サー・リチャード・カルマディの歴史：ロマンス

THE CLOWN – CHAPTER VI

The novel opens by establishing the ancient pedigree of misfortune attached to Brockhurst House, the great red-brick and freestone estate on the southern verge of the moorland bordering Windsor Forest and the Surrey Hills. Denzil Calmady, esquire, began building the house in the closing years of Elizabeth I’s reign, completing it in 1611 with a royal house-warming for Henry, Prince of Wales. By 1842 the house retains much of its Tudor character, though bears and bear-pit have given way to racehorses and a great square of stable buildings. A narrator’s note makes clear from the outset that no male heir of the line has reached the Biblical “threescore years and ten” and died quietly in his bed. The chancel monuments of Sandyfield Church and the family records recall, among others, Sir Thomas the grandson, who died of gangrene from a buck’s antler; Zachary, stabbed in a brawl in the Strand; a young soldier killed at Ramillies in 1706; a second Sir Denzil, shot by highwaymen on Bagshot Heath; and Courtney Calmady, Richard’s father, who died when a wound taken at the taking of Frenchtown under General Proctor during the second American war reopened during a hunt.

The cause of this catalogue is traced to a brutal episode in the closing years of the Commonwealth. A young royalist, Sir Thomas Calmady, seduced his head forester’s daughter under repeated promises of marriage. She bore him a son idealized in the old chap-book verse as having “red-gold hair and eyes of blue.” At the Restoration, Sir Thomas brought home a wealthy bride; when the forester’s daughter confronted her at the coach door, the new lady’s canary-coated footmen beat her off with staves. The little boy ran to the step and was pushed down; the hind wheel of the heavy coach nearly severed his legs above the knee. The dying mother thereupon cursed Sir Thomas and his line, declaring that no owner of Brockhurst should die peacefully in his bed until a “fatherless babe” should be born into the line, with no brother or sister, with red-gold hair, with eyes of blue, and with a foot that would “never know stocking or shoe”—a child who, opening his purse to the lamenter’s cry, would lift the woe forever.