The Lunatic at Large

In a London where gaslight still clings to cobblestones like guilt, a velvet-jacketed millionaire—his mind a shattered kaleidoscope of chessboards and cathedrals—slips the asylum’s iron embrace and pirouettes into the fog. He is a lord of lunacy, a coin-flipping poet who believes the moon is a perforated postage stamp licked by angels. At a masked soirée dripping with champagne and venom he intercepts a porcelain-pale heiress betrothed to a Danish baron whose smile is pure glacé icing. What follows is a delirious nocturne: rooftop waltzes, a hot-air balloon stitched from nursery curtains, a chase through Madame Tussaud’s where the wax kings blink, and a final duel of riddles on the parapets of Tower Bridge at dawn. The escapee wins not by sanity but by excess of wonder, proving that madness, when generous, can be the last refuge of chivalry.