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Chapter 21

Besançon

December 1636


“This Hamilton’s father began life as nothing but a schoolmaster,” Priolo reported, “the son of a Presbyterian minister, who in turn was the illegitimate son of some minor ‘laird’ as the Scots name their untitled nobility, but still nothing but a schoolmaster who went to Ireland fortune-hunting and opened an academy in Dublin, thereafter becoming associated with the founding of Trinity College. A cunning fellow, by all reports, but still just a schoolmaster. Then, in the service of King James of Scotland as he weaseled his way onto the English throne, the father became first Sir James Hamilton when he was fifty, after he had acquired a lot of Irish land by more than dubious means, and then, some dozen or so years past, Viscount Clanboye. Thus, the young man coming is the heir to a title of nobility. A new title, a minor title, an Irish title, but still a title. All this comes, of course, from my recent brief and hurried visits among the Scots officers in the service of Grand Duke Bernhard, and is hearsay. Or gossip.

“Still, the father holds a lot of land in County Down, acquired by defrauding Con MacNiall O’Neill, one of the most powerful of the native Irish chiefs, but still a lot of land, with his title confirmed by the English monarch when said King James of Scotland became King James of England, and more granted to him by the same King James elsewhere in Ulster. Old man Hamilton is past seventy now but still alive and healthy. He divorced two childless wives before he took a third. She is Welsh and some thirty years younger than he is. Her father bought one of the baronetcies that King James put on the market for money; her brother now holds it. This boy is an only child, so one can only assume that Clanboye puts a lot of faith in the lady’s virtue by believing that her son is his.”

“Or was so anxious for an heir that he was willing to accept any son born in wedlock,” Marguerite interrupted.

“Little cynic.” Rohan smiled. His daughter rarely bypassed an opportunity to make a snide reference to her illegitimate maternal half-brother, Tancrède.

“I would say,” Priolo commented, “that the precise relationships among the dates of the boy’s conception, his father’s second divorce, and his parents’ marriage appear to have been somewhat obfuscated.”

Rohan rapped his knuckles on the table. “This O’Neill your mentioned—what exact relation is he to Owen Roe O’Neill who was here in the summer?”

“Was, not is. Brother-in-law. They were also cousins in varying degrees, of course, but that is the closest connection. Con MacNiall O’Neill left two sons. When he died in 1619, they were children. King James took them as wards of chancery and had them brought up in England as Protestants. Thus far, neither of them has married.”

“So the Hamiltons will be in feud with Owen Roe?”

“Yes, and with the Montgomerys as well, who did the first level of fraud against Con MacNiall, and then old man Hamilton pulled a favor from King James and got a third share of the whole of the Clanboye lands. Hugh Montgomery did the work of breaking O’Neill out of prison at Carrickfergus and then Hamilton cut himself in on the payoff.”

* * *

“As the second element, I believe . . . ” Rohan paused for a sip of coffee. “When I first tasted this beverage, Madame Calagna, I thought it to be surely the most horrid substance that any person ever voluntarily took into his mouth. Yet, within the week, I tried it again. Then again, a couple of days following. Now I have a cup every morning, and sometimes, as now, once more in the evening. It is quite insidious, so enlivening for the mind, rather than the dullness that ensues from hot cider.”

Carey nodded. She had no objection to drinking coffee at the duke’s expense. It still cost quite a lot.

* * *

“He hulks,” Shae said.

Dominique nodded.

The guests, Mr. Hamilton and his tutor Mr. Traill, had arrived.

“He’s disgusting,” Shae said, “and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Twenty years old, twenty pounds overweight, too much hair, and the expression on his face only manages to go from pout to sulk and then back again. For all the world, he looks exactly like some over-entitled WVU frat boy trolling through the evening in search of a girl who’s stupid enough to swallow a doctored drink.”

“Shae!”

“Mom’s a nurse, and she’s a realist. They may not have roofies down-time, but they’ll probably come up with something else, so she’s made sure I know all about what some guys do. All he does is complain.”

“Well, I’ll grant that,” Dominique giggled. “First he gripes that he hasn’t had any fun at all on his European tour, stuck with this tutor, meaning Mr. Traill, who was recommended to his father as ‘a very learned, discreet, and religious master.’ I’d love to go to Italy myself, but Hamilton said, ‘We went to Florence and Rome, first, which involved a lot of art galleries and language lessons.’ Then he griped, ‘After that, he made me go to Geneva, of all the dull spots on earth that he could have found. We were there much longer than I had any wish to be, because Mr. Traill decided to qualify for his ordination and receive it there, in the home of Calvin himself. We have duties of piety at the beginning and end of each day. Once we got to France, I got to start my day, after prayers, mind you, at seven o’clock in the morning with two hours’ study of French or Latin grammar, then classes in dancing and fencing, then oral French, followed by an hour of translation, followed by logic and mathematics.’

“On he goes, blah, blah, blah.”

“Dominique, you are a wicked mimic.” Shae grinned.

“I tried, honestly. I said that surely Mr. Traill gave him some time for entertainment, and off he went again. ‘Only if you think that literary salons are entertainment. Or, while we were in Geneva, sermons.’”

“Then what’s he doing here?”

“Well, according to Susanna, who heard it from the cook, who heard it from one of the footmen, who heard it from Hamilton’s manservant, while they were in France, he and Mr. Traill heard the gossip regarding a search for a husband for Marguerite. Given the troubles in England, Scotland, and by extension Ulster, Hamilton decided that it’s probably not smart for him to put all of his eggs in the basket his father manipulated his way into, and that he, being definitely not only Protestant, but Presbyterian, and not quite a ‘nonentity,’ clearly qualifies as Marguerite’s future husband. So they weaseled their way into getting the duke’s sister to send them here. It looks like Marguerite has a suitor on her hands.”

* * *

Hamilton did not like Shae and Dominique any more than they liked him. He was outright rude to Susanna.

Hamilton and Traill had not been in residence for a week when a package arrived from Marc Cavriani, “wherever he is at the moment,” Susanna said. Her face was cheerful enough, but Dominique thought that the bright tone in her voice was more than a little forced.

The girls all started pulling off the wrapping paper right there in the entryway.

“Oooohhh!” Susanna screeched with delight. “It’s a little nativity scene such as the Italians make. He must have ordered it all the way from Naples. Unless he’s back in Naples, of course.”

Traill’s voice came from the door leading into the salon. “Destroy those idols at once.”

“No!” Susanna screeched, hugging the box to her chest. “It’s mine!”

Hamilton, following Traill into the entryway, reached out and snatched the box out of her hands. He was about to pull the little carvings out and smash them on the floor when Shae and Dominique each grabbed one of his wrists, Dominique with both hands and Shae more by poking her good arm through the crook of his elbow and tugging.

“Give me back my crèche!” Susanna’s voice, echoed and amplified by the tile floors, resounded as far as the duke’s second-floor study.

“Mom,” Dominique screamed. “Mommmm!”

“Marguerite,” Shae yelled. “Carey!”

The footman stationed by the front door looked on, not at all sure what his duties might be in a situation where dissension arose among his betters in the household in which he had recently taken service.

“Give her back the crèche,” Rohan said as he came down the stairs, followed by Carey.

“There can be no toleration of idolatry,” Traill screamed.

“There obviously is,” Rohan pointed out. “In spite of the storms of destruction that our co-religionists visited upon stained glass windows, statues, and paintings in the previous century, large numbers of them survive. Artists create more day by day. I would think that you would have noticed this during your various tours of Italy. I see no real sign that God is busily striking them down.”

“Not in a Reformed household, though,” Hamilton said, trying to shake the girls off his arms. “In Ulster, we have been scrupulous about repressing the mistaken practices of the surviving natives.”

This Reformed household,” Rohan said, “happens to be mine rather than yours, and the girl is my daughter’s guest.”

He beckoned the footman, who, with some relief at having an order he should clearly obey, took the box away from Hamilton and then looked around blankly, wondering what he should do with it. “Give it back to the girl.”

Rohan waved in Susanna’s direction. “Take it up to your bedroom and leave it there.”

Susanna curtsied and backed out of the hallway as fast as she could.

Rohan looked at his uninvited Scottish guests. “Has either of you, perhaps, ever heard the name Leopold Cavriani?”

* * *

“It’s hard to focus on serious scholarship in the middle of all this domestic turmoil,” Rohan said. “However, in regard to the third major section of Les Futuriens, I believe I will subdivide it into several subsections. The first will be headed: Underlying Moral and Ethical Presuppositions. I will begin with this subsidiary story about Gertrude McFuzz and the repudiation of worldly vanity.”

“It was scarcely universally accepted up-time any more than it is down-time,” Carey commented. “This can be documented by the amount of time that girls spent in shopping malls. Susanna . . . ” She paused. The duke had a lot going on. “Do you remember who Susanna is?”

“The little Italian Catholic girl whose nativity scene caused such a fuss.”

“Yes. Well, her reaction, when she read the book, was hostile to the whole underlying premise. Of course, she is a court dressmaker. After objecting to the moral of the story, she requested permission to draw copies of some of Gertrude’s more fantastic feathers, which she planned to send to M. Cavriani for forwarding to the silk weavers of Lyon, thinking that they might make lovely designs for brocades.”

Rohan cleared his throat. “I have recently paid some of Marguerite’s bills for various feminine fashions. My household was much more economical when I lived in two rooms and her mother paid her bills. Conclusion: the moralists of the up-time had no more success with this premise than did the Hebrew prophets, the philosophers of classical antiquity, or those of our own modern day, although this unblemished record of failure did not keep them from trying.”

* * *

“My lord duke,” James Traill began. His voice was quivering with barely restrained outrage. “My young master . . . ” He gestured at Hamilton. “ . . . has observed that you permit your daughter’s dressmaker to leave this house on the Lord’s Day in order to attend the blasphemous Catholic mass. It is bad enough that the grand duke has not closed all of the Catholic churches in this city but rather permits them to continue to be used for this unacceptable purpose. It is worse that he allows his wife to have a Catholic confessor and to maintain a private chapel in their residence itself. But he is a Lutheran, and therefore, what could a person expect in the way of zealousness?

“However, it is worse that you, a professor of the true Reformed faith, do not require this young woman to attend the Lord’s Day observances in your own household in order that she may hear scriptural sermons and be informed of her errors.” His general squawks of outrage continued for quite some time.

“If we want la religion prétendue réformée to be tolerated in France,” Rohan commented, “which for my part I most certainly do, I think it behooves us to extend some toleration to the practices of others.”

“Certainly not!” Hamilton exclaimed. “It is one thing for us to require that errorists tolerate truth, but quite another for those of us who hold to the truth to tolerate error. Let me tell you a little about the superstitions of the native Irish peasants with whom my father has to deal.” Which he did.

“I assure you that the lands of this Irish Catholic chieftain that my father claimed—for that matter, also the ones that Hugh Montgomery obtained and the ones that Con O’Neill kept—lands in Upper Clandeboye, more around The Great Ardes and around Castle Reagh, were entirely desolate and gone to waste.”

“I don’t suppose,” Rohan asked, “that their condition might have in any way been the result of the English wars against the Irish during the years preceding your father’s settlement? Non?”

“Well,” Hamilton answered, “the Irish had resisted all the prior efforts at Protestant settlement, so the condition of the land was their own fault. Queen Elizabeth’s agents had to put down the resistance, obviously. The region was almost without population. Therefore, it was only right for the king to confirm grants to men such as my father who were willing to bring in Protestants from Scotland, settle them, and once more assure a flow of rents to the landlords and taxes to the royal treasury.

“In fact,” he barreled on, “I believe that it would be only fair to say that the successful efforts of my father and some other Ulster entrepreneurs served as the pattern that encouraged King James to authorize the plantation of Jamestown in Virginia and other ventures in the Americas. Therefore,” he beamed at the up-timers, “your nation and your very existence were? are? will be? actually the result of my father’s enterprising nature. Part of what Mr. Traill has made me study is the nature of the ‘Scotch-Irish’ settlements in West Virginia. My opinion is that all of you owe due gratitude to the Hamiltons.”

“A little bit full of himself, maybe?” Shae asked later that day.

Dominique didn’t answer directly. “What I would like to know is why he has been spying on Susanna closely enough to know that she goes to mass. Isn’t he supposed to be listening to one of Mr. Traill’s properly Calvinist discourses on Sunday mornings?”

“He’s probably trying to trap her and rape her,” Shae said. “That’s what villains always do in novels. They ravish the maidservants.”

“I don’t think so,” Susanna said. “Young Master Hamilton is following me around, but I believe that he is looking for my nativity scene, so that he can destroy it. He did force his way into the bedroom where I sleep, but I wasn’t there. Neither was my crèche. I hid it better than that.”


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