SH04_Empire Read online

“But, if one of you is right, then the other must own to it.” Etáin paused. “Mr. Proudlocks sees it, too.”

  Jack did not believe that the severity of the events in his own life had forced him to become the man he was. Other men, he knew, had experienced the same kinds of events, or worse, and succumbed to them, because they chose to, either from fear of the consequences if they had not, or from fear of the requirements and responsibility of acting otherwise. Or from a helplessness rooted in a tenacious incomprehension. He did not believe that hardship was necessarily a parent of a man’s character, or that it was something integral to its formation. There was Hugh, his friend, who had grown up and matured in comparatively comfortable circumstances, but these circumstances had not spoiled him or sapped his capacity for becoming the man he was. He knew that it would have been so much easier for Hugh to apologize to the Duke of Cumberland, so much easier to deny his association with the imprisoned Pippins, so much easier to simply regret the necessity of owning slaves and keep them in benevolent bondage. Wealth, Jack knew, could be as much a seducer as hardship, and spare one the care and obligation of becoming a man. As he stood in back of Etáin and pressed his face into her hair, he chuckled to himself in appreciation of John Proudlocks’s subtlety. What causes the flames, indeed?

  Etáin reached up and caressed the arms that encircled her. “What?” she asked.

  “I was thinking about John, our resident peacemaker and lawyer.”

  “He is a better man than most,” remarked Etáin. She marveled, too, at her husband’s constancy, a constancy that never flinched in the face of a problem, never flickered between moods. He was always lucid, always in control of himself and of his mind, even when he was in doubt about something, or angry. Whatever was on his mind at any given moment received his fullest attention.

  She blushed when she herself was the object of that attention, and then she would smile, in concert with him, in mutual self-awareness and self-assurance. She had stood before him on their wedding night, as Omphale should have stood before Hercules, as a penitent Circe might have stood before Ulysses, unafraid of his attention and desire for her, knowing that she was worthy of his attention and desire. And she let him know, that first night together with him, that he was worthy of her own.

  Jack said into her hair just above her ear, “You know that Hugh honors a truth-teller as much as he honors a truth. Would you expect him to be so mean-spirited and petty — your words, my dear — as to resent me for being right?”

  “I would not do him the disservice.”

  Later, as Etáin lay asleep in the circle of his arm, Jack pondered the paradox of his friendship with Hugh Kenrick. While he had won Etáin, he watched with grim certitude the succession of events in Virginia and England that would ultimately jeopardize his newfound happiness, events that must progress to an explosion. He was the only man in Caxton, and perhaps in all of Virginia, who knew that these events must end in a bloody clash between the colonies and the mother country. He also knew that he must be their passive observer. He was unhappy in that role, for he could neither accelerate nor arrest the progress of those events. Other men of like mind had not yet reached his state of certitude. He was grateful to Etáin that she understood that about him.

  He knew that to recognize the nature of the coming clash, to know as well as he did that there was no fundamental rapprochement possible between the colonies and England, these men, many of them his close friends, would need to cast off the irrelevant sentiment of filial association, if they were ever to become men of their own making, instead of settling for being coincidental Englishmen, or Scotsmen, or Welshmen, or Irishmen. The elements of that new identity lay in each and every one of them; when the time came, each must become in his own mind and soul the person each of them must have had a glimpse of in himself before he surrendered to the pressures of society and circumstantial identity. When the time came, each must be convinced of the false security of his liberty, and of the absurdity of relying on a king to protect and ensure it. Kings, after all, even the best of them, must rule. And if they were mere figurehead kings, other men must rule in their stead.

  Rational persuasion, Jack sadly knew, would not, this time and by itself, awaken in these men that latent capacity. Only a determined violence on their lives could ignite that crucial metamorphosis of self; only a traumatic crisis could wring from them the undiscovered honesty to recognize who they were and what was possible to them, and move them to shed the clinging, comfortable traces of their past lives. Only the glint of approaching bayonets, or the thunder of a volley, or the calculated toss of a torch into their homes would give them long enough pause to allow the truth about themselves and what they were witnessing to seize their beings and awaken in them the true nature of their peril. If Hugh Kenrick, the proudest, most honest, most virtuous, most complete, and most thoroughly rational man he had ever known, could not be persuaded of the logic of events, then how could he expect other men, men who were virtuous and honest and self-assertive, yet still unfinished, to be persuaded so soon of that logic?

  On the other hand, he thought with a smile, there was John Proudlocks, wise beyond his years, a student of an alien society, whose wisdom seemed to come from his being an outsider. Somehow, Jack thought, John was a complete man, as complete as he himself was. Unfinished, yet still strangely complete.

  Etáin stirred in her sleep. Jack disengaged himself from her, rose, dressed, and went downstairs. He lit a lantern and left the house for the path that led to Proudlocks’s shack. He found him sitting in a chair, reading a dictionary by candlelight. There was a bed, and a table and two chairs, a fireplace, and a crude bookshelf made of planks and discarded bricks. Many of the books on the shelf were Proudlocks’s own; many were borrowed from Jack’s library. He put down his lantern and said, “We forgot to discuss tomorrow’s business.”

  But he saw in Proudlocks’s brief grin that he knew the real reason for the visit, that it was a form of thanks for having saved the evening. Proudlocks said, “I will suggest to Mr. Robins that we start the others in picking the corn. It is ripe. Their stalks should be left to stand, so that the beans on them can ripen. They are not ready yet.” He lit a clay pipe and offered it to Jack, then lit another for himself. They sat and talked about what other plantation tasks needed to be done before the fall.

  After a while, Jack rose to leave. Proudlocks said, “You will quarrel again. You are right, and he is wrong. But I will try to stop you from hurting each other.” He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a picture he had nailed to a wall. It was an engraving of the Ramsay full-length portrait of George the Third, a page he had torn from one of his books. “Him? He will hurt himself.”

  “Why do you keep it?” asked Jack.

  Proudlocks shrugged. “To remind me of this country,” he answered. “When the things you say must happen, do happen, I will take it down. He will no longer worry us. But he is interesting to study. I do not think he is a happy man. He looks like a king, but I can see in his face that he does not believe he is one.”

  Jack nodded. “I am afraid he will try to be one.”

  “Yes. There is that to him.”

  Jack left Proudlocks and walked back to the house. He did not hate Englishmen, or Britons, or even kings. He was merely resolved not to be conquered by them. He did not hate Parliament; he merely feared its kingly powers. When he reached the porch of his house, he sat down and lit his own pipe, and let the quiet and darkness of the night coax from his mind another problem he had never been able to solve.

  One thing he had been unable to put into words was why he thought of himself as complete, why, against all his instincts for privacy, and contrary to his notion of vanity, he still measured men in terms of his own completeness, why he was certain that he was right about it, and why he was certain that this aspect of him always had and always would come between him and the others. He was certain, too, that there were words that would explain the completeness. Perhaps he had read them somewhere, word
s whose author had struggled to say the same thing, but whose final, precise form had eluded him, too. The problem came to the forefront of his consciousness only at times like this one, when he was at peace with himself, when he was happy with the conduct and sum of his life, when he chose to rest for a moment and contemplate the pages and chapters of that life. The problem had perplexed him for as long as he could remember, clear back to his youth in Cornwall. It did not perplex him so much as remind him that it was there, waiting to be solved. He was in no hurry to solve it, though, for he knew that the words, once he found them, would simply confirm what he already knew, that everything he had ever done, had been right.

  Sitting alone on the porch steps, under an evening sky brilliant with the dust of uncountable stars, Jack Frake thought of the distance he had traveled since Cornwall. He felt proud of that distance, and of the fact that the boy who had begun that journey would be pleased with the man he had become. The boy would look at him and say to himself, “This is the man I mean to be.” He remembered that boy who, long ago, in a similar state of peace, sat alone before the fireplace of a seaport tavern, the boy who was not a stranger to him, and who still wondered what were the words for the unconquerable thing about himself that set him apart and permitted him a magnanimous certainty.

  The boy who was now a man now wondered why he felt that his serene solitude was right for him, and right for all men, if they could learn to know it and be unafraid of it. Hugh Kenrick knew it; Jack was sure of it. So did John Proudlocks. As had Augustus Skelly and Redmagne. The words were missing, but would be found.

  The light of the lantern at his side, a friendly, animate companion to his thoughts, glowed steadily on the calm lines of Jack’s face as he looked with joyous solemnity and consecration upon his past, present, and future.

  Chapter 7: The Burgesses

  It was with a concentration of willpower, allied with a tenacious dedication to decorum, that Hugh Kenrick, burgess for Queen Anne County, was able to stifle his yawns throughout the days of the new session of the General Assembly in Williamsburg, a session that lasted from the 30th of October through the 21st of December, 1764. This was one of the more protracted sessions of the Assembly, which rarely sat for longer than a month. The last session, in January of the same year, lasted barely a week. A great deal of business had accumulated since that session, including cases that could only be heard in the General Court, which sat only when a General Assembly had convened.

  Williamsburg was the seat of the Virginia empire, and the Capitol was its throne. Here laws were passed, bills debated, men and women tried for serious crimes, and balls held. The Capitol was modeled on the old Capitol building, which had burned down in 1747, in a figure H; the chambers and Hall of Burgesses were on the east side of the figure, connected by gallery and arcade with the west side of it, which housed the Governor’s Council chambers and the General Court. Some arcane symbolism may have been intended in that arrangement, but not even Richard Bland, burgess for Prince George County since 1742, could say for certain what.

  The west side of the H faced Duke of Gloucester Street; a mile down that boulevard sat the College of William & Mary. It was at the College that the Virginia Assembly sat while the present building was being completed. The new Capitol was more elaborately flounced than was the old Capitol. It featured a gabled neoclassical portico and balcony on the west side, made of white-painted oak, and wide, majestic steps. In front of these steps, leading from Duke of Gloucester Street, was a circular drive that encompassed a neatly cut lawn. It was a grand, imposing, and impressive façade, almost as grand and impressive as the Governor’s Palace half a mile down the boulevard.

  The Hall of the House of Burgesses was about half the size of the House of Commons in London, so it was comparatively more spacious for its one hundred sixteen members than was the Commons for its nearly six hundred. The broad, rectangular windows, which had replaced the ovals of the old Capitol, could not be opened, so while they helped to keep out the cold, they also retained the heat of several score bodies and the smoke from the dozens of candles that were needed to light the chamber. This, and the enforced immobility of sitting on straight-backed benches, squeezed in between other burgesses, induced among the members either restrained irritability or a desire to nap. The constant drone of speech-making on mundane subjects also contributed to the mood of the burgesses. Many of them succumbed to the desire to nap, no matter how committed their attention to the matter before the House.

  Hugh’s boredom stemmed largely from lack of interest in the range of matters so far discussed and debated this session: private disputes between freeholders over the legitimacy or accuracy of land surveys; proposed bounties on crows and wolves in some of the Piedmont counties; the dissolution of some lapsed vestries, and the sale of glebe lands; the testimony of witnesses in the case of a fraudulent land transaction initiated by another member of the House; the need for more tobacco warehouses above the Falls and the selection of their locations; a request from Governor Fauquier for money to be voted as a reward for the apprehension of the men who murdered some Cherokees passing through the Shenandoah Valley; a prolonged debate on the need for a gallery above the present public space near the lobby, and how and when money could be raised for its intrusive construction.

  Hugh waited patiently during those weeks for the House to take up again the matter of the proposed stamp taxes which Dogmael Jones wrote him were being prepared for passage in the Commons. On the 7th of November, Peyton Randolph, the colony’s attorney general, read to the House the most recent correspondence from Edward Montague, an English lawyer and the House’s agent in London, who discussed in detail the progress being made by the Grenville ministry in its pursuit of precedent and passage of a Stamp Act.

  A special committee of the attorney general and seven of the House’s most respected members had been appointed by Speaker John Robinson to compose an address to the king, a memorial to the House of Lords, and a remonstrance to the Commons protesting the tax now under discussion in London. The language and points in the documents had been discussed and debated by a Committee of the Whole House. Hugh had objected to the obsequious language of all the documents, believing that it was too humble and meek, and rose a number of times during the debate to raise that issue, but the Speaker had not deigned to recognize him. The documents were now in the hands of the Council of State for correction and amendment, and would come back to the House for a formal vote in a few days.

  In the meantime, Hugh waited patiently for that day to arrive, and assuaged his boredom by observing the character and conduct of his fellow burgesses. There was John Robinson, burgess for King & Queen County, a huge, stout man who had entered the House in 1727, and had been both Speaker and Treasurer of it for twenty-six years. He sat in a raised, high-backed chair at the front of the Hall, much as did the Speaker of the Commons, and performed the same functions and held the same powers. There was George Washington, burgess for Fairfax, the tallest man in the House, who sat directly across from Hugh in the other battery of benches. He was a hero of the late war, a favorite friend of the Governor’s, and occasionally appeared wearing his blue colonial officer’s coat. Burgesses who sat next to him did not crowd him. There was Richard Bland, burgess for Prince George, prematurely aged in his forty-fifth year from constant study of ancient and modern law; he rose often in debate to enlighten or correct the House on seemingly abeyant points of jurisprudence. There was Edmund Pendleton, burgess for Caroline, a prim, fussy man who raised, in Hugh’s estimate, too many objections during debates. There was Peyton Randolph, Attorney-General and burgess for Williamsburg, probably the most powerful man in the House after Robinson, chairman of the Committee of Privileges and Elections, and of the Committee of Propositions and Grievances. He was a handsome but stout man whose fastidious bearing and imperious manner approached the mien of a member of the House of Lords. As chairman of Propositions and Grievances, he and his fellow committee members controlled which bills would b
e introduced into the House for consideration, and which would be dismissed.

  Except for his natural presence when the House was called into a Committee of the Whole, Hugh was not selected to sit on any of the standing or special committees, as some other new members were. He suspected that he was resented, or distrusted, or too much of a stranger to the ruling dynasties.

  His election in September was hardly memorable. He was spared the effort of campaigning for the seat by Reece Vishonn, who even paid to entertain the voters with several pipes of ale and a round of suppers at the Gramatan Inn. Electors rode to Meum Hall all that month to meet him and discuss what was on their minds. Virginia law forbade him from actively soliciting a freeholder’s vote, so he had to content himself with receiving an almost endless parade of men who solicited from him his positions on many matters. When presented with particular private interests, or matters men wanted drafted into private bills, he invariably referred these men to Edgar Cullis, his fellow burgess for the county. Cullis was more experienced in that aspect of Virginia political life, and certainly more interested and adept. His success in introducing and getting passed private bills over the years had ensured his continued reelection. This man also instructed Hugh on what to expect in the House, what were his duties, whom he should cultivate, and whom he should avoid, and he imparted these lessons even before the election was held one late September afternoon in Caxton’s courthouse.

  Hugh was the only candidate on that foggy day, and sat at a table with Sheriff Tippet on one side of him and Radulphus Spears, drafted as recording clerk from his duties at Meum Hall, on the other. One after another the planters and freeholders marched up to the table and said his name. There was a muted gasp of surprise among the witnesses and spectators in the courtroom when Jack Frake, who had voted infrequently ever since coming into possession of Morland, appeared at the end of the day, and pronounced Hugh’s name. Hugh thanked each voter in turn, and saw in Jack’s eyes that his friend took this moment very seriously and had given the matter much thought. When Sheriff Tippet confirmed the results of the election, Hugh joined the crowd of electors and spectators on the courthouse lawn. He could not remember what had been said by him or anyone else during the innumerable congratulations and speculations. Reece Vishonn hosted a victory supper at the Gramatan Inn that evening; Hugh could not remember what was said on that occasion, either.