Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  On the other hand, neither Ben nor his father knew that Darwin was a dabbler in investments, who figured that cultivating Sir Archibald Knowles might somehow, someday, prove useful to his own purposes.

  As soon as they were all seated for dinner, Emma Darwin asked Ben to tell what he had seen in Paris, which he proceeded to do for the sixth time this week. His summary of his extraordinary forty-eight hours was now so well practiced he realized he could dine out for the rest of the season on his tales of riot and cannon and death. Tonight, he spoke for an entire course of whitebait, describing the barricades and burning omnibuses and mobs and musket fire as the guests washed down piles of fried baby herring with champagne.

  “…and after I arrived at Saint-Lazare Station,” he finished, “I did not see the French sergeant again. I made my escape thanks only to the railway and the generosity of the French ticket agent who mistook me for an American.” Never before had people considered Ben Knowles an adventurer. He was enjoying his new role.

  “Nor, of course, did he see poor Mr. Ashby again,” his father said. Sir Archibald had already explained to the table that the story now making the rounds in London—that Lord and Lady Brightstone “had been sent in their late son’s stead some poor naked frozen French Jew”—was true.

  “Simply dreadful, that,” Philip said. “Lord Palmerston has requested an official inquiry.”

  Ben noticed that Philip’s wife Tryphena was looking into a middle distance and pursing her lips repeatedly, as if impersonating a fish. Everyone knew that she was fainty, and tended to pay her no attention.

  “Do you imagine, sir,” Emma Darwin asked Ben, “that it is possible this mania you witnessed in Paris might soon explode in the streets of Manchester or Birmingham? Just this afternoon I received a letter from a French friend—she writes that everyone there is shocked.”

  “Well, I—” Ben started to answer, but his older brother cut him off.

  “I can assure you, Mrs. Darwin, that Lord Palmerston and I were by no means surprised at what occurred in Paris. Although we rather thought more would die on the government side. Only eighty soldiers and police, according to our best reports. And in any event, I can assure you as well that Her Royal Highness Victoria is not the abdicating sort.”

  “But if it were to come to war in the streets here,” Emma Darwin asked, “do you believe our troops would behave so differently?”

  “‘War’?” Sir Archibald said. “This ‘February Revolution’ in Paris was no war at all. It was a tantrum run amok.”

  “It is the French, Mrs. Darwin,” Philip said.

  “Who are, in the main, ridiculous, melodramatic monkeys,” Sir Archie said. “Monkey” was a favorite trope of Sir Archie’s. On the table in front of him were salt bowls on the heads of silver apes and Ceylonese napkin rings carved from ivory in monkey figures. “Thirty-five million silly, jabbering monkeys, most of the people as well as the troops—whom I know all too well to be cowardly ambushers.”

  As a young man, Archie Knowles had fought the French under Wellington, and still called the limp in his left leg his “frog wound,” even though it had been the result of one of the British General Shrapnel’s fragmentation shells that had fallen short and killed half of Corporal Knowles’s platoon. A shard of Shrapnel’s iron struck Archie just below his left knee.

  “Given the opportunity,” Archie Knowles said, “the French simply fire without reason or run away—including their kings. Former king, I should say.”

  Philip raised his forefinger as his eyes darted up and down the table. “Who—I ought not to say—is at the present moment living not far from here with his family and precisely one servant.”

  Nearly the whole company smiled and—one servant!—shook their heads in wonderment.

  “As befits the ‘Citizen King,’” Sir Archibald said. “Queen Victoria has stuck the old white-flagger over in Claremont House, has she, Philip?”

  “I certainly cannot say, Father,” his eldest son replied with a proud smirk that made his brother want to grab the nearest candlestick and whip it across his face. “State secret,” he said.

  Ben wondered now, as he often had before, how Philip’s poor, queer wife could bear life with him. As a girl in London a decade ago, Tryphena Matheson was intelligent and fetching. Glancing at her now, Ben saw that she was oblivious to her husband’s performance, and continued to purse her lips every second or two. He wondered if she had a herring bone wedged between her teeth. In fact, she was silently and repeatedly mouthing the words poor naked frozen French Jew.

  “Are we to assume,” Darwin asked Philip, “that the new rulers of France are not to be allies of Britain?” At that moment a wind rattled the widows, and Darwin simultaneously emitted a long, soft, breezy fart. Ben wondered if he deliberately timed his flatulence to coincide with other sounds.

  “No, sir, we applaud the popular aspirations in France—and across Europe. We have no perpetual allies and no eternal enemies. Our British interests are perpetual and eternal.”

  “Ah—flexibility,” Ben said rather loudly, as if he were raising a toast. “It was flexibility that allowed my nimble brother to begin the 1840s a Tory and finish them now as a Liberal.”

  Philip smiled warily.

  “Yet in addition to its interests,” Ben said, still loudly. “I have supposed that this country is meant to stand for certain principles in the modern world as well. I had also supposed that Viscount Palmerston might see that history is now moving rather emphatically against the viscounts of the world. Not to mention,” he added with a small smile, “against the baronets.”

  Sir Archibald, thunderstruck by this cri de coeur, both frowned and smiled at Ben.

  “Benjamin,” Philip said, “our government is sympathetic to—”

  But the new Ben Knowles would brook no interruption. “As monkeyish as their revolution may have been, as spontaneous and disorganized as it certainly was, it was indeed a revolution. And that fever is bound to roll west, to England and Ireland, even as it is apparently now rolling east over Europe.”

  “Minor outbreaks, Benjamin, I—”

  “Our interest, Philip, it seems to me, is in stepping out of its way and permitting the democratic spirit—the spirit of this century—to transmute this dull old nation as it will.”

  Ben could hardly believe the words that had come from his own mouth with such vehemence, as if he were a firebrand, or…an American.

  Philip was unprepared to grant his brother the moral high ground. “Do you mean the democratic spirit as it is arising in Bavaria? The peasants beating and murdering Jewish moneylenders? Or the drunken, stupid Luddites bursting into factories to break looms and kilns?”

  “No,” Ben replied, “for as you well know I, unlike you, am fond of engines and the jangle of trade. Unlike you, I oversaw a mill that employed one hundred forty-two workers and shipped two hundred thousand yards of poplin and cotton drill each week. And unlike you, Philip, I am friendly with Jews. All I suggest is that what rages now in France and in the German states and who knows where else is simply…an uncorked flow, an irresistible tide. A tide that no dikes will hold back, and which just might prevent you, brother, from ever becoming Sir Philip Knowles.”

  “My red republican little brother,” Philip said as he glanced around with a tight smile at the guests. “My brother the artificial American.”

  “As a student,” Sir Archibald informed the table, “young Ben fancied himself a Chartist. And he joined up with…what was it, your socialist cabal, at Cambridge? The Brotherhood of the Virtuous?”

  “No,” Philip said, “the Confederacy of the Noble.”

  “The Federation of the Just,” Ben told them. “Which is now the Communist League.”

  “Lady Knowles,” her widower noted, “was a member of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa—endeavors I strongly support.”

  Ben did not mention, as he had once before when his father bragged about his late wife
’s abolitionism, that half their wealth depended upon the labor of enslaved, cotton-picking American Negroes.

  “Father,” said Philip, “is it true the Manchester mill has lately increased its profit since the old order was restored?” This was a goad at his brother. Ben’s modest reforms at the mill—raising the minimum age for employees to twelve and reducing children’s workdays to ten hours—had been reversed after he left for London last year.

  Sir Archie nodded sheepishly.

  Ben lifted his goblet. “To the hardworking toddlers of Manchester, by whose sweat and nipped fingers we profit so handsomely.”

  The fat squire mumbled “Hear, hear” and held his glass in the air for a long moment until he realized that the younger Mr. Knowles’s toast had been a joke.

  Roger Warfield, alarmed by any display of passions, tried to steer the conversation toward the balmier vale of the law. “I am given to understand,” he chirped, “that the new French Assembly has passed a statute abolishing the death penalty for political crimes, even those involving violence.”

  A few of the dinner guests nodded but no one replied. Instead, they sipped wine or cut at their pieces of goose meat and mutton, waiting to see if the Knowles brothers’ row would continue. Ben, however, was struck by Roger’s remark: it was the only time he had ever heard his brother-in-law utter an interesting new fact. During the few seconds’ pause, he lost the fire for any more fight with Philip.

  “But who is this poor frozen French Jew?” Tryphena Knowles abruptly asked. “And will they return him now to his family in France?”

  Philip broke the silence with a practiced laugh, as if his wife had intended to be amusing, and others chuckled along. Several innocuous new conversations sprouted. Ben reported in detail for Darwin how he had used the penguin as a weapon in Paris, and Darwin told him in turn how intrigued he had been, a dozen years earlier in Tierra del Fuego, the first time he’d seen the little birds called sheathbills eating the excrement of penguins directly from the penguins’ anal sphincters. Sir Archie told the squire and the miller’s wife his theory that all successful colonial ventures were based on the commercialization of stimulants—coffee, cocoa, tobacco, opium, rum. Tryphena thought of fairies and hailstorms as she pretended to listen to Roger Warfield explain to the miller ancient laws concerning the weights of white versus black bread.

  Up the table, Mrs. Darwin asked Philip if business in China was prospering more or less than expected since the Opium Wars. Tryphena Matheson Knowles’s family opium business had employed Philip for several years in Hong Kong and still provided them with an income of £2,000. And were it not for her family’s business, Mrs. Philip Knowles would not now be an opium gourmand—for Tryphena indulged not merely in the ordinary matron’s occasional sip of laudanum, but ate Jardine Matheson opium like a candy, five or six secret, fragrant, luscious spoonfuls a day.

  Philip, however, tended nowadays to affect a certain obliviousness to the China trade.

  “Yes,” he replied to Mrs. Darwin’s question, “I understand that business is robust, up at Shanghai as well as Hong Kong. Although, as you might expect, my concerns now are rather focused more on affairs of state than on”—he shrugged, and reduced his voice almost to a whisper—“some Chinamen’s chests of opium.”

  Philip’s last word and disparaging tone snatched his wife’s attention as if she had been tugged by the ear.

  “Philip,” she said sharply, “are you speaking of me?”

  “No, no, certainly not, my dear,” he replied. “I was explaining to Mrs. Darwin that we have not much news of China.”

  Between the considerable wine Ben had consumed and the pleasure he was now taking in his brother’s embarrassment, he only now noticed that Darwin was directing a question at him.

  “Sir? Which college?”

  “Which college?”

  His sister interceded. “At Cambridge, Ben.”

  “Ah—Trinity,” Ben replied. “Trinity College. Isaac Newton’s Trinity.” He was a little drunk. “The family college.”

  Darwin looked surprised, and Isabel apprehensive. “Your father is also an old member of Trinity?”

  A rude laugh boomed from Ben, and immediately Darwin farted, like a bassoon answering a trumpet.

  “Forgive me, sir,” Ben said quietly. “Sir Archibald’s higher education consisted of back numbers of The Library of Entertaining Knowledge. I was simply making a poor joke about Trinity, for one of my father’s great-grandfathers reputedly…it is all a bit complicated.”

  Isabel touched her brother’s sleeve.

  Ben put his hand over hers and breathed deeply in and out—not a sigh, but rather as if he had just stepped outside on a sunny June morning.

  “You see, one of our ancestors is said to be Isaac Newton, who, as you know, was a fellow at Trinity, so…that is all. I am sincerely sorry.” He sipped some more claret.

  “Heavens! So we are dining tonight,” Darwin said to the table, “with descendants of Sir Isaac Newton!” He raised his goblet. “We are honored even more than we knew.”

  The other guests, slightly bewildered but compliant, lifted their glasses and murmured assent. Philip glared at Ben as if he were a barn rat in a beam of lamplight. At the head of the table, Sir Archibald’s expression seemed to flicker between anxiety and delight, delight and anxiety.

  “Well,” Ben said, “at the time he fathered our ancestor Seth Knowles, if indeed he did, he was merely Mr. Isaac Newton.”

  Tryphena knew nothing of this alleged history, and she was struggling now to make sense of what Ben was saying. “Ben? I am confused. Why would Mr. Newton’s son be called Seth Knowles? I am afraid I am quite confused.”

  “Forgive me, sister-in-law. The child was not called Newton because this particular great-grandmother happened not to be married to our hypothetical great-grandfather. Mr. Seth Knowles, I am afraid, was a bastard.”

  Philip made a sound like a cat’s hiss.

  As the guests looked to their host, who was now grinning, the big clock in the library began striking nine. “My younger son is an evil-minded, mischief-making telltale,” Sir Archibald said, “but I cannot in good conscience call the boy a liar.” He arose, and the rest of the company stood as well. Darwin’s fart was masked by the sound of scraping chair legs and rustling dresses. “I ask the gentlemen to join me for some very old brandy in the museum.”

  On the gravel outside, Ben accompanied Darwin on the long walk to the priory. Two boys carried lanterns.

  “You do know, Mr. Knowles,” the older man said, “that there is no biographical evidence that Sir Isaac engaged in intimate relations with any woman during his whole life.”

  “Oh, I know that all too well, sir. My father was correct about my mischief-making mood tonight. Let me apologize for subjecting you and your wife to our quarrels and scandals.”

  “I know the nettles that pass between siblings. Nettles.” He waved down toward the birches, only the tops of which were visible above a moonlit mist. “Or perhaps rather a fog. In families I think we stumble forever, searching for one another in a kind of permanent fog. Mrs. Darwin and her brother have a hard time of it—Mr. Wedgwood holds their family purse tightly.”

  Ben shivered, perhaps from the cold, or perhaps from imagining his own financial future after his father’s death, when Philip—Sir Philip Knowles, Baronet—would be managing the Knowles fortune.

  Happily, Darwin changed the subject. “Tell me, sir, precisely how you believe we ought to respond to this latest spasm of revolution? My family and I quit London in ’42 during the labor riots.”

  “And quitting is one means of adapting to new circumstances. Perhaps the best means of adaptation.”

  Darwin smiled. “Adaptation, is it? To flee the problematical conditions? Scoot away?”

  “Is it not? Despite my talk at table tonight,” Ben said, “I am no true revolutionist, as I discovered in Paris. I may welcome the revolutions, but as for actually taking—”

  Darwin tripped,
and Ben took his arm.

  “Careful! Hedgehog divot. But revolution or not, I shan’t be taking up the fight myself.”

  “You are not an agent of…the national ‘transmutation’?”

  “Did I misuse the word earlier? Again, my apologies, I have drunk too much.”

  “No, not at all—transmutation happens to be an idea much on my mind…water becoming steam…a girl of the streets gradually turned into a respectable woman.” He looked at Ben carefully. “Or certain types of creatures—barnacles, for instance—over many dozens of centuries, turning into different types.” From a paddock they heard the whinny of one of Sir Archie’s Arabians. “Perhaps even the ancestor of our horse was a tapir. And millennia before that, possibly, a rhinoceros.

  “Or take your escape from the soldier in Paris. You mentioned that you raced as a boy. Your skill at running proved useful—indeed, essential—only now, years later. It may be the same with a bird’s feathers, that he sprouts them eons before he finally uses them to fly.”

  “I see,” Ben said. “So if a person can be transformed, and improved, like your whore, then whole societies may be changed, transmuted, adapted to new conditions. And so perhaps England shall not change as France is changing, need not change, because it has already reproduced itself in superior form elsewhere.” His brain was afizz. “England spat out America like, like a seed, a…”