I, Libertine

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “He’s Oswald Marryat, the French brandy chap. Got two castles and a race course of his own.”

  “We can help him,” Barrowbridge said immediately. “What’s saddened him?”

  “This marriage of his. Third wife, y’know. He’s afraid his second wife will find out about it.”

  “And charge bigamy, what? I presume there’s a first wife, too.”

  “Not any more. She just died. Her relations feel she should have more of an estate out of it. They’re the ones who are hinting at telling the second wife about the third wife.”

  Barrowbridge frowned while his mind tested, turned, threaded and reviewed. “That’s not bigamy, lad, that’s trigonometry. …Who’s the second wife? Where’s she come from?”

  “I think he said her mother was married to his Uncle Oswald.”

  Barrowbridge’s eyes opened abruptly. “Really … I say, how tidy d’ye suppose their marriage records are?”

  “Not very, I’d imagine. He’s only recently made his pile. They’re nobodys, actually. Village folk.”

  “Do you tell your Mr. Marryat,” said Barrowbridge, “that if he can arrange things so that he changes places in the records with his uncle of the same name, his troubles are over.”

  “Over how?”

  “Why, by an honest accident, unbeknownst to himself, you might say, his second wife is his niece. Now that’s within the prohibited degree, and though the marriage isn’t void, it’s readily voidable, and on the record, too, without her knowledge or appearance. Get him to a good barrister and have that done.”

  “Very well, but wouldn’t it call attention to his bigamy?”

  “Not if he brought the action to void. Ignorance of consanguinity is a defence; its being his action makes it good faith. They’ll void.”

  “I’m sorry, sir; I still don’t understand how voiding that marriage solves his problem.”

  “Well, lad I’ll spell it out for you. His dead wife’s relations can’t bring charges for bigamy when his second marriage is a nullity.”

  “Ah, I see. And what about the third marriage? He was married to her while the second marriage existed.”

  “The second marriage never existed, now we’ve voided it.”

  “And what about the third marriage, in regard to the first?”

  “First one’s dead. Do you go tell Marryat instantly to become his own uncle. Slide me that chamber, will you, lad?”

  And so when the liberated Mr. Marryat found out that Lance did not have a cellar large enough for the cases of fine brandy he wished to give him, he had one dug for him.

  One of the pleasantest things about the Hobby was the good relations Lance set up with lawyers. He never missed an opportunity to send the people involved to lawyers, virtually never solved any but the most simple problems with advice alone. As a result lawyers cultivated him, added to his “collection” of uncommon law, and in general made things as happy for him as they could. Beasley early became one of his staunchest and most voluble admirers. “Chap practically a beardless youth,” he would say at the Club, “and thinks like a Lord Advocate. You’d think he’d been at the bar for fifty years.”

  Splendid years. … There was Minden, Sir Gregory, Elaine. Despite the fact that he associated with the little baronet primarily for his position and influence, however limited, he was not immune to the man’s surprisingly deep enthusiasm for the immense history he was compiling. Sir Gregory read Latin and Greek with familiarity and French as if he had been born to it, and many a literary and historical tag Lance carried away with him, to be hoarded and flashed briefly as the circumstance offered itself in London—that is, the presence in a gathering of just the right level of folk who could be and should be impressed by a young man’s scholarly attributes, and the absence of scholars. Yet at times he came away bemused, for the moment oriented in the swell and change of culture against culture, the pressure of Rome against the world around her; the pinching off of the Parthians and the explosive rise of the Sassanian Persians which, with the ambition of the Teutonic tribes, Sir Gregory held responsible for the dissolution of the Roman Empire, despite its power in subsequent centuries. These spells of identification with history and humanity were transient but heady, and Lance was confirmed in his belief that Sir Gregory was a great if unimportant little man, whose history of Rome would be, if nothing else, a phenomenon, like a stone column in a desert; useless in itself but a good deal more than other men could boast of.

  Elaine became a lady. Her eyes and her hair grew brighter and her figure ripe; in one way only did she not change, and that was only because it was initially a state of completeness: her devoted constancy to Lance. Isolated as she was with her sisters and a series of genteel tutors, she had no opportunity to acquire fashionable guiles and tactics, no wish or need for them. She loved Lance openly and wholeheartedly. It was one of those rare affections seen sometimes in the religious recluse, the artist and the scholar, wherein to love is sufficient, to be loved inconceivable. Indeed, her emotion for Lance fed her quite as adequately as her father’s engrossment in dead Italians fed him. Lance struck a posture of grave regard when he was with her, and permitted no peaks on this particular plateau. He had brief moments of regret that her father was such a small baronet and his holdings so unimpressive, else this might have been one of the great loves of the period. Sir Gregory permitted him unlimited freedom with the girl, perhaps sensing Lance’s attitude, perhaps, in his preoccupations, genuinely unaware that he might be expected to do otherwise.

  Bella and Barbara likewise blossomed, and each had her extremes of passion for Lance, each more than once; but this was a game, part of the atmosphere, and there was no question in their minds as to whose “property” he was.

  During those years there were disappointments for Lance, but in the long run they served only to etch in the finer shadows and put his greater contentment in perspective. Chief among these shadows was a perpetual and nagging pique at the new Countess of Kingston and her ward Miss Axelrood, which became inflamed after 1773, when the Duke died. Completely overlooking the handsome remuneration he had already received, he began to believe he had been “had”—that his entire aim in the operation had been to secure the implied promise that they would see to it he was circulated about, placed next to the mighty, and even given entree at court. The continued residence abroad of the Kingston ménage made this impossible, and although he kept up his visits to Blanton House and a few others of that ilk, his acquaintance in the City did not expand very much. Barrowbridge was of course no longer in a position to pressure and black—well, grey-mail him into high society; so all things considered, these were years of consolidation, of retrenchment, wherein he became far more the country gentleman and less the man-about-town. His salve enterprise throve, and his income from it increased, even after he halved his interest by the sale of manufacturing rights to an apothecary in Soho who had married Miss Callow primarily out of a desire to retain for himself the displays of the salve’s effectiveness. It was rumored that he executed, in a mezzo-relievo of skin and hair, a magnificent St. George and Dragon on her back and hips, but Lance was content to relegate this to fancy and eschewed his privilege, unquestionable even now, to see for himself.

  In the fall of 1775, which marked Lance’s fifth season at Featherfront, he returned from Minden one evening to find a dusty horse with the reins over its head clomping unforgivably about upon the bowling green. His occasional man Hicks had gone for the post and there was apparently no one about but Johnson, who had always expressed herself terrified of horses. Cursing and grumbling, Lance captured the animal and led it to the stable yard, where he tethered it.

  Returning to the front of the house, he rounded the corner by the bayberry bush and was confounded by the explosion, as if out of the ground, of a leaping, yelling figure wearing a long headdress of brilliantly dyed feathers, leathern leggings which left the buttocks bare, and a fringed buckskin shirt. This apparition brandished a small, long-handled, and apparentl
y very sharp axe, and with its other hand cupped over its shrieking mouth, created a wavering ululation so shocking in effect that Lance’s leap upward threatened his very shoe-buckles. He staggered back into the zinnia bed and put his shoulders against the house lest he fall in a faint, and stood there awaiting death. His mouth was dry and his lips drew back and twitched against his upper teeth; he stopped breathing.

  The nightmare creature bounded about in a large semicircle, pounding its mouth, pounding its chest, waving the tomahawk aloft and plunging it into the ground, cutting great gobbets out of the already damaged green, and arriving at last face to face with Lance, with the axe raised for its terminal coup. It was a tableau for a horrid frozen instant and then the red Indian said, “Oh, I say, old chap, I mean, don’t smile at me like that, you make me feel contemptible.”

  “Meadows!”

  “I mean, I should jolly well’ve known I couldn’t make you turn a hair, what? Not you.”

  “What the devil are you doing in that outlandish … the deuce do you mean by chopping up my bloody bowling green … tie up your ruddy horse … come from anyway?” It all burst from Lance with apparent simultaneity, and the savage figure backed away from the torrent, fluttering his hands uselessly in front of him. The tomahawk, fastened to his wrist with a thong, slipped from his fingers, swung down and gashed his thigh. “Oh, I say. This bloody thing’s all bloody,” he whimpered, separating the cut edges of legging and flesh. Again there was tableau as they stared at one another, and suddenly they were pounding each other on the back: “I say, it is good to see you, whatever in the world, why didn’t you write?”

  “Come in, dammit,” said Lance. “No—wait; can you show me that … that dance thing again?”

  “Rather good, what? But I am bleeding a bit.”

  “Hang the bleeding. We’ll have it put right in a trice. Do you just show me how one of those howling savages enters a house.”

  The effect, even though expected, actually frightened Lance for a moment. He followed the howling, capering figure into the great hall, seeing at the far end the horrified figure of Johnson disappear behind a slammed door. Even over the uproar Meadows was making, he could hear other doors bang in rapid succession—the kitchen, the pantry, the back kitchen, the scullery, the wood-room, and finally the rear exit. He wondered how far she would get before she turned back. He was also aware of the rattling intake of breath discernable in the area of the gimlet hole, which was his reason for asking the encore. Delighted, he fell back on the settle and brought surcease: “Well enough, old chap, look out, you’ll have my mantel cloven. I say, stop! old boy—enough!”

  Dripping sweat and blood and panting like a bellows, Meadows ceased, and Lance went to the kitchen to fetch water and cloth to bind him up. And while he did so, Meadows, with many discursions and chronological trackings back and trackings forth, told of his adventures in America.

  It appeared that Boston circa 1770 was not what he and Sir Gregory and Lance had thought—at least, not for a Crown tax collector. “Place is positively seething, I mean. Chaps rushing about burning M.P.’s in effigy and that sort of thing. Politeness doesn’t count a bit there, y’know. After all, one’s just doing one’s duty, but the very nicest people are likely to get positively rude when one asks for taxes, even if one apologizes first.” He had stumbled along exposing himself to a minimum of fury on the one hand from the colonists and on the other from his superiors, until he had his bright idea. His income (a fund from his uncle the Duke of Kingston), plus his small share of the large amount paid as royalty on the salve, and his salary, had been just sufficient to carry him in his deception for nearly four years. He would make his rounds, but in all but a few cases this was purely a social act. He would then return to his office, count out what moneys he had, and give them together with doctored books to his superiors. He was helped in this incredible charity by two factors: his predecessors had not been able to collect even this pittance, and his superiors could not understand bookkeeping. And as long as the people paid no taxes and the collectors received them, Meadows was left alone. His deception was revealed in October of 1774, when the last act of the fleeing tax commissioners was actually to throw him into the river Charles for having softened the King’s hand on these rebels by leading them into non-payment of excises. There were more formal punishments in the codus lex, of course, but they all took time, and time was what the commissioners had not at the moment. The Massachusetts Assembly was prorogued clean out of existence, and the hapless Meadows was, as reported, thrown into the Charles by the commissioners on their way to safety on board the anchored men-of-war. And as if this were not tragedy enough for one night, when he paddled ashore and hauled himself, exhausted and chilled, down the riotous streets toward his lodgings, he was recognized as a tax collector by a band of patriots, who unhesitatingly carried him back and threw him into the Charles again. This time he swam out to a British frigate, where first the galley-dregs were thrown upon him by accident and next some bored shipbound grenadiers started potting at him with their muskets. He cried long live George III until bubbles began to appear between the syllables and they at last took pity and grappled him aboard.

  Three days later he was able to join an armed shore party and make his way to his lodgings to pick up his things, only to find that looters had preceded him, and all that was left was his Indian costume. Resignedly he took it along because it was all he had to show for four and a half years in the government service, and because it occurred to him that it might amuse old Lance Courtenay to see it in action. And so he had come back to England, and here he was.

  Lance laughed unabashedly during this recital, and afterward promised to see to it that suit was instituted to recover the tax money he had so nobly paid for the colonists, a suggestion which threw Meadows into blind panic on the instant. No, he would let well enough alone. What, try to present records for those years—itemize those tax payments? “It’s over, old man—finished. Don’t let’s live it again. Besides—dear dead uncle Evelyn’s dear old bank draught will be along in a fortnight. If I can put up with you for a day or so, I shall be all right.”

  “You’re welcome, of course,” said Lance sincerely, thinking, I wonder if Hepzibah will take him off my hands … I wonder if Sir Gregory can wangle something else for him … has he no ruddy relatives? “What do you hear from your cousin Charles?”

  “Oh, he’s back on the continent—Leghorn, this time, exporting exports and importing imports and all that. Which is jolly fine. Every time he hears a word about the Duchess Elizabeth he gets livid and can’t be polite. He can’t even be understood. He just makes noises.”

  “What do you hear of her?”

  “The last I heard she was being squired about by His Holiness Pope Clement the Fourteenth, but of course he’s dead now.”

  “Surely it wasn’t true.”

  “So they say. Oh, I don’t think there was anything … you know. After all, she’s going on sixty, what?”

  “Mm. … Miss Axelrood still with her?”

  “Always. And you don’t hear any gossip about her, by Jove. I don’t know just what she does, what? but she does it quietly.”

  Lance didn’t know, and said so. He did know how quietly she could get into and out of an inn, and didn’t say so. He laughed suddenly.

  The red Indian made a questioning sound.

  “I was just thinking that it’s sort of amusing, the wheels-within-wheels thing, Meadows. The reason you’re strapped, waiting for a draught, is because the Duchess has the money. But the reason you get the money is that she doesn’t get it—and it all comes from the same place.”

  “It’s a wonder she didn’t get it,” said Meadows, “the way she had him buffaloed. (American expression; good, what?) Not that she needs it.”

  “Lord no.” The Kingston fortune was large indeed, and it was by no means all in frozen assets. Lance knew a bit more than most people just how large it was; Beasley had given him a draft of the Duke’s will to exa
mine for loopholes, and he and Barrowbridge had fine-toothed it, curried it down, and delivered it shining; it was as final as the last trump. He laughed again. It had been Barrowbridge’s exclusive idea to continue Charles and Evelyn Meadows’ settlements and quarterly income; as heirs apparent (but for the Duchess) they might be angered if she got the bulk of the estate, and let them; but they might be dangerous if they got nothing. As for the other clause—that the Duchess would inherit the estate and keep it only so long as she did not remarry—that too was Barrowbridge’s idea, he knowing full well that the Duchess would so present it that it would appear to be a concession. Actually, he could not imagine a circumstance which would make that extraordinary women happier than to be hugely wealthy, free to go where she wished, do what she cared to do, and be forbidden to marry. … But at the moment, Evelyn Meadows was his problem. “I say, you know dear old Hepzibah married.”

  “Yes, I’d heard. Who’s the, ah, lucky chap?”

  “Fellow named Suarno, Portugee or some such. Apothecary.” He laughed. “Interested in sculpture too, I’ve heard.”

  “Sculpture, oh, I say. Always wanted to try my hand at sculpture.”

  “Evelyn, you’re a very funny fellow sometimes,” said Lance, hardly able to contain himself. “We’ll ride up to the City tomorrow … I say, you do have some other clothes?”

  “Oh yes,” said Meadows, touching his great train of feathers. “These are just extras.”

  So Lance took him to the City; and indeed it was an excellent idea; not only did Hepzibah take Meadows in, but it was all Lance could do to keep her from adding him to her household as well. It took all day, but at last he laughingly pried himself away, stopped laughing as the door closed, looked at the sky and then at his watch, and decided to ride home that very evening. And thus he rode into his destiny.