SH02_Hugh Kenrick

by Edward Cline

  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.

  Obviously something inside their son enabled him to be friendly with the dreaded hare. And so, embarrassed by lending the superstition any credence, but convinced of the esteemed vicar’s reasoning and concern, the Kenricks agreed that a turn at Eton might do the boy some good.

  Hugh knew nothing about the conversation. He knew nothing about Eton, except that it was a school far away, and that his tutor, Mr. Hales, spoke almost enviously of the time he would spend there.

  “Why is he here?” asked the Earl now, indicating Hugh.

  “He is going to the College next week,” explained the father. “He needs instruction on how to best deal with his instructors and fellow pupils.”

  The Earl turned and wagged a finger at Hugh. “Mind your masters and get along with the other boys, except if they are sons of gentry. Those you may cuff. But I want no more business like the Hamlyn boy. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  The Earl promptly forgot Hugh. “Now, what is this about a schooner?” he asked his brother. “Why do you need to see me about it?”

  “The Ariadne is for sale. She is in dry-dock in Weymouth. She was impounded by the Revenue some time ago and her captain and most of her crew tried for smuggling. She was sold to another captain, who took her to Boston. On her way back she was badly mauled by a Spanish pirate, but she got away and limped home without further incident. The captain does not wish to spend more time or money repairing or refitting her. His cargo was mostly orange trees from the Floridas, and half of these either perished in the fight or died from attrition. He is short of funds.” Garnet Kenrick smiled. “She can be had for a mere eight hundred guineas.”

  “What would we want with a schooner?”

  Garnet placed a sheaf of papers in front of his brother. “Talbot thinks, and I concur, that we should have our own conveyance, now that the war is over. He has been urging me for some time to secure a merchantman of modest size.” Otis Talbot was the family’s commercial agent in Philadelphia.

  “The Ariadne?” interjected Hugh.

  Garnet turned to his son. The Earl frowned. “Yes, Hugh. That is the schooner’s name.”

  Hugh beamed. “Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos, a son of Zeus and Europa, and of Pasiphaë, a daughter of Helios and Persë. Ariadne gave Theseus a sword with which to slay her father’s Minotaur and a length of thread with which to find his way out of the beast’s labyrinth. Then she left Minos with him.”

  Garnet Kenrick chuckled. “And what happened then, my proud cygnet?” he asked with affection.

  “Theseus deserted her on Naxos, but she married Bacchus.” Hugh turned and addressed his uncle. “Prometheus did not coax Athena from Zeus’s head, sir. He cleaved it with an ax, and then she sprang from it. He was not a coaxing kind of hero, and she was too wise to be persuaded of the benefits of such a birth. She already knew them.”

  “Anan?” replied the Earl. This flagrant contradiction of his words added another particle of dislike of the boy. But he stretched his lips in what most men would not recognize as a smile, but which was one nevertheless. “You will do well at Eton, if you can correct me. But the next time you hear me fiddle with myth, be gracious enough to allow me my amusement. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Earl turned in his chair and addressed his brother again. “Now that my privilege has been cleaved by this young Titan of yours, dear brother—have you taken into account that we should have to pay a crew?”

  “Of course. However, we would be more than compensated by the erasure of many of the extraordinary arrangements we now need to make with other merchantmen, not to mention by the commensurate degree of independence we should gain. The schooner can be repaired, refitted, and crewed in three months. I have inspected her. She does not need careening, and she is eminently seaworthy. Full cargoes both ways in two years would cover the initial outlay of her purchase and refitting. That is a modest outcome. Extraordinary cargoes should halve that time. I know of two or three captains for hire, presently idle but known to be amenable to our kind of business.”

  This conversation lasted for another half hour. Hugh Kenrick had been present during many such meetings between his father and uncle, as a silent observer, and learned much about commerce and the family business. He listened with the same fascination that he experienced when he read the legends of the Greeks and Romans.

  * * *

  When the Earl was gone, Garnet Kenrick gave his son his advice. The Baron was innovative in business, but his inventiveness did not extend to questioning the received wisdom of his time. Thus, his advice was a litany of contradictory maxims, adages, and homilies.

  “Above all,” he concluded, “submit to the spirit of compatriotism among your peers. If they are gentle, be gentle with them. If they are cruel, be cruel, for if you exhibit the least amount of reluctance to resort to cruelty, it will be turned against you. I made that mistake myself, you see. Fashions in manners and sentiments change, but all aim to mould the proper comportment of a gentleman. You must learn that you are not alone—did not Mr. Donne write so wisely that ‘no man is an island’?—and the best way of assuming the dignity of nobility is to learn early in what I hope will be your long life that you must defer your person and your desires to the sanctity of your present and future station. You will be the Earl of Danvers, someday. Observe the posture and actions of your peers and superiors, and emulate them to the best of your wits. Keep in mind that your instructors and masters at the College are not quite gentlemen, but that they have knowledge to impart to their charges, so do not tease them with inordinate curiosity, and do not bait them, as you will see other students will be wont to do. They are the only commoners in the kingdom who may with impunity birch a knight.” The Baron studied his attentive son. “You have a quick mind, Hugh, and it would be easy for you to commit that venial sin.”

  The Baron paused again. He could not be sure that anything he was saying was finding a niche in his son’s mind. “Err…Vicar Wynne informs us that on Saturday last you were not able to recite the abbreviated Articles. Yet today, you are able to regale your uncle and me with a portion of a complex pagan legend. Can you explain this, Hugh?”

  The boy frowned. “I remember the legends better, Father, because they are more interesting than are the Articles.”

  The Baron was willing to concede this. Had he not, when he was his son’s age, reveled in the adventures and epics of gods and mortals, and lost himself in the worlds of The Iliad and The Odyssey? The mighty struggles, the alliances and betrayals, the exotic lands! But he could not confess this to his son. “The gods and the Titans were lawless, Hugh. Humility and generosity could not be observed in a single one of them, good or bad.”

  Hugh Kenrick’s face brightened. “That is because they were not Christians, father. They could not have tolerated the saints of our church. The gods and the Titans fought for possession of the earth, while the saints forsook it. How could the meek and the humble inherit the earth, as Vicar Wynne claims they will, when the gods and the Titans were so powerful? They would have laughed, and evicted the saints and the humble!”

  The Baron raised his eyebrows in alarm. Here was a formulation he had never heard before in any sermons, and he doubted it had ever occurred in his son’s catechism. On one hand, he was intrigued; on the other, the Vicar’s evaluations and warnings seemed much more ominou
s. “Do you approve of the saints, Hugh?”

  The boy grimaced. “They are sometimes droll, but mostly dull. I know that the Romish church makes much of the saints, while ours does not. Is it because Englishmen have martyred the most illustrious of them, such as Thomas Becket and Joan of Orleans?”

  The Baron laughed involuntarily. “No,” he said, “that is not the reason—or, at least, not the whole reason. I am not an authority on the subject of our church’s history, and I would not think it wise to ever put that question to Vicar Wynne. I may assure you, however, that the schism between ourselves and the Papists had little to do with an embarrassment of such riches.”

  Hugh Kenrick laughed at the jest. The Baron merely smiled. He felt a compulsion to hug his son, to laugh with him, and to encourage through these actions the spirit he was beginning to see emerge in the boy. There was something right about that spirit. After he dismissed his son, he thought, also, that there was something dangerous in it.

  Children tend to explode, when set free of their parents or tutors, especially when their parents’ or tutors’ notions of character building consists of pounding into their charges’ heads a plethora of undifferentiated maxims, adages, rules, and moral concoctions that had little or no relation to the world as observed by children. Hugh Kenrick’s difficulty lay in this phenomenon, also, though what was pounded into his head was, more often than not, ejected with a violence that frightened his wardens. If something did not make sense to him, he questioned it relentlessly, and if no sensible or credible answer to it was given, he dismissed it.

  Hugh Kenrick was spoiled. He had six pairs of shoes, all with silver buckles. He had riding boots to wear when he exercised his pony. He had several suits of clothes of the best cut; fine shirts and lace cravats; more toys in his room than possessed by all the middle-class children in Swanage and Danvers combined; three meals a day, none of which he ever finished; a succession of governesses and tutors before he was sent to Eton. He had a sumptuous allowance of ten guineas a year, to spend as he pleased. He had books, or rather his father and uncle had books, and if books were missing from his elders’ libraries, they could usually be found in Hugh’s room.

  Therefore, Garnet Kenrick could not say that he was completely surprised when, a week after delivering his son to the College of Eton, he received an urgent letter from the headmaster requesting that he remove his son at his earliest convenience. Hugh Kenrick had seared the hands of a senior boy with a red-hot poker when the older boy attempted to make him his fag. The Earl was scandalized, for the injured boy was the son of the Marquis of Bilbury, a political ally in the House of Lords and sometime guest and companion when the Earl spent time in London.

  Some days after his return, Hugh’s parents escorted him into the Earl’s study, and in their presence Basil Kenrick interrogated him. The Earl had been kept ignorant of Vicar Wynne’s revelations and speculations about the boy’s behavior. To him, his nephew was beginning to take after the king’s oldest son, Frederick Louis, the Prince of Wales: sullen, rebellious, spiteful, and frivolous. The Prince, who was hated by his father the king, was in the Earl’s eyes a witless fool who had no good reason to reciprocate his father’s detestation. Hugh stood before the Earl’s desk, while his parents sat to the side, almost in shadow. “Why did you do this cruel and cowardly thing, young sir?” asked the Earl.

  “Because he was trying to humiliate me, sir,” answered the boy.

  “Were you the only boy levied in this ritual?”

  “No, sir. There were three others.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Hugh Kenrick narrated the incident. Two days after arriving at Eton, in the dead of night he and the other new boys his age, still in their nightshirts, were roughly spirited from their cots by older boys and taken to a small wooden structure somewhere off the school grounds. There he was told by the young Marquis of Bilbury that he was releasing another boy from his obligations as a fag or servant, and that henceforth Hugh would fill that role, acting as the Marquis’ valet and cook. “Your handsomeness also recommends itself to occasional, special companionship, when the village tarts are otherwise engaged,” added the aristocrat, and the other older boys giggled. Hugh Kenrick did not understand the import of this last remark, but he noticed, after he had related it, his parents exchanging quick glances with his uncle, whose nostrils flared slightly in distaste, but whose expression otherwise remained stern and unmoved.

  Then he had been told that as part of his initiation, he was to hold a tin bowl of hot coals from the den’s fireplace while the young Marquis tickled his bare feet with a twig. If he dropped the coals, he would be punished with a birching that would leave the back of his legs raw for days. Hugh refused to pick up the bowl. When the Marquis rose and forced it into his hands, Hugh flung it at his tormentor. Angered, the Marquis approached Hugh, screaming that he would break all the fingers on his hands. Hugh picked up the fireplace poker and stabbed at the Marquis’ outstretched hands, which grasped the hot end of it. The Marquis roared in an unearthly scream of agony as the metal fused his palms and fingers.

  In the meantime, the glowing coals Hugh had thrown at the Marquis had fallen on some of the dilapidated cushions that littered the den floor, started a fire and a panic, and the den was consumed by flames. Hugh and the other younger boys had fled in the confusion and sought refuge in the headmaster’s quarters.

  When Hugh was finished, the Earl asked, “Did the other boys submit to their initiation?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could you not, like they, tolerate a spell of humiliation?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “I saw no point in it, sir. I will not be anyone’s lackey.”

  “It is the practice in such circumstances to submit to the wishes of senior students, sir,” replied the Earl. “The sole persons exempt from such customs are the members of His Royal Highness’s immediate family, who may not be touched by anyone except by waiver and leave. You are not of royal siring. You had no right to refuse to submit or to question the right and prerogative of any older student to impose service on you.”

  “The Marquis’ son wished to harm my person, sir,” replied Hugh. “He wished to harm my soul.”

  The Earl snorted. “He would not have inflicted mortal injury on you, sir. But you have apparently so mangled his hands that he will be denied the use of it for the rest of his life.”

  “His intention was harmful, sir,” answered Hugh.

  “How so?”

  Hugh could not answer. He could not find words for the evil thing that seemed to govern the events in the Marquis’ den.

  The Earl said, “Your person is not so precious that it cannot be taught to brook a modicum of servility, sir. It is not your prerogative to set yourself or your soul apart from the concerns and standards of your fellow men. It is disturbing to me that such a basic Christian precept has not already found a permanent cranny in your conscience. It applies to all men, humble and great. And the Marquis, regardless of his intent or purpose, is one of your fellow men.”

  His uncle’s words awakened something in Hugh’s mind, and he stared at the Earl with amazement.

  The Earl took the glance as a frown in the affirmative. After a long, withering scrutiny of the boy, he reached for a book on his desk and lifted it. “Take this,” he ordered, and when Hugh had stepped forward and obeyed, the Earl continued. “You will read that labor of your grandfather’s and write for me an essay agreeing with its thesis. This will be in addition to attending to the duties assigned you by your new tutor, whoever that may be.”

  Hugh glanced at the book in his hands. It was a richly bound tome, entitled The Many Ways to Sainthood, by Guy Kenrick, the 14th Earl of Danvers.

  “That is all,” said the Earl. “You may return to your room. I wish to speak to your parents.”

  Hugh’s parents placated the Earl by denying their son the liberty of the estate for a month. The Baron agreed to pay the elder Ma
rquis of Bilbury a sum of money in compensation. The Baron and his wife were confused by their responses: they were secretly proud of Hugh for having defied what they both regarded as a silly, brutal tradition; yet they sensed the seed of a character trait which they were certain would eventually ostracize the boy from normal human society. They wished to see the trait corrected; but they did not possess the cruelty in themselves to crush it. They would not nurture it; but neither would they starve it. Hugh, they concluded, must make his own rules and reap their rewards and penalties. Garnet Kenrick resolved never again to advise his son on what he should do, be, or believe in.

  Hugh Kenrick read his grandfather’s work, and composed an essay on its virtues and values. It was a dry, unconvincing essay, but it satisfied the Earl, and no more was said about the incident at Eton College.

  Chapter 4: The Heart of Oak

  IN MARCH OF 1751, THE PRINCE OF WALES DIED, AFTER A BRIEF ILLNESS, OF a burst abscess caused by a rebounding cricket ball.

  The Earl and the Baron and Baroness were having tea over a game of faro in the orangery one early spring evening when a messenger arrived at Danvers. A servant handed the Earl a sealed envelope. He opened it, read the contents, then glanced up at his brother with a face that was expressionless but for a twinkle in his eye. “It is from Hillier,” he said. “Poor Fred is dead.” Crispin Hillier was Danvers’ representative in the Commons. Not only was it his job to protect the Earl’s interests in that house of Parliament, but to gather and relay political intelligence. The Earl rang a table bell, and the servant reappeared. “Pay the man who brought this a guinea,” he said. “Put him up in the stables, and attend to his needs. I shall have a reply ready for him to take on the morrow.”

  The Earl leaned to support the king’s oldest son, Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall. The Prince, he reasoned, was very likely to be the next king, or at least Regent.

  Still, the Earl, on advice of his brother, had maintained a delicate neutrality between the king’s two sons, the Prince of Wales and William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, liking neither but ready to return overtures of friendship from either, should they occur. He forbade Handel, the king’s favorite composer, to be played at concerts and banquets at Danvers, requiring his hired musicians to learn the compositions of the Prince’s favorite, Giovanne Buononcini, who managed Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in London until he was discovered to be a plagiarist and forced to leave the country in disgrace. For years, the Earl had sent the Duke a birthday present of five pounds of sweetmeats in a bentwood box adorned with military tableaux painted by the best illustrator in London; and to Augusta, the Princess of Wales, a birthday present of a silver brocaded quilt of flowers stuffed with the finest Dorset wool and swans’ down.