Hugh Kenrick

by Edward Cline

  When James II abdicated the throne under pressure from the Whigs and his nephew William (Prince of Orange and husband of Mary, James’s daughter), the Earl of Danvers lobbied vigorously among the lords and members of the London Convention—there was no sitting Parliament, as there was no king to call one—to have William’s sovereignty legitimized. For this work, Kenrick was appointed to the Board of Trade, and made a lieutenant surveyor of the Cinque Ports.

  Clearly, it had been established as a Kenrick family tradition not to risk death, banishment, or insecurity for anything so insubstantial as a belief or a principle.

  “Mine has been an unscrupulous family,” remarked eight-year-old Hugh Kenrick to his tutor, who had been assigned the task of teaching the boy his family’s history. The tutor frowned; nothing in his dry recitation of the chronicle could have been interpreted as judgmental. “You may say that, sir,” he said. “I may not.” He paused. “What causes you to reach such an…opinion?”

  “My uncle often gets drunk at dinner and talks. And I hear things. And I don’t like the men I see in the portraits in the hallways. You provided me with information. I formed an opinion of it.”

  “I see,” said the tutor. “Well, I would advise you not to communicate that opinion to the Earl.”

  “I shall restore the family’s honor,” said the boy thoughtfully. “No. I shall introduce it to the family, for the first time.”

  “Your father is an honorable man,” broached the tutor, hoping that he was not inferring that the boy’s uncle was in any way dishonorable.

  “Yes,” answered Hugh Kenrick tentatively. “Perhaps he is.”

  The boy seemed to be reserving an opinion on his father. Still, the tutor decided to drop the subject and move on to the boy’s arithmetic lessons. This kind of talk had a way of reaching the wrong ears, and he could not afford the risk of offending the Earl.

  The Earl’s mansion was a great house of granite, roughly shaped in the form of an H, and sat in the middle of ten acres of landscaped grounds. The Earl and Countess and their retainers occupied the eastern half of the H, and his brother and family the western. The segment connecting the two parts contained the offices, libraries, and studies of the brothers. The facade of the eastern length was the front of the mansion, serviced by an immaculately kept cobblestone road a mile in length, flanked by Italian cypresses, which ended in an oval courtyard decorated with a fountain and copies of Roman statues.

  The Kenrick brothers were born at Danvers, the Earl three years before his brother, Garnet. Garnet Kenrick was nominally a baron, but neither used nor advertised the title. They did not resemble each other in the least; local gossip had it that they did not share the same father, for while the previous Earl was a bookish man and a model husband—an anomaly in the Kenrick tradition—his wife indulged her fancies for dashing young officers and the vigorous sons of neighboring nobility. The Earl bridled at the notion that his mother was anything but noble and virtuous, and had whipped and banished from Danvers any servant caught repeating the rumor. He had not liked his parents, but that was another issue.

  Against his will, the annoying canker of a suspicion sat in the back of his mind that perhaps there was some truth in the forbidden gossip. It was inflamed by boyhood memories of the odd, surreptitious behavior of his fair mother and her gentlemen visitors, especially when his father was away on business or had locked himself in his library to write another tract. If it was in the least true, then it was entirely true, and either he had no legal claim to the title, and his brother had, or his brother had no claim to his, which would leave the earl without a successor. Or, much worse, neither of them had a claim to any title at all. The letters-patent signed by James I specified that, in the event there was no male issue to assume the title and take possession of Danvers, the reigning sovereign had the right to appoint a new earl. The specter of strangers dispossessing the Kenricks haunted Basil Kenrick’s mind and mocked his sense of permanence and posterity. But that was only when melancholy affected his thinking; he allowed himself no further thought on this subject beyond these simple but terrifying syllogisms.

  Garnet Kenrick also harbored the same suspicions, but did not permit them to fester in his mind. It was one of the few subjects he and his brother did not discuss; it was a gentlemen’s understanding not to be named. There had been no instances of attempted blackmail. He knew that their father had had to purchase the silence that surrounded a handful of his and Basil’s youthful indiscretions, but there was otherwise no potential for scandal.

  The Danvers servants, among themselves, discreetly referred to the brothers as “Lord Fox” and “Baron Box.” The Earl was tall and thin almost to the point of emaciation, and had a saturnine face that no one ever expected to see smile. He moved quietly, like a ghost, down his mansion’s halls and through his garden paths, and had the unnerving habit of speaking before anyone knew he was present. Garnet Kenrick was also tall, but moved with a robust energy and a sense of purpose. His face was hard, broad, and angular. He smiled with an unaffected benevolence uncommon among the nobility then. He could share a joke with the servants, on occasion solicited their views on practical matters, and generally treated the Earl’s staff with a respectful humanity that granted them some dignity; a notion utterly alien to his brother’s sensibilities.

  While Basil Kenrick was an earl, and had a keen, aggressive interest in preserving and extending the influence of his rank, he had not much bothered to develop the faculty for the task. A nobleman, he had been taught, could not be expected to demean himself with the physical and mental labor required to maintain his rank. “We wear swords and finery, young Basil,” his father had once told him. “It is not within the definition of a gentleman or a lord to soil his hands or his soul in the making of these or any other things.” This attitude did not apply to the writing of books. Basil’s father authored many tracts on such subjects as The Necessity and Superiority of Nobility, The Clergy’s Duties as the Sovereign’s Spiritual Watchmen and Criers, and The Planning and Pleasure of Private Parks in a Search for Eden, with Epistles and Analogies on the Flora of the Christian Soul. The vicar of St. Quarrell’s, the parish church, borrowed liberally from the Earl’s many published tracts for his services. For this flattery, the parish of Danvers was richly endowed by the family. It is no mean compliment to have one’s scrivenings treated on a par with Scripture. Basil Kenrick viewed his father’s authorship of the tracts on his study shelves with respectful, sometimes fearful awe, superstitiously believing that the old Earl had been bequeathed with a gift of moral knowledge quite beyond his own ken.

  The death of his wife from pneumonia affected the old Earl in a strange way. It was as though her passing dissolved his self-imposed bonds of mature respectability, and he was seized by all the vices he had once inveighed against. He abruptly abandoned his dilettantish excursions into theology and moral philosophy and became as profligate and promiscuous as the late Countess. He gambled away enormous sums at the gaming tables and in the cock-fight dens in London. He became a regular patron of the Folly, a floating brothel on the Thames, and once bought each of its whores a new broadcloth gown, a pair of silver slippers, and a Dutch watch. He was rarely seen entering his once precious library, except on ill-concealed trysts with a servant girl or one of the more notorious local baronesses. He began to drink the wine cellar dry, and to eat more at one meal than a servant did in a week. His doctor could only attribute his embarrassing behavior to a “choleric imbalance of mental fluids caused by grief for the late Countess.” He followed his wife into the family burial vault in St. Quarrell’s church a mere three years later, having died under scandalous circumstances in a Weymouth inn. His carefree mode of living brought the family to the brink of financial ruin.

  Basil Kenrick left the task of sustaining Danvers to his brother, who did not share their father’s once-chaste sense of aristocracy. Garnet Kenrick wished he had been able to lead a life independent of his older brother. But he gravitated to a career
in commerce, chiefly because, on their father’s death, he was the only one capable of sorting out the financial shambles left behind. It was not a chosen career, but it consumed his time and immediate interest, and so it became his career. His late grandfather’s connections on the Board of Trade, and the still thriving merchant company from his great-grandfather’s day, gave him an edge and allowed him to compensate for his brother’s occasional extravagances. He managed the Earl’s business from Danvers and traveled frequently between there and the family company’s offices in Poole, Weymouth, Bristol, and London.

  The Earl left his brother alone in business matters, but harbored a secret envy of him for being able to master them, coupled with a peevish condescension. He resented the special, peer-like relationship Garnet granted to his business associates and even sea captains. Garnet Kenrick did not think himself indefinably superior to anyone.

  The Earl had another reason to distance himself from his brother: Garnet and his wife had children, while he had none. He and his wife, the Countess, almost had one—who would have been heir to the title—but the child was stillborn, and the Countess could produce no more. This was a closely kept secret. Further, Effney, his brother’s wife, mother of a son and a daughter, was a gracious, amiable woman who also lacked airs and whose handsomeness would endure well past her child-bearing years. The Earl’s wife, on the other hand, had allowed herself to grow fat, shrewish, and tyrannical. The Earl was bitterly aware of his wife’s shortcomings, but she was the Countess of Danvers, and he would brook no insolence from anyone about her.

  Once, at a ball he had thrown years ago, he overheard a young squire say to his companion, “The Lady Danvers, I know, is a painfully virtuous woman—virtuous, I dare say, from fear. She wouldn’t think of risking a son not of the Earl’s passion.” The companion had answered, “I own that this must be true, friend, but, you must credit it, her virtue is greatly assisted by her ungainly visage.” The Earl, surprising them in the midst of their laughter, had taken a cane to both men and beaten them bloody in front of the throng of horrified guests, and then had his servants toss them outside and down the mansion’s broad stone steps.

  Garnet Kenrick could not say that he hated his brother, or merely disliked him. Their frequent consultations on family and business matters were informal and cordial. No love grew between the siblings, and none was lost. Each regarded the other more as a family intimate than as a brother. The only evidence of a close link between them was that they addressed each other by first name. And the only personal feelings they would tactfully reveal to each other was that Garnet thought his brother overbearing and baselessly arrogant; Basil thought his brother déclassé, if not outright plebeian. “My dear Basil, had you the mind of Newton, and the physique of Ganymede, perhaps we should see the world running to you, instead of you after it.” “My dear Garnet, it does not do to behave as though you preferred to be familiar with the coachman’s daughter, rather than with those of your own station.” This was the limit the brothers would permit their curious, mutual acrimony to go.

  Basil Kenrick held the upper hand. He had power. His man in the Commons voted for every protective, mercantilist measure that came up for debate on the floor. The Earl himself was a peer, and journeyed to London, when it suited him, to sit at sessions of Lords.

  There was, however, one matter in which the brothers were in full agreement. The Baron saw to it that the family’s coffers were filled with the profits of smuggling into the country the very things the Earl voted to ensure were heavily taxed.

  Many smuggling gangs offered shares in their enterprises, which were bought anonymously by aristocrats and gentry along the south coast of England, from Land’s End to Ramsgate. Garnet had seen to it that the Earl owned shares in half the principal gangs in each coastal county, except Dorset, where the Earl controlled one of the biggest gangs. This gang was known as the Lobster Pots for its practice of landing, hiding, and transporting illegal goods in lobster pots deposited near the shore by Dutch, English, and French partners. The chief of the Lobster Pots, once a fisherman, owned a great house and twenty acres near Lulworth Cove, the gang’s main point of operation. The Earl had never met him and refused to meet him; the task of negotiating with commoners was left to his brother and his intermediaries.

  When the Skelly gang in Cornwall was crushed and its leader hanged in Falmouth, Garnet Kenrick tied a black satin ribbon around the neck of an Italian bronze statue of Hermes that loomed from a corner of his vast study desk. The Skelly gang had repeatedly rejected his careful overtures of partnership in the gang, and shown no interest in the capital he could have provided to expand their scope of activities. Still, he had admired the gang and its leader, and was sorry to see them vanish.

  The ribbon remained, after almost two years. The Baron was reluctant to remove it, for he had read many newspaper accounts of what was said and done at both Marvel and the trial in Falmouth. Something unusual had happened in these places, something significant, and he felt that if he removed the ribbon, the incidents would vanish into the anonymity of his mundane affairs, and he would never know what was special about them.

  When Basil Kenrick entered his brother’s study one evening, he cocked an eyebrow on sight of the black ribbon, and asked in challenging jest, “What means this eternal mourning, dear brother? Did Hermes fail to persuade Prometheus to coax Athena from Zeus’s head?” He took pleasure in needling his brother for what he considered over-sentimentality.

  “No, dear brother,” answered Garnet. “A son of Hermes failed to coax reason from the skulls of cretins. He was extinguished by them and, like Prometheus, chained to a rock.”

  Hermes was the Greek god of commerce, invention, cunning, and theft. The brothers, who had both excelled in classics at Eton, had years ago fallen into the habit of discussing the Skelly gang and related matters in these allusive terms, and Garnet, on an inspired whim, removed the statue from the dining hall and placed it in his study, “So that he might bless all the unimpeachable and crafty things done here in his name,” he had explained then.

  The Earl sniffed. “Prometheus was alive when he was chained. This son of Hermes is tarred and very dead.”

  “Still, someone’s liver is being eaten.”

  “Well, thank God for that, nevertheless. You will remember that some of the things said by these brigands at their trial were unsettling. Treasonable!”

  “Revolutionary,” remarked the Baron.

  “Leveling,” added the Earl with rancor. “This son of Hermes was shown mortal justice!”

  “But someday, I fear, Hermes himself will make an appeal to his friend Apollo, and then we shall know Olympian justice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That only the gods are immortal.” Garnet studied his brother for a moment. “Suppose they all went to the colonies—these sons and daughters of Hermes—and one day refused to deal with us mortals?”

  “We should teach them an awful lesson,” scoffed the Earl.

  Garnet shook his head. “One does not teach gods or their offspring lessons, dear brother.”

  Chapter 3: The Rebel

  EIGHT-YEAR-OLD HUGH SAT IN SHADOW NEAR HIS FATHER’S DESK, listening intently to their cryptic exchange, but understanding little of it. He recognized the names from his tutor’s classics instruction, but could not grasp how his father and uncle were using them. His uncle had nodded curtly to him when he came in, then ignored him.

  Hugh had been summoned here to receive advice from his father on how to best conduct himself at Eton College, where he was to be sent in a few days on the stern recommendation of the vicar of St. Quarrell’s.

  “He’s a bright lad,” the vicar had said to his parents a week ago during an unexpected call, “but he needs the tonic of society of boys his own age. He is too, well, imperial for his own and others’ good. I cannot help but imagine that he leads a somewhat solitary life here, in his home, and I believe that this has had an unfortunate effect on his moral character.�
�� The vicar paused to sip some of the sherry he had been offered, and continued his nervous pacing before the seated parents. “True, the masters of the College would better be able to impart the knowledge and mental exercise his keen mind needs and yearns for—better than a single tutor. At the same time, the rigors and demands of school life may work as an aqua regia on a peculiar, unattractive aspect of his character.”

  “What aspect?” Hugh’s mother had asked.

  “I would say rebelliousness, but then, every boy has that in him. This particular aspect defies category. I know only that if it is not restrained, it will bring him and you both a quantum of pain and unhappiness. A turn—perhaps even a career—at Eton may spare everyone concerned the nurturing of, well…an incubus.”

  The Baroness had gasped. Garnet Kenrick had risen from his chair. “Incubus? That’s a drastic term, Vicar,” he said with unusual sharpness. “You are speaking of our son!”

  “Indeed, I am,” replied the vicar with airy confidence. “It is the nearest thing I can think of.” Then he had lowered his voice and in menacing, embittered sympathy said, “Last Saturday, I saw him outside the vicarage, before he was to report to the curate for his Scriptures lesson, on his hands and knees on the church lawn, inviting a hare to eat some clover he had in his hand. The hare came and ate it, and he let it go off without trying to kill it, as other boys would have tried. As he should have tried.” He turned his back on his listeners. “Subsequently, he could not recite the Thirty-nine Articles of our Church, as he had been able to just the week before.”

  This was ominous news to the otherwise sane and practical parents, for in Dorset, hares were regarded as transformed witches.

  The vicar need not have said more. Still fresh in all their minds were the incidents, only days apart six months ago, involving two village children. One, the son of a cobbler, had cornered a hare and was bitten by it. He had gone mad, and after a terrifying sickness, died. Another, the daughter of a seamstress, had tried to cage an injured hare for a pet, and had also been bitten. She had gone mad, too, but did not die. Instead, she lost the power of speech and the ability to control her facial expressions. The magistrate of Danvers had forbidden her to appear in public, except in the company of her mother, and then only on a leash and wearing a hood.