Blood Royal Read online

  Two demurred. There was no agreement to save Lemuel.

  ‘So what happens now?’ she asked, when a worn Mr Tate returned from the meeting.

  He shook his head. For the first time since she’d known him, he sat down in her presence without permission. ‘You could fly the country,’ he said, wearily.

  It was because of Dolly that they didn’t. The thought of ‘abroad’ frightened her and brought her wits back. As the bailiff’s men knocked on the door of Spring Gardens, she became active, throwing Cecily’s court clothes into a travelling case. ‘Give me your rings,’ she said. ‘Don’t stand there. Give me your fucking rings.’

  Cecily caught on. She tore off her rings. In a cupboard was the case containing the valuable ivory-chased duelling pistols the Doge of Venice had given her father. She tossed it to Dolly.

  ‘They’ll go round the back,’ said Dolly. ‘Tell ’em you’re coming.’

  Cecily leaned out of the window, heeling a pair of shoes with jewelled buckles in Dolly’s direction as she did it. ‘Just a moment, gentlemen. Allow me to dress and I’ll open the door.’

  Together they sat on the travelling case and locked it. They carried it downstairs to the parlour where Dolly clambered out of the back window into the brick-walled shrubbery. Cecily handed her the case. ‘Don’t let ’em turn you out,’ Dolly said. ‘I’ll be back.’

  Cecily watched her through the back gate, then, very slowly, walked along the passage to open the door.

  The bailiff’s men were professional and jolly. They hefted the furniture out onto the road and wrapped it in sacking, complimenting Cecily on its quality. ‘Nice spinet, mistress. We took Lord Pitland’s last week but it weren’t a patch on this. Look at that bloody inlay, Josh.’

  Queen Anne had given it to her. Her father had bought the gold épergne and cutlery in Venice. The gold-chased glasses had been a gift from Princess Caroline. The carpets had come from Persia. The men rolled them up, took down the damask curtains, tassels and rails, unscrewed the chandeliers from the ceiling and the delicate wrought-iron flambeaux holders from the walls. They debated whether the Chinese wallpaper in the drawing-room should be stripped off and decided against it. They emptied the kitchen of everything but a kettle and a pot. A Louis Quatorze ormolu clock chimed ‘Walpole, Walpole’ as it was carried off. Cecily heard it.

  She spoke only once. ‘That is my mother.’

  Josh agonized for a moment, then ripped off the back of a filigree frame and doubtfully handed her the miniature portrait from inside: ‘Shouldn’t do this, you know.’ It had been painted just before the countess died in giving birth to Cecily.

  Josh had to be firm about the Italian bed with the velvet tester in which Lemuel was lying. ‘More than my job’s worth. Ain’t you got somewhere else for him, poor old soul?’ Cecily indicated the divan and with great care they lifted Lemuel on to it.

  Dolly returned to give them the rough of her tongue. ‘Take the bloody roof off next, I suppose.’ Josh told her no, the house itself was claimed by another creditor using other bailiffs.

  They were left in an empty house in which the only light was a tallow candle from the kitchen. Cecily’s head pulsed with pain and the mantra: ‘Walpole. Walpole.’

  Two days later Lemuel was arrested for debt and put into the Fleet.

  * * *

  The Fleet river had once run – and in Cecily’s time oozed – into the Thames just west of the City walls. Over its six hundred years the prison on the east bank had burned down on several occasions, the last during the Great Fire of Charles II’s reign. Cecily had many times driven past the rebuilt Fleet, considering its long, exterior brick wall and entrance too elegant for the rogues who famously chose to stay behind it rather than come out and pay what they owed. On principle, she’d always ignored the hands gesturing from a grille in the wall, their owners begging for charity and crying: ‘Pray remember poor debtors.’

  There were indeed ‘politic debtors’ in the Fleet: wily and comparatively wealthy men who’d run up debts they had no intention of paying, preferring to live well in prison than face poverty outside. But most of the Fleet’s inhabitants were insolvent and, unlike criminals serving a defined sentence, they were in for life. Unless some angel paid their debts. And angels were few.

  Supporting Lemuel, Cecily and Dolly had to attend a well-furnished office in a house just outside the prison while a man she vaguely recognized was threatened by the Fleet’s Warden, Bambridge: ‘It’s back to Corbett’s for you, sir.’

  ‘Not Corbett’s. I can’t go back to Corbett’s.’ The prisoner’s voice was high with terror. Aimlessly, not really interested in somebody else’s plight, Cecily wondered where she’d heard it before.

  Bambridge clapped his hands soundlessly together. His nails were manicured, he was well dressed and would have been handsome except for a protuberant upper lip, like an owl’s beak. Mice and voles wouldn’t have liked Thomas Bambridge. ‘We need more garnish, Mr Castell. This prison don’t run on good intentions.’

  Castell. John Castell, yes. An architect. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had introduced them once, praising his book The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated.

  ‘There is smallpox at Corbett’s, Bambridge.’ The architect spoke reasonably, trying for control. ‘I haven’t had smallpox. Any other house, I beg you.’

  The warden stood up: ‘Do you tell me that my sponging houses are diseased? I won’t have it. Do you garnish or not?’

  ‘I can’t. I haven’t got any money.’

  ‘Gaolers, take this man to Corbett’s.’

  The Fleet was a royal prison; until then Cecily didn’t know, having never considered the matter, that it was also a business.

  The telling thing was not merely John Castell’s horror as he was dragged away past her but the knowledge that she and Lemuel had been meant to witness it.

  ‘Sir Lemuel Potts, is it not?’ said Bambridge. ‘Welcome, sir, welcome. We hope to make you comfortable. And this must be Lady Cecily. Honoured, ma’am.’ He nibbled on the title as if it had a tail and squeaked. ‘I think we may offer you accommodation suitable to your condition. The Master’s Side is comfortably spacious, not too high-priced, near the coffee- and taprooms and in easy reach of our chapel…’

  Like the ogre-ish landlord of some inn, he handed them over to one of his gaolers: ‘Carver, conduct Sir Lemuel and these ladies over the road to the John Donne Room.’

  The gatekeeper charged five shillings to unlock the prison door for them. In the reception area the book-keeper who took down their details demanded 3s. 6d for doing so. Carver’s price for carrying Lemuel’s case up to the third floor was a shilling. The John Donne Room was certainly spacious but had no furniture: Carver, apparently, would rent them a bed, chairs, etc., at 6s. 2d, a week while the kitchens hired out eating irons and would provide what meals Sir Lemuel liked – at a price. ‘He can eat free once a day in the dining hall,’ Carver said, ‘but it ain’t recommended for delicate stomachs.’

  ‘Twelve shilling a week?’ shrieked Dolly, on learning the rent of the Donne Room. ‘I could hire Blenheim Palace for that, you grasper.’

  ‘Ah, but do it lodge debtors?’ Carver had taken to her.

  ‘Ain’t you got nowhere cheaper? We wouldn’t be in this spew-hole if we was flush.’

  ‘We’ll stay here for now,’ Cecily said. They were all exhausted and Lemuel’s head was beginning to shake as it did when he was confused, while the smell and sounds from the Commons Side across the court outside the window, where the poorest debtors were incarcerated, were uninviting. Nevertheless, her purse had been emptied by the unexpected charges. Dolly had left the travelling case in the safe-keeping of a friend in Cheapside.

  While they waited for the furniture to arrive, Dolly said: ‘You got to write them letters now.’

  Cecily gritted her teeth. ‘I’ll see.’ Soon it would be necessary to beg for help, but to do so would be the end of the person she had been. After that she’d be poor Lady Cecily; sh
e and Lemuel condemned to some tied cottage or living out their lives in the least-used room of a great house, batteners on the charity of those whose politeness would eventually become impatience. She’d seen it before.

  True friends would have sought her out already. Mary Astell had written to her immediately, while she was still at Spring Gardens, offering her and Lemuel her home. Cecily had written back, gratefully declining; neither Mrs Astell’s means nor her health could tolerate indigent guests for long.

  With Sophie and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu still abroad, Anne in exile, it turned out that there were no true friends. Most of those who’d brought her up had been elderly and were now dead. Her other acquaintances, the fashionable, had themselves suffered losses in the crash – and not just of money. Many, like the Prince and Princess of Wales, were suspected of accepting South Sea Company bribes and were keeping as far as possible out of the public gaze while they tried to mend their shattered finances and esteem.

  In any case, few could have afforded to settle Lemuel’s debt: they were in nearly as bad a case as herself. Dolly, trudging the streets to sell or pawn Cecily’s chattels, reported that emblazoned snuff- and patch-boxes, silver and jewellery were a glut at the pawnshops.

  Cecily didn’t even consider turning to her Jacobite acquaintances for help: in the best of times they could barely help themselves.

  It was for Lemuel’s political friends that Cecily saved her contempt. The Whig party was facing a general election with the South Sea scandal still hanging around its neck; it had little time for a supporter who’d shown himself incapable of managing his own economy, let alone the country’s, especially since, incapacitated as he was, he no longer qualified for a seat in the House. Following its leader’s example, the party was trying to forget he existed.

  And he won’t for much longer in these conditions. Lemuel was pulling her sleeve, uttering the inarticulate sounds he made when he was bewildered, looking round the cold, empty room and beginning to cry.

  At least there was one decision she could make. ‘I’ll have to stay with him,’ she said brusquely.

  Their original idea had been that she and Dolly should rent somewhere near the prison and visit Lemuel by day. Dolly had already found them a room in Red Lion Court and herself a job, which involved working at night in a Fleet Street baker’s.

  Dolly nodded. ‘That’ll be best.’

  Best? Best? How easily these commoners adapted to hell. She was in its flames and she still didn’t believe it.

  It was night by the time the room was furnished and they’d settled Lemuel. Dolly turned back at the door: ‘Let me sell them bloody pistols at least.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look, I know what you’re keeping ’em for and you can’t. They’ll chop you quick as liver.’

  ‘No.’ One of these days she’d meet Walpole again.

  * * *

  The decision to share Lemuel’s imprisonment had been taken for the main part because Cecily could not, noblesse oblige, leave so helpless a creature alone in its system. Anyway, better to be hidden behind walls than to be seen coming out of a cheap dwelling by some acquaintance in a passing carriage. And, in fact, there were many worse places than this expensive part of the Fleet where money could purchase privacy, good food and service.

  Also, it buoyed her up during that first cold night, lying on a pallet, to think: ‘He once went through this. He lay on the floor next to a sick old man’s bed as I am lying now.’

  But it was a difficult analogy to sustain as, one by one, the items in the travelling case were sold. After two months, penury forced them to move to a cheaper room, still private, but on the Commons Side and next to what Bambridge termed ‘one of our houses of easement’, a stinking lay-stall. Guillaume’s fellow prisoners had been soldiers, not male scum who drank the taproom dry and vomited outside her door, nor female scum like the one in the next room who screamed as she went into labour. Nor, she was sure, had Lord Keltie wet his bed as Lemuel did and continued to do every night, costing 4s. 4d. a week for laundry.

  She put the memory of Guillaume away, like a woman folding old love letters into lavender. She didn’t want to cheapen it; she would keep it for later. And then she would think: What later?

  But it is difficult for someone of twenty years to envisage that there will be no ‘later’. Still she didn’t write the begging letters and still she refused to let Dolly sell the duelling pistols. A persistent optimism at the back of her consciousness insisted that a deus ex machina would eventually appear to put everything right. All around her was the living and, often, actual death of those to whom the god in the machine failed to appear. But she was Lady Cecily Fitzhenry…

  Nevertheless, the days went by and her expectation deteriorated into dreary plans: Dolly must smuggle more bread from the baker’s. If I wash Lemuel’s sheets myself… but where can I dry them?

  Despair made her lazy. She tried to dig in metaphorical fingernails to stop herself slipping towards what she knew was disintegration of body and soul, to pull herself together, but matters had slid out of her grip too quickly. Her old life was now somewhere above; she was being tipped down a slope into a pit she couldn’t climb out of.

  Dolly, who visited them each day, became exasperated at Cecily’s inertia. She resented that it was she who now maintained them, even though she found the power it gave her enjoyable. ‘All you got to do is look after poor Lemmy when I’m at work and you can’t do that proper.’

  It was true. Or, rather, it was true for the first few weeks. She cared for Lemuel’s immediate needs but she watched his struggles to speak with detachment, wouldn’t assist his attempts to walk. Walpole was the cause of her fall but this dribbling, inarticulate old fool had been his instrument. She could hardly bear to touch him.

  ‘He done it for you, you know,’ Dolly shouted at her.

  ‘Oh, what?’ asked Cecily wearily. ‘What did he do for me?’

  ‘Tried to double his money. He wanted it for you. Poor bugger, he was always trying to make you notice him.’

  After a while she came to think that, in this, her sister-in-law had more insight than she had. Perhaps Lemuel’s conscience had seen his wife’s contempt for him, seen herself and her estates as a gift he hadn’t earned. Perhaps his speculation had been an attempt to lay booty of his own at her feet. Certainly, she could remember a hundred occasions when he’d vied for her attention without knowing how to get it. And, apart from his sexual insistence, he had always been kind – repellent, but kind.

  All this didn’t make his speculations less blameworthy but it gave some inkling that they’d been motivated other than by idiocy and greed.

  One afternoon after Dolly had brought their food and Cecily had placed Lemuel’s bowl on a table by his side, leaving him to feed himself – she couldn’t be bothered and in any case it was time he used his right hand more – she heard him shout and looked round to see that he’d put the full bowl on his head. Egg pudding dripped over his forehead.

  His anger – the first he’d ever shown in her presence – evaporated under her eyes and he cowered. He was frightened of her.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘this won’t do, will it?’ She cleaned him up, fed him, called for Carver to sit with him while she went out to the street market and paid a penny to dip in a wig-bag on an old-clothes stall. She found a full-bottom that had led an exhausting life in the legal profession, took it back and asked Carver to fumigate it.

  When she put it on Lemuel’s head she smiled at him for the first time in their acquaintance. It made him cry again.

  Carver approved: he had a soft spot for Lemuel. ‘’Andsome as Solomon, you look, Sir Lemmy.’ He didn’t: his lop-sided face was like an anxious child’s peeping through curtains, but it was as an anxious child that Cecily could tolerate him and began to treat him.

  * * *

  Nobody could live in the Commons of the Fleet without being dirtied, physically and mentally. As far as possible, Cecily kept herself and Lemu
el aloof from what went on outside their cell and managed to live on what Dolly provided without selling her body for more as many of the Commons women – and men – were obliged to do.

  Even so, it was during this time that she lost a bloom which even the four last years hadn’t quite scoured away and her eyes gained the knowing look that comes from seeing human beings at their most brutal and degraded. She also acquired a vocabulary so expressive and foul that it gave her release to use it, then and later.

  Thomas Bambridge had bought the office of Chief Warden of the Fleet for five thousand pounds. Within a year he had recouped that sum and from that time on made a regular annual income of another five thousand from what he called ‘presents’ and ‘fees’. Those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give them were made an example to the rest and were kept, crouching in irons, in a section of the prison known as Bartholomew Fair.

  Female prisoners who took his fancy were allowed to make another sort of ‘present’, while anybody who had a title attracted his particular attention – a debtor on Cecily’s floor, ironically called Sir William Rich, had been dragged off to Bartholomew Fair and loaded with irons for no other reason than Bambridge’s dislike of baronets.

  Cecily, both titled and female, being only the wife of a debtor, was not strictly speaking his prisoner, but he kept an eye on her with the interest of a man watching his plum tree for the moment when the fruit was ready.

  In March she was summoned across the road to Bambridge’s office. He had an account book open on the table in front of him. ‘This won’t do, Lady Cecily. We were informed that our rent had to be paid in advance, were we not? Yet we are behind, yes, behind. What are we to do about it?’

  Cecily said nothing.

  He came from behind the table and advanced protectively on her, his eyes on her bodice, beak nibbling. ‘You know, don’t you, Lady Cecily, that any financial embarrassment you suffer may be settled most amicably between us? Most amicably. My door is open to you, tonight if you wish, any night, Lady Cecily.’ He kept repeating the title: the subjugation of her rank was as important to him as her body.