Hugh Kenrick (31 page)

Basil Kenrick shot from his chair and waved a fist in the air. “I would prefer that he got drunk and spent himself into debt than he behave as he does!” he shouted. “That is normal behavior for one his age! He doesn’t honor me! He abides me! I could see through his insolence the whole time!”

Garnet Kenrick shrugged. “In light of your past treatment of him, I rather think that that is a just attitude for him to adopt.”

“He is a nemesis!”

“How?”

“I don’t know! He…frightens me! That is all I can say!”

The Baron picked up the two letters from the floor. “Hear this, dear brother: I will neither punish him for his actions, nor check his path. He is bringing honor to this family, something absent from it for some generations, as we both know.” He frowned. “You are a peer of the realm, Basil, yet you dishonor us with your childish foolery.”

“Do you hate me, too?”

The Baron shook his head. “Why, no, Basil, I don’t hate you. But more and more, it is only when I see you that I dislike you to distraction.” He paused. “Effney and I will ensure that the two of you are kept separated, when you and he are in the same vicinity. We will do this more for his sake, than yours.” He waited for a reply, and when none came, said, “Tomorrow, after you’ve rested from the journey, you may tell me what you have accomplished in Lords.” He turned to go, but stopped to add, “And be assured of this, dear brother: I shall find another copy of that novel you burnt, and make a gift of it to Hugh again. Do me the honor of not assuming the power of the French Parlement or the Congregation of the Index.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded the Earl.

“Surely you remember, Basil,” said the Baron with mock gaiety. “Some years ago Montesquieu’s
The Spirit of the Laws
roused the indignation of the Papist establishment in Paris, and was put on the Prohibited list by the Papal Court. It is one of the books that Hugh writes is missing from his shelf. I find it odd that you should frown upon it, for it pays us Englishmen numerous compliments.”

The Earl snorted at the observation. “Why do you defend him?” he asked. “He is nothing like you, either!”

The Baron cocked his head in thought, then said, “He is imbued with a species of vitality which neither of us possesses, Basil, but which it would be a crime and a sin to suffocate. I do not know what is its cause, but it is no nemesis to me, and I am frightened less by it than by the punishment with which some men are driven to reward it.”

I
N
M
ARCH OF THE NEW YEAR THE
H
OUSE OF
L
ORDS PASSED A BILL ENTITLED
“An Act for the bettering of the Militia Forces in the Several Counties of that Part of Great Britain, called England.” In April, French forces invaded the Mediterranean island of Minorca, a British possession. In May, Admiral John Byng, sent by George II to relieve the island, failed to, and for this almost a year later was court-martialed and subsequently executed by firing squad on the quarterdeck of the
Monarch
, a third-rate warship captured from the French ten years before.

On May 27, the king, through the Lord Chancellor, formally advised both Houses of Parliament of his declaration of war against France. Siraj-ud-Daula, nawab of Bengal, captured Calcutta in June after fierce fighting and a loss of seven thousand Indian troops. One hundred and forty-six Englishmen and other Europeans were afterwards confined by him in a 14-by-18-foot jail, already known as the “Black Hole” by drunken sailors who had been detained in it, and overnight all but twenty-two suffocated to death in the 100-degree heat. Louis Joseph Montcalm de Saint-Veran, French commander in North America, captured British Forts Oswego and George in August, and began construction of Fort Ticonderoga.

In Virginia, the tobacco harvest was jeopardized by the absence of small planters and field-hands, who, being in the militia, had been sent to the frontier to quell French-incited Indian raids. Frederick the Great of Prussia, also in August, invaded Saxony with 67,000 men. Russia, stung by a treaty of neutrality between Frederick and England, sided with France and Austria. History’s first world war, variously called the Seven Years’ War, the Third Silesian War, and the French and Indian War, had begun in earnest.

In England itself, the pin-making industry of Lancashire continued to supply the nation with pins and provide employment for hundreds of children who otherwise would have perished or had to endure near-slavery in parish workhouses. Liverpool was beginning to rival Bristol as a port and commercial center, and a canal begun the year before to connect it with the coal-mining region would eventually reduce the cost of carrying coal to the Irish Sea and cause the auctioning of all the packhorses it replaced. The
woolen weavers of Gloucester succeeded in having passed an Act of Parliament that allowed justices to fix their piece rates. Surgeons, who studied anatomy, were still regarded as “inferior tradesmen” by physicians, who practiced blood-letting as a standard panacea, prescribed potions composed of herbs, saltpeter, and birds’ beaks, and strived to preserve and codify the often deadly admixture of medieval lore, primitive notions of cause and effect, and wishful thinking concerning the relief of human ailments. Joseph Black, a British chemist, discovered carbon dioxide in this year, though oxygen itself would remain hidden behind that elusive, contradictory, and perplexing relic of ancient Greek science, phlogiston, an element thought to be produced by fire and human respiration.

Concurrent with the escalation of hostilities among the European powers, the intellectual realm advanced haltingly. Old ideas, beliefs, and customs fought a desperate and often vicious rearguard action against ineluctable refutation and the phenomenon of man being recast as a Lockean individual capable of acting on his own power for his own ends.

The phenomenon was not welcome in all quarters: there were those in this realm who wished men to remain a deferential subject of the church and state, to labor under those institutions’ rules and conditions to produce the glories and wonders of the age, tithed by one hand and taxed by the other. The French were the most enthusiastic exponents of the phenomenon, but could not practice it openly under an absolute monarchy allied with a powerful church. The English, by grace of a monarchy limited by a jealous legislature, indulged it by default. In France, Diderot was imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes for offending a Court lady with his method of arguing in favor of Locke’s thesis on the evidence of the senses. In England, while a man could be tried in the Old Bailey for publicly libeling the sovereign or slandering the Virgin Mary, virtually anything else could be said in private or in print about the state and church without fear of official or ecclesiastic retribution. Virtually anything could be said, but little done; it was an actionable offense to assault the Crown or Church with more than words. In England, a treatise on atheism could be bought for three shillings in any bookseller’s shop, though its author was likely either a High Churchman such as Swift or a Dissenter who had submitted to the test oath; in France, an author could argue his atheism only in elegant, hyperbolic prose in a manuscript circulated privately among friends and colleagues. In England, the treatise would be signed by “Anonymous” or “A Concerned Gentleman” or a Roman-style pseudonym; in France,
under the author’s true signature.

It was not long before Hugh Kenrick realized that the Society of the Pippin consciously confined itself to words, and that even in this realm there existed risk, for many of the things asserted and debated among its members could be construed by the authorities as conspiracy to sedition. The risk was rarely discussed; prudence and discretion kept it at bay.

Hugh attended several meetings of the Society as a silent observer and occasional recorder of the club’s minutes. Soon the rule was suspended, and he was permitted to join in the discussions. Only Mathius objected to the suspension. His protests were congenially countered by the other members, though no one could determine whether his strenuous arguments against allowing Hugh to speak were based exclusively on tradition, superstition, envy of Hugh’s erudition and acumen, or jealousy when the members paid Hugh more attention than he thought was due. Mathius was as wily in argumentation as any of his colleagues, but he had never introduced an original subject for discussion. Hugh not only raised novel ideas, but could examine and argue them in depth. This virtue fascinated all the members, including Mathius. His objections were overruled, and Mathius managed to cloak his bruised pride behind a convincing mien of good fellowship and savoir-vivre. Thus, his colleagues discounted their unspoken suspicions of envy or jealousy, and ascribed to his dissensions mere inordinate worry and, as one of the members humorously put it, “a brief interval of Tory gout.”

*  *  *

“Ego humilibus devitare, superbis autem tribuere aestimatum meus.”

This radical inversion of a common Christian homily—“God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble”—was the opening statement of Hugh’s first “paper” to the Society, and it took the members by surprise.

“Sublime!” exclaimed Elspeth

“Wickedly delicious!” laughed Claude.

“It borders on the blasphemous!” remarked Mathius.

Muir frowned and turned to Tobius. “I have not been schooled in Latin, my friend. What has he said?”

Tobius leaned over and said, “‘I shun the humble, but reward the proud my esteem.’”

Muir grinned at Hugh. “A wonderful ethic!”

Hugh chuckled. “I would have translated it in due course, had you but given me the time,” he said. He then gave a half-hour discourse on the importance of pride in man’s life, and made sharp distinctions between it and vanity. He ended with the statement: “For the man of spirit, there is no serenity in servitude, nor peace in passivity, when his liberty is under assault, when his life and field of action have been abbreviated by the vanity of power. For the man of spirit, servitude gnaws at his pride, and consumes his time, while in the lesser man passivity may cripple his soul, and inculcate in him an unreasoning malice toward those who are neither servile nor passive.”

“What are the alternatives, then?” asked Abraham.

“None, sir. Just…liberty.”

“Have you finished, Miltiades?” asked Tobius, the chairman.

Hugh bowed in answer, and took his seat. His doing so touched off an explosion of speculation. Hugh finished his dessert and listened to the excited exchanges between the other members, and waited for them to come to the inevitable conclusions. When they had, he deftly fielded a barrage of questions.

“Is your discourse a direct answer to Mr. Pope’s
Essay on Man
?” asked Claude. “It is a work, may I remind you, revered both here and on the Continent.”

“In part, sir,” answered Hugh. “My answer is in reply to many standard works. Pope, for example, attempts to exalt man and humble him, too. He lauds self-interest, but avers it should stem from a concern for others.”

Steven asked, “Are you a deist?”

“When I think of God, perhaps I am. But the notion grows fainter each time I address the subject with my reason.”

“Are you, then, an…atheist?” asked Mathius.

“Very likely,” said Hugh. “I have not given the matter much thought.”

“You have twisted a truism,” said Tobius, “and created a tenet of a novel ethic. Have you given any thought to the consequences, were it ever to be propagated, on modern morality? The results could not be but revolutionary!”

Hugh frowned in thought. “It is not wholly a tenet, sir, but the consequence of a new morality. It is but a clue to it. The system in which my statement would be a mere facet awaits the mind and hand of a great philosophical engineer.”

“It is Aristotelian in color,” remarked Muir.

“That is true,” said Hugh.

“The term ‘meus’ or ‘my’ seems to be superfluous,” said Steven. “It is the only flaw in your opening statement.”

Hugh shook his head. “No, sir. The term specifies the personal action of a particular kind of man, one who does not dispense freely his respect for others in society. Thus the statement is rendered compatible neither with the poor rate, nor with the peerage.”

The members laughed in unison. Abraham waited until they had finished, then said, “You are critical of the work of one of our sages, sir. Would you not call that an act of vanity?”

Hugh shrugged. “No, sir. Mr. Pope addressed the subject of man according to his lights, and tried to mate our new vision of man with the old. I take pride in having stated that the union he proposes cannot produce anything but more misery and confusion. The esteem Mr. Pope pays man and reason is leavened by Christian precepts. His work is a beginning, but it is sour to my taste.”

“It is more than vanity that would prompt one to substitute God with oneself,” said Mathius, “and then utter what could be called a heresy. Satan did so, and look at the world.”

“Satan must share credit for the world with God, sir, if what occurs in the world is by God’s will.” Hugh smiled. “That is what I would say, if the subject concerned me. My utterance, were it, and not its antipode, a common truism, would contribute to a happier world, and oblige men to regard each other with more honesty than they do now.”

Mathius asked no more questions.

“Just think of it,” mused Elspeth. “A new ethic unhobbled by hypocrisy, an ennobling ethic that did not need the angel-water of any church to give it sanctity. It staggers the mind.”

“It is invigorating!” echoed Muir. “Just to begin imagining the consequences makes me heady!”

Tobius smiled at Hugh, then addressed his colleagues. “Sirs: When the old peerage is deceased, a new peerage shall take its place—the peerage of the intellect!” He gestured with the ornamented cane to Hugh. “And here will be its first marquis!”

“Hear! Hear!” exclaimed the members, who slapped the tabletop with their open palms. Abraham rose and said, “I propose a toast to a youth who has not only justified his presence in our company, but justified the purpose and character of our society!”