by Edward Cline
The ornate ebony Tompion bracket clock that sat atop the fireplace ticked away in the long silence, causing Mr. Hunt to count the seconds before his master responded to his information. He risked a glance at the annoying machine, and found himself entranced by how beautifully the flames below it reflected off the clock’s gold and brass facing and mounts.
At length, the Earl said, “I see. That is unfortunate. I was certain we would soon be rid of him by cut or ball.”
“He would be bested in such a contest, sir,” volunteered Mr. Hunt, “as I do not think he is easy with sword or pistol. Books and words are his preferred weapons, it would seem.”
“A nice observation, Mr. Hunt,” mused the Earl in a mocking compliment. “Well, I think some men can be found who are easy with swords and pistols and even cudgels. I am not alone in thinking that the honor of Parliament and of the Crown cannot — must not — remain disgraced and besmirched. I am sure one of those bollixed gentlemen will see to justice, if not in the light of day, in some chilly wood, then in the dark of night in a street or alley. That would be fair. Fairer still, my brother would lose his voice in the Commons. How unfortunate! I am certain that he put Sir Dogmael up to it! To insult the House by proxy! Yes, fairer still!” The Earl shook his head, not having meant to digress on that subject. His private thoughts were not for other ears. “What do you think, sir? Price would be no object to such a person, of course, though discretion would be advisable and necessary. And, anonymity, needless to say.”
Mr. Hunt gulped, and understood what his next task was to be. He had known for years that something like it would be asked of him. “Yes, sir. I have heard of such things being done, when satisfaction was not to be had in the courts.”
“How many gentlemen did you say have visited Sir Dogmael?”
“By this afternoon? Seven, sir.”
“Of course, all those unsatisfied gentlemen were wise to wait until Parliament had done with the business to pursue their honor. Some time has passed. Perchance, if Sir Dogmael wounded or killed one of them, that gentleman may not have been able to enjoy the Crown’s victory, and Sir Dogmael would live to speak and offend another day. Yes, some time has passed since he slighted the Crown.”
Mr. Hunt did not understand the relevance of these remarks, and said nothing.
The Earl reached over and toyed with the gold-coated tassels of the bell-pull. “Seven, you say? Well, I imagine that a determined man could find seven capable rogues in Whitefriars or Southwark for ready money who could administer a thorough thrashing.”
“They are as plentiful as sand on a beach, sir,” replied Mr. Hunt with a sigh, wishing now that he was back in Lyme Regis. “And as cheaply purchased, I would say,” he added, knowing that his father would wish to hear it.
“What do you think are the chances of that kind of incident coming to pass, Mr. Hunt?”
Mr. Hunt paused to swallow some spit. “Very good, sir, if he dunned Parliament as you say he did and if nobody’s been able to get him to feel bare knuckles for it, nobody would be surprised if he got turned off hasty like.” As he spoke, he was surprised to hear his usually impeccable grammar disintegrate into the patois of beggars and criminals. Nerves, he thought. Even more surprising to him, the Earl did not seem to notice it. No nerves, he mused; my father possesses a bloodless soul. It’s a wonder I was begotten.
“Well, let us hope that justice is done to Sir Dogmael, and that we may soon read of his desserts in the newspapers. Very soon.” The Earl paused to look at his son with unmistakable meaning. “That is all, Mr. Hunt. Thank you for the information.” Before his son could turn to leave, he added, “Oh, yes, Mr. Hunt. Your services to me these last few years will not go without some special reward. I have been thinking of signing over to you a few of my shares in the East India Company. They are better than consols, as you might imagine. Remind me of that in a few days, would you?”
Mr. Hunt blinked in astonishment. “Yes, sir. Thank you. Good night, sir.” Mr. Hunt nodded once and took his leave.
The Earl congratulated himself on his own patience and discretion for having, like all those offended gentlemen, waited until the crisis had passed before acting. He tugged on the bell-pull for Claybourne to signal the valet his wish to retire.
“Cold-blooded bastard, he is,” mumbled Mr. Hunt to himself as he made his way to his room. He would see to this latest task tomorrow morning, when it was light. In his nocturnal wanderings around London in search of diversions, he had met some men who would do the job for a bumper of gin, or men who knew others who would. When he entered his room, warm from the blaze in the fireplace, he felt an unnatural heat coating his face. He went to the washbowl for a handful of water to splash on himself. In the looking glass over it, he saw that he was sweating. He snorted once in self-reproach. Well, he thought, when those East India shares are in your hands, you won’t remember the sweat. Not a drop of it.
A few evenings later, after a hearty supper with Winslow LeGrand at a tavern near the Inns of Court, Dogmael Jones bid the young man goodnight and strolled home, humming a melody that had suddenly come into his head. He was not a man to recall music of any kind, but the consumption of the right number of glasses of wine, when he was in the right mood, could trigger the recollection of something that had in the past struck his discriminating esthetic. After he had hummed the melody for a while, he recognized it, together with some words — some lines from Handel’s Messiah. He smiled. Alice Kenrick had sung some portions of it weeks ago during a family music party at Cricklegate, her mother at the pianoforte, her father and Lieutenant Tallmadge and some neighbor guests listening appreciatively from a semicircle of chairs.
“Of course, I will sing!” he said to himself, for he saw a means of sharing something with the girl. He would not sing in private company, for he knew he could not sing, not well, at least. A duet with her, he knew, was out of the question. So, it would need to be a solo duet! He would sing in public tonight! So he raised his voice and sang the words as best and loudly as he could, to address and entertain the unseen occupants of the dark forms of the buildings around him:
“To break our bonds asunder,
And to cast away our yokes!
Break them with rods of iron,
And dash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel!
Our sound goes out to all the lands!”
He stopped and laughed quietly to himself. “Or, words to that effect,” he said. “An oratorio,” he announced to the darkness, “composed by the greater George, as amended by Serjeant-at-Law Sir Dogmael Jones, member for Swansditch, for the delectation and edification of a sleeping populace!” He glanced around in the near darkness, up at the darkened windows, twirled his cane once, then swept it in the air above him. “Hey, you sheep who safely graze on the innards of your brothers across an ocean! Wake up and listen as I serenade your House! Double entendre there, if you’ve the wits to catch it!”
And he sang the words again, this time with more gusto than harmony. And stopped to listen for any response. Nothing, he noted. Silence. Not even a curse. “Since when was deafness a virtue?” he asked the buildings. “That was your call to liberty! Must I bang a pot? Sound a trumpet?”
Silence, he noted. He sighed and walked on. Well, that was the story of his life: Eloquence answered by Morpheus. In the House, in the King’s Bench, and in public places. But, he thought, I have solved the riddle of them all! It is confusion, abetted by fear and avarice and a penchant for a proper remuneration to salve the sin of voluntary servitude. “‘Oh, mighty God!’ you slaves pray on your knees!” he shouted at the window shutters closed to the winter air. “‘Let me remain ignorant, for I know that a knowledge of true liberty would be a reproach, and so I would be a harsher judge of myself than would you of me, Lord! Forgive me my weaknesses, oh Lord, but let me indulge them! I know that the meek and the humble shall inherit the earth, and cowards made saints! Let me be saintly! Is that not your plan?’” Jones paused. “Why, Lord! You dishonest ra
scal! You know very well you snitched it from Parliament!”
Jones stopped again. Still a silence answered him. He shouted to the houses at the top of his voice, “I have just insulted you! Have you no souls to offend? Are you so destitute of pride?”
A shutter somewhere did slam open then. A rough voice shouted down, “You, down there! Be quiet, or I shall call the watch on you!” The shutter slammed closed.
Jones tipped his hat to the unseen person. “Thank you, sir, for being my gallery. I have made you conscious.” He walked on. An interval of warm weather had melted all the snow; the streets were dry.
“I might have been a noted actor, if I had so chosen,” he mused to himself. “I shall write a play — The New Hudibras, or No Laughing Matter, I shall call it — and submit it to Garrick for consideration.” Then he stopped again to whip the back of his hand across his forehead. What ramblings! he thought. He could not decide whether he was happy or sad or merely drunk. Surely, not drunk. I have been drunk before, but never like this! But, the answer is irrelevant, he thought. He felt alive and invincible. Even for all the failures over the course of his career. In the courts, in the House. In love.
With Alice. Lovely, innocent Alice! Smitten with a man in a uniform! How like a woman, to fall for glitter, mistaking it for substance! No, no! thought Jones. I will not insult her! There is more to her than that! After all, she grasped my experiment in reciprocal justice, and in so doing, even enlightened her own father! I must settle for remaining her Uncle Dog. That is at least a measure of something.
A measure of something? He could not forget, either, the aria she sang in halting Italian at the same recital, Bononcini’s “The Glory of Loving You,” from his Griselda. Of course, she had sung it with discreet glances at Lieutenant Tallmadge. But, no matter, he thought. One does not stop admiring the moon because one cannot reach it, or touch it. One merely suffers the inconvenience.
He glanced up at the clear winter sky, whose stars were occasionally dimmed by passing billows of smoke. But it was more sky than usually canopied London in winter. He glanced around, raised his arms, and bent them to encompass the city and the sky to his bosom. Even for all my failures, he thought, the earth and my life on it are mine. Dear Hugh Kenrick, dear Judge Grainger! That is the solution to public places! He thought: I shall write Mr. Kenrick about it, but not Lord Wooten. That great felon, indentured to his pearls and ermine, may stew in his own farrago of fallacies! Wisdom would be wasted on him!
He walked on. Then the joyful solemnity of his soul was abruptly disturbed by a sound. A kicked pebble. Up until now, he had been conscious of his lone footsteps on the cobblestones and the frozen dirt as he trod his earth. Now he became aware of a tribe of stealthy footsteps behind him. He became alert.
Ahead of him at the corner were a lamppost and Chancery Lane. He was a block away from his rooms. There he had a pistol and a sword, and a door. He thought that if he ran, he could reach the safety of that fortress. But the footsteps were moving closer. If he ran, he was certain to be overtaken. Besides, he was not inclined to run. After all, he had stood and defied five hundred.
He turned and peered into the darkness. The lamplight behind him allowed him to perceive the forms of six or seven men. As they moved closer into the light he could see their faces, which were uniformly taut with purpose and grimly blank. They did not look like Mohocks, but like denizens of Alsatia, the most notorious of London’s disheveled slums, a community of thieves, murderers, and prostitutes, recently cleared to make way for the north end of the Blackfriars Bridge. They were dressed in ragged cast-offs or in coats and hats too new and rich-looking to have been acquired by honest work. And they carried a variety of implements for subduing a man. He recognized one of the men, whom he had noticed loitering outside of the tavern earlier in the evening. He seemed to be the leader. This man stopped, and the others stopped with him.
Jones felt the mahogany cane in his hand. He could defend himself with it. Once, on the Pall Mall months ago, it had foiled, with a single whack on the head, a lone man who had leapt from the bushes and tried to rob him. But what could it do now? He doubted its adequacy here, against so many heads.
“We’re the night watch, guvna’,” said the leader, “and we heard you disturbin’ the peace with your catterwailin’. We’re here to put a stop to it, you see.”
“Caterwauling,” corrected Jones almost without thinking. He raised his cane and held it leisurely in both hands before him. “I require that my murderers at least be familiar with the King’s English. You are not, so you may go home and acquaint yourself with Mr. Johnson’s dictionary, if you have been discriminating enough to steal one.”
The gang laughed in unison. “We’ll be home afore you, guvna’,” said the leader.
A burning fear of death shot up through Jones’s chest, then fell to the pit of his stomach. He shut his eyes in brief regret. This was not how he wanted it to end, in the dead of a cold night, anonymously, at the hands of a band of common cutthroats. Rather, to die on a pillory, or by a noose, for having disturbed a greater peace. “Who sent you? Colonel Molyneux? The Earl of Danvers? George Grenville?”
“Don’t know any such gents, guvna’,” said the leader as he moved forward again, tapping a short truncheon in the palm of his other hand. His companions followed him, all menacingly waving their implements.
Well, no matter who sent them, thought Jones. It was not so bad to die like any of the Pippins. Yes, he was a Pippin. He remembered then what Hugh Kenrick had once told him, about how he had met the Pippins by rescuing Glorious Swain in similar circumstances in another dark byway. “Koshes and cudgels it is, gentlemen! Against my brave cane? Then you will have the privilege of dispatching the last Pippin in London! Ah, what a glorious exit! Mr. Garrick would envy me!”
He raised his cane and shouted, “Charge your bayonets, sons of liberty, close ranks, and follow me! Long live Lady Liberty!” and rushed headlong at the gang. Startled, the men scattered, reformed to encircle him, then swiftly closed in on him and did the deed for which they had been paid a pound a piece to do. Koshes, cudgels, and staves whipped up in the frigid air and flailed away. Thumps and grunts broke the silence. Lamplight glinted faintly off a knife blade as it rose and fell. A man bellowed in pain when mahogany met his skull. It was not the member for Swansditch.
When it was done, and the body moved no more, it was relieved of its cane, hat, cloak, watch, and shoes. And money. More would have been taken, but at that moment a lamp on a pole rounded the corner, the light of a pair of watchmen. The gang rose from its feast of loot and ran.
A lone witness, wrapped in a cloak and scarf so that only the eyes were visible, huddled in the shadow of a doorway. When the watchmen became distracted by the sight of a body in the middle of the street, and cautiously brought their light closer to see, the figure slunk quietly away in the wake of the fleeing gang.
* * *
Chapter 26: The Victory
“What do you think of this?” asked the Earl of Danvers of John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, some days later over coffee in the Cocoa Tree near Westminster Hall. He pointed to an item in the London Weekly Journal, and handed the newspaper to Sandwich.
Sandwich, who had contemptuously declaimed in a speech in Lords against both repeal and the Commons as an anarchical instance of “that democratic interest which this House was constituted to restrain,” read the item, which briefly reported the murder of Sir Dogmael Jones, member for Swansditch, by persons unknown. He immediately handed the paper back to his companion. “What do I think of it? Ought I to think of it? Not at all, Lord Danvers! But, I will tell you this: It ought to be the common fate of half the lower House!” He frowned when his peer failed to acknowledge the jest with so much as a grin. Sandwich was known for his good humor, and few were immune to it. Disappointed, he then asked, “Why do you inquire? How could such a trifle concern you? Why should it concern anyone?”
Basil Kenrick shrugged in turn. “The chap was my
brother’s man in that lower House. He made a particularly offensive address there, and was subsequently challenged, I have heard, by a number of members there, whom he rebuffed in an equally offensive and cowardly manner. Or, so it is said.”
“Would that had happened to that knave, John Wilkes,” remarked Sandwich. “Then we should be spared the worry that he might return to bedevil us.” He shook his head and grumbled, “But, no, Mr. Martin merely knacked him in the arm in that duel, on the second exchange. Poor shots, these commoners.” Samuel Martin, member for Camelford and a friend of Lord Bute, had called Wilkes a “cowardly scoundrel” over remarks about him in The North Briton. Following the duel, Wilkes fled to Paris to escape the courts.
“Well,” said Basil Kenrick, “at least Mr. Wilkes attempted to defend his honor. Sir Dogmael, it seems, had none that he cared to defend.” He did not pursue the subject. He was satisfied that no one of consequence suspected his role in the matter. He had already asked Bedford and Halifax.
Nor did he pursue the subject when Crispin Hillier and Sir Henoch Pannell made circumspect inquiries about the murder. “You are as much informed of the matter as am I,” he said to them with bluntness. “He was set upon by a band of rakehells. It appears the man was foolhardy, as well as radical. The two phenomena often occur in pairs, as you yourself, Sir Henoch, once pointed out to me.”
“So I did, your lordship,” conceded Pannell, recalling the occasion, and not a little flattered that the Earl would remember.
The two members were reluctant to entertain the possibility that the Earl was in some way complicit. Pannell limited his comments to, “Well, I shall miss him, for he was good for an occasional verbal joust.”