Hugh Kenrick Page 11

  The Earl smiled apologetically. “Our steeds mostly pull hay, Your Grace, or uproot stumps in our fields with the oxen.”

  “Pugilists?”

  “None to speak of, Your Grace,” ventured Drew Tallmadge. “The fist trade among the population here is embarrassingly artless.”

  The Duke chuckled. “Then you must journey up to London frequently, to escape the boredom!”

  “Often, Your Grace,” said Covington Brune. “But on business, mostly.”

  “Too often,” muttered Garnet Kenrick to himself, with a glance at his brother.

  “Pretty country, Dorset,” mused Cumberland. “Pretty holdings you gentry have here. Yours especially, Lord Basil. Your terraces are placid enough to inspire a poem or two. The sheep safely graze!—to borrow a notion from that Bach fellow!”

  “It is prettier in the spring, Your Grace,” said the Earl. “In all fairness, however, it is to my brother the credit must be given.”

  * * *

  Later that night, the Baron, the Earl, and Sir Everard discussed the army contract. And when the Duke and his companions had retired, and the guests had departed, Garnet Kenrick walked wearily to his and his wife’s bedchamber. Effney Kenrick showed her husband the pages from Hugh’s notebook. “We have made a martyr of him, Garnet,” she said.

  “I have made him a martyr,” replied the Baron. “You did not wield the rod.”

  The Baroness shook her head. “I sanctioned its use.”

  In silence, the Baron read the pages. He recognized the first sentence. And he understood the last.

  “It is an alien thing he discusses there, Garnet,” said the Baroness. “But I know it is right.”

  “It is not so alien a thing to me,” mused the Baron. His wife wondered why his words sounded like a wrenching confession.

  The Baroness sat down on the bed next to her husband. “I am certain of this much, Garnet: I shall no longer be afraid for Hugh. Such a thing as he observes about himself cannot ever be broken, or tamed, or made to submit.”

  Garnet Kenrick looked away from his wife, and merely nodded in agreement. Then he reached out and held her close, so that she could not see the tears in his eyes. He agreed with her, but not entirely. He hoped he could some day. Then he held her away and told her what he had learned, and what he must do.

  * * *

  Still dressed for dinner, and silver candleholder in hand, he called on his brother in his bedchamber after the Earl’s valet had gone. The Earl was dressed in his nightgown and day cap. “Yes, my tireless brother?” he inquired, amiably stepping aside. “What can I do for you?”

  The Baron passed without word through the anteroom and into the bedchamber. He set down the candle on a wing table, faced his brother, and asked, “Do you hate my son so much that you wished to see him bleed?”

  “What?” replied the Earl.

  “I have spoken with Vicar Wynne and Sir Everard. The vicar states that you claimed that Sir Everard required the rod to draw blood. Sir Everard, in turn, asserts that he demanded no such thing. Moreover, he said that His Grace did not demand it. Ergo, it was your assertion alone—your desire.” The Baron paused. “Not that any one of them was displeased with the blood.”

  The Earl sniffed. “It was my duty and privilege to require it,” he answered, turning his back with nonchalance on his brother.

  “It was a lie, and I was made the instrument of it.”

  “It has secured us a lucrative contract.”

  “That remains to be seen,” said the Baron. “Sir Everard and his friends have a large gallery of applicants for their largess. And the contract means nothing to me. But you, Basil, lied to me, and through me, injured my son. Why?”

  “I do not hate your son.”

  “You were eager to see him punished.”

  “He offended the Duke, and me as well, and embarrassed this family.”

  “Why, Basil?” insisted the Baron.

  The Earl would not answer. He drifted to the fireplace and held his hands in the emanating warmth.

  The Baron said, “You have the Duke to thank for this interview, dear brother. In his own thick way, he put me on to the lie. You may thank His Grace—if you dare.”

  The Earl jerked around to face him, his face wrinkled in ugly petulance, and spat out the words, “He is a son I cannot have, and you are raising him wrong! He needs correction!”

  The Baron smiled and shook his head. “Hugh is a prodigy of unknown stamp, dear brother. And he is raising himself. Neither I nor Effney nor any tutor we may hire is equal to that task. He will be a stronger man than either of us. And he will be a great earl, someday.” Garnet Kenrick smiled wistfully. “A nobleman, dear brother. Something, in fact, neither of us is, if we correctly parse the meaning of that word.”

  The Baron paced back and forth thoughtfully. “Besides, Basil, you have a son. Jared. Son of the late Felise Turley, once a maidservant in our father’s household, then his occasional mistress—until our father’s exertions with her in a Weymouth inn ended in sorrow. We blamed that hapless cook—I forget his name—to preserve the family’s good name. And you retained the comely Miss Turley, and eventually also developed an appetite for her. A costly one, it has turned out. Where the father failed, the son succeeded. It would be an interesting tale to tell the Duke. He would be amused. The good earl owns not a racing horse, nor a pugilist, but a bastard son. He respects such…sport.”

  The Earl glanced at his brother with wicked indifference, and poured himself a glass of port.

  “So do not tell me that Hugh needs correction, dear brother. A son of yours may not even enter Danvers, he is such a blot on our good name. He is being raised with money sent by the royal post through a third party, to a brother of his late mother’s, a hard-drinking saddler in Lyme Regis, who gives him none of the advantages of your moral authority. I have observed your son from a distance, Basil. You have not. Jared is quite a nasty bastard. With luck—and your generosity—he should raise himself up to the level of a London Mohock. A bully. A wastrel. Gallows bait.”

  “I refuse to discuss him,” replied the Earl, his words bitterly toneless. This time he smiled. “I have lied to you in the past, dear brother,” he said, turning his back on the Baron. “And you shrugged it off, or even laughed.”

  “I did not mind being your dupe, so long as I was the only one duped. This matter, however, is of a graver scale.” The Baron stopped pacing, stood thinking for a moment, then turned to his brother. “I concede the offense to His Grace. But I will not concede your offense to me. I ask that you reduce Hugh’s sentence to four months.”

  The Earl whirled around, spilling the contents of his glass in the movement. “I cannot do that!” he exclaimed. “Everyone knows that it is to be for a year!”

  “Everyone will think you magnanimous. That is for you to cherish. But—it is either that, or I will shortly follow the Duke, when he departs. I shall remove my family and possessions from this house and from Danvers—and Danvers and the estate and the contract, and you, dear brother, can go to blazes—as surely it all will, under your enlightened guidance.”

  The Earl’s glass slipped from his fingers and struck the carpet with a muted thud. “You would not leave!”

  “I would, Basil,” said the Baron. “I would not have come to this room if I did not think it absolutely necessary to be here.”

  The Earl stared at his brother with dumbstruck terror.

  The Baron picked up his candleholder. “I grant you the night in which to entertain this concession, and to accustom yourself to it, Basil.” He walked to the door, then stopped to face his brother again. “Oh…and I would be grateful if, on the morrow, when you speak again with His Grace and Colonel Wolfe, that you correct the anecdote you related to everyone this evening, about that cook and the haggis he served our late father. We did not beat him. You did. I merely wanted the fellow banished. He was a harmless, ignorant soul. Good night, dear brother.”

  Chapter 8: The Watershed


  WHEN HE AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING, HUGH KENRICK LEARNED painfully that he could only hobble at a snail’s pace, and not sit at all. Soon the pain ceased to be a personal affliction to him, and became a kind of external impediment, a nuisance like a pair of leg braces.

  A number of incidents occurred that morning before he was taken to his tutors on the Tallmadge estate. When she had finished helping him dress, Bridget, his governess, pecked him on the cheek.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked, surprised.

  “You are a young man, milord,” she said with a grin. “If you were a few years older, you’d see more than a kiss,” she added playfully.

  His mother came into the room to inform him of a reduction in his punishment, from a year to four months, and of the freeing of the servants from the requirement that they treat him like a leper. “All the other conditions remain. But you are not to communicate this news to anyone until His Grace has departed tomorrow. This is most important.”

  “Why did Uncle change his mind?”

  Effney Kenrick smiled secretively, wanting to reply, “It was not so much your uncle changing his mind, Hugh, as it was your father making up his own.” Instead, she said, “Your father can be very persuasive, and your uncle unaccountably lenient.”

  And when he went outside to the dogcart that awaited him by the door that he was to use from now on—for he was no longer to pass through his uncle’s part of the house—he encountered Admiral Harle and Otis Talbot, pipes in hand, talking amiably in the brisk morning air. They stopped when they noticed him. The Admiral gave him a studied but cryptic grin, and doffed his hat once in a naval salute. The colonial agent regarded him more closely, and inclined his head, not in deference to Hugh’s rank, but in apparent courtesy to an equal. Hugh nodded once in acknowledgment and passed on. He wondered, as the cart sped down the estate road, why the men had so behaved. He sensed that their actions had little to do with his rank. In classes that day, he stood the whole time at his desk. He defied the curious glances of his tutors and classmates, then grew inured to them. No one mentioned either his faux pas, or his condition, or the rumored punishment he had endured.

  Only Roger Tallmadge spoke of it, during a spell between tutors. He had a black eye. “Francis called you so many names, and said you were a fool and a lurdane,” he said excitedly. “And I said he had no right to judge you, and that he was the same! So we fought and he gave me this, and I bloodied his nose!”

  “Thank you.”

  After an awkward pause, Roger Tallmadge asked, “Why did you do it?”

  “Not pay courtesy to the Duke?”

  “Yes. Everyone’s talking about it.”

  “I forgot,” replied Hugh, shrugging.

  “You did not apologize, or express any regret?”

  “No.”

  “Did you cry—when you were birched? Were you tempted to apologize?”

  “No.”

  Roger Tallmadge sighed. “I wish I had your courage, Hugh.”

  “It was not courage.”

  “What was it?”

  “I think it was justice,” replied Hugh, after a moment of thought.

  “It was justice that caused you to do it—I mean, not bow?”

  Hugh again thought for a moment. “It was not a matter of what caused me to do it, Roger. Rather, it was a matter of an absence of a cause.” He saw the perplexed look on his friend’s face. “A man should bow at his pleasure, and not blindly. He should be able to choose his object of honor, one that complements his own.”

  “But…it is the custom to bow.”

  “It is not mine.”

  “He is the son of our king.”

  This Hugh could not deny. George the Second was indeed his king. Everyone’s king. And the Duke, his son, could become king someday.

  * * *

  Garnet Kenrick sat in his study, content to be alone for a moment, before he dressed and prepared for this evening’s dinner and ball. He had spent most of the day with his brother and Everard Fawkner, talking about Danvers, its business, its history, local politics, and court gossip during a tour of the estate. Fawkner had expressed warm admiration for the organization and apparent prosperity of the Earl’s possessions, and asked many questions about the herds of sheep and the wool they produced. It had been a tedious task, made more taxing by having to ride the whole day in a drafty post-chaise in a stiff winter wind. Garnet Kenrick did not think that his exertions had guaranteed him and his brother the army contract. He felt exhausted.

  Not even his brother’s capitulation this morning on Hugh’s punishment could rouse the Baron. He knew that while it had been a victory, it would plague their relationship from now on.

  For a reason he could not explain, his sight kept returning to the black ribbon tied to the neck of the statue of Hermes on his desk. He remembered that he had put it there to remind him of the mystery that surrounded the fate of the Skelly gang in Cornwall. It seemed so long ago, and he was no closer to solving it.

  But the sight of it triggered another memory, of a pair of books hidden behind some others on a high shelf above him. In a spurt of energy he rose, climbed a stepladder, and retrieved the books. When they lay before him on his desk, he smiled. In a gesture of defiance, he resolved to do with them what he had first thought to do. Defiance against what? he thought. Against his brother. Against Fawkner, and the Duke. Against the thing that had made him a party to his son’s punishment. He picked up one of the volumes and weighed it in his hand; it was mere paper and ink and tooled leather over pasteboard, but it seemed to be as augural as a hangman’s noose.

  It was a novel that lay before him. Its full title wasHyperborea; or, the Adventures of Drury Trantham, Shipwrecked Merchant, in the Unexplored Northern Regions, by Romney Marsh, Gent. Romney Marsh, he knew, had been an alias of one of the smugglers hanged in Cornwall so many years ago. The son of a prominent London merchant, too, he recalled. He had been at the Royal Exchange in London then, meeting with Benjamin Worley and other city merchants, when a king’s man had posted the proclamation stigmatizing the book on a nearby pillar. Curiosity drove him to a bookseller’s to purchase a copy of the novel. He read it on the coach trip back to Danvers. It had given him a strange, fearful pleasure. He could not imagine what could drive the man who could write such a book to a life of crime—unless it was an infatuation with the criminal and seditious actions that occurred in the novel, or something for which he had no name, but which seemed to animate his son, to whom he could attach no criminal motivation. He had heard his son’s explanation for his actions; he had thought about those words; he could not digest them.

  There was as much mystery in the novel’s appeal to him as there was in the mystery surrounding the black ribbon. He could penetrate neither. He would give these books to his son. He did not know how this gesture could be defiance, but it was that. He felt as duty-bound to do this as he had felt duty-bound to punish his son. He knew that the gesture would be more for his own sake than for his son’s; it would make his life more tolerable, and perhaps make his son’s harder. In the books lay some inexplicable salvation, or redemption. He could not decide whether it was he or his son who was to be redeemed.

  He loved his son, but could not now think of another way to express that love except to give him a proscribed book. It was almost as though he were contemplating giving a young Brutus the dagger with which to slay a future Caesar. He could fathom his motive no further. He was a highborn Englishman, and even the most thoughtful of his rank were noted more for their compulsions than for the depth of their introspection.

  * * *

  At the end of the day, when Hugh returned to his room, he found a pair of books sitting on his desk, accompanied by a note in his father’s hand dryly cautioning him neither to take the books from his room nor ever to mention the books in the presence of his uncle. When he was about a hundred pages into the book, and had grasped the spirit of the story and the unleveled character of Drury Trantham, he stopped to wonder at the silent, u
nnamed purpose of his father in giving the book to him.

  Garnet Kenrick called on him in his room that evening before the banquet and ball commenced. The Baron was ready to accept anything from his son. Even forgiveness. But Hugh behaved as though nothing had happened. Hugh turned to him from his window to greet him with a smile. “Thank you for the book, Father. It is a marvelous gift.”

  “Have you begun reading it?” asked the Baron, relieved and thankful.

  “Yes.” Hugh paused. “It is a compelling story. I don’t know what to make of it. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before.” The boy’s eyes lit up with excitement. “It’s…it’s like The Iliad and The Odyssey woven into a single, fantastic fabric, but the heroes wear cocked hats and carry pistols, and the Sirens lure men to their best, not to their deaths…and men have a different notion of themselves.” Hugh shook his head, unable to express all that he recognized in the story. “It is a glorious tale, Father!”

  The Baron permitted himself a slight grin. “I was sure it would entertain you.” He sighed. “Well, I must attend to our guests. We shall talk later about the rascals you meet in Hyperborea. Your mother sends her regards. She may come by and watch the fireworks with you, but if she does not, please, forgive her.”

  “I could watch them with you, Father.”

  The Baron shook his head. “No, I am obliged to keep our guests company this evening.” He paused. “Will you forgive me?”

  Hugh nodded.

  The Baron left the room.

  That evening, Hugh listened to the music and laughter of the ball downstairs, the sounds only echoes to his thoughts. Owen brought him a platter of sweetmeats and other delicacies from the kitchen. Hugh asked him what music was being played. “Oh, the usual minuets and country dances, milord. And a bit of Mr. Handel, although the musicians play him awkwardly. Otherwise, it has been a grand affair.”

  Hugh tried to compose the comedy of sheep, but had no patience to invent the requisite humor for the things he wanted to say frankly and openly. He continued reading Hyperborea.