Hugh Kenrick (47 page)

*  *  *

He found Swain in his garret, sewing silk parcels of tea to a false lining inside his frock coat. The man expressed surprise and relief at seeing him. “You are safe!” they exclaimed together to each other.

After they had exchanged greetings, Hugh asked, “What has happened?”

Swain told him the whole story, and showed him the newspaper accounts he had saved.

Hugh read them, and set them aside. “Who filed the suit? That is not mentioned anywhere.”

“Our mutual friend, the Marquis of Bilbury,” answered Swain. “The son.”

Hugh paced back and forth for a moment, thinking. “Somehow, he learned of my association with the Society.” He shook his head. “It was me he was after, not any of you.”

“Yes,” agreed Swain, who sat on his bed. “I know.”

Hugh stopped pacing and faced his friend, his expression inviting an explanation.

In the manner of a man confessing his sins, Swain told Hugh about his encounter with Brice Blissom at Windridge Court. “I killed him, my friend, I—a man who has never so much as spanked a beast of a child or cursed a man who cheated me!”

After a long moment, Hugh said, “That was justice, sir. He was going to kill you. I do believe he would have contrived to kill me. However, I do not think you would get justice in the law courts.”

“No,” answered Swain. “I was a Pippin. I resisted arrest and killed the man who wanted to arrest me. I would be hanged, as surely as the Thames tide goes out.”

“And he was a marquis,” added Hugh. “A thousand marks are on your head. I read about that in Danvers. The man who could offer that reward could also afford to have you killed before you came to trial.” He stepped forward and gripped Swain’s shoulder. “I do not know how to thank you, Mr. Swain. You have my gratitude. You rid me of a nuisance. But you did it to save yourself. Feel no guilt about that, or I shall be angry with you.”

Swain managed a weak smile, and nodded.

“So,” said Hugh, pacing again, “the Society was betrayed. One of us gave him the minutes.”

“It must have been Mathius,” sighed Swain. “As I recall, it was he who had them last, for that meeting. And he is now notably absent.”

“He, too, bore me ill will,” remarked Hugh.

“If, like me, he is hiding, or not going about publicly, because he fears me… Well, if I saw him, he need fear nothing from me but my pity.”

“A dire retribution, to be sure,” said Hugh, studying his friend. “A better one would be contempt.” He smiled a smile as cold as marble in winter, and Swain knew that he had not been paid an empty, patronizing compliment.

Swain said, “I have been communicating with the advocate, and so I know this: Elspeth and Abraham have perished. They are gone. In two weeks, Claude, Tobius, and Steven are to take their turns on the pillory, for seven days. They could not be scheduled sooner. They have been sentenced to three years of labor for the Crown, or transportation if it suits their wardens. Abraham’s watch shop was seized in lieu of his fine. Elspeth’s bookshop—he dealt mostly in law books, I learned—has been shunned by lawyers and barristers and students, and is near bankruptcy. Tobius has been banished by the College of Surgeons, and his wife impoverished. Claude’s mistress made off with all his possessions, or what was left after the Crown took its due. And poor Steven will never again play music, for his fingers were smashed almost beyond use.”

Hugh was silent for a while. “Where are they to be pilloried?”

“At Charing Cross,” answered Swain, “‘that place being nearest to the scene of their perfidy,’” he added, quoting Judge Grainger in a mocking impersonation of the judge’s voice. “I would not tell you that, except that you would learn of it in any case.”

Hugh stared out the tiny rectangle of waxed paper that was Swain’s sole window. “I shall visit them in prison,” he said ominously. “I shall see them on the pillory, and ground any man who taunts them or throws a single stone. I will call on this advocate and demand to know why he lost.”

Swain looked up at Hugh, his eyes now alert. “He would not be able to tell you why he lost. He tried to win, but the trial was foreordained to conclude as it did.” He paused. “You pass the pillory every day, sir. There are wretches there now, enduring public censure. ’tis the season to exhibit them. Why do you not feel that same anger for them?”

Hugh shrugged, and did not turn around. “Because they are thieves, and reprobates, and larcenous scum. Why should I feel anything for them?” His hands balled into fists, and he leaned against the edges of the windowsill. “Our friends, however, are the benefactors of the men and women who censure them, and they do not deserve to suffer for their generosity!”
He whipped around and shouted, brandishing a fist that punched the air with every word he spoke, “I will accost King’s Counsel and tell him who I am! I will dare—no, challenge—him to file charges against me! I will secure the release of our friends, before they perish in captivity!”

Swain calmly studied a face animated by murderous fury, a face that would perish in the very hell its owner presumed he could destroy. He had been afraid that this would be his friend’s reaction. Now he knew it. He was determined to abort that certain tragedy. “And who are you?” he asked in a mocking tone.

“I am Miltiades, who triumphed over the Persians!” shouted Hugh with a grim, dreadful recklessness. “I vanquished them, and I’ll vanquish the Crown!”

“No, you will not.” Swain rose and approached Hugh. He towered menacingly over his friend. “You may thank me by not doing anything foolish!” he commanded. “You will not attempt to see our friends, or even rescue them. You will not try to help them. The Crown does not wish them to be helped. You will make no move that would identify you as one of them, young sir!”

Hugh’s brow furled in surprise at these words and their manner of utterance. He began to reply, but Swain wagged a finger in his face.

“You will do nothing,” said Swain. “For if the Crown learns your name, and the name you were known to us by, it will know who made the statements on the poster it most objected to—and then a greater conspiracy would be imagined by it than the mere gluing of inane posters to columns and doors! I observed the entire trial, sir, and saw how men wedded to the Crown would flout reason and mislead honest men! The Crown would go mad, and unleash the dogs of war on everyone, and begin arresting men without cause, reason, or protest! Your family would not escape examination, and your teachers, because they are mere commoners, would be interrogated with the same kindness and respect as were Elspeth and Steven! Men of your own rank would be suspected, and friends to our cause in all the strata of our strange society abused with general warrants, only to disappear after hurried trials and be consumed as our friends are fated to be!” Swain paused. “You credit me with having a fresh mind, sir. Then honor me by owning to that harrowing scenario!”

“So be it!!” shouted Hugh up at Swain’s face. “But I will not stand idle and watch them be degraded and lawfully murdered! I could not live, knowing that they—”

Swain raised an arm and shoved Hugh roughly against the wall. “But you will stand idle, sir! That will be your pillory! And mine! See this: Your sword cannot help them, and neither can your rank! You would not have enough money to purchase all the places owned by the Attorney-General and the Secretary of State, and even if you had, would it guarantee you justice? Do you believe that the men who wield that kind of power would relinquish it by admitting their error, and defer to your reason? No? Then you will be silent, and settle for saluting our friends at the pillory, to let them know that you are free, and will someday avenge them! You will live, my young Baron of Danvers, and enjoy living, and know when it is the right time to vanquish the supreme Mohocks who ambushed them!”

Hugh’s eyes narrowed and he steeled himself. “I’ll avenge them now!!” he growled. “And you are in my way!” He raised an arm and made to push Swain aside.

Swain’s hand rose and his palm slapped Hugh roundly across the face. “Be silent, younker!” he commanded. “Be still, and obey me!”

Hugh fell back against the wall, shocked by the act and by the violence of Swain’s words.

Swain moved his face closer to Hugh’s. “You wonder why I oppose you? This is why, sir: You are something I struggle to be. All of us in the Society have had a glimpse of it. Before you joined us, we merely tinkered with the trappings of what you are, groped futilely in its shadow with the weak candles of our minds, danced to music we could hear only faintly beneath the commotion of our own confusion! We are all drawn to it, except Mathius, whose fear of it caused him to turn Macbeth on us! You could not have had that effect on us, were you not what you are. Yet you do not know what you are. You have had no reason to think on it. The name for you has not yet been devised. The answer lies in you, and only you can put it into the right words. Someday, you will. I may not witness the moment, nor ever hear the words, but I will live happily knowing that they will be discovered and spoken! Somehow, they will justify our own cruel pillory and demolish it at the same time! And I will not allow you to jeopardize that moment!” Swain now saw in Hugh’s eyes the thing he could not identify, together with a knowledge of itself, and rebellion against his words.

Swain bit his lip, then clasped Hugh to him and held him tightly. “You are the future, my friend! And I forbid you to die until you have lived it!” He held Hugh away from him, gripping his shoulders with a strength he
had never tested before. “Promise me, as a Pippin, and as my dearest friend, that you will heed my wisdom! Swear to me!”

Hugh did not understand the conviction that took hold of him. It compelled him, after a long moment, to whisper with solemn honesty, “I swear it.” He did not think his words had anything to do with the intensity of Swain’s eyes, nor with the tears that glistened in them. All he could understand, at that moment, was that Swain had touched some part of his soul, and that he felt an unquestioned duty to acknowledge the act with a commensurate promise.

H
UGH
K
ENRICK KNEW THAT
G
LORIOUS
S
WAIN WAS RIGHT—RIGHT, AT
least, about the consequences of rashly identifying himself to anyone as one of the missing Pippins. Upon cooler reflection, he privately conceded Swain’s points, but their rightness only magnified his sense of helplessness, which in turn fed his anger. He had taken an oath, but now wondered if, in the act of not breaking it, the oath would instead break him.

It was dusk when he paid the driver and stood to watch the hackney leave the courtyard. He walked over to the spot where Dolman and the stablemaster said they found Brice Blissom. Rain had washed the blood away. What happened here many nights ago did not seem real to him, either. Nor did the idea of Glorious Swain committing the act. Then he remembered his friend’s warnings in the garret, and the slap on his face. The reality of Brice Blissom’s death returned.

That evening, Hugh sat at an open window in his darkened room and watched the lights of vessels move up and down and across the Thames below, and let the distant rumble and rattle of wheels over Westminster Bridge soothe his mind. He had accepted all of Swain’s arguments, but one: that he was the future. That is, he did not reject it. His life and future were his, as much as were his hands and feet. It was not an issue of accepting or rejecting such things; they were simply there. He did not know that there was something to be glimpsed, or something others struggled to be. The notion was so alien to him that he could not grasp it; it was as foreign to him as was the
Corpus Mysticum
. That, at least, he could grasp, for it was something he could observe, analyze, and abstract. He did not know how to observe and abstract himself. The idea smacked of vanity. He could not decide whether it was ludicrous or sublime.

It must be sublime, he concluded; Swain was not a man who wasted time on absurdities. And it must be wisdom, an elusive fragment of it he would perhaps acquire in the future that Swain had forbidden him to forsake.

*  *  *

Hugh had promised Swain not to reveal his association with the convicted Pippins. Such a promise, under such circumstances, is merely a lid fixed atop a boiling caldron of anger. Either the lid will be shot away by the mounting pressure, or the caldron will explode, leaving the lid intact. The first sign of the oath’s inadequacy occurred two days later, when Hugh allowed himself an innocent exception to the oath, took time away from his duties at Swire’s Bank, and went to Serjeant-at-Laws Inn to enquire after Dogmael Jones. He found the man in the near-empty library of the Inn, sitting at a table laden with law books and documents. He introduced himself, saying that he had been one of the spectators in the courtroom.

Jones was not wearing his wig and gown. He was a tall, lean, pockmark-scarred man with silver-streaked black hair tied in back with a plain ribbon. He bowed cordially to Hugh, and gestured for him to sit across the table from him. A bottle of wine and a half-filled glass stood on top of an ancient, worn tome. “What is your interest in the matter, milord?” asked the barrister.

“I thought you should have won,” answered Hugh.

“As did I,” replied Jones. “Do you know the men?”

After a pause, Hugh answered, “I was acquainted with them, through their trades.”

“I see.” Jones scrutinized Hugh for a moment. “Did you see the poster?”

“Only in the courtroom, sir.”

“Of course.”

Swain and Benjamin Worley had told Hugh enough about the trial that he could ask informed questions. These he put to Jones, together with some on points of law. Jones smiled in appreciation of the questions. He gestured to the books and papers. “You catch me here in the midst of preparing a reading for students, come the next term. Statutes and precedents and rules of law.” He paused to pour more wine into his glass. “Here’s to public places.” He tilted the glass back and swallowed the red liquid.

Hugh knew then that the man was half-drunk.

Jones noted the observation on his visitor’s face. “Physicians bleed their patients to purge them of infirming humors. Why can’t a man bleed a bottle to purge himself of pain?” He grinned. “Well, do you want to know how injustice was done? All right. On paper, I won the case. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind about that. King’s Counsel would even concede that. But when Milord Grainger examined my own arguments with malice
aforethought, he lost it for me. I had not expected that tactic. I had heard he was a fair man.”

“But, how?”

Jones shrugged. “He made an issue of public places, and those secret names. You were there. You heard him. I neglected both matters in my presentation, as they were not germane. But he flung them into the air for the jury to see, like a juggler at St. Bartholomew’s Fair, for the mob to coo and crow over—while the twin thieves of protocol and privilege picked our pockets! Of course, he did not instruct the jury to disregard his own digression, and I could not instruct him to…instruct.” Jones picked up the bottle again and poured another glass.

“Why would he want to sabotage your case?”

“Why?” chuckled Jones. “Why, indeed? To get himself a crown,” said the barrister in the manner of a quotation, “or, at least, a coronet. Milord Master of the Rolls, I have it on good authority, is to be bestowed the Viscountcy of Wootton and Clarence, in Staffordshire, by a grateful king acting on the advice of those who have heard something of his prudence. Well, sixteen silver balls on a hat, versus the lives of five men—who could quarrel with such a trade?” Jones leaned back in his chair and passed a hand over his eyes, then studied the glass of wine in his hand. “Well, there’s some justice in that reward. ‘The last was I that felt thy tyranny,’ said the ghost of Clarence to King Richard on the eve of battle. ‘Despair and die!’” Jones emptied his glass again, and set it down with a thump on the tome. “I’ll bet he never reads that tragedy again, the right honorable bastard!”

“That was the ghost of Buckingham,” corrected Hugh.

Jones shut his eyes for a moment, then smiled. “Milord, you are right. Wrong ghost, wrong crime! I’ve misplaced my lines. Here, then, is Clarence: ‘I wash myself to death with fulsome wine.’ Slightly paraphrased, as Mr. Cibber and Mr. Garrick are wont to do on the stage.” He picked up the bottle again and drained the last of its contents into his glass. “Is that all you wish to know, milord?”

“Yes,” answered Hugh. “Thank you.”

Jones rose, holding his glass. “Then you will please excuse me, while I imbibe my certain quietus, prepare to stump my students, and ponder the prerogatives of public places.”

Hugh rose also. “Public places? That is the third time you have mentioned that, as though it were a lesion that inflamed your mind.”

“I confess the notion confounds me, milord.”

Hugh looked thoughtful. “Perhaps the confusion lies in its definition, sir,” he suggested.

Jones was about to taste the wine again, but he paused to study his visitor. After a moment, he grinned and winked. “Spoken, milord, like a true Pippin. Thank you. I shall harry that definition.” He bowed in deference.

“Good day to you, sir,” said Hugh. He turned and walked away, but glanced back at the barrister. The glass, still full, now sat on top of the ancient tome. And Sir Dogmael Jones still stood, his back to him, fingers drumming a tattoo on the table, apparently deep in thought.

*  *  *

Between the soaring twin turrets and weathercocks of Northumberland House at Charing Cross strode a gold-plated bronze lion atop a rococo pediment, looking as though he were stalking prey below. Just south of the long facade of this building, the statue of swordless Charles I commanded the juncture of Whitehall with Cockspur Street and the Strand. The space there was wide enough to accommodate the pillory and the crowds it attracted. The pillory itself was not a permanent structure; it was dismantled and stored near a bailiff’s house until the courts produced a fresh batch of felons. When it was up, merchants and tradesmen who leased shops at the crossroads rarely complained of the ruckus and inconvenience of the crowds; an excursion to the pillory was regularly fitted into many a lady’s and gentleman’s daily itinerary of shopping, social calls, and idleness.

Every six weeks, the hangings at Tyburn Tree near Hyde Park on the western outskirts of London drew thousands of spectators. The punishments at Charing Cross drew mere hundreds. Always there were men and women on the pillory, at times only two, often as many as six. Their sentences ranged from two hours to a whole day. The size and character of a crowd depended on the notoriety of the crimes or the felons. Whatever was not a hanging offense was a punishable offense. Adulterers and adulteresses were exhibited here to endure the ribald and coarse catcalls of the crowd. So were buggers and mollies—sodomites—who provoked so furious a wrath that often they were fortunate to be released from the pillory alive, barely able to see through their own blood. So were prostitutes and wagtails, or any women found guilty of lewd behavior. False cambists, or forgers of bills of exchange or other money instruments, took their turns at the pillory, as did receivers of stolen goods and defrauders of tradesmen.
Apprentices who beat their masters, and artisans who beat their apprentices, were exposed to public judgment. Servants lucky enough to win a jury’s sympathy, when the appraised value of the property they stole was less than forty shillings, were sentenced to stand here instead of on the hangman’s cart beneath Tyburn Tree.

And like Tyburn Tree, pillory days took on the character of a street fair. Enterprising vendors put up food and drink stalls nearby, or circled the crowds noisily hawking fruits, refreshments, potions, and snuff from wheelbarrows. Touts roamed the crowds selling places closer to the pillory, or illegal lottery tickets, or programs listing the schedule of felons and their crimes. Others, working on commission for the felons themselves, or for a prison chaplain, hustled to sell the prisoners’ personal confessions, histories, or protestations of innocence in penny pamphlets, for there was a great market for the printed lives of criminals. Pickpockets and cut-purses, drawn naturally to great numbers of distracted people, worked stealthily and discreetly in the crowd, and joined in with their own curses and epithets. A handful of constables, watchmen, beadles, and mounted javelin-men with their red-tasseled spears were posted around the pillory by the presiding sheriff or bailiff to prevent rescue attempts and to control the crowds. If a felon or his family was rich enough, private guards could be hired to keep the crowd far enough away from the prisoner to reduce the risk of harm to him.

For many felons, time on the pillory was tantamount to the death sentence, for there were those among the spectators who, for lack of any other amusement or diversion, were professional tormenters. These were usually street urchins and idle men. They would come ready with bags slung over their shoulders crammed with the dross and scourings of the city: stones, dead cats and rats, blocks of wood, horses’ hooves, rotten eggs, dung, and slaughterhouse offal. Their aim was practiced, accurate, and often deadly. What they did not themselves hurl at the prisoners, they sold to game or roused spectators. For some of these rogues, pelting the pillory was the only cathartic of their aimless, abridged lives; for others, the gross sales of missiles for the use of lawful mobs enabled them to sustain themselves for another day or week.

If a prisoner was maimed, or died from his injuries at the pillory, the law, age-old custom, and public approbation allowed it. The possibility was integral to the punishment. When a prisoner expired on the pillory, a coroner’s jury would simply return a finding of “willful murder by persons
unknown,” and no investigation would be made.
The London Evening Auditor
was not the only newspaper to note that, on pillory days, “there are usually more criminals and miscreants in the crowds, than there are on view.”

The pillory itself was a marvel of simplicity. It consisted of as many upright posts as a platform would accommodate. Attached to each post were two transverse boards, an upper one, hinged, and a stationary lower one. The upper board could swing up to allow a prisoner to place his neck and wrists in the sockets of the stationary, then swing down to complete the holes and be locked to the lower. The average height of the boards forced most men and women to stand in a bending position. The posts were often connected at the base to an iron bar that would permit a hangman, safely out of the way of missiles, to turn the posts, and thus the prisoners, for the crowds on all sides to see.

Swordless Charles, sitting high above the pillory, did not witness what transpired beneath the nostrils of his steed. The golden lion of Northumberland House, gazing down on it all, seemed to give it his kingly consent.

From Windridge Court, Charing Cross was Hugh’s only egress to Worley’s offices on the Lawful Keys and Swire’s Bank on Lombard Street. He could have paid a waterman to row him from the Whitehall Stairs to Lion Key downriver, but he chose to pass through the juncture every morning. He thought he could accustom himself to the spectacle, so that, when their time came, the sight of the Pippins, standing with their heads and wrists locked between the boards, and exposed to the taunts and abuse, would be bearable. He had never ventured to Tyburn Tree, for he thought that a fascination with the executions there was morbid, strange and unhealthy. He had seen pillories before—in London, in Danvers, in Canterbury—and, without pausing in his business to gape, assumed that justice was being done. Nor was he a stranger to the gibbets that travelers encountered on the roads and turnpikes, those iron cocoons of the decaying remains of brutal highwaymen, planted aloft at the scenes of their crimes.

Soon enough, though, he realized that he was deceiving himself. He could endure the sight of a pillory and the raucous crowds that surrounded it. He knew that what he could not endure was the sight of the Pippins on one. They had been found guilty of blasphemous libel, of putting up seditious posters, yet they were not criminals. The Crown said they were. He knew they were not.