The son of an offal miner and a milliner, Franklyn soon learned that people are like gloves stuffed with organs. If you remove the organs, you can wear the glove. He was destined for a life in either career, but like so many young people of his generation he was spared from early labour by his parents’ class aspirations.
Cruelly denied an opportunity to develop chimney lung he was sent to an Academy of Competence in the local borough. There he learned little but graduated with a plethora of qualifications, none recognisable to employers.
Engorged with ignorance, Franklyn undertook a world tour of Europe, embracing art, history, culture and night life. During this adventure he learned the value of the fairer sex (omitted from his school curriculum), and was inducted into a number of influential sects. Mysteries were revealed to him by way of near fatal intoxicants and implausible rituals.
He returned to England a different man; the real Franklyn lived on, in a tiny amulet worn about De Gashe’s neck.
His first murder was committed on the site of a now fictional genocide site, triggering a catastrophic wave of temporal destruction which annihilated his own reality and flung De Gashe into a future.
Thus ripped from his own time by the unseemly portal, De Gashe travels back and forth through the universe at the whim of fate, a deity or some devious scoundrel with a button. Perhaps one day he will discover this.
In the meantime what can any Victorian gentleman with a penchant for blades and intoxicants (and an enviable collection of rings) do except seek such such divers entertainments as the world has to offer.