Hugh Kenrick

by Edward Cline

  * * *

  Garnet Kenrick stood at his desk with his hands behind his back. Hugh stood before the desk, almost at attention. “You are not ill, sir, or light-headed,” said his father. “Explain yourself.”

  “It was not a willful act, Father,” said Hugh. “I simply forgot.”

  “How could you forget? After all the instruction, after all the examples set for you to see—how could you forget?”

  “He…did not prompt me to bow.”

  “What?”

  “I…saw nothing divine in him, sir. He is a noxious man.” Hugh paused. “It did not occur to me to bow.” He paused again, searching for words that would explain his actions even to himself. “He is not a great man. I did not feel compelled to bow, or to grant him any more courtesy than I would the village drunkard.” He shook his head. “Still, Father, it was not willful.”

  Garnet Kenrick paced in back of his desk. “You may disrespect the man, but not his station and status, which demand your immediate and unquestioning deference.” He paused. “You carry reason too far, Hugh. In this instance, reason applies to neither your action nor your estimation.”

  “It must apply to everything,” protested Hugh. “To things natural and made by man, and to men themselves.”

  The Baron shook his head. “In most things, Hugh. Not all. There are exceptions. Some very mighty exceptions. This is one of them.”

  “I cannot honor a man who I think has no reason to receive it…from me.”

  The Baron furled his brow. “We are speaking of the King’s son, Hugh, and of a prince! Of a hero of battles! Of a generous and magnanimous person! How can you compare His Grace—His Royal Highness, I might remind you—with a village drunkard?”

  “I saw a very ordinary man today, Father. No magic or special power or intelligence emanated from that person. That is why I did not bow.”

  The Baron shook his head in exasperation. “I told you, Hugh—this is beyond reason! As beyond it as is God, and to question the honor one must pay to the Duke is tantamount to questioning one’s devotion to God.” He raised a finger and shook it at his son. “Hugh, men have been imprisoned, tortured, deprived of their property and livelihoods for the kind of insolence you showed today! Can you not appreciate the gravity of the matter?”

  Hugh did not reply.

  His father paced in back of his desk for a moment, then pointed to a chair. “Sit down, Hugh.”

  Hugh obeyed.

  The Baron planted his hands flat on his desk. “Your uncle and I want you to write a note of apology to His Grace, which you are to read to him in our company. In it you will explain why you neglected to pay the respect due him—something, to the effect, that you were so struck by his presence that you…forgot. His Grace will continue on his journey the morning after tomorrow. Your apology must be ready for him by tomorrow midday.” He paused. “I cannot overemphasize the gravity which seems to have eluded you, Hugh. Apart from the gross infraction of courtesy, there is the matter that your uncle went to great lengths to arrange this visit, and great sums of money were spent preparing for it. There is more at jeopardy here than our standing or His Grace’s offended honor.”

  Hugh at first felt an icy shot of fear, then a strange aura of calm. He looked up at his father. “I cannot author an apology, Father.”

  The Baron’s jaw dropped. “What did you say?”

  “I cannot author such an apology.” Hugh furled his own brow this time, hoping it would help him articulate his stand. “It would be a fraud.”

  “A fraud??”

  “I would not mean it, sir. I could not mean it. I would know that, the Duke would know that. Everyone would know that.” Hugh paused. “The Duke would know it best of all, that my apology would be a false one. You see, Father, our eyes met, and he knew what I thought of him, and I knew what he thought of me. And so, if he honors truth at all, the Duke would know that I did not mean anything, and the apology would mean nothing to him—as it would mean nothing to me.”

  Garnet Kenrick stood erect and stiffened his shoulders. “Fraudulent or not, Hugh, an apology is required, and an apology will be composed and addressed!” he commanded. “You are not being asked to apologize to the man, but to the person of his station! This is not a matter of personal offense, Hugh! It is a matter of state!”

  Hugh glanced at the rug. He could say nothing in answer to this formidable fact.

  Garnet Kenrick pursed his lips and said, “The alternative is a birching, Hugh, administered by me in the presence of your uncle and Sir Everard. Satisfaction will be had, in one form or another. The punishment is to be severe enough to draw blood. The instrument with such blood on it must be offered to His Grace as proof of punishment. Those are your uncle’s demands, in lieu of an apology.” The Baron stopped to sigh. “An apology, sincere or not, would seem the least painful course for you to choose.”

  “Father…I cannot author one.”

  The Baron turned and pounded the silk-clad wall once with a fist. The sconce nearby rattled and the flame in the candle flickered. “Why not, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Because…it would kill me, Father,” replied Hugh, “inside, and nourish a wrong.” The words seemed distant, almost as though another person had spoken them, because overriding the issue of the Duke and the terrible punishment was the first glimpse of something immeasurably more precious than remaining loyal to his conviction that the Duke did not deserve his humble recognition. He felt the faint glow of a self-awareness that muted the importance of everything around him, including his father, the house, Danvers, even the Duke. It was an emotion that made everything, even his stand, seem irrelevant. Yet, at the same time, his stand, while diminished now in his mind, was the catalyst for the emotion, and he knew that somehow the two phenomena were mutually, inexorably dependent. His stand acted as a kind of door to a greater, cleaner awareness of himself and everything else around him.

  His son’s last words echoed in Garnet Kenrick’s mind. If he had heard a note of desperation in his son’s reply, he might have relented and written and delivered the apology himself, pleading the illness of his son as an extenuating circumstance. But Hugh had said it with an unshakable conviction that seemed unconcerned with consequence; there had been no begging in his manner, no petulance, no plea for pity—no bow to the power and prerogative of his elders.

  For was not the act of bowing a combination of submission to the majesty of power and of offering one’s neck to the pleasure of the person endowed with that majesty? Was it merely a physical gesture, governed by strict rules of courtesy and protocol? The boy seemed more concerned with the life of his pride than with the dire consequences of not having performed that act. His refusal to write an apology was another form of that act, though this time it must be willful—Garnet Kenrick believed his son on that point—for it was a more conscious decision than his neglecting to bow.

  Garnet Kenrick wanted to ask his son: “Are you saying that bowing to the Duke would bend more than just your spine, or that an apology to His Grace would bend more than your mind?” But he did not ask it. He knew the answer. Instead, he said in a low, tired voice, “Great men have paid their sovereign proper respect, Hugh, and assumed the entitled decorum, and still remained great and men. Can you do no less than they?”

  Hugh did not answer.

  “Why, the Duke of Monmouth made a private confession to Charles the Second of his complicity in a plot to assassinate his king. He bowed with the best of them!”

  Hugh averted his father’s eyes for the first time, not from shame, but because a word had entered his mind, an ugly word that he did not want to associate with his father: extortion.

  Garnet Kenrick studied his son. Outwardly, he bristled at his son’s defiance. Secretly, he was pleased, even envious, though he would never admit these things to himself. He thought: “I wish him to be what I was never brave enough to be.” He thought: “We—Effney and I—have a monster for a son, and he will bring us grief—or much pride.” He tho
ught: “My son will not live long enough to be the Earl of Danvers. He will be struck down by God or by the Crown, for he seems not to pay either of those powers any mind.” He thought: “My son will be a great man—or he will never reach manhood.”

  These thoughts drove him on. The Baron said, “Birching will be but the beginning of your punishment, Hugh—if you do not do this thing. In the absence of an apology, your uncle has insisted on this, also: that, for a year, you be banished from the dining table. That you scrupulously avoid the presence and sight of your uncle. That should you encounter him in his house, you are not to expect him to either speak to you or acknowledge your presence. That you not enter either his library or his quarters. That you not be asked to join our company in the evenings. That you not attend any ball, concert, or ridotto that may be held in this house. That you take your meals in your room. That the servants treat you like a leper. Finally, that we—your mother and I—not speak to you in the presence of others, particularly your uncle’s, except in the most dire circumstances.”

  The Baron paused to study his son’s face. He hoped to see some sign of wavering. He also hoped to be spared a punishment that would be no less cruel for him and his wife than it would be for Hugh. Instead, he saw a flicker of pain, then a fleeting beat of defiance, and then, again, that odd sense of calm. He went on. “Those are your options, Hugh. Thirty minutes devoted to composing an apology—versus a year of shame and solitude. A transient gesture of humility, or a year of ostracism.” He paused. “What say you?”

  Hugh was more perplexed by his father’s willingness to acquiesce to his uncle’s demands than by the severity of his punishment. He saw the strange expression on his father’s face, an inexplicable mixture of hope and stoically muted pain. Hugh, though, was governed by his own conviction, and these observations were subordinate to it. A test was being set before him. He tried to imagine a year of enforced loneliness; a huge question mark filled it. He did not know if he could endure it. But his estimate of the Duke was an absolute that forbade him any action but loyalty to it; it would not be cheated of its ineluctable finality. It was a wall erected by his own hand, and nothing would persuade him to loosen or remove a single brick of it.

  Hugh stood up, took a step from the chair, and shook his head. “I will not author an apology.”

  The Baron shut his eyes for a moment. “Very well, Hugh,” he said with a heaviness Hugh had never heard in him before. “Your punishment will commence tonight. You will be birched before dinner, which you may not attend. Then you must go to your room and not leave it until His Grace has departed.”

  Chapter 7: The Punishment

  A WORD OR TWO ABOUT WILLIAM AUGUSTUS, DUKE OF CUMBERLAND, who was also Baron of the Isle of Alderney, Viscount of Trematon in Cornwall, Earl of Kennington in Surrey, Marquis of Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, and Knight of the Bath. The Duke began his life with a fair appearance and a sharp, absorbent mind. A poet once referred to the young prince as “Adonis.” As an infant and a growing boy, he was hailed as “the darling of the nation.” He was an assiduous learner, and displayed signs of potential for becoming either a Latin scholar or an engineering genius. He had the benefit of instruction by the best tutors his father the king could hire, including close personal association with Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley; he so esteemed Newton that he insisted on attending his funeral. He became fluent in French, German, and Italian. He had a quick wit and was noted for his repartee. He was physically active and cut a trim, handsome figure for the adoring newspapers and court biographers to report.

  But a sharp, absorbent mind is not necessarily a critical one. In his elevated, privileged station, the Duke failed to develop a mind of his own in the things that mattered. His rank at the top of English society spared him the absolute necessity of forming his own judgments, a crucial task shirked often enough even by those who must make their way on their own skills and intelligence without benefit of royal promotion. The Duke left the moulding of his character to the chance influences of fashion, royal protocol, and the banalities of the moral wisdom of his age. He was not born to be the caricature of profligate dissipation that he was eventually to become, but he neglected to think for himself, and so he became that caricature. Nature will not tolerate a vacuum, neither in the physical world, nor in men’s souls.

  It would be unfair to say that Cumberland had formed no evaluative powers. He had developed a shrewdness for appraising horses, women, sportsmen, and games of chance. He introduced the unpopular notion of promotion by merit for army officers, and assumed the equally unpopular and thankless task of standardizing the army and removing large segments of it from hereditary control by noblemen and from larcenous colonels rich enough to buy whole regiments from vanity. Obviously, he judged the army ripe for improvement.

  Early in his life, the Duke showed a penchant for things military, and he pursued a military career. As this career progressed, his mind dulled, and his appearance seemed to register the growth of the dullness with complementary degrees of obesity. The slim, sharp young prince became a stocky middle-aged man with a large, commanding, but insipid face. He moved heavily, and later in life with difficulty. He loved horses, and owned and raced stables of them. He loved women, married or not, and the aristocracy of gossips counted his conquests. He loved boxing, and promoted the careers of some of England’s most famous pugilists. He loved gambling, and bet, lost, and won small fortunes on everything from dog races to cards to the course of a raindrop down a windowpane.

  He loved war, too, but because war requires a man to be able to think on his feet, to know how to elude peril yet be one himself, to know how to assess the character and intentions of an enemy, and to act with imagination and initiative, the Duke’s career was a lackluster, blameless one. It was only at Culloden Moor that he gained an upper hand over any enemy, chiefly by default of the Young Pretender, whose campaign during the Jacobite Rebellion was conducted by mood and whimsy. Elsewhere, the Duke proved to be a general whose military skills were limited mostly to a talent for withdrawing from an engagement in good order and with honor—that is, he was able to pull most of his chestnuts from the many fires lit by his thinking opponents. He displayed no special political leanings, other than whatever was right by his father the king; and so he developed no political talent, no shrewd acuity, and was easy prey to those who had leanings, acuity, and the requisite talent.

  In short, the Duke of Cumberland was a tragic example of a man who became basely common because he did not need to think. A beat was missed by him some time in his life. Perhaps he knew this, though it is doubtful. It requires an introspective, critical mind to detect such a loss.

  This was the man Hugh Kenrick saw.

  Hugh Kenrick knew only a smattering of the details of the Duke’s life; but not even these were necessary for him to form an estimate of the man he witnessed striding grandly up the steps of his home. The splendiferous figure could just as well have been an impostor, an impersonator, or a mannequin. It would have made no difference.

  This was the man to whom Hugh Kenrick neglected to bow. Because he forgot all the power and glory that was appended to the figure, and saw only the figure. Because he sensed that even the village drunkard might have a pathetic excuse for being a drunkard, while the Duke, for all the spectacular benefits, advantages, and emoluments bestowed on him throughout his life, was essentially a nondescript blank.

  This was as honest an observation for a child to make as that a king wore no clothes. The Duke was magnificently arrayed in the finest traveling garments, yet the child saw nothing in them.

  The man who had no critical faculty encountered the boy who had. The boy paid the price.

  * * *

  Hugh Kenrick waited in his room until his pocket watch, ironically a gift from his uncle two birthdays ago, read six o’clock. Then he rose from his desk, left his room, and walked through the chilly corridors to the eastern wing and his uncle’s study, as his father had instructed him.

  Hugh
spent the hours between the time in his father’s study and this moment in his own room. His mother, responsible for preparing tonight’s banquet, had stopped in to see him. She had never scolded him before, and did not scold him now. She did not say much to him; he could not remember what she said, except that it was brief, perfunctory, and regretful. He remembered only that she studied him with an expression oddly reminiscent of how she sometimes looked at his father.

  He did not know it, but his father had furtively sought the advice of his valet about how to mitigate the severity of the whipping. “Can we somehow substitute rabbit’s or chicken’s blood?”

  “No, milord,” had answered Owen. “If the gentleman, Sir Everard, is to witness the punishment, then there is no way to simulate the wound.” He offered to administer the birching himself.

  “No, Owen, thank you, but this is my doing, I think. If he should hate anyone, it should be me.”

  Owen cleared his throat. “His lordship will insist that such a task is unseemly for a man of your rank, milord.”

  Garnet Kenrick’s face became a mask of defiance. “And I will remind him that it is the prerogative of a father.”

  * * *

  “I would die, inside, and nourish a wrong.” Hugh reflected on these words while he waited in his room. But the thoughts came so quickly that he went to his desk, opened one of his school notebooks, and tried to write them down.

  That thought, those words, had come to him like a divine revelation. The truth of the words was so brilliantly clear, almost as though he were describing a tree, or the shape of a book, that he could not help but utter them. Yet, the wisdom of the thought was a mere consequence of some other, more fundamental and intimate knowledge of himself, something that was so joyous that it made the wisdom irrelevant. Another boy, had he stumbled upon this wisdom, might have made it a core premise that would govern his character and actions for the balance of his life. He would have deserved the esteem of other men. But Hugh did not think it sufficient reason to cherish it that way. He did not know why, and he did not deny its ineluctable finality, but it was not enough. “It is a right thing to know,” he wrote in his notebook, “but is it enough to make a religion of it? I would respect the man who wore it as the raiment of his soul, and never belittle him—I would thrash the person who did so!—but is there not some wonderful thing about oneself to which such a truth owes allegiance? It is an efficacious truth, but it is a servant to that thing. One does not live to starve wrongs, to deny sustenance to evil. It is important for a man—for his honor, for justice—to be able to judge when it is best to employ this servant—nay, to know that the servant is there to be employed.”