The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles
Read The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles Online
Authors: John Jakes
The Kent Family Chronicles (Book One)
John Jakes
The eight novels in this series, carrying the story of an American family forward from its beginning in Revolutionary times to the two-hundredth anniversary of the Republic, could only be dedicated, book by book, to the eight Americans I love best of all. And so, Rachel, this is for you.
Chapter II - Behind the Madonna
Chapter III - Blood in the Snow
Chapter VI - “A Perfect Member of the Mob-ility”
Chapter VII - Brother Against Brother
Book Two The House of Sholto and Sons
Chapter I - Swords at St Paul’s
Chapter II - The Black Miracle
Chapter III - Mr. Burke and Dr. Franklin
Chapter IV - The Wizard of Craven Street
Chapter VI - The Bristol Coach
Chapter VII - To an Unknown Shore
Chapter VIII - Journey to Darkness
Book Four The Road From Concord Bridge
Chapter II - A Death in Philadelphia
Chapter IV - Too Much for the Whistle
Chapter VI - “God Damn It, They Are Firing Ball!”
“The
gentleman
tells us that America is obstinate; that America is almost in open rebellion. Sir, I rejoice that America has resisted…
“The gentleman asks when were the colonies emancipated. But I desire to know when they were made slaves…
“They are subjects of this kingdom, equally entitled with yourselves to all the natural rights of mankind, and the peculiar privileges of Englishmen; equally bound by its laws, and equally participating in the constitution of this free country. The Americans are the sons, not the bastards, of England.”
1766:
William Pitt the Elder,
before Parliament,
in support of repeal
of the Stamp Act.
Fortune’s Whirlwind
CHAPTER I
The Beating
i
T
HE WOMAN’S FACE BURNED,
glowed as though illuminated by a shaft of sunlight falling from a high cathedral window. But the woman was no madonna, unanimated, beatific. Her face showed violent emotion.
He fought to turn away from the searing brilliance, but he could neither run nor move. The old, strangling dread began to tighten his throat—
The woman stared at him, accusing. Her black eyes shone nearly as bright as the highlights in her black hair where it crowned her forehead and cascaded on either side of her oval face. Behind her was darkness, nothing but darkness. It intensified the frightening radiance of her face, emphasized the whiteness of her teeth. Unlike most women of her years—she was three less than forty; he knew every dreadful detail—by some miracle of inherited health, her mouth was free of gaps and brown rot.
He struggled to hide from the face and could not even avert his head. The dread quickened. He heard his own strident breathing. It grew louder, because he knew she would speak to him—
And she did, the words frightening as always, frightening because he could never be certain whether she spoke from love or rage.
“Don’t try to run. I told you—
don’t.
You will
listen.”
Run. God, as if he could! He was held in that vast darkness where her face burned so fiercely; and her eyes—
“There will be no Latin. Do you hear?
No Latin!
You will study English. The reading and writing of your own language, and English. And how to figure sums—something I never learned. But I had no need of it, acting in Paris. You will. There’s a different role for you, Phillipe. A great role, never forget that—”
Like coals on the hearth of a winter midnight, her eyes were fire, hypnotic. But they held no warmth. He was all cold sweat, terror, crippled immobility—
“I’ll tell you what the role is when I feel the time is proper. Till then, you must obey me and learn English as your second tongue—and also such things as how much an English pound is worth. That way, you’ll be ready to take what belongs to you. Let the fools around here chatter about the glory of France. The greatest empire the world’s known since Rome lies across the water—where you must go one day, to claim what’s yours. So let the little church boys learn their Latin from that bigot priest and his helper!”
Stabbing out, disembodied white things, white claws, her hands reached at him. Closed on his upper arms. She shook him, shaken herself with the ferocity of her passion.
Trying to deny her, negate her, he was able at last to turn his head from side to side. The effort required all his strength. But she would not release him. Her face floated closer, wrenching into the ugliness that brought the old, silent scream climbing into his throat.
“You will learn your English from Girard!” she cried. “From good, decent books—none of those filthy, blasphemous things he hides in his cupboard. Do you hear me, Phillipe?”
He tried to speak but his throat somehow remained clogged. Nothing but a feeble hiss of air came out between his teeth.
She shook him harder, then harder still, as a wind from the limitless dark tossed her lustrous hair. The wind added its keen to the rising shrillness of her voice; its blowing and buffeting seemed to shimmer the burning image of her face like a candle-flame in a gale—
“Do you hear what I say, Phillipe?
Do you hear me?”
At last he brought forth sound: a howling, animal cry of fear and pain—
The wind-roar broke off like an interrupted thunderclap. He tore himself from the clutching hands, fled through the darkness. Away from the white claws. The face. The eyes—
But the darkness to which he fled was without substance. His legs churned on emptiness, as he fell, and fell, and
fell—
This time the sound from his throat was a scream for mercy.
He awoke sweating. Sweating and—after a moment’s realization that it was over—enraged.
The dream came on him from time to time. He should be used to it. But he wasn’t. Always, the dream brought unaccountable terror.
In those first muzzy moments, his anger turned to shame. He rubbed his eyes to rid himself of sleepiness. The roughness of his knuckles against his eyelids was a reassurance.
His body was slick with sweat. Yet at the same time he was cold in the garret room above the inn. He knuckled his eyes harder. A little more of his drowsiness sloughed away. And more of the fear. He tried to laugh but made only a rough, croaking sound.
The dream’s details were essentially the same on every occasion. Her face. Her eyes. Her hands. Her implied accusations, couched in the long, jumbled harangue. He’d heard bits of it before, often. In sleep. And awake too.
She always insisted that England was the rising star in the world’s constellation of powers, and now he wondered again whether she said that because she had been treated so shabbily by her own people.
She always insisted that he was better—much better—than any of those among whom they lived.
But she refused to say precisely why. Whenever he pressed her for specifics, she would only smile—how haughtily she could smile!—and reply:
“In good time, Phillipe. In good time.”
The garret smelled of straw, and his own sweat. He rolled on his side, toward the little round garret window that looked out onto the basalt hillside touched now with the glint of starlight. Under his left arm, the stiff corners of book spines jabbed him through the prickly wool of the knee-length shirt that he merely tucked into his breeches when it was time for the day’s work to start.
Uncomfortable, he tugged the precious, carefully hidden books from under his body—the books whose contents he understood so poorly; the dangerous books Girard had been slipping to him for more than a year now, always with the caution that he keep them concealed.
One of the volumes, by an Englishman named Locke whom Girard much admired, had been helpful in Phillipe’s study of the second language he had learned. But
Two Treatises of Government
also puzzled and confused him in many places. As did the other two books.
The first was a slim volume called
Le Contract social.
By a Swiss writer Girard called one of the
philosophes,
whenever he didn’t refer to him with a wry smile as the mad Master Jean Jacques. The largest and bulkiest book was one of Girard’s two most cherished possessions. The first volume of something called
L’Encyclopedie
—a compendium of the world’s knowledge to date. Mind-numbing essays on everything from politics to the nature and construction of the heavens. Two more of those admired
philosophes,
a thinker named Diderot and a scientist named d’Alembert, had assembled the vast work, Girard said.
The first two volumes of the work had been suppressed the moment they went on sale because, as Girard put it, quoting with acerbity some official of the French government, the compendium “tended to destroy the royal authority, to encourage a spirit of independence and revolt and to erect the foundations of error, the corruption of manners, irreligion and impiety.” Somehow a few copies had been privately circulated before the official suppression. Girard had been lucky enough to get hold of one of each of the initial volumes.
As Phillipe buried the books underneath the straw, his mind turned back to the dream. Perhaps he deserved it, as punishment. On every possible occasion when more legitimate works—safer works—were not under study, Girard patiently tried to explain some of the vast, hard-to-grasp ideas Phillipe could read but could not fully understand. Voltaire. Montesquieu. The mad Rousseau. They were all represented in that precious big book Phillipe slid on top of the other two and hid with straw. They were all, Girard maintained smugly, unarguably great. They were all rattling the world to its foundations—
And turning Phillipe into one corrupted by error?
If she only knew! How often would the dreams come then?
Probably never, he reflected with a small, weary smile. Very likely she wouldn’t let him sleep but would lecture, lecture, lecture—
All three books safely out of sight, he relaxed a little. Breathed more slowly and deeply, for the first time since waking up. He sniffed the damp mist of fall drifting down from the Puy de Dome in the north. The tang of the autumn night was a kind of tonic, restoring his senses but shoving him hard into reality again—the reality in which he always doubted the dream and all it contained.
Another cold, difficult winter would soon wrap around the Velay plain and freeze the Allier, which flowed northward to join the Loire. The dreary days would pass, and he would shiver and work and sleep his life away at a moldering inn that no longer attracted many customers.
He stuck a straw between his teeth and chewed the end absently. He was supposed to believe there was some marvelous, shining future waiting for him? In
England!
The homeland of France’s traditional enemies?
He bit on the straw and let the corners of his mouth wrench up in another sour smile.
The very idea was laughable.
But it was also an explanation of why he had no friends his own age. Though he hardly believed the shrilled promises of the dream and the daytime harangues that carried the same promises, he knew he sometime acted as if he believed them completely. Others sensed that unconscious arrogance—