Empire

by Edward Cline

  The Earl nodded. “Sir Dogmael said he had sent the satire to my nephew?”

  “Yes, sir. I concluded that copies were already enroute to Virginia.”

  The Earl sipped the last of his tea and put down the cup and saucer on a side table. “I see,” he said after a moment of thought. “Well, I have persuaded Sir Henoch to not pursue the matter. He knows that he would simply cause more ridicule than he has already suffered. Mr. Grenville is of the same mind, Mr. Hillier reports. And a suit would cause other consequences, ones far more serious than Sir Henoch’s humiliation.” The Earl stared into space with his own thoughts for a moment, then glanced at his visitor. “That is all, sir. Thank you for the information. There is some correspondence to be copied into the letter book in the study, and then the day is yours. Send Claybourne back in, if you would.”

  The gentleman prepared to bow. “Beastly weather, sir,” he volunteered. “Is there anything else to be done?”

  “Just the letters, Mr. Hunt,” replied the Earl.

  “Good day to you, sir, and thank you.” The gentleman bowed, turned, and left the room, hoping that he had not looked too startled when his father pronounced the pseudonym by which he was known in the house. It happened rarely enough; the gentleman sensed it was his father’s way of expressing gratitude and satisfaction. He found and instructed Claybourne, then threaded his way through the mansion to his room, a spacious, richly appointed domicile that was once part of the Baron’s quarters. Here he removed his coat, hat and wig, poured himself a glass of Madeira from his own sideboard, and lay down on his bed to rest. He propped the glass atop his chest, put a hand behind his head on the pillow, and pondered, not without some regret mixed with contentment, his past and present.

  * * *

  His name was Jared Turley. Only he, his father the Earl, and Crispin Hillier knew this, and that he was the illegitimate son of the Earl and Felise Turley, a maidservant in the Danvers household long ago. She had been the object of his father’s and grandfather’s amorous attentions. Not an infrequent situation among the high- and low-born, he reflected. The grandfather, Guy Kenrick, the 14th Earl of Danvers, had expired in the room of a Weymouth inn in the course of expressing those attentions. Some time following his funeral, the son had expressed his own. She must have been a comely wench, thought Jared Turley, to have aroused the passions of both father and son. Felise Turley, unmarried, continued on in the household until her pregnancy could no longer be concealed. She was subsequently dismissed by the Earl, although his brother, the Baron, persuaded him to confer on her a small income; whether that was motivated by sympathy, or by a desire to purchase conditional silence, Turley could not say. She left Danvers to live with her own brother, a saddler in Lyme Regis.

  Jared Turley sometimes regretted not being able to remember what his mother looked like. Two years after his birth, she died of a fever. He was raised by his aunt and uncle, and none too gently. They were garrulous, religious, and often brutal disciplinarians. They continued to receive his mother’s “pension” — though they knew not from whom — and used some of it, fortunately for Jared, an unwelcome charge, to send him to a local grammar school. The uncle also felt it his right to apprentice Jared to his trade. When he was seventeen, the aunt died, and when he was twenty, so had the uncle, of exposure during a drinking binge in the middle of a terrible winter storm. Jared found himself in possession of a shop and a trade, neither of which he was particularly fond of. But the saddler’s trade was all he knew. He just barely managed to keep the shop afloat. He dabbled in smuggling, and inherited from his uncle a profitable alliance with the local revenue rider for the receipt of American leather; bribing that man cost him less than did the duties. Then, five years after he took over his uncle’s shop, Crispin Hillier appeared, swore him to secrecy, divulged his relationship with the Earl, arranged for the sale of his shop and cottage, and took him to Danvers.

  He was seduced and put off-guard the moment he stepped inside the great house of the ancient family of the Earls of Danvers. It was only later that he realized that, his shop and home in Lyme Regis having been disposed of, he had no alternative but to agree to the proposition put to him that first day in another, magnificent universe, other than being turned out and reduced to beggary. His father, the Earl, a cold, formal man, that first day in the great house described what was expected of him and the rigors of what he must learn and of what he must become. Then Mr. Hillier bedazzled him with a mental box of rewards for submitting to the Earl’s demands: the freedom of the household, and, when in London, of the city; an allowance of £100 per year, exclusive of bonuses, many times more than what was paid the most senior servant in the household; his own quarters in the household; connections and introductions to influential persons; in the future, possibly his own house, free and clear; possibly a seat in the Commons; a sinecure and place in the government. Hillier described a life far better than that of a tradesman, an existence immeasurably superior to the grimy, smelly, sweaty daily labor of beating, cutting, and treating leather for saddles.

  Hillier had made the then-cryptic comment, which Jared Turley later knew was a warning: “You have left Lyme Regis for what I hope will not be your Sedgemoor.”

  Turley heard a fuss somewhere in the house, and presumed that it was the Earl leaving for Lords. That was just as well, he thought, for his father was in the habit of stopping in the study to make certain that things were in order. Turley had his own small desk in a corner of that room, inherited from the Earl’s late secretary, and if he had been at it, bent over the task of filling in the letter book, his father would have frowned. His father, he knew, preferred to have things done; he did not like to see them being done.

  With all those precious, impossible baubles whirling in his mind, he, the humble and nominally literate saddler, agreed to submit to the Earl’s expectations. He was even obliged to sign a contract to that effect. For the next two years, he endured a rigorous, often frustrating regimen of tutors in history, grammar, ciphering, dress, manners, and deportment. He was even taught the art of stenography and the science of bookkeeping. He was trained to be his father’s secretary and amanuensis, and later, his retainer, messenger, and legate. In short, his extraordinary factotum. He became his father’s human appendage.

  There were conditions. From that first day onward, he was to be known, and to refer to himself, as Jared Hunt. Or, simply, “Mr. Hunt.” His actual surname was never again to be pronounced by anyone. His relationship to the Earl was to remain secret, even to the Earl’s staff. Jared Turley did not mind this condition; he learned early on that his mysterious presence and close association with the Earl and his friends carried more power and commanded more respect and deference among the staff than if they had known his true identity. He was never to communicate with his new uncle, the Baron, or with his family, never to identify himself to them, never to let them know that his father had reclaimed him. There was more secrecy in this arrangement than shame, reflected Jared Turley.

  And he accepted the fact that he was reclaimed not from any motive of paternal love or atonement for past indiscretions. He had been brought to Danvers and incorporated into the Earl’s routines, he learned later, shortly after the Baron and his family had completed their move to Milgram House near the town. He supposed that the Earl presumed it was wiser to trust “blood” for the position than a complete stranger. It was odd, he thought, to think of the Baron as his uncle; the man was a complete stranger to him, other than what he had learned from his father and by his own observations.

  The Earl remained a stranger to him, too, keeping him at arm’s length in all their meetings. Turley reciprocated. They had never supped together, never shared tea or a glass of wine, except when another commoner happened to be present, such as Crispin Hillier, or Sir Henoch Pannell, whom, he knew, the Earl regarded as a commoner notwithstanding his title and appointments. Turley did not mind this situation either; for he did not like his father, and he was certain that his father harbor
ed no affection for him. He had, over the years, grown to see the mutual advantage in the distance they maintained between themselves. Turley had no scruples that would prevent him from performing some of the tasks assigned him by his father, and his father had no scruples in assigning him those tasks. A modicum of affection for each other, or even on the part of one of them, would have spoiled the arrangement, and led to its eventual dissolution. This, neither father nor son desired. They remained intimate strangers.

  Another condition of Turley’s employment was that he was never to commit an action for which he could be arrested. The Earl was firm on this point, having, on that first day in Danvers, lectured him with almost maddened zeal that in the event of arrest, regardless of the offense, his son could expect no assistance from him, and no recognition. He would deny any knowledge or connection with “Mr. Hunt.” Turley believed him, and kept his gambling and carousing to a self-conscious, disciplined minimum. He had a weakness for card games, wine, and women. In Lyme Regis, he had built a reputation for those diversions, one in which he reveled — and one which was also known to the Earl. He knew that he himself was the father of at least two bastards in that town.

  His initial elation at the great fortune of being in his father’s secure employ, however, had dwindled to fear; the butterfly of his astonishment reverted into a crawling caterpillar of caution, and finally into a larva of anxiety. Every day, especially here in London, he observed on the streets the repellent state of men and women of meager means — the near-paupers in their ragged clothes, their practiced desperation, their hollow-eyed, unnatural ages, their perilous, grasping lives — and knew that he could be quickly reduced to their state and consigned to their company for just a single infraction of his father’s rule. Later, he tremulously, discreetly enquired of Crispin Hillier the reason why the Earl was adamant on that point. The gentleman had replied, “His lordship had the humiliating occasion to bail out his nephew — your cousin now, I suppose — from the Tower. You will, in time, learn more about your cousin. My advice to you is that you adopt his lordship’s view of him. His lordship absolutely refuses to endure again the immolation of his family’s standing.”

  Partner to Jared Turley’s fear of being returned to the state from which he had been delivered, was his own repressed humiliation. That, together with the fear, gnawed with little, hardly felt bites at his consciousness. He was moved by them almost as much as by the pleasure he derived from being the Earl’s many-talented servant. In that role he was often an anonymous force that called on men in their homes with instructions or news. These men always heeded a visit by “Mr. Hunt,” and paid him close attention and courtesy. The humiliation, though, often nagged him more than did the fear. It was the humiliation of a son who understood his value to his father, but who knew also that, apart from his utilitarian value to that man, he did not exist.

  A man who is unsure of his own worth, or who, at least, is sure that his worth is greater than what others choose to see in him, rankles at the sight of those who are sure of their own worth, and who are indifferent to his existence. Such a man may develop a bitterly acquired facility for memory — of the indifference, of the many intended and unintended affronts, of the rare, accidental compliments. Turley possessed such a memory.

  Turley, being as unscrupulous as the Earl, was willing to perform any service his father required of him. He had no principles, no ethics, no convictions — that is, no convictions other than the one, absorbed by him over his lifetime, and demonstrated repeatedly by those with whom he usually associated, that all life was a vale of corruption, and that one must endeavor to find a profitable, comfortable place in it.

  But even corruption needs an ethics, a two-headed creature by which the good for the corrupt can be measured with a commensurate, practical gain; and against its eternal companion, the incorruptible good. Jared Turley did not think of his corruption in these terms, but they were his premises. His remarkable memory and stenographic skills, for example, had allowed him to sit in the gallery of the Commons as a spy, and record, for the Earl’s edification and peace of mind, the principal speeches on the pending Stamp Act of all the main speakers.

  Once he had finished that task, and transcribed his notes, the Earl read them. The Earl then dictated to his son letters of thanks to Sir Henoch, Mr. Hillier, and others whose seats were in the bloc he controlled. About Sir Dogmael’s speeches, the Earl remarked only: “Some day, Mr. Hunt, some thing should be done about my brother’s lackey. He is too sharp by a guinea. He is almost dangerous.”

  Turley was sensitive to the ominous suggestion in his father’s appraisal of Sir Dogmael Jones. His corruption allowed him merely to note the hint and brace himself for the service of doing “some thing” about the man, some day.

  Turley was corrupted, not only by fear for his secure employment and station, but by an unexpressed contempt for his social superiors. The contempt was likewise partnered with an envy for their station, privileges, and power. Over the years the force that drove his unfailing and unquestioning service had also been reduced from obedient gratitude to a species of obedient malice. It was like a thick, lush vine that had grown over a marble column, and whose roots ate away the strength and purity of the stone. When he sat in the gallery that overlooked the august space of the Commons, he did not think: “If only my mates in Lyme Regis could see me now!” He did not think of them; they were forgotten. They were below him now, because he lived and moved on a higher plane. He knew that if he were to return to Lyme Regis, he would revel in the envious attention of his former friends, but be offended if one of them slapped him on the back and called him a hale fellow.

  So he would never return to Lyme Regis. His former friends there conspired for shillings and pence; he was the envoy of a man who conspired with others for governments and nations. Ergo, he was superior to those ill-clothed, ill-spoken, and ill-bred men. He had been one of them, but that Jared Turley had died, and gone to a temporal heaven. The thought occurred to him that contempt was contagious, and bred its own hierarchy of swaggering disdain. The master despised the servant, the servant his master and the tradesman, the tradesman the pauper, the pauper everyone. It was the natural order of things, he supposed, and he did not reprove himself for having succumbed to the phenomenon.

  On that thought, Jared Turley finished his Madeira, put the glass aside, closed his eyes, and took a nap. An hour later he awoke, rose, and pulled the bell-rope near his bed to signal the kitchen for his dinner. While he waited for it to be brought up, he read some newspapers. The Earl required him to have knowledge of affairs in the court, in the city, in the country, in the world. When he had finished his dinner, he went to the Earl’s study, sat at his desk, and completed his chore with the letter books.

  One letter amused and reassured him, because it was so in character with his superior existence. In a note to Sir Henoch Pannell, the Earl discussed various strategies his bloc in the Commons could employ to defeat the opposition, including a closer cooperation and selective alliance with the king’s own bloc, which was considerably larger. Near the end, the Earl remarked:

  “It is hoped that Mr. Pitt’s arrant and scathful behavior will keep him out of favor and out of government, should Mr. Grenville injure himself with His Majesty and be compelled to return the seals of office. The minister is certain to offend the king with his justifiable reluctance to clearly name the Princess as Regent; and it is rumored that His Majesty is anxious for a pretext to replace him, and this would serve his purpose. Cumberland, Newcastle, and Rockingham are the likely candidates to follow Mr. Grenville. Mr. Pitt, though, waits in ambuscade, and if he cannot be prevented from coming out, perhaps he can be lured out with poison. He exerts an influence in your House, even in his absence from it. Many in your House would abandon him, should he don the scarlet and ermine. He may believe he is being rewarded, or even bribed by the king, but the total effect of such an action would be to injure Mr. Pitt and reduce his following. We should hope that, if this e
vent comes about, Mr. Pitt’s mind will be too clouded to perceive the danger, or too arrogant and swollen with his own demands to believe that accepting a peerage would make a difference. We should all work amongst our sets to accomplish this end: I shall hint to my colleagues that Mr. Pitt ought to be rewarded; you should persuade Mr. Pitt’s loyalists that his acceptance of a peerage would be a disgrace and a betrayal. These insinuations cannot but help to reach, in time, the attention of His Majesty, and perhaps affect the course of his own cautious, terrible deliberations…. ”

  Jared Turley was amused — almost entertained — by the Earl’s sly scheme, and reassured because such doings comprised the natural order of things. It gave him a sense of efficacy to play a role in it all. Before he was reclaimed and transformed by the Earl, he had had no political convictions. He still had none, but had since imbibed the Earl’s, and became a staunch believer in the status quo.

  Done with the letter book, he closed the letters and sealed them with his father’s seal. He searched for and found Alden Curle on the terrace that overlooked the Thames. Curle was supervising some servants in the removal of the slush that had accumulated. With him was Horace Dolman, the Earl’s steward. He informed Curle that he was taking some letters to the post-office, then going to the Pantheon, and would return some time in the evening, should the Earl ask after him.