I, Libertine

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Do ye hate her so much?” Barrowbridge asked.

  Lance answered with a sound, a snort, which said more about hatred and scorn than Alexander Pope could in a lifetime.

  “Ay,” said Barrowbridge, nodding as if to a statement. Then, “So far, lad, so good; things should indeed come as you say. She married Bristol and you have the proof; she married Kingston; between the two there is merely a rare and perjurious action. ’Tis bigamy and no mistake, and she must be guilty. As to the Earl of Bristol, I credit ye with a fine insight. Were ye to go to him now with no proof ’o yerself but your Hervey’s face and your Chudleigh schemes, he’d jettison you today as he did when you were but an unwanted proof of an unwanted circumstance. But appear, and stand by him, when he’s sick with humiliation, call him father and honour him, and I do believe you can win him over. … ’Tis a pity you haven’t a speck more substance, though. Long-lost son or no, you’re still a penniless claimant to a sizable estate.”

  “But I’ve thought of that!” cried Lance, his exultation returning. “What if my wife were daughter of a baronet, with a nice little holding and a bit of gold coming to her?”

  “Ah—ha!” said the old man appreciatively. “I see what you’re up to, ye sly scamp. You wouldn’t marry Miss Eustace to elevate yourself to the level of the Gregorys, but you would to elevate the Gregorys to the level of earls!”

  “Or so it will seem. But the marriage will be for love, and the elevation will be my secret until the time comes to come to the aid of yon poor broken Earl.”

  “You’re a credit to all my wickedness,” chuckled the old man. “Tell me now what I needn’t ask—why did you proceed with all this before asking my thoughts?”

  “Have I done any of it wrong?”

  “Did I not say I needn’t ask? … Na, you’re right all along, fiendishly so. Eh!” He closed his eyes for a space, in that swift sleeping of his. Lance waited patiently. With his eyes still closed, Barrowbridge said, “I suppose I was trying to make you say you needed me no longer. Now why should I want to hear that?”

  “Ah, sir!” cried Lance, but the old man did not move again, nor speak, so he shrugged and left, smiling.

  As always, he was warmly received at Minden, Bella and Barbara dancing about him and plaguing him with little attentions until shooed away by Elaine, and Sir Gregory emerging from centuries past to grant a sherry and a moment’s conversation to the younger man. “And how do you fare with the work, sir?”

  Sir Gregory gave a pleased grunt. “Bit proud of it. Never done before, what? Decent history of Rome. Almost finished. Deuced lot of work. Years. Well, worth it. What?”

  “I picked up something that might be a help, sir. Source, y’know. This chap’s done a bit of research, I think,” and he handed over the just-published quarto he had picked up in London. “Three more volumes being printed now; I’ve ordered them for you.”

  “I say, good of you. Hm, yes,” said the baronet, peering at the book, turning it over, opening, leafing. “Yes indeed. Look this over, what?” and off he went into his sanctum again. Bella, the obedient one, had already towed Barbara away, and he was alone with Elaine. She smiled and came close. “You’re so good to Father.”

  “And why not? Everyone should be.”

  “What was the book?”

  “Oh … something they’re all chatting about in the City just now. Haven’t looked at it myself, but since it concerns Rome and so on, I thought he might like it. Chap called Givens … uh, Gibbon, yes. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But enough of dead things, my dear.” He took her hand and they sat together on the sofa. She was in pink this evening, such a pink as should have gone badly with her red-gold (or gold-red) hair, but which was enchanting instead. She had an extraordinarily fine neck, he noticed for the first time. As she turned her face away and down, he caressed with his eyes the clean straight lines of the tendons to their hollowed junction below her throat, and the pink petal of ear so shyly hidden near the upper end. He reached out with his free hand and touched the ear. She did not move away but closed her eyes, so that the lashes lay right down on her cheek.

  “I think,” he said in a voice full of astonishment, “that I have never seen you before.”

  Not looking at him, she said, “What has happened to make you see?”

  He laughed, mostly at the thought of telling her what was happening. “I’ve been dreaming,” he said, “and I think my dreams will come true.”

  “Who is in your dreams?”

  “Ah … fine folk. Lands and castles and ships of gold.” He looked up through the ceiling at some heaven of his own and chuckled richly. “Brocades and masquerades and a great stable of blooded nags …”

  He was finished, and she made a little disappointed sound, but turned to him and smiled. “I’m glad the dreams please you so.

  “Once upon a time,” he said suddenly, warmly, taking her other hand, “there was a young prince who was put under a spell by an ugly old witch. And it made him invisible. He walked about and did things, and went to places and saw things, and felt that he was alive; but really, you know, he wasn’t, because when anyone looked his way they saw … nobody, just nobody.”

  “Is there a princess?”

  “Oh, most certainly there’s a princess. She had golden hair, and her eyes—her eyes—”

  “What of her eyes?”

  “A wonderful thing: they were both exactly the same color.”

  “Oh …” she said petulantly, and in mock anger, snatched away her hands; but she put them right back.

  “And the prince went one day and saw that the wicked old witch had lands and treasures and castles and—all the things I was dreaming about. And so he made a great magic when the old witch wasn’t looking, and poof! she was punished and no one ever heard of her again, and so he took all her lands and castles and everyone could see him.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t like your dream.”

  “Why not? It’s a lovely one!”

  “It hasn’t anything about the princess.”

  “But he married the princess!”

  “Did he?”

  “Doesn’t that please you?”

  “I expect it does, all right. … He was greedy.”

  He laughed immoderately. “Ay, that he was. And a good thing too, else he’d still be a nobody.” He looked at her and sobered. “Can’t it please you? What shall I add to it to make it please you, Elaine?”

  “I’m silly,” she said, and tried to laugh lightly, making instead two silly little squeaks. At that she blushed, and again he had this strange sensation of never having seen her before.

  “Tell me,” he begged.

  “Oh-h … I thought the princess would love him truly, and one day she would wish for a prince, and kiss her wish, and poof! there he would be, right by her where he had been all along.”

  A most amazing sensation came to him. It felt like shame, and if it was, he was incapable of understanding why. It certainly felt like it. He pressed it away and asked tolerantly, “How do you kiss a wish?”

  “I don’t know. I expect you just—”

  What happened? What happened? It was a tease, a small thing, a nothing, a passe-tiempe, and she closing her eyes and her lips to show him some … childish … something … and this blaze, this coruscation, arms full of, mouth full of, break, burst, spill, crash, silence—

  Breathe.

  God, he would say, but God was a word and he could not say a word. He held her and stroked the nape of her neck while she cried.

  She sat up suddenly and looked at him, and he said a very strange thing. He said, “I was fourteen in the garret and a thousand times since, and never this, not once.” He saw in her eyes a knowledge of what he meant, though he himself hardly knew; the knowledge he saw in her eyes was past in an instant; it seemed like the knowledge Meadows had spoken about, that he found in his draped fuming room, known utterly at the time and inexpressible
thereafter.

  She put her hand on his mouth, and took it away, and put her other hand to make a cup on her lap. She sat looking down into it while he rose quietly and left without a word.

  All the way back to Featherfront he looked up at new stars with new eyes, and the only articulate thought he could command in all that time was, “But … a kiss did that?”

  On the eve of the trial he went to see the lawyer Briggs, and secured copies of each indenture, affidavit, certificate and instrument pertaining to the action, and carried them all home for Barrowbridge’s inspection. He was followed from London by two horsemen, which was unpleasant; once he told himself but I’m not invisible any more and was irritated at the thought: this was no time for whimsy; and then he began to think they were highwaymen, which made him think of Piggott, which unaccountably angered him even more. But when he turned in at the path, and climbed the first slope, he looked back and saw them canter past, going straight on toward Tatsfield, and then he laughed at himself for a fool and forgot the matter.

  This was a time for happy moments; Barrowbridge gave him one after he had seen the papers. It was only a grunt and a shake of the head; he had not a word to change nor a suggestion to make; just a caution: “Do not let a whisper of your part in this get to the Earl o’ Bristol, and you’ve not a thing to fear.” Suddenly he flung the papers upward with a shadow of his old great shout, and, “Lord!” he cried, “what a structure! What a retribution! You could rack the old bitch and never hurt her so much as this! And all so safe, and all without her even daring to defend herself!” He looked at Lance with fond amaze. “I lie here sometimes and wonder what I’ve been spared for, Lanky, for by rights I should have died when I said I did, in Bermondsey. I’ll never think that again; I’ve lived for this, and I’m happy.”

  Lance was embarrassed. “Ah …” he said, shy as a pipit. “Meadows thinks I’m put here to make people happy, too.”

  The old man chuckled, then: “Ah yes—Meadows. Have you a plan for Meadows? ’Twould be a shame to waste all the Kingston estates on him.”

  “Oh … I shall scan them; mayhap there’ll be a town house or a bit of a manor which I might wistfully covet and he might gratefully deed me. He will have his opportunity.”

  “If wistful you must be, let it be for lack of a block of high rentals ’round Grosvenor.”

  “Mr. Barrowbridge,” Lance said abruptly, “I’m in love.”

  “Tchah!”

  “I am, sir. Truly.”

  “The blind archer at last … d’ye know what Cupid confers on his victims, Lanky?”

  “Madness, they say,” smiled Lance.

  “Blindness, Lanky. His own blindness.”

  “But it’s Miss Eustace, sir. Don’t you agree that a linkage with—”

  “ ’Tis not the girl I object to, nor the plan. They’re both exquisite. … A strange thing about the wonderful Jesuit, Balthazar Gracian, is that his Oraculo contains not a single maxim about love and courtship. In a specialist on worldly wisdom this seems a dreadful oversight, but the penetrating mind will discover that it is not. It is, indeed, the greatest part of his wisdom.”

  “How so?”

  “Why, it is his way of saying that the wise think so little of love that they think of it not at all. If I presumed to add a maxim to the Oraculo on the subject, explaining this, I would say—He closed his eyes and slept, or seemed to sleep. Then he opened them and continued, “—would say When considering marriage, look first for love, and if it is absent, proceed. The moth, in a room of a thousand lights, sleeps safe on an unlit candle.”

  Shocked, Lance cried, “Why, she’s the most—” But Barrowbridge was asleep.

  Lance gathered up the papers and went away.

  A shepherd’s crook and a bony sturgeon swung in the bright noon sun over the entrance to the Fish and Staff. And it was full of fine folk on such a fine day, eating the splendid food and drinking the good ale and old brandy. ’Tis a day of largesse, thought Lance, for the first time in his life tossing a silver sixpence to a beggar. ’Tis a day of brightness and certainty, marred only by one’s inability to be a fly on the wall of the House of Lords, watching the progress of humiliation, seeing the pen strokes sending disaster away to Italy and the enemy, searching the newest Earl’s face as it crumbled under the blows and was softened for the aid and comfort he would build for it as meticulously as he had designed these wounds.

  He paused and looked down the street where a corner of Parliament toasted in the sun. Was it started? Was it over? Would it take all day, and adjourn, and take tomorrow, while the business of America waited, while the disasters of Rockingham, the stubbornness of George III, the balanced forcefulness of Pitt and the balance it forced from Fox—would all these matters wait on him through today … through the week? Ah Parliament, he exulted, the next time I sway you, you’ll know well it’s I. He would sit with the Prime Minister over a glass of port one day, he thought, and he would say Remember the day back in ’76, and the trial of the false Duchess of Kingston? You were there, were you, and saw it. Ha ha! Now let me tell you what really happened.

  From the direction of Parliament came a great closed coach, yellow, struck golden in the sunlight. I shall ride in such a carriage. He stood on the walk before the Fish and Staff and watched it come.

  From his left he heard his name called. He turned. From the Fleet Street corner came a lady and a—why, it was Sir Gregory Eustace! And in a pale blue sacque, Elaine! He raised his hand, and to his amazement saw the baronet stop dead, shaking his fist. He saw Elaine turn to her father, clasp her hands anxiously, then suddenly run from him, to come tripping down the street toward Lance, holding out her arms.

  From his right he heard his name called. He whirled. The great coach was almost opposite now. Its door swung wide, and its passenger held out an imperious bejeweled hand to him.

  He turned again. Elaine’s face was pink with exertion and something else; it was twisted as a face so fair and dear should never be. He took a step toward her, but, from across the road: “Here!” in as chilling, as self-confident a command as had been flung at him since the early days with Barrowbridge.

  Spellbound, he stepped off the curb and crossed the road, and it was as if fear had been there all his life, not born of the moment at all; fear curled tighter in him than the spiral of a butterfly’s tongue, fear now springing out and across his belly slashing him inwardly. For he knew that face. Reflexively he took the extended hand. “Milady!”

  “Say ‘Your Grace.’ ”

  “Your Grace … ” he said faintly. Because he held the hand, and because one did, one must—he kissed it.

  Behind him, on the walk; anguished: “Lance!”

  From the coach: “Get in … son.”

  He got in the coach.

  The door slammed and the wheels rumbled. With the sound, the near-cataleptic numbness left him and the fear took over, drying his mouth, capturing his lips and cheeks, knotting his stomach with a great empty ache. So crouched he there, his eyes drawn down to glistening slits as through their squeezed captured tears they tried to see the magnificent menace seated opposite. Faintly, “Lance!” came through the window unheard, a glimpse of pale blue unseen; then the world was shrunk to these rumbling walls and the presence of terror seated so close that it touched him knee to knee.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said the Duchess.

  His vision cleared and at last he saw her.

  He wished he could see a Hervey now, so that he could understand the admixture. But that was a detail; his mirror henceforth could tell him who his mother was.

  She said, “I confess, this is a moment I’ve dreamed of since I was summoned, and in the dream you have crawled, you have wept, you have fled, you have fainted. I never thought to find you smiling.”

  He said nothing.

  “Perhaps Lily was right in her preoccupation. Does it please you to learn that she would speak of you daily if I permitted it; that she has written you seven letters which
I have had to intercept? … I should listen more to Lily.”

  She had a strange voice. Different … different how? Different from what one would expect. He knew her as resourceful and shrewd; he had coupled softness, mellifluousness with these. Therefore he did not expect this brassy quality. Her voice was coarse as a Bermondsey barmaid’s, her diction pure as an archbishop’s. It shocked, it transfixed. She said, “Are you going to persist in using one of my own best tactics, and remain silent until you can command the situation?”

  He bent his head until his lips were in his puffed scarf, and tried to wet them with his tongue. It was too soon.

  She observed this sharply and made a mistake. “Very well, then—smile. I shall give you the situation, exactly as it is, and defy you to command it.

  “I am just come from Lords’. It is over—all over. It took under two hours. You’re a fool, boy. You’re the cleverest fool I think I’ve ever known, and there may be hope for you. And perhaps ignorance of the most important piece in this pattern does not quite qualify you as a fool; I’ll give you that.

  “You did not know because you could not what passed between me and Bath in the old days, between me and Hamilton, ay, and Winchester and Bishop Hervey—ha! even Bath was astonished to find out about him! You don’t know what passed between us, and you couldn’t know what was left.

  “You could have known, however, how they all feel about Augie—I should say, the Earl of Bristol, your honored father. Ah, you should have found out about that first! … Perhaps you are a fool after all.

  “Know, then, that I walked into Lords’ at ten of the clock this morning after quite the busiest two days of a very busy life. And whom should I see first but my dear old cockscomb Bath, surly and gout-ridden but with the old devil still alight in his eyes.” She chuckled. “ ‘It’s in camera, old girl,’ says he, and takes my arm, ‘Come along with me, and, bless you, it’s good to see you again.’