduction in Queens of the Abyss, a lot less history in my weird historical. I can only be grateful that it wasn’t from the point of view of the horrible person who eventually gets eaten by a grue.
In general, I try to read reparatively—or at least to acknowledge when I dislike a story for reasons unrelated to the text. I don’t always succeed, and I confess that I’m coming up a bit light this week. Part of the issue is that I didn’t hate it; it didn’t raise a ton of passionate emotional reaction at all. When I ask myself what the author was going for, I strongly suspect that she had one gorgeous image—Greatrix’s spirit wearing a miter of hellfire—and came up with a story to support that image.
The problem is that between “Greatrix sucks,” “Greatrix sucks more,” “Greatrix promises to come back and show off his hat if the afterlife exists,” and “Greatrix dies and keeps his promise,” the expandable part is Greatrix sucking. And his sins on the page do indeed suck, but are also insufficient to earn his title. More unholy rites! More playing with forces better left buried! Ruining “infantile” women with auburn hair and then murdering them is certainly suckage, but I regret to say that I think more than one guy was doing that at the turn of the 19th century. I suspect Byron of being an inspiration, but despite the poet’s low murder quotient you can get way more shock value from any one of his biographies.
From the story’s opening, I was expecting the sort of homoerotic leader-follower pairing in wickedness from which Lovecraft wrings so much angst. But Jack becomes sensibly disgusted by Greatrix almost immediately, and remains on the story’s edges only because of his willingness to come when “summoned.” He nobly advocates for Alicia Burgoyne without once respecting her as a person. There’s a sad lack of homoeroticism in the whole thing; Greatrix’s corrupting charisma remains safely at a remove.
A good weird story, even if it doesn’t fully acknowledge the weirdness until the end, needs to spend its words building the fear of that denouement, in either the reader or the character. Lovecraft’s “aesthetes” work their way toward disturbing the dangerous dead. Shirley Jackson’s “witch” invokes the natural un-naturalness of children, so that the reader shudders along with the rhythm of the train. Poe’s apocalyptic party reeks of desperate denial.
Jack has already become a god-fearing, hell-believing citizen by the time his religious convictions are confirmed. This shouldn’t make a glimpse of the abyss unremarkable, and the opening promises sleep-disrupting terror. But the fear of the abyss should also be personal. Imagine if, when Greatrix avers that death is mere oblivion, we learned something of Jack’s own doubts? Perhaps his late-blooming belief in hell is still incomplete, and he hopes or fears that Greatrix is right. Perhaps he isn’t confident in his own salvation, and worries that his youthful association with the “bishop” still taints him. Perhaps he (unlike Alicia) still quietly loves Greatrix and wishes that his former friend weren’t bound for eternal punishment. But—beyond his plot-driven willingness to answer when Greatrix beckons—none of this is particularly supported. We don’t know the shape of his hell-fears. It makes their confirmation fall a bit flat.
In any fanfiction, there is a balance between taking advantage of existing canon, and adding meaning with one’s own narrative—this is no less true when leveraging any deep-rooted mythos, be it Olympian or Christian. It’s the same error as Lovecraftiana that hopes for shudders at the mere mention of a shoggoth. I’m a hard sell on Christian horror in general, but I don’t think that’s the problem here. I think the problem involves assuming that readers will bring their own full baggage to the idea of hell, and to the disgust associated with an unfrocked clergyman. If the reader lacks an overflowing complement of that baggage, the story misses its oomph.
Next week, join us for the final fate of Three-Persons and Good Stab, in Chapters 23-24 of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.[end-mark]
The post The Perils of Flame-Colored Hair: Marjorie Bowen’s “The Bishop of Hell” appeared first on Reactor.
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