I, Libertine

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “God,” said Lance.

  “She uses everything she touches,” said Piggott. “If she doesn’t, she shall. Why, back in those early days, when she was keepin’ ’er marriage so secret an’ the secret leaked out, she used e’en that. She got rid o’ Hamilton by whisperin’ it to him; ’e went abroad. She turned Bath into the surly knave ’e is today the same way. I don’t doubt she knew everything about you, Lanky, the Courtenay matter an’ all. I wouldn’t doubt some o’ Barrowbridge’s clients weren’t clients at all. Eh? So you see Miss Axelrood needn’t’ve bribed anyone to find the Dirty Beast an’ you.”

  “Piggott, have you any letters, papers, certificates—anything like that?”

  “Na, lad. She’s too sly for that. But the new Earl might have some such. ’Twouldn’t matter, could ye get him to accept ye, though; he’s by no means a mighty man but ’e’s respected. ’E was commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, y’know, an’ a vice-admiral o’ th’ blue. Been M.P. out o’ Bury St. Albans for donkey’s years; writes a bit, they say, for the periodicals, an’ got ’isself genteely notorious, y’might say, for spittin’ in the eye of Rockin’am. I mean to say, ’e’s not the downy-cheeked silly-ass, ’e once was, by a long shot. ’E’s added to ’is own pittance, and now ’e’s got the rest, all ’is brother ’ad, an’ Ickworth, that’s belonged to Herveys since the ruddy fifteenth century. There’s a certain seat for St. Albans in Parliament for the Herveys o’ that line … all that’s a ’earty ’eight to jump from, eh? were you to be next in line. Otherwise it all goes to ’is other brother Frederick, ’im that’s a bishop in Ireland, an’ ’e don’t need it; ’e ’as packets.”

  “Piggott, hush up a bit or you’ll start coughing again. I know my peers and peerage. I’ve got to think.”

  “As you wish, laddy-buck. … Anyway, you carry your certificate about wi’ ye. The Herveys is a breed apart. John Hervey it was tied ’is father to a bear an’ was hanged for somethin’ else. Frederick, they say, may be a bishop but’s godless as well. That great old swine Dr. Johnson that everyone’s kissin’ the ’ams of, ’e once said, ‘Call a dog Hervey an’ I will love him.’ And a great strange thing about ’undreds o’ years o’ Herveys, two out o’ three marries an Elizabeth, even if she’s married ’erself at the time. But one thing about ’em all, they looks like Herveys, their accidents spring up throughout the ruddy population like corn lost in a field o’ daisies. You ’ave the stamp, lad, you may take my word. I’ll say the Hervey is blurred a bit by the Chudleigh, an’ given a choice, a stranger might say you were more Chudleigh than Hervey; but give ’im a chance to say you’re both, and ’e’ll agree you could be nothin’ else.”

  “Will you shut up?”

  “Ay, lad. … I know Lib Chudleigh got herself some sly kind of divorcement but surely that can’t alter your fortunes; seed is seed. Ah now, she’s got ’erself top o’ the ’eap, eh? Since the Duke died. Now there’s a fortune could drop three Ickworths into the ruddy Channel and never miss ’em. … But ’oo knows, tides an’ changes in humans bein’ what they are; for you to link the Kingston properties wi’ th’ Bristol ain’t so ruddy farfetched as the idea of snaffling off a dead Devonshire title. I mind—”

  “Now you listen to me,” snapped Lance as they rounded the bend of the brook and approached his footbridge, “I want no more chuntering and maundering out of you. I’m sick of listening to it. Do you tell me one thing and one thing only; why didn’t you tell me all this years ago?”

  “Coo. You don’t ’ave to ask me such a question. And you don’t ’ave to jump salty at me neither.”

  “Never mind that. I’m asking you.”

  “I am telling it to you, Lanky, the very instant it can do you a pennyworth o’ good.”

  “Who in hell are you to decide what’s good and what’s not good for me? How do you know what I might have done years back, knowing this? or what Barrowbridge might have done? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Angry in his turn, Piggott wheezed, “Because, damn ye, if I’ve to spell it out: ye don’t—unless you must—ye don’t tell a child, nor tell a man, that ’is mother’s a hoor!”

  “You tell this child!” screamed Lance, smashing himself on the chest. He was so angry he drooled. “God damn you for an interfering old pig! What did you keep me around you for all those years—to dream you were the father of one of your betters? Did that make you feel like part of a gentleman instead of altogether a Bermondsey fen rat? How do you excuse yourself for putting me out to slavery with Barrowbridge when all the while I might have been at Harrow or abroad with a tutor, learning to speak like a gentleman from gentlemen instead of from some strumous old swine in the second storey of a filthy warren … ay, and sweeping, by God, by God!” he shouted, “and chamber pots! Ay, Lanky, slide me yon chamber, then get thee out to Surrey to some foreclosed manor land and have a threadbare poacher teach you to shoot grouse like a gentleman so you’ll know how an M.P. does it on the twelfth of August … and all the while it might’ve been falconry for me, and fencing. Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Piggott, you’d’ve served me better had you sold me to the Tripolitanians as a bloody slave! What for? What for? Have you a slice of my mother’s humor; d’ye like to see a body squirm and suffer while you alone know how far he has fallen, and you with a heel in his face? Why? Why? Did ye dream I’d one day be the master of great estates and fit you with a diamond collar and old brandy for the rest of your days?”

  “Ah, lad … no, no … say no more. I raised ye for yersel’, because I loved ye, and I could not tell ye that your mother—”

  “She’s my mother, let me be the judge of that!” roared Lance. “What of my mother? Where is my mother today, and where am I? And for this I’m to buy a pasture and turn you out in it in your old age—for this knightly favor? Old man, I’d not give you a cup of water, not, by God, unless you were drowning.”

  “Ah,” the old man breathed. He shook his head blindly, fumbled at his eyes with his hands. “I feared to do it, I feared this. … Well then, Lanky, farewell, and God be with thee.”

  “And the devil with you!” and he heeled his horse and bounded over the bridge. He never looked back.

  All night long they sat before the fire, Lance Captain Courtenay, petty squire; Lancaster Higger-Piggott, coachman’s brat; Lainston Hervey of Ickworth, aye, Bury St. Albans and the houses of Parliament; Chudleigh-Hervey, libertine, sweeping up and down the Continent in the grand manner, sampling sins. There they sat, one, the other, two of them, three, the lowly worshiping the highborn and the highest utterly despising the rest. Back and back, round and back again he went, they went, circling and changing one with the others in a weary, angry de Coverly … then for a moment there would be a young man alone in a draughty hall, up for a bit of firewood to hurl into the flames. At times he would glare furiously upward to a gimlet-hole high in the wall; he would not go up there, not now.

  He plotted and planned and discarded and planned again, until fatigue sucked away a part of his sanity and he began to have visions, visions of the hunt, the masquerade, the pageantry of court … a vision of visions, his mother, young, clad in a transparent web, prostrating herself at his feet in a dying-swan curtsey, and he confronting her with his full knowledge of her machinations, her huge laughter at the lad she had caused to bastardize himself. You laughed eh, milady? Then laugh now! I’ll have you sweeping for me, Mother, slide me yon chamber! Miss Axelrood, do you hand me yon wee box of stinking salve, that I may salute my dear mother. A great square man in admiral’s court regalia: and the kneeling figure moans: Augustus! Augustus, forgive me: Take all I have! and the admiral: My son, my long lost son, Take mine, take hers, take all.

  Lance shook himself awake—or not awake, for the fugue had not been sleep. He drew all the shades and shapes and colored lights of his fantasies down to a hard bright white point of fury, and, Duchess, he said with all his heart and mind, you will pay me for this.

  At that point he was inspired. First, he thought rapidly, Lainst
on, and the parish record, truly entered so that none can say it is not the clear genuine record of the marriage of Augustus John Hervey to Elizabeth Chudleigh. Thence to the one higher body than the ecclesiastical court, and its piddling jactitation of marriage: to Parliament with the parish record. Then what? Ah, then the Hervey marriage must still exist, and he, Lance, is legitimate again; ay, and Elizabeth Chudleigh is a bigamist! (But the Duke is dead!) no matter, no matter; the law concerned itself with the first husband, and he lived, he lived—it was bigamy, just for the act of marriage to the Duke of Kingston. (But she is not in England: may never be.) Then Parliament marks her as a fugitive, tries her in absentia, and since her second marriage is now the nullity, she is no longer a duchess; her properties fall to the Crown. (But that’s not the place for such properties, out of reach.) Then how …

  Inspired, inspired!

  In the public interest, anyone might bring this suit. But there was a man who had a special interest—a man who stood to inherit the Kingston properties, though not the title not being de corpore suo … Evelyn Meadows, who ate out of his hand—he would bring the suit! He had the right, even the duty.

  Lance leaned back and rubbed his hands together rapidly, a distinctive Barrowbridge gesture.

  Now then. What of the Bristol matter—what of his father, Augustus John Hervey, the new Earl?

  He, Lance, had forced Augustus Hervey into collusion and perjury in the jactitation action. Could these not be used against him?

  … But no; he did not know of Lance, could not know he was involved in the matter. The bigamy trial would make a laughingstock of this third Earl of Bristol; if he never found out that Lance had anything to do with either case, he could not blame him; if in his disgrace from collusion and cuckoldry, perjury and persiflage, his young son appeared out of limbo to be at his side, to honor and comfort him, to give his declining years the son he had never had … yes, and he with the Hervey stamp on his features and the Chudleigh certification to blur it, as the old man had said—why, he couldn’t fail!

  And Chudleigh, old, disgraced at last, duchess no longer, countess never, would sink away into the mire with her transparent costume as a winding-sheet; and young Meadows would have the Kingston treasures, and could only be grateful …

  And he would marry Elaine, eldest daughter and heir of Sir Gregory Eustace, and in time add her fortune to the Bristol estates …

  … And if he wanted something to do with his busy clever mind thereafter, why not pursue the Courtenay earldom as well?

  He laughed and clapped his hands together, rose and teetered happily on his toes at the window.

  It was snowing now, restfully, quietly, all’s well with the world. Patterns of rime flaked the window-light, to show how cold it had become. The first dawn greyed the east and turned the hedgerows into steel-graved glyphs on the snow.

  Cold … “God!” he cried, coming to his senses, “Piggott!”

  He flung on his heavy things and banged out of the house, round to the stables. He saddled, mounted, his hands, his mind a blur of eagerness and content with life. He galloped round the bowling green and over the footbridge, stopped a moment at the path.

  He wouldn’t have gone up—there’s only Minden. He’ll have gone down, to the Tatsfield road.

  He spurred his horse. His blood sang in the cold air. His fatigue was gone with his hatred; he was alive and certain.

  And he hadn’t far to go. Piggott’s horse stood athwart the path, tethered to a poplar, stamping and rheumy with cold and inaction. Nearby, his back against the heavy hedge, sat Piggott. He was not lolling nor lying, nor hunched, as a man might be when afraid. He sat with his feet apart and his hands on his knees, calmly waiting. His face was neither sad nor angry, nor was it content; it too was merely waiting, the face of a man of patience who knows not how long it may be before he is met. He was looking directly at Lance, and he was stone-dead.

  Lance slipped off his horse and fell to his knees. “Piggott!” he cried in a great voice, and it echoed and echoed away over the Downs.

  “Ah, God help me, what have I done?” he moaned, and, “Look, God, look what I’ve done: I’ve gone and killed my best witness.”

  12.

  “IT’S LIKE BEING BORN again, sir!”

  “Well, you’ve been gestating long enough in the womb of London town,” said Barrowbridge. He was feebler now, and hard to hear when one wasn’t used to him; but then, one was. The old mind, however, was crisp and clear, though subject to surprisingly sudden fits of slumber, sometimes only a minute or two long. He had no longer any particular sleep period, but read and slept, slept and thought, talked and slept as it came to him. “Sit you down and tell me all you’ve done, lad … my, you look as if you’d paid sixpence for a ruby and found it to be a diamond.”

  “ ’Twas threepence, sir, and the diamond big as your head,” said Lance exultantly. “Well, I’ve been to see our old friend Meadows.” He laughed.

  “Tried to scalp ye, I’ll warrant.”

  “Ah no, he’s over that. He’s living in two rooms over a tannery in Camden Town and searching for the meaning of things.”

  “On what road?”

  “He says all the universe and all the years are but a hand’s breadth away from us, and do you care to see all of it at a glance, you need only open the casement.” He laughed. “To open this window, you place yourself in a small room with dark hangings and no air, light a brazier, throw on some dried leaves and lie down before it until you are half-dead with the smoke from it, and in this condition all knowledge is at your disposal. He finds it impossible to recall what the knowledge is after he comes out of it, but he’s sure he recognizes it at the time and goes back and back after it. He forgets to eat—perhaps he means not to; he did say that eating and sweating and such intrude upon the higher self—and he never goes out but to fetch more leaves from the lascars down at the docks. Ganja, they call it, ‘wisdom weed.’ It smells like old rope and catnip.

  “I thought I’d find him too stupefied to do anything with, thinking of opium and such, but he surprised me. His thinking is wild as ever, but perfectly clear—perhaps more so, as I discovered when I got him decently dressed and over to a private room at the Fish and Staff and packed him full of good English mutton and ale, which he ate submissively enough but uncaring. A strange thing, his body starving and his mind not knowing it.

  “I explained to him that it was in his power to right the wrongs done him, his cousin Charles, and his dead uncle Evelyn Pierrepont, the Duke of Kingston. I don’t know that righting wrongs, even wrongs done to him, is a subject of interest to the lad, but the pacification of his tormentors definitely is, and I think the idea of gaining the approval of his disgusted cousin Charles pleases him very much. Riches for himself, vengeance against that—that very blight of a woman—these seem not to reach him, but when I painted him a picture of Charles wringing his hand and saying ‘Well done!’ why, he wept onto his mutton chops. And when I explained to him that the action I had in mind would require nothing from him but his signature upon various papers and that he probably would not need to testify or appear—for the entire case rests on documentary evidence—why, he was overjoyed.”

  “And did he not question you as to your interest in the affair?”

  “Not he. I do believe he lives in a world populated by but three classes of people: those who do things to him, those who do things for him, and those who leave him alone. The last are the ones he likes the most, and his greatest wish is to include all humankind in it. Any action which adds the class of persecutors to it is an action he favors. As to the few who do things for him, he feels humble and unworthy and grateful. If he thinks about my motives at all, it is only to regard me as a mystifyingly clever chap who goes about righting wrongs out of the greatness of his heart, using methods he would not presume to understand.” He laughed.

  “Mind you never begin to see yourself in that light,” Barrowbridge cautioned. “And so he agreed, eh?”

&nb
sp; “That he did, and then and there signed identifications of self and total charges, and I carried him back to his catnip temple. I then did all necessary things at the Court and the Office of the Clerk, Lord’s. The suit is begun, even now a rider is off to Lainston to take in charge the parish record for 1744, and a package is being made of the Duke’s marriage records, the proceedings at the suit for jactitation, and everything else relevant. Including, of course, a despatch of information to the Duchess and a command to return, which she won’t do.”

  “Have you yourself signed anything?”

  “Not a dot. I’ve a faceless little chap called Briggs, just barely a member of the bar, to send my messengers about. He’ll voice everything on behalf of Evelyn Meadows.”

  “Ay, that was wise. The new Earl of Bristol isn’t going to be happy about this, testifying before the House of Lords—to which he’s only now had entry—that after those years of being cuckolded he did collude and perjure to remove the nuisance. Should you be identified with such a humiliation, you’ll be hard put to it to sidle up to him and say, ‘Love me, Da.’ ”

  “He’ll not find out. How could he?”

  “Just you take care. … And so the case is to come up?”

  “It couldn’t be stopped now. Her Grace Elizabeth, Duchess of Kingston shall be summoned to stand trial for bigamy, will certainly refuse, will be tried in absentia and certainly found guilty.”

  “Lad, don’t make a habit of using the word ‘certainly.’ But I do think you’re right. And what else do you prophesy?”

  “The Kingston marriage must be voided by the verdict, and her title with it. The title becomes extinct, the estate goes to the cousins Meadows, the now-valid marriage to the Earl o’ Bristol succumbs to a divorce for adultery which must be brought and shall be granted—ay, and at a stroke—and at the end we have a crushed and sorry Bristol to be consoled by a dutiful son, and,” he said slowly and with the greatest pleasure, “an obliterated Elizabeth Chudleigh.”