I, Libertine

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Surly, sloppy Barrowbridge instilled in his pupil a macaroni’s urge for display and a Gregorian’s austerity, and kept him in tight balance between. “Take half the ribands off that hat and make the others dark.” He taught him one brandy from another and not to ask for either at the ale-drinkers’ table. “The woman was never born who hasn’t a beauty about her; you must find it in an instant and tell her. But stay within reason; if she’s as tall as your collar don’t stand there admiring upward.”

  “You may act like a fool,” he told the boy one day, “any time you know you’re acting.”

  Barrowbridge’s practice was a rich one, but in variety only. A barrister needs to know the law; abiding by it is quite another specialty. He could not afford the luxuries of defending only the innocent and supporting only the weak. As the years passed and he became less and less able to travel, his work became more and more advisory and his purse thinner; the best of advice in the hands of the ignorant and the slipshod is worth nothing, and nothing was what he frequently got through the mistakes of others. But in the eyes of the apprentice, much of this was priceless. He would crouch over his tall table and sponge up the sounds of what crossed the master’s desk, hearing the probes of legalistics penetrating the fabric of law, hearing how courts common could be brought counter to courts Christian, how cases could be made to fail in the certainty they would be reversed on appeal. He saw many a groat gained through mad demands for a sixpence, and many a fleeced lamb gamboling with such joy that it did not realize it had lost something. He listened amazed to friends here who were enemies in the legal arena, and their strivings to prolong where the fees were high and to bring justice swiftly where they were low.

  “You’re not to be a barrister,” Barrowbridge told Lance when he was eighteen. It was not a prophecy; it was a command. “You’re to be a gentleman. The law’s for oxonian sort of chaps who’ve studied a third as well for twice as long as you have. They’ve all the chits and certs and thank-you-Dean sort of recommendations, and whether they stand for Parliament or whether they take up landholdings, it doesn’t matter to you. You’d never compete with their kind. You couldn’t. They have a curl-o’-the-lip way of chatting with people like you, who frighten ’em. ‘I say, old man,’ he mimicked, ‘where did you go to school?’ A gentleman does not ask such a thing of you, nor does he inquire of your fortune and family; if you are a gentleman he accepts you. But to be so accepted you must be more perfectly a gentleman than an advocate at the bar must perfectly be an advocate, d’ye follow me?”

  The matter of a Courtenay, Earl of Devon, was the product and discovery of Barrowbridge’s capacious mind and references. “Given that your ancestry is at present unknown,” he said once, “you have taken the first great step toward finding one. To make a Courtenay out of a Smythe one would first have to erase his Smythe-ness. You do not present that difficulty.”

  So Lance swept and sweated and swotted; in manor houses in Surrey, Hampshire and Berks he watched the gentry secretly from pantry and stable; he shot black-cock and greyhen with gamekeepers whose masters were in the City, and played billiards with City footmen whose masters were shooting grouse. Where the coachman Piggott had not acquaintance and entree into the world of backstairs, Barrowbridge could obtain it at the front door from some young blood, say, whose angry tailor had been placated or counter-threatened, or from some lady whose carelessness had produced results which Barrowbridge had healed. Another youth lounging about was never remarkable; village folk would think he belonged to the manor and the manor staff thought he might be from the village; as to his wide familiarity with houses in town, the gentry never knew. The times were right for such a machination, and the place. It was the wake of the Seven Years’ War, a boiling, uncertain, exhilarated, impoverished, expanding time, wherein England was acquiring its empire, merchant-baronets were beginning to appear in the House, great estates were growing greater or smaller or changing hands. It was a time of comings and goings, of new faces at milady’s soirée and strange faces at the London hostels. Boulogne and Calais were handier to the City than Wiltshire and Berks, and young Lance Courtenay was by no means the only person in England who was substituting courtliness and fine linen for a pedigree.

  Barrowbridge stirred, and Lance rose instantly to put the kettle on. It was growing dark; he lit a candle and carried it into the bedroom. In the silent way of the sick and the old, Barrowbridge was altogether awake on the instant, and watching him. “How are you, sir?”

  “I’m a dead man.” He raised his head weakly to look into the other room, and let it fall again. Lance correctly read his wistful hunger: “I’ve put the kettle on.” He straightened the pillow. “You’re no more dead than I am.”

  “Ah, I am. I died there on the floor when ye watched me groveling.” He looked up at Lance’s contemplative face. “Would you be going ahead with this amusement now, lad? If you plan to, change your plans. Mutilating a corpse is not conduct becoming to a gentleman below the rank of viscount.”

  “I’ll not harm you, sir,” Lance said gently.

  Barrowbridge grunted and closed his eyes. Though his hands did not move, Lance had the impression he was feeling over his aching body like a man after a bad fall, taking tender inventory. “I’God,” he said in his harsh whisper, “I might’ve laughed at anything from a hot poker to the Iron Maiden, and even borne the bursting of my bowel from that ordeal of the pot you devised. But you had me groveling, ay, and that without laying a hand on me, without speaking any but respectful words.” He was not angry. He was examining the events of the morning with an almost admiring detachment.

  “God and the wrong parents made me look like a Barbary ape, Lanky, but ’tis I alone who’ve made a beast of myself; only two people on earth have made a fool of Simon Barrowbridge, and you’re the second. Working, I gather,” he added, eyes abruptly open and blazing, “for the first.”

  “Ah, sir! you said that before, and I remarked that you did me little credit. I was instructed by no one.”

  “All your own idea? Eh! You’ll pardon the curiosity of a disembodied spirit—because I insist I’m dead; ’tis the only way I can live with myself now—but if ’twas information you wanted, even to succor mine enemies, why need the request take the form of torture? Or have you been concealing the appetites of that villainous Marquis they’re gossiping about these days?”

  “May I return your question with a question, sir?”

  “Why, that would be in the best tradition of a barrister.”

  “Thank you. Well then, sir, is it true that you had vowed never to assist Elizabeth Chudleigh in any circumstances?”

  “While I lived,” the old man nodded. “Further proof of my passing, if any were needed. But go on.”

  “Then can you think of any way I might have secured this information from you but by doing what I did? Might I have simply asked you and given my simple reason? Or threatened you with that hot poker you have only now derided? Or reasoned with you, or argued?”

  “I concede your points, especially the last,” said Barrowbridge with the shade of a smile. “And what put that especial method into your surprising young mind?”

  Lance smiled in his turn. “Our old comrade in worldliness Balthazar Gracian, where he counsels: Find out each man’s thumbscrew. ’Tis the art of setting their wills in action.”

  “What a viper have I raised in my nest,” cried Barrowbridge, and now there was no concealing his rueful admiration. “And have you found your precious information?”

  In answer Lance went for his summary of the procedure of jactitation, brought it to the bed, put a second pillow under the barrister’s shoulders, adjusted the candle, and then left him to brew the tea.

  “Well drawn,” said Barrowbridge when he returned a moment later with teapot, sugar and cup. He waved the papers. “And to what end are you giving away this rare gem?”

  “To right the injustice of Miss Chudleigh’s situation,” said Lance pompously, and enjoyed the amazement which grew o
n the other’s face, and enjoyed even more the glee which replaced it when he added, “And I’m too much your disciple to be giving anything away.”

  The tea was poured by now; he took it and sipped with noisy gratification. “Now then—” he murmured as he sipped and pondered, and again, “N-n-ow—” sure outward signs of his mighty mind at work. Lance stood by silently, waiting.

  “In my shriven state,” hissed the old man at length, “as I lie here dead and released from the pettiness and paucity of man’s lot on earth, it comes to me that my long bitterness toward that lady is … unworthy. Notice, lad, I don’t say ‘unjustified.’ Never that; but the depth of my rancor, and its long tenure—those are unworthy. True to the code of a gentleman, you have not asked me the cause of this—ah—disaffection of mine in regard to the lady. True to the instincts of a soul in purgatory, I shall tell you. It is a sad tale and reflects little credit on anyone concerned; but then, it’s a confession, and well due you, my executioner. In addition, you have set yourself a perilous course through the very heart of a jungle of which you have as yet traversed only the margins.”

  “But, sir, I—”

  “Hush! and listen,” the barrister snapped. “I am writhing in embarrassment and chagrin at the very contemplation of an episode I have concealed, even from myself, for twenty years. You have reduced me to a prideless fraction of my former self, and I very much doubt I shall ever have the fortitude to begin this tale again.”

  Lance ostentatiously placed both hands tight over his mouth and sat down to listen.

  I said twenty years [he began] and I couldn’t be more precise. It was 1749, just this early in the year and, now that I think on’t, as unseasonably warm. I’d wintered well, in Majorca—this was before Admiral Byng gave it away to the French, and it was pleasant and peaceful, and the task I had there pleased me and was successful; I’ll not add it to my story just now because it was skullduggery; because it does not concern the matter in hand; and because I won’t spoil the telling of it one day when it is germane. You should know only that the law was but a piece of my career in the early days; I performed what one might call confidential repair work on broken things—vows, hearts, contracts and consciences. I returned to England pleased with myself, settled with my tailor for the first time in twelve years, and took a little house in Jermyn Street.

  I shall not say I had a reputation for efficiency, because a reputation implies wide public knowledge, and an element in my efficiency was the very absence of renown. For the handling of matters such as the return of embarrassing letters, or the gathering of evidence to transform ‘potential’ to ‘putative’ paternity, one does not insert a public notice in the Monthly Review. (Don’t raise your eyebrows at me, lad! My standards were high; I never undertook an assignment not in the interests of justice, though I’ll confess to the use of my clients’ definition of the word.)

  Ah—where were we? High standards? Ah yes! I had a bit of capital, you see, my health, and a bit of leisure, so I could pick and choose. I accepted only those assignments which I could positively fulfill. Clients who were turned away went elsewhere and forgot me; clients whom I served were satisfied and sent me others. As a result I actually was known, for a certain period, as a man who made no errors. My promise was as good as anyone’s oath, and because I succeeded in everything I undertook, many believed I would succeed in anything I undertook. And perhaps I had begun to believe that too, else I should have excused myself from my drawing room the instant Elizabeth Chudleigh entered it. But I did not, and I was undone.

  Na! I am shriving myself. Prosperity was my undoing quite as much, or I might have demanded a … a more negotiable fee than the one I exacted. Complacency was my undoing, for I had ample warning that Miss Chudleigh was not to be dealt with as just another client. And perhaps the old Adam undid me most of all.

  I wish you could have seen her then! They tell me she is still a splendid-looking woman, but in those days, those days … imagine first her clothing, a bottle-green gown with a little cape, a strange hat close to the brow and flaring out behind to frame her face with a green darker than the dress—almost black. Now in my time I’ve observed many an artifice for the entrapment of the unwary, and have devised not a few; I yield the palm to few men, but with all my heart, to any woman, I do. They come by it untaught and reach excellence by instinct; and like a green shoot, they’ll break rocks to accomplish it, however tender they be.

  A long time had passed since the scandalous episode of the costume ball at the Venetian Embassy—five years at least, and she had used them as well as they had her. Then, she made such an extreme of forwardness that it looked like innocence. Here in my drawing room she was so modest in appearance, so decorous in mien, so foiled in gentility, that the whore in her flamed out like a diamond.

  She had a flawlessness about her—skin that mud wouldn’t stick to (as she’s often enough proven, the many times it’s been thrown at her) and a child’s mouth, and arches to her brows barely turned, like the flat steady wings of birds that soar. But I don’t want to tell you she was a beautiful woman. … or perhaps she was; but if she was, no beautiful woman had ever looked like her before. Her lips said what she wished them to say; her eyes demanded openly to know what a man had, and how soon he intended to use it. Ah … and I was a shade under forty and I had my health, I had my health.

  She paid me the compliment of taking no precautions, exacting no confidence, and telling no lies. She made it clear by these omissions that she knew who I was, I knew who she was, and that, being what we both were, we could work together or we could not once the facts were out.

  She told me as soon as I had seated her that she was married to young Augustus John Hervey, brother of the second Earl of Bristol; that the marriage had been secret and was unsatisfactory, and that they had been living apart for nearly five years. Nevertheless, recent news from Ickworth in Suffolk had given her to think.

  It seemed that George William Hervey, the Earl, lay even now in Ickworth aflame with fever and his life was feared for; should he be taken, her husband would inherit the title and the estates. Married, she would be a countess, and either remain one or draw off a reasonable weight of Bristol treasure as the price of a divorce or annulment. But of her marriage to this young gentleman there was no record; the curate who had done the thing had taken a large contribution for his little church in exchange for a lapse of memory in this matter. He was now dead, as was the village idiot who witnessed the midnight ceremony. Probably a thousand people knew of this wedding; fifty thousand had guessed; no living soul except the principals could swear they saw it done, and one of them might not.

  Could this marriage, valid in the sight of God, Church, and common law, be entered quietly in the parish records?

  I asked her where, and exactly when the marriage had taken place, and then I thought a bit while she waited with her face asleep and her eyes alive. Presently I asked her what she would do if the Earl recovered—he was, after all, only three years older than his brother—and thereafter outlived Methuselah? You see, I had known for some time that this remarkable creature was the mistress of the Duke of Kingston. The future cannot be foretold, I said to her, but in a measure it can be controlled. One may eliminate things from it as one can never do with the past. Might it not be possible that one day she would regret the existence of the written record?

  I think that troubled her, but only for a moment, for she smiled at me. It must have been then that I decided to make a fool of myself; say rather, to permit her to do so. She smiled and said, “I understand you can repair anything, any time, if the price is right. If one day I needed to rid myself of this evidence again, might you manage it? For the only circumstance I can imagine which would make that desirable would entail a … sizable advancement.” And I knew she was thinking, even then, of one day being the Duchess of Kingston, though her hopes were not great.

  I said no; the evidence must stand, once in; getting it out again would be a mutilation too difficu
lt to conceal. On the other hand, I said, I had run across some surprising information which would apply to that circumstance. Now, that’s all I said about it and it was true. She believed me and she believes to this day that I know a way to erase that irritating union with Augustus Hervey who, by the way, has still not inherited, and is still an officer in his Majesty’s Navy as he was the day she met him, though rather higher up.

  In any case, she totted up the risks in an instant, and then laughed. She has a shrewdness which surpasses intelligence and an intuition which is wiser than wisdom. “I must have the Hervey marriage just now,” she said, and, “I might like another later. Let us be dutiful then and do what we must. Later, when the circumstance arises, we can consider the other.”

  “Very well,” I said, “I’ll rush off to your little lost village and see that your little lost marriage is recorded. There’s only one more thing to discuss, and I’m off, praying the good Earl lives the week out. I shouldn’t like him to predecease our plans.”

  “One more thing?” says she, and, “Oh, of course; the fee.”

  “The fee.” I looked at her until she—even she!—must drop her eye.

  “Will it be much?” she asked me; and for reasons I can’t clearly explain, that was the most hilarious thing I had ever heard; I came out with a big inexcusable boom of a laugh. I told her that I could not possibly answer such a question; and then like a fool I laughed again. I do not think women enjoy being laughed at. When I could, I said, “You have the payment with you this minute, Miss Chudleigh.”

  She stood up. She understood immediately and completely. She said without hesitation, “Very well, then. Have you a … preference as to the time of … payment, and the place?”