Hugh Kenrick Read Online Free PDF

wouldn’t think of risking a son not of the Earl’s passion.” The companion had answered, “I own that this must be true, friend, but, you must credit it, her virtue is greatly assisted by her ungainly visage.” The Earl, surprising them in the midst of their laughter, had taken a cane to both men and beaten them bloody in front of the throng of horrified guests, and then had his servants toss them outside and down the mansion’s broad stone steps.
    Garnet Kenrick could not say that he hated his brother, or merely disliked him. Their frequent consultations on family and business matters were informal and cordial. No love grew between the siblings, and none was lost. Each regarded the other more as a family intimate than as a brother. The only evidence of a close link between them was that they addressed each other by first name. And the only personal feelings they would tactfully reveal to each other was that Garnet thought his brother overbearing and baselessly arrogant; Basil thought his brother
déclassé
, if not outright plebeian. “My dear Basil, had you the mind of Newton, and the physique of Ganymede, perhaps we should see the world running to you, instead of you after it.” “My dear Garnet, it does not do to behave as though you preferred to be familiar with the coachman’s daughter, rather than with those of your own station.” This was the limit the brothers would permit their curious, mutual acrimony to go.
    Basil Kenrick held the upper hand. He had power. His man in the Commons voted for every protective, mercantilist measure that came up for debate on the floor. The Earl himself was a peer, and journeyed to London, when it suited him, to sit at sessions of Lords.
    There was, however, one matter in which the brothers were in fullagreement. The Baron saw to it that the family’s coffers were filled with the profits of smuggling into the country the very things the Earl voted to ensure were heavily taxed.
    Many smuggling gangs offered shares in their enterprises, which were bought anonymously by aristocrats and gentry along the south coast of England, from Land’s End to Ramsgate. Garnet had seen to it that the Earl owned shares in half the principal gangs in each coastal county, except Dorset, where the Earl controlled one of the biggest gangs. This gang was known as the Lobster Pots for its practice of landing, hiding, and transporting illegal goods in lobster pots deposited near the shore by Dutch, English, and French partners. The chief of the Lobster Pots, once a fisherman, owned a great house and twenty acres near Lulworth Cove, the gang’s main point of operation. The Earl had never met him and refused to meet him; the task of negotiating with commoners was left to his brother and his intermediaries.
    When the Skelly gang in Cornwall was crushed and its leader hanged in Falmouth, Garnet Kenrick tied a black satin ribbon around the neck of an Italian bronze statue of Hermes that loomed from a corner of his vast study desk. The Skelly gang had repeatedly rejected his careful overtures of partnership in the gang, and shown no interest in the capital he could have provided to expand their scope of activities. Still, he had admired the gang and its leader, and was sorry to see them vanish.
    The ribbon remained, after almost two years. The Baron was reluctant to remove it, for he had read many newspaper accounts of what was said and done at both Marvel and the trial in Falmouth. Something unusual had happened in these places, something significant, and he felt that if he removed the ribbon, the incidents would vanish into the anonymity of his mundane affairs, and he would never know what was special about them.
    When Basil Kenrick entered his brother’s study one evening, he cocked an eyebrow on sight of the black ribbon, and asked in challenging jest, “What means this eternal mourning, dear brother? Did Hermes fail to persuade Prometheus to coax Athena from Zeus’s head?” He took pleasure in