Description
Fifty-eight, and built like the third generation of a family that got its money before its manners: heavy through the shoulders, weather-faced from thirty years of riding his own acres, with Freddy’s easy blue eyes set in a face that never learned Freddy’s charm. He dresses ten years behind London and does not know it. His voice is unhurried and carries across a field.
He writes short letters. Four sentences is a warm one. The length of a letter from Lord Cavendish is inverse to the seriousness of its subject, and both his sons learned young to fear a single closely-written page.
Speech: begins his weightiest sentences with “I take it that…”, which turns every question he asks into a statement you are invited to correct at your own risk.
Background
The barony is new money three generations deep. Freddy’s great-grandfather was a City man with cargoes in the East India trade; his son bought Stanmere Park in Northamptonshire, married well, and took the barony in 1768. The Cavendishes of Stanmere have held East India stock ever since, and William votes his holding in the Court of Proprietors at India House as his father did. The family did not merely profit from the Company. The Company is the ladder the family climbed, and William regards Leadenhall Street with the proprietary affection other men reserve for their college.
The Charter Act of 1813 therefore sits in him exactly where it sits in the old Calcutta hands: Parliament has begun dismantling the institution his family’s position is built on, and he said so in the Lords, briefly, to no effect (East India Company).
Two sons. The heir, the Honourable Robert Cavendish, twenty-six, is at Stanmere learning the estate: sound, dutiful, and as interesting as drainage. As of 1814 Robert is unmarried, a fact Lady Cavendish manages and William refuses to discuss. The second son, Frederick, got Oxford, an allowance, and Pemberton, a tutor hired frankly as a minder, because William’s precise assessment of Freddy was: a good boy with no occupation, which is how good boys spoil.
One wife. Augusta, Lady Cavendish, fifty-three, very much alive, the granddaughter of an earl, and the reason the family’s manners caught up with its money. The sons write to her, not to him. He reads the letters anyway, with her, by the fire, and would deny it under oath.
One dead brother, and the debt nobody names. William’s younger brother Francis was charming, improvident, and dead by 1805, leaving a widow, thin funds, and a son. William solved the problem the way he solves problems: efficiently, once, over port. A word to a Director of his acquaintance, and Francis’s boy Hugh had a writership and a ship east at sixteen. It cost William ten minutes and it saved the cadet branch, and he has genuinely never understood that the two halves of that sentence do not cancel out. Hugh, who was the sixteen-year-old on the ship, understands it perfectly. This is the soil the Freddy-and-Hugh reckoning grows in: one boy was exported and built a life; the other was kept and given everything; and the man who made both decisions considers the matter closed.
Connections
- Freddy Cavendish — son
- Hugh Cavendish — nephew, and the debt nobody names
- East India Company — proprietor, three generations
Appearances
Connections
People
Family
- Freddy Cavendish Player character warmFather. Loves his second son in the inarticulate way of his class, and arranged his allowance, his tutor, and his freedom in that order
Creditor of
- Hugh Cavendish NPC neutralHis uncle and patron. One nomination at sixteen made Hugh's whole life, and Hugh knows exactly how little thought it took
Finances
- Hugh Cavendish NPC neutralUncle and patron. His nomination sent Hugh out as a writer at sixteen, a kindness done in ten minutes and never thought of again