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Henry Esmond

By WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY Condensation by ANNIE D. HUBBARD IN the days when the Stuart was playing his losing game for England's crown a sallow-faced, precocious boy was growing up, half loved, half neglected, in Castlewood House, knowing all the secrets of its hidden chambers, where cavalier and priest could hide for a lifetime. Harry was reputed the illegitimate son of Thomas Esmond, Lord Castlewood, whose childless wife, herself an Esmond, had been a beauty and king's favorite once. After Viscount Castlewood had died, fighting for King James at Boyne Water, and King William's men had taken his lady prisoner, hiding in her bed, painted and powdered, resplendent in her brocade gown and gold-clocked red stockings--by her side the japan box holding the papers of the Royalists--another kinsman, Francis Esmond, had taken possession of the old house. "O dea certe," little Harry Esmond said in his heart, when Rachel, the new Lady Castlewood, in her lovely girlhood, met him in the yellow gallery and there stirred in him the beginnings of a lifetime's devotion to her, to her beautiful children, Beatrix and Frank, and to his jovial new patron, Francis, Lord Castlewood. As a loved kinsman now, Harry had grown to manhood, when suddenly the smallpox, ravaging the neighborhood, destroyed for a time Lady Castlewood's beauty, and her gay husband's heart turned to lesser loves, though he still cared enough to be wildly jealous when Lord Mohun, a London blood, made love to her. The two men fought, and Francis, foully murdered by Mohun, on his death-bed made a written statement that he had long known from the priest who heard Thomas, Lord Castlewood's, dying confession that Harry Esmond had a right to the name he bore and was head of the house of Castlewood.