The Entail Club

Alistair Chipley-Jones fit in at the Entail Club. He fit in a bit too well, in fact, especially given his Welsh pedigree, which he would immediately dismiss if someone brought it up.

“Oh, no, the Joneses of my lineage are all from Oxfordshire dating back to the reign of Edward the Third. Not a drop of Welsh blood left in me, I imagine. Unfortunate the moniker stuck.”

He leant into his English pedigree like a jockey riding the rail at Ascot but coming up short on the home straight. Still, all his fellow club members were too polite to say anything for they, too, had plenty of secrets darker than Chipley-Jones’s.

“Say what you will about capricious, megalomaniacal potentates with unchecked power, but at least society was rather more… coherent”

Chipley-Jones paused before the final word, not because he was searching for it—the right word was never absent his mind or lips—but for effect.

“When those chaps were running things, one never knew if a minor infraction—or even a sideways glance on a day when the king was feeling a bit off—could banish one to the oubliette or be drawn and quartered.”

“Quite right,” chimed in Trevor Pembroke, a lesser baronet whose lands had been gambled away a decade earlier. He remained at the club only through the charity of some anonymous patrons and this was, for him, a badge of honor and importance, not something to be quietly dismissed.

Noblesse oblige, but in this case, he was the noblesse, not his benefactors. He was bestowing favor on his fellow club members simply by being present. Why, then, wouldn’t they pay for him to be there just as they might pay for a ticket to the opera?

“We’d do far better off if Curtmantle were still running things,” Pembroke continued, using Henry II’s obscure sobriquet.

“A splendid thing, getting rid of that papist Becket,” piped in Clement Ross, another man who didn’t really belong and went to considerable lengths to hide his foreign extraction—his grandfather, Emilio Rossi, had changed his name and married an Englishwoman not out of love but in hopes that his posterity would be devoid of any Roman features.

His studied bombast included a latent obsession with the papacy that hinted at a desire to return to the faith of his forbearers. (No one dared point out that in 1170, everyone in England was necessarily a papist—unless he was a pagan, which was far worse, even still.)

And so was another afternoon spent at the Entail Club, a place where none of the men belonged—not there, not anywhere—but in their liminality, they nonetheless belonged to one another, misfits who, together, wove a tapestry of presumption and a mosaic of studied disdain held together only so long as one did not examine the entrails too closely.