Hugh Kenrick (12 page)

“He recited the poem at the request of the Duke. Surely a recommendation. Besides, he frowns on flogging,” remarked the Baron. “He would prefer to lead dedicated, not desiccated, soldiers. His very words.”

The Earl merely sniffed at the allusion. “And that Harle—too high-minded for a commoner.”

“Commoners usually exhibit more sense than their betters,” said the Baron. “I liked him.”

From that day onward, there existed a tension in the Danvers home, composed of muted animosity, on the part of the Baron and Baroness toward the Earl, and of resentment that clothed itself in studied arrogance and boredom, on the part of the Earl toward his brother. They dined together, traveled together, shared tea and played cards together, as usual, but never forgotten was the punishment. Hugh sensed the tension, did not understand it, but did not inquire about it, for these were adult matters, and he had little time for them.

One consequence of Hugh’s punishment was that he was not permitted to sit with his family on Sundays during services at St. Quarrell’s. He was sent, alone, to the second service in late afternoon. He sat by himself in the family pew box, across from the altar, a solitary figure in full view of the congregation. When the time came in the ritual to shake hands with one’s company, there was no one for him to turn to. Hugh did not mind this; the sermons, the hymns, the groans of the organ all rushed past his consciousness like the water of a rapids. Vicar Wynne, aloft in his great gilded, canopied pulpit, observed Hugh’s isolation with, at first, some satisfaction, then with disapproval, for while the boy looked attentive, his mind seemed to be elsewhere. His attentiveness seemed to be focused on things of his
own concern and not of the congregation.

*  *  *

The London Gazette,
the government’s chief official organ, a week after the event reported the injury to and repair of the Duke of Cumberland’s esteem at Danvers in a short notice buried in a flurry of other notices of both graver and less-than-noteworthy importance. It generated some gossip about the incident, but not as much as the Earl had feared.

The army contract, however, was pared from its original exclusivity to half a dozen contracts doled out by the commissariat. In March, Danvers received an order for enough wool that would, when factored, clothe a mere regiment, not an army. The Earl wrote Sir Everard, asking for an explanation. That gentleman’s secretary replied that Sir Everard had gone to the Continent for a rest cure. The Earl fumed and snapped at his servants, and even at his brother, for he knew that the other awardees even collectively had not gone to a tenth of the bother and expense to win their parts of the contract.

The Baron observed his brother’s anger dispassionately and without comment, for he had warned him about the likely outcome. While they awaited word, the Baron’s only other caution was “I reiterate my remark on the Duke’s gallery of applicants, dear brother. There are, as you must know, more applicants than there are seats.” While he was a loyal subject of the Crown, Garnet Kenrick was pleased with the awards; he wanted as little as possible to do with government obligations. He was more concerned with repairing the injury to the Earl’s solvency.

*  *  *

It was a time when a desire for solitude was a mark of one of three egregious maladies: madness, genius, or eccentricity. Life, especially that of an aristocrat, was governed by communal and public affairs. One did not shy away from society; it was considered an inferred punishment for society to shy away from any species of loner. This custom was lost on Hugh Kenrick; solitude was not a punishment. He learned to savor it; to be alone with his thoughts, with his own being. He was almost sorry that his uncle had relented and reduced his sentence. For four months, his life became a routine, almost a ritual: he would rise in the morning, have his breakfast, be
driven to the Tallmadges, for tutoring, be driven home again, complete his assigned lessons, be served dinner, read on his own account, and sleep. His room for those four months became the core of his known universe. He was only partly aware of the value of his enforced solitude, of the unconscious gathering together of all the cords of his soul and their tying together into a knot that would never unravel and never be loosened by anyone. He would occasionally, idly launch his brass top, and watch it balance itself. It stood humming, turning, erect by its own rules. And though he read other books, he would reread
Hyperborea
many times, trying to glean the gist of its many facets. The novelty of the story led his mind down so many exciting paths, and opened up vistas of ideas that were tantalizingly sharp but somehow beyond his grasp. He came to regard
Hyperborea
as a personal possession, as something that had been written exclusively for him.

On the last day of May, he sat again for dinner with his parents and uncle. The occasion was marked by no mention of or reference to his former absence.

Hugh was never told of his uncle’s role in the punishment, nor why its duration had been shortened.

*  *  *

“I read yesterday in the
Weekly Register
,” remarked Garnet Kenrick, “that some colonial—a Quaker, no less—claims to have tamed lightning, bidding it to strike where he pleases it to, with the aid of a kite.”

“There is a report in the
Daily Auditor
,” mused Effney Kenrick, “that a farmer has discovered the remains of Pompeii, buried under a league of ash.”

“Hillier reports,” sniffed the Earl, “that the Parliament’s journals are to be printed now. Now any cretin with half a skull can read them.” He added, “They say in Lords that Clive will take Arcot some time soon.”

“Lady Ornsby writes me from London that she has browsed through the new French
Encyclopédie
,” said the Baroness, “and says that it will be superior to Chambers’, once it is finished.”

“The scrivenings of radical rogues,” grumbled the Earl. “Even here, they can’t be avoided. This Henry Fielding person, I have heard, basks in the scandal of this new history of his—
John Jones
, or
Tom Jones
—even the title is common and dull. Vicar Wynne has informed me that he shall preach against it soon, as his father preached against
Moll Flanders.
”

The Baron and Baroness exchanged tactful glances about the irrelevancy of this comment. The silent remark did not go unnoticed by their son.

Hugh said nothing, and ate what was put before him.

Basil Kenrick rarely spoke to him, and when he did, spoke with obvious effort and control. The fact that the boy had elected to endure punishment rather than apologize to the Duke not only superseded his outrage at Hugh’s behavior, but became the kernel of another species of odium. He could be persuaded to forgive forgetfulness and even ignorance; he would not countenance willful impertinence, and was closed to argument.

And in the deepest recesses of his soul, buried under an embarrassment for the barely acknowledged absurdity of the notion, and wrapped in a contempt for himself for harboring it, the Earl feared his nephew. One evening soon after Hugh resumed his regular place in the life of the estate, his valet heard the Earl mutter to himself: “I should have made him kiss the rod with which he was beaten. I wish to humble that boy. He will be Earl some day.”

“M
AY YOU LIVE AS LONG AS YOU ARE FIT TO LIVE, BUT NO LONGER!
Or may you rather die before you cease to be fit to live, than after!”

So wrote Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, to his illegitimate son in 1749. Hugh Kenrick might have pondered this frank bit of wisdom, and eventually concurred, had his father the leisure to compose such a thought.

A boy born into the aristocracy was driven against the very thing that was his milieu. The impetus was a multitude of assumptions that were to be taken for granted and never questioned. Such an aristocrat naturally presumed that all the privileges that he enjoyed were his by right. He could adopt his rank’s vices and banalities, or be repelled by them. He could patronize those who wished to be aristocrats, but were not; or he could debunk or spurn them. He had the advantage of education, if he chose to use it; or he could become a notorious rake and profligate who perhaps had once read Pliny and mastered a complex mathematics, but to no observable consequence. He could be hurled against the wall of aristocratic demands like a meteor, and either be incinerated or deflected by the atmosphere of privilege and noblesse oblige. Either way, he would be destroyed as a man; either way, he was destined to become an aristocrat.

Hugh Kenrick seemed to take neither course, but still became an aristocrat—by his own definition. He had a notion of what it meant to be fit to live; that is, he sensed that a definition of fitness was necessary, but was certain that none would be offered by any adult. And he did not think in terms of fitness; rather of a purpose for living, a reason, or an end, and this purpose, reason, or end had to be fit first.

*  *  *

The Earl decided to have the family’s portraits painted: one of his family, and individual portraits. Emery Westcott, a fashionable portraitist in London, was commissioned by the Earl and came to live at Danvers one summer while he recorded the likenesses of the family. The Earl also
wished him to do renderings of the estate. “The portraits must be imposing, the grounds made more picturesque than they are.”

Westcott assured the Earl that he would have difficulty improving on so picturesque a setting.

“None of your faddle, sir,” rebuked the Earl. “I’m told you could make this grotesque Samuel Johnson creature look like a Greek god. Now, get on with you. I’ve spoken with you longer than I should.”

Westcott set up a studio in one of the larger guest rooms in the mansion. Because he was a commoner, he was not permitted to dine with the family—at least not with the Earl, who spoke to him but never again with him. The artist accepted the slight; he knew he was a mere practitioner. Garnet Kenrick and his wife, however, shared frequent meals with him in his room, for they found him to be charming, witty, and a storehouse of gossip and information about London society.

The most difficult task for Emery Westcott was not the Earl, but the boy. There was the boy himself, whose piercing green eyes gave him the most trouble. He winced every time he saw them. They disturbed him in a way he could not name. But he bravely tackled them at every sitting. The face was mature and wise beyond its years. Then there were the objects in the picture—a stigmatized book, a brass top, and a plaque on a wall. The boy had had some instruction in composition from a tutor, and had recommended those props; had, in fact, insisted that his portrait be of him at his own desk. Westcott had originally intended a conventional out-of-doors setting for Hugh Kenrick, on the grounds of the estate, with the boy standing placidly with a hoop and stick, or some other toy suitably diverting for a boy of that age. But Westcott admitted to himself that the boy’s suggestions were singular. He had asked the Baron and Baroness about their son’s ideas, and whether they would insist on a standard setting. The parents had sided with Hugh, saying that it was their son’s decision. “It is his wish to be remembered that way, Mr. Westcott,” remarked the Baron, who spoke as though the boy was the Earl himself.

Westcott had painted many portraits of boys of Hugh’s age and rank, but found this time he did not need to turn an insolent sneer or vapid indifference into something pleasant to behold by the parents. Hugh was unique. Westcott tried to ignore the eyes, to convince himself that there was nothing special about them. But he could not ignore them; the subject would not let him.

When he had finished placing the objects that would be a part of the
portrait, the artist asked his subject, “Why do you wish to include the top, milord?” He paused. “I ask this so that I may better understand its place in the portrait.”

“Because, when it is set in motion, it stands by its own rules. Then it is not an inert thing, like a tree or a rock.”

Westcott had smiled. “Ah! But your hand must set it in motion, milord. So it cannot be as independent as you say.”

“It is the symbol of a soul, Mr. Westcott. Or of a mind. Every man has one, and it is like a top, fashioned by himself. He must keep it upright, by his own hand. He must exert the effort. Otherwise it will topple, and lay inert and useless within himself, not a living thing at all. Or another hand may set it in motion, and then he will have no say in its motion or course.” Hugh paused. “This top has sentimental value to me, sir, and I wish to remember it.”

Westcott hummed thoughtfully to himself. “Interesting analogy, milord. It recalls a sermon I heard recently, about how Sir Newton’s laws of nature confirm, rather than dispute, the actions of an all-wise Overseer.” He paused. “Do you plan to take orders, when you have attained your majority?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Do you wish to become a shepherd of souls? A minister of our church?”

“No,” replied Hugh, frowning. “Why would I wish to?”

“Your concern with souls, milord, invites me to believe that you ultimately may choose that path of occupation.”

Hugh made a face of disgust. “No. I wish to become a man. One must become a man, first, before he can choose to be anything else.”

Westcott did not again venture to discuss such weighty subjects with the boy. An unreasoning but accurate fear told him that to enquire further into the boy’s mind would lead him to confront matters too disturbing to contemplate.

The boy also insisted on wearing a green frock coat. This Westcott could not argue against, for the coat matched the troublesome eyes.

*  *  *

Mr. Cole, who also tutored literature, assigned his charges the task of reading many famous authors, living and dead. He was particularly anxious
that his students appreciate Alexander Pope’s
Essay on Man
, one of his favorite literary paeans.

Hugh read the long poem, at first avidly, then with mixed feelings. On one hand, Pope exalted man and reason; on another, he derogated them. Hugh could not comprehend the dual purposes; he ascribed the composition to faulty knowledge, and said as much in a written critique of the piece required by Mr. Cole. In it Hugh would quote a line from the
Essay
, such as “Since life can little more supply, than just to look about us, and die” and then ask the question, “Does Mr. Pope mean that life is something like a Grand Tour, on which we see what great and wonderful and unusual things have been done, but that we should not presume to act to emulate them? How can Mr. Pope then hope for a ‘kingdom of the just,’ as he mentions in Epistle IV? Does not one act to attain justice? Just men are not mere spectators, but act to effect justice.” The critique was masterful in its synopsis, but its analysis confounded Mr. Cole, who began to wonder if Milord Kenrick was an example of some species of idiot savant. He did not know how to answer such questions or appraise such commentary, for he refused to concede the contradictions.

Hugh found this phenomenon in much of the literature of the period: gems of reason, snatches of profundity, and eloquently expressed verities sunk in a tepid broth of humility, skepticism, and cynicism. He wondered at times about the purposes of these admixtures, or whether there was any purpose to them at all. But all attempts to make him humble, skeptical, and cynical struck his soul dully, and registered no palpable hits. He knew that there was an answer that would construe the pandemonium of ideas he encountered, and was certain that, once he knew enough, he would have the task of composing the answer himself.

Under Mr. Cole’s tutelage, Hugh also sampled Montaigne, and rummaged through the great heap of skepticism and piety of that Frenchman’s
Essays
, searching for nuggets of wisdom or insight, finding some, but ultimately leaving the rest behind, his memory of the task a gray stew of distaste and indifference. However, he took personal offense at one of the Frenchman’s dictums, and grave exception to one of his stated purposes: “God permits no one to esteem himself higher,” and “I make men feel the emptiness, the vanity, the nothingness of Man, wrenching from their grasp the sickly arms of human reason, making them bow their heads and bite the dust before the authority and awe of the Divine Majesty…” He rebelled against these statements to the extent that he paid a village craftsman to
carve a plaque that defiantly proclaimed his single answer: “Reason is man’s sole salvation; he is its sole and proud vessel,” and had a servant fix it to the wall above his desk. He discarded everything else that Montaigne had said, because he did not think it was worth remembering.

He also read a translation of Baron de Montesquieu’s
Esprit des lois
, and became fascinated by the politics revealed in the seminal work. He understood only a fraction of the thinker’s observations, but enough of them to win his intellectual affections. The Frenchman’s praise for English political institutions even awakened in him a smidgen of pride for his country; though when he heard his parents, his uncle, and their guests discuss politics, this pride was checked.

Hugh continued to wrestle with the conundrum that he was not permitted to be anything. A gentleman was nothing if he was something; to be something other than a royalty-conferred identity—an attorney, an engineer, a mechanic, or any variety of tradesman or merchant—was to be less than nothing, an object of scorn, pity, or condescension. A beggar could be given a penny or a shilling, and that would buy him a dram of gin or half a loaf of bread; a tradesman could be paid false civility, and that would buy him a humiliating kind of gratitude. This did not immediately concern Hugh Kenrick; it was his fate that all the avenues of occupation, of ambition were closed to him, other than conformity to his appointed station. He was fated to be an earl, which subsumed the rank of gentleman. A gentleman’s identity was an ethereal thing, a mode of existence aspired to by those who connived to attain it. Hugh could afford the identity, but did not aspire to it. He was a gentleman, but did not attach any value to it. To be a gentleman was to be able to brush aside those who were something and indulge in one’s whims or appetites. Many envied those who were nothing; Hugh envied those who were something. This was the society in which he was raised.

Hugh Kenrick was becoming something, even if he did not know it.

He assiduously absorbed the best of the wisdom of his age, prizing that portion of it which appealed to or nourished his sense of self, storing that portion of it with which he disagreed on the premise that it was better to know one’s enemies than to be ignorant of them. Also pressing for his allegiance was a myriad of influences: the endemic skepticism that would shortly be exonerated by David Hume in his
Natural History of Religion
; the jealousy of Toryism; the nonchalance of Whiggism; the demands of the Dissenters; the posturing of Non-Jurors; the tolerance of the Latitudinarians.

In this chaos, his uncle the Earl remained a mystery closed to inquiry, moved by motives incomprehensible to him, while his father became more a friend and ally than a paternal mentor.

For all this, however, he did not turn into an annoying pendant, but became a vibrant young man.

And as he grew wiser, he grew lonelier. With each new insight he gleaned from a sage, or formulated by himself, he became aware of a curious, unsettling distance growing between himself and those for whom he cared, and of the gap between himself and strangers and those whom he disliked, which was widening into a chasm. He did not cherish indifference or contempt; there was no satisfaction in these things, even though they were what he justly felt. He accepted the phenomena as natural ones, and for which he presumed there would exist a corrective in the future.

He found more use for his father’s library than for his uncle’s. The libraries, he realized, were stocked with books that reflected his uncle’s and father’s frames of mind. His father’s library was larger, and contained more titles that piqued his curiosity. The one book he valued the most came from his father’s library, and was now his own. His antidote to the received wisdom of his age was Drury Trantham, the hero of
Hyperborea
.

*  *  *

A boy adopts a hero for two reasons: because a hero captivates his soul and serves as a projection of his innermost self; and because a hero seems to have solved many problems that may worry a boy, or at least demonstrates the capacity to solve them. The hero is an idealization of successful living, even though he may die in a story. The death may be gallant, brave, tragic, or perhaps even foolhardy. But living or dead, a hero is the stylistic embodiment of living on one’s own terms—noble terms, grand terms, exciting terms—terms, in short, that complement any youth’s uncorrupted, untamed, unabridged projection of what is possible to him in life.

Drury Trantham, shipwrecked merchant, became Hugh’s model of manhood, his test for moral stature and successful living. His image of Trantham loomed large enough in his mind that it crowded out all other candidates of exemplars and became the exclusive touchstone of heroic worth.

Trantham, the tall, handsome, hardy, commanding gentleman rogue who was equally at home on the deck of his merchantman,
The Greyhound
,
or in a raucous tavern, or on the floor of a great lord’s ballroom; Trantham, who owned a magnificent estate in Sussex and a great house in London, purchased with the proceeds of a career of flouting the King’s law; Trantham, a man who made no distinction between a common murderer and a Revenue rider; Trantham, the captain of a skilled and loyal crew whose members were willing to die for him, and often did, on land and at sea, and who would risk his life for any of them should an injustice be committed; Trantham, the ship’s captain who boasted that his vessel had never come within twenty miles of London Bridge to be customed, inspected, or unshipped, but whose holds were the secret envy of all other merchants; Trantham, the scoundrel and the patriot, who spied and fought for the country he loved, but mocked the men who ruled it.