War

by Edward Cline

  Curle, of course, did not know the contents of the letter — it was given to him by a messenger only a few minutes before — and had retired from the Earl’s bedroom to attend to other duties.

  Basil Kenrick abruptly exploded in a rage. “No! No! No!” he shouted. “What did he do about my nephew?? Did he punish him?? I demand to know!” This outburst caused Claybourne to slip into a closet and close its door. The Earl glanced around, looking for him. “Traitorous worm!” Then he repeatedly and insistently yanked the bell cord by his bed for Curle, until that man appeared. The Earl proceeded to blast him with accusations of disloyalty, and traduced his long service. “You insignificant worm! You put this man up to this just to spite me, didn’t you?” he said, almost sobbing, waving the letter from the official in the air. “You and my brother! That’s it! It’s a conspiracy between you and my brother and this damned placeman!”

  Curle stood speechless and quavering before this onslaught of insanity. He was older now, and slightly bent. And he was worried. His employer had been growing madder by the month for years; it was a subject of grave but discreet jollity in the servants’ kitchen. But the violence of this outburst was a new level.

  “God damn you, Curle! I am not amused by this prank! You will pay, and this placeman, and my brother! But, you shall pay first!” Still holding the letter, the Earl stepped up to the major domo and slapped him over and over, first with his palm, then with his backhand. “Don’t you know he is my son? My son! And you have the temerity to say he is dead! I am not finished with him! But you are finished here! Get out of my sight!”

  “Your lordship, I do not know — if you will only let me — ”

  “Be quiet!” Basil Kenrick raised a fist and struck Curle in the mouth.

  Curle fell backward, close to the fireplace. The Earl stooped over him, kicked him in both legs once, then bent and waved the letter in the major domo’s face. “Lies are thy sustenance, worm, so consume this!” He reached down and tried to force the letter into Curle’s bleeding mouth. Curle gagged. He was terrified. Struggling desperately to find leverage to rise and flee, one hand fell onto the fireplace poker. Without thinking, he clutched it, and swung it up at the Earl’s head.

  The pointed claw near the tip drove into his head, just above his left ear, into his temple. He gurgled once and collapsed immediately onto Curle. Claybourne emerged from the closet and saw what had happened. He stood gaping at his superior and the Earl. Curle dropped the poker, pushed the body away, and stood up to face the valet. “We must flee! We will be hanged, surely!” Claybourne nodded agreement, and they did flee, but not before Curle stopped to snatch the letter from the Earl’s hand. They discreetly packed their belongings, and some other things not their own, and without informing the rest of the household, slunk undetected from Windridge Court, never to return. A maid found the body of the Earl hours later, and raised the hue and cry.

  A day later, Garnet Kenrick, the Earl’s brother, received a letter at his residence at Cricklegate, Chelsea, that contained the Customs official’s letter, and a note from Curle, announcing and explaining the Earl’s death. “He said this Mr. Hunt was his son. I do not know if this is true, but I always suspected some relation.” The Baron did not bother to press the authorities to search for Curle and Claybourne. They had vanished into the anonymity of London. He thought: Good riddance to all three. He and his wife, Effney, and their daughter Alice, now a widow, quietly rejoiced. Garnet Kenrick and his family elected not to wear mourning blacks; the Baron forbade his staff to don them, either.

  Thus did Garnet Kenrick become the sixteenth Earl of Danvers. He interred his brother without ceremony and under a plain tombstone in an anonymous London cemetery. Keeping a vow he had made many years ago, he had the casket of Dogmael Jones moved from St. Giles in the Fields to the family vault in Danvers. The marble tablet that marked the barrister’s tomb read: “Here Lies Sir Dogmael Jones, Barrister and Member for Swansditch. 1719-1766. Friend of Liberty. Fiat Lux.”

  He half believed Curle’s assertion that Jared Hunt was his brother’s son. He summoned Crispin Hillier, member for Onyxcombe and his brother’s political crony, and queried him about it. Hillier confirmed the fact with profuse apologies and explanations. He dared not lie to the new Earl. Garnet Kenrick told his wife, Effney. “Then justice has been done, if it is true,” she remarked. “He sent his son to murder our son, just as he sent him to murder Mr. Jones.”

  But they had not heard from Hugh in months. They would not receive news of his death for a year, until they received a letter from Jack Frake, followed by another from Rupert Beecroft, the former business agent of Meum Hall. It was then that they donned mourning blacks.

  Reverdy Brune-Kenrick was preparing to accompany her brother and sister-in-law to a gay evening at Ranelagh Gardens when Garnet Kenrick came to Berkeley Square with the news of Hugh’s death. The servant who came to her bedroom with his card on a silver salver said nothing about the black silk armband that Garnet Kenrick wore. When Reverdy descended the stairs to the foyer and saw the armband, and then the grave, sad look in her father-in-law’s eyes, she knew the nature of his call. From across the space, she asked in a whisper, “Is it about Hugh?”

  Garnet Kenrick nodded. “He died a hero, my dear. In September, a year ago. I’m sorry.” There was an unspoken question in his eyes: Are you?

  She was suddenly struck with the incontrovertible knowledge of a world without Hugh, her life without Hugh. She felt tears form in her eyes, and she rushed to Garnet Kenrick and pounded his chest with her fists. “Damn you for bringing that man into the world!” she shouted at him. “Damn you! I knew she would take him from me, forever! That damned mistress of his! Why must the best always perish first? Why??” Then she dropped her head on his chest and sobbed without control or care.

  Garnet Kenrick encircled her with comforting arms. “Come home to us, my dear, and we will try to answer that question.”

  John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, after nearly a year of raiding and plundering Chesapeake Bay and making more enemies than friends on both sides of the conflict, quit it on August 1, 1776, a month after the Declaration of Independence, and made his way back to England. It was also a month after publication in England of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In Book Four of it Smith proclaimed that America “will be one of the foremost nations of the world,” tempering that prophecy with a judicious sop to the North ministry and critics by advocating colonial representation in Parliament, a project he privately considered impractical.

  William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, in April 1778 attended a debate in Lords on whether or not to continue the war against the American colonies. Earlier in the debate, he rose to reply to a proposal by the Duke of Richmond to include in an address to the king an acknowledgement of American independence and a recommendation to withdraw British troops from the colonies. Pitt protested the “dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy,” and scoffed at fears of a French invasion of Britain — the French recently having declared openly its support of the colonies. When he rose a second time to again answer the Duke of Richmond, he collapsed in a fit. He died in his son’s arms on May 11, 1778.

  A pundit wrote in a London newspaper on the occasion of Pitt’s death: “Throughout much of his truculent but admittedly glorious career, Lord Chatham, one must opine, was painfully afflicted with a number of familiar ailments, including an insupportable and incurable contradiction concerning the mutualism of power and liberty. One must consequently speculate whether or not he succumbed also to the deleterious effects of said malady, and not exclusively to a combination of merely physical ones.”

  In Williamsburg, Virginia, the marble statue of Baron Botetourt in the open corridor of the Capitol was subjected to some patriotic stone-throwing. One missile gouged out a part of its pug nose. Although the Virginia Convention in Richmond had assumed the reins of government, and had recessed in late August, thirty-seven burgesses dutifully arrived
at the Capitol in mid-October 1775, believing that the General Assembly under the royal government was still the legitimate institution, regardless of the Convention’s presumptions and actions. They were not enough to form a quorum. They went home, tut-tutting the delinquency of other burgesses and the desecration of the statue.

  In March of the following year, thirty-two burgesses arrived. Adherents to lawful procedure, and hoping against hope, they rescheduled the General Assembly for May 6. And on that date, oblivious to the fact that Patrick Henry that very day, before the fifth revolutionary Convention in Richmond, called for Congress to make a Declaration of Independence, and was also elected by the Convention as the first governor of Virginia, a member plaintively entered in the House journal, that only “several members met, but did neither proceed to business, nor adjourn, as the House of Burgesses. FINIS.”

  * * *

  Jack Frake and most of his Company reached Charlestown and enlisted in the Continental Army. It was not from indifference to the fate of Virginia that he persuaded his men to follow his example. “Virginia is too big and too populous for the Crown to attempt its conquest. The Crown will first try to subdue the smaller colonies, or the weaker ones. If the war continues for many years, eventually we will return to Virginia.”

  He was proven right. He rose to the rank of major of a regiment in General Anthony Wayne’s Pennsylvania Line. Follow that general’s military career, and you will follow Jack Frake’s. He served with distinguished intelligence and heroism. He traded his rough fighting garb for Continental blue. And he always wore the gorget that Hugh Kenrick had given him, the one engraved Sapere aude.

  In 1781, he returned to Virginia with the Pennsylvania Line. He commanded his men at the battle of Green Spring near the James River, and took part in the siege at Yorktown. He stood with Lieutenant John Proudlocks and Lieutenant Jock Fraser in the front rank of Americans receiving the surrender of Lord Cornwallis’s army.

  Even though a war existed between their nations, mail packets continued to carry correspondence between Americans and Britons. Jack Frake wrote dozens of letters to Etáin in Edinburgh, and to John Ramshaw in Norfolk, England. He forbade Etáin to return until the war was over. “Morland is gone,” he wrote in one. “Caxton is in ruins. Meum Hall is gone. And our dear, precious friend, Hugh. Most everyone we knew is dead or gone. When you return, we shall begin over, on our own terms. Mr. Ramshaw writes that after the war, commerce will resume again between Britain and America, and I am thinking of engaging in it. I have saved some money, and memories, and will retrieve them from the ashes of Morland when I am free to. Lieutenants Proudlocks and Fraser send you their salutes and warmest regards…. ”

  The most difficult letter he wrote in this period was to Hugh’s father, Garnet Kenrick. In it, he confessed without guilt his role in Roger Tallmadge’s death at Charlestown — an action that had made Alice, Hugh’s beloved sister, a widow — and explained in detail why Hugh had died on the Sparrowhawk. “We agreed that the Sparrowhawk must be destroyed. We completed halves of that task, but Hugh paid the higher price.” He sent the letter on, expecting neither a reply nor ever to be welcome in the Kenrick household.

  It was a reasonable assumption. It was one of the very few things about which he was wrong.