Blood Royal Read online

  ‘Oh, the romance,’ said Sophie, clasping her hands and swaying. ‘Go on. Did the axe chop clean?’

  Mary Astell turned to Cecily. ‘Lord Kenmuir was even more composed. The sheriff asked him if he had anything to say and he declared he came to die and not to make speeches.’

  Cecily poured more tea for her guests. She had stayed with the Kenmuirs more than once and felt distress that made her irritable.

  ‘If they were going to rebel,’ she said, ‘they might have done it properly. How could my uncle be seduced into such an enterprise? A rebellion in James’s name when the man hadn’t even arrived… Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, damned if it wasn’t.’

  ‘Do you tell me, my dear Fitzhenry, that you would have approved it had it been more efficient?’ Lady Mary pretended shock she did not feel. Cecily’s unfashionable inability to dissemble her views enabled those who were jealous of her riches, her looks and her descent from one of England’s oldest families to misrepresent her in a court where bitches of both sexes fought for advantage. Those who were assured of their own standing, and Lady Mary and Princess Caroline were among them, valued her.

  The question was one to which Cecily, like many of her class, had yet to formulate an answer. She did not believe in the divine right of a king to interfere with her church, law and liberty but she was convinced of the sanctity of blood and succession. The Pretender, so young and alone in France, so good-looking, had God on his side, while the fat Hanoverian occupying the throne had only Mammon on his.

  Though maid of honour through right of birth and chosen by Princess Caroline because of it, Cecily often asked herself uneasily whether one should be serving the daughter-in-law of a German who could decapitate so many of one’s relatives with a stroke of his pen.

  Besides, young Sophie was right: there was romance in a lost cause when it was accompanied by speeches from the scaffold and the whiff of heather and the distant skirl of pipes…

  ‘Another meringue?’ she asked. ‘Louis says they are épatantes.’ She’d had them made especially for Mary Astell, who could afford few luxuries. Herself, she had no interest in food, regarding it merely as fuel; Society’s four-hour dinners bored her – another advantage to her enemies.

  Outside mist blurred the shadowy trees and put a sheen on chimneys, arguing a thaw.

  Then Anne Insh came in and slammed the door behind her. ‘My father is taken ill. They sent word. I’m for Scotland this minute. I have permission. For you also. It is arranged. The king says we may go if the princess says we can. She just has. He is so ill. It is gaol fever. I beg you to come with me.’

  She was shaking with anxiety and resolve. Her blue eyes, which had a deep line below them that slanted from their corners, were directed at Cecily.

  And the older Cecily, reliving that moment, hears the younger Cecily’s immediate response: ‘Of course.’

  Less formidable women would have blanched at the journey but to these the weather was another servant to command. Cold, the lateness of the hour, distance, the menace of highwaymen, were inconveniences that wealth and spirit must overcome. When Cecily asked, ‘But how shall we go? There’ll be no stages and my rattler’s at Cook’s for repair,’ she was only concerned at the delay that finding another coach might cause.

  Sophie said: ‘We’ll take mine. I’m going to come. He’s my uncle too.’ The relationship was more distant than Cecily’s, Lord Keltie was merely her second cousin once removed, but since she’d provided the solution to the problem, it was accepted that, yes, Sophie must go.

  Mary Astell thought of their reputations. ‘Lady Cecily, it is not fitting you should travel without a chaperone. I shall come with you.’

  Cecily paused in the act of taking money from her box. It would be a hard enough journey for three young women; for someone of Astell’s age… but Mrs Astell’s compact little body quivered with anticipation, her jet-button eyes shone. ‘Bless you,’ Cecily said.

  Should they take a maid? No, it was decided: with four of them in the coach it would be comfortable; with five, overcrowded. They would be staying at inns overnight and could just manage to pack, unpack, dress and undress themselves, and their hair must stay unmanaged until they arrived in Scotland where they were to stay with friends of Anne’s who would provide the appropriate servants.

  Should they take a male companion? No, again. They’d have outriders for protection who, with the coachmen, would be armed.

  Only Lady Mary Wortley Montagu stayed silent.

  Sophie was sent off to instruct the coachmen, Anne to find fur rugs, the maids to pack, footmen for food and wine.

  It was Cecily who managed the enterprise. Capability was not a trait admired in women – it was the ton to be absent-minded – but, when a friend was in need, Cecily could bustle, and she bustled now.

  A voice came out of the shadows of the corridor. ‘Where are you going, lady?’ He scuttled after her, spider-like.

  ‘A-visiting, Your Holiness.’ Anne would not want her business confided to a notorious gossip like Pope.

  ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘There won’t be room.’

  ‘I’ll be your foot-warmer.’

  ‘No, my dear, I thank you.’

  She was his adored of the moment, perhaps she genuinely liked him. He laid poems of worship on her altar, wordy incense to her nostrils. He was the most charming companion in the world but he was wearing. Even if she could have taken him, she wasn’t going to spend the journey to Scotland with those lustrous, vulnerable eyes continually watching her face for rejection.

  Pope writhed. ‘You shall be taking Lord Fanny, of course.’

  ‘Indeed, I shall not,’ she said, guiltily. She had considered it. Lord Hervey might act the hermaphrodite but his wooing of the night before had shown distinct, and masculine, possibilities.

  The poet’s voice belled like a siren’s down the corridor after her:

  ‘Where’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,

  Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade:

  Where’er you tread, the blushing flowers shall rise,

  And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.’

  She grinned. He’d offered that one to Lepel last week. ‘No good, Alexander,’ she called over her shoulder, ‘I’m busy.’

  Behind her, the delicate face twisted to become as ugly as the poor body beneath it in which passion could flame too high and burn too easily into hatred.

  Princess Caroline was red-nosed and kind when Cecily went to bid her goodbye. The Prince of Wales was with her: he usually returned to her apartments when he’d been disporting himself with a lover in order to tell her about it. He took mistresses because it was expected; his wife was the real romance of his life. He would make an upside-down king, Cecily thought.

  Kissing Cecily, Caroline said: ‘If he is ill, poor, foolish man, for his daughter and nieces to see him before he die is good. Yet such climate it is. I fear for the coach to turn over. You haf outriders?’

  ‘Yes, dear madam.’

  ‘Lady Cecily, you haf ever seen Busen like so?’ The Prince of Wales was fondly indicating his wife’s undoubtedly magnificent chest.

  ‘Herrlich, Your Highness.’

  ‘I sink so.’

  ‘Return to me soon, liebchen,’ said Caroline.

  As she waited for Sophie to curtsy her farewell, Cecily thought that fear of a further, nationwide rebellion must be receding or the Hanovers would not be so complacent in allowing three of their maids of honour to go and minister to a rebel. Or else Lady Mary was right and it was wise to begin to show clemency in case the mob’s fickle sympathy turned Jacobite. In fact, she thought, George had already shown surprising forbearance in ordering only two deaths.

  (Lady Cecily was choosing to ignore the sentence of drawing and quartering, which was being imposed on four other rebels at Tyburn, and the thirty-four still to hang in Lancashire, and the number who would die in prison. These were lesser beings, commoners, and prob
ably deserved it.)

  Backing out, her last sight of the future George II and his wife was one of connubial contentment. Very pretty, she thought, and then, dutiful to fashion, but bovine.

  The travellers gathering round Sophie’s coach, or running back into the Palace for something forgotten, were infected with excitement, even Anne. Here was adventure.

  The coachmen were less enchanted.

  ‘Has Hobson fixed frost nails to the horses?’ asked Cecily.

  ‘Have you, Hobson?’ Sophie called.

  ‘No, I ain’t. But I fixed ’em to their shoes.’

  ‘Oh, stop scowling, Hobson. It’ll be exciting.’

  Lady Mary was grave: ‘I should come with you.’ She took Cecily’s arm and led her behind the coach. ‘I wish you were not going.’

  ‘Madam, it’s not like you to be cautious.’ This was the woman who had eloped with Edward Wortley. Who had accompanied him on a diplomatic mission to Turkey. Among foreigners. Black foreigners.

  ‘I am concerned. Cecily, I want you to promise me you will remind the others whose servants you all are. Keltie is your relative and it is right to nurse him, but remember he is also a traitor.’

  ‘Forgive me a moment, Lady Mary.’

  Cecily stepped away to address herself to the second coachman who was cramming their wrapped skirt hoops – it would be impossible to get into the coach while wearing them – into the back pannier without consideration.

  She turned back. ‘I beg your pardon. Yes?’

  ‘Guard yourself, I beg.’ Cold took beauty from Lady Mary’s face, leaving it bony. Her eyelashes had gone in a bout of smallpox, which had left her otherwise unmarked, and the loss emphasized her fierce eyes. ‘Anne is rash in her anxiety and her nature leads her to extremes. You must guard yourself and her. And little Sophie. I wish you were not going.’

  Cecily kissed her. ‘I am Roland at Roncesvalles. The Saracens shall not pass. Tell Pope he may write an epic on it.’

  ‘Roland died at Roncesvalles.’

  An older, wiser Cecily remembered the words. Looking back, the scene was vivid to her: the piles of dirty snow in the courtyard illuminated by footmen’s flares, the horses stamping, guards staring. She could even recall the particular blue of the horizontal stripes on her stockings as her younger self lifted her skirt and put one foot on the coach step. Don’t go, you clodpoll. Turn back.

  Cecily climbed in and settled herself next to Mary Astell, putting her arm through the holding strap and wiggling her fingers in farewell to Lady Mary. There came the crack of Hobson’s whip and the lurch as the coach wheels unstuck themselves from the snow and began to turn.

  The light from St James’s lamps, glowing fuzzily through the mist, was blotted out as Anne pulled down the blinds to keep out the draught from the windows.

  The wheels were almost soundless as they turned towards the Great North Road, making for Scotland…

  Chapter Two

  The Breffnys’ family coach was ancient and enormous. ‘Like travelling in the Step Pyramid,’ reads the last entry in Cecily’s diary, ‘only colder.’

  Slush permeated its floorboards and made the straw at their feet damp. The bouncing of its springless carriage began the chafing on the occupants’ backsides that would end in sores. Every lurch into a foot-deep rut jarred their spines. The coach lamps outside cast little light inside so that they were in darkness.

  Nobody complained: Mrs Astell was a Stoic, the girls aristocrats.

  Indeed, inside that over-large, icy black shaker flinging them about like dice was an air of holiday. Though she was the kindest of employers, attendance on Princess Caroline included hours of standing through civic functions and loyal addresses, kneeling for daily services in the Chapel Royal and spending endless evenings at cards.

  ‘Frizelation and dangleation’, their terms for flirting and getting themselves pursued by young men at court, were fun but involved energetic concentration on their looks and wit, not to mention guarding themselves from the barbs of other maids of honour.

  Here, now, among loved and trusted women, they could loosen their stays and let their tongues run as they pleased while Mrs Astell’s pedagogy took them comfortably back to the years when the three of them had formed what she called her ‘female academy’.

  ‘When Sir Robert Carey rode from London to carry the news of Queen Elizabeth’s death to James VI of Scotland, he reached Doncaster that same night,’ she said. ‘What date was that, Sophia?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Sixteen three,’ said Cecily.

  Mrs Astell nodded. ‘He galloped into James’s palace courtyard in Edinburgh two nights later. Four hundred and ten miles in under sixty hours. Therefore we may average his speed at… Sophia?’

  ‘Nearly seven miles an hour,’ said Cecily, ‘but I’ll lay guineas he had better weather than we shall.’

  In fact, the journey took them almost a fortnight, Hobson declaring at the first stop: ‘You can’t ask me to do more than thirty mile in this weather, Miss Sophie, you can’t.’

  ‘I could,’ said Sophie, though she didn’t.

  ‘Thirty miles,’ said Mrs Astell, not passing up the opportunity, ‘the distance a Roman soldier marched in a day.’

  But, as they ate a good supper at that night’s inn, her didacticism overstepped itself and alarmed them: ‘A doctor friend of mine has taken an inventory of patients in Bedlam and do you know which profession forms the largest group? Apart from abandoned women, of course?’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Coachmen and hackney-carriage drivers.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Cecily, intrigued.

  ‘Doctor Forbes thinks the continual motion has a deleterious effect on their…’ Mrs Astell lowered her voice ‘…glands.’

  Their eyes went to the door where Hobson, his fellow-driver and the outriders were stiffly carrying in the ladies’ overnight luggage, rime glistening on their cloaks and hats.

  ‘How are your glands, Hobson?’ Cecily called.

  ‘Cold,’ Hobson told her, massaging blood back into his fingers.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Sophie. ‘D’ye think he’ll run amok and kill us all?’

  ‘Not Hobson,’ Cecily assured her, but she kept a wary eye on the man as the weather turned worse after Grantham.

  Not often did she question society’s status quo but every now and then a happening or chance remark, such as Mrs Astell’s, would awake the fear tucked away in the mind of all England’s elite – that its elitism rested on the consent of that quiescent monster, the common people, which, should it become restive, could overwhelm its masters. And mistresses. In England, the servile hand rarely held an assassin’s dagger, as happened in lesser countries, but one couldn’t be too careful…

  Anne, chafing at having to stop at all, would have driven harder but Cecily, unconsciously pursuing the policy that had protected England from revolution for twenty-eight years, argued restraint and thus kept Hobson’s glands from turning nasty.

  In any case, thirty miles a day was enough for all of them. True, highwaymen had retired into hibernation and would have had poor pickings even if they hadn’t; often, the women’s coach was the only one on the road. But the roads were dangerous in themselves.

  They became weary at having to make frequent descents in order to lighten the coach when the horses refused the steeper hills and must be led up them and down. Frost misted the windows, so that they either opened them to see the countryside and froze, or kept them shut and saw only each other.

  Accommodation worsened among the steep hills of the north, where landlords were not expecting passing trade. Indeed, Lady Cecily was to say in her mature years that it was by experiencing poor inns that she became aware of what a good one should be.

  Their last, the first they’d stayed at in Scotland, was a mere croft with beaten earth for a floor and a naked child sitting in the dripping destined to fry their eggs – the only meal on offer. They had hoped by now to be at Lord Petrock�
��s, the house outside Edinburgh of one of Anne’s father’s friends, but were still too distant.

  ‘Usually we Scots’ll not use an inn,’ said Anne, defending her national honour. ‘Our hospitality is given and received in each other’s homes.’

  The landlord overheard her. ‘So it is, mistress, mair’s the pity. We’re petitioning the Parliament on it.’

  ‘If you cleaned your kitchen,’ Cecily felt she had to tell him, ‘you wouldn’t need to.’

  Next day, as they drove in through the arched passageway of Fetlaw Place into a courtyard, accumulated exhaustion overtook them. Lord Petrock had been hunting. He strode through a hubbub of horses, hounds and jockey-capped men. ‘Anne. Ladies. Here you are the long last and it’s a blithe day that brings you to my door.’

  Too tired to curtsy, Cecily listened to an introductory roll-call of Mac-this and Mac-that. Lady Petrock rescued them: ‘You long-tongued chiel, Donal, will ye let the weary lassies stand till Doomsday? Come away to your rooms, my dears. There’s a log to your fire and a bedside posset.’

  After a change of clothes, the travellers descended to an enormous and draughty hall, in which numerous huntsmen and guests were preparing to do justice to a dinner of turkey pie mashed with ruby jelly, salmon pasties, painted hams and Château Margaux 1713. Only the chairs of Anne and Lord Petrock were empty.

  ‘They’ll be in soon,’ said Lady Petrock, when Cecily inquired for them. ‘Take of some duck, now, Mistress Astell. We hang it in our fig tree for flavour. And when were ye last in Scotland, Lady Cecily?’

  ‘Not since seventeen eight for my misfortune,’ Cecily told her. ‘They were afraid the Pretender would whisk me off and marry me.’

  It was true. A spy in the French Jacobite camp had reported to Robert Harley, then Queen Anne’s most trusted minister, that there existed a list of aristocratic young women whose pedigree and Anglican faith might make one of them an eligible bride for James, rendering him more acceptable to his people. Eight-year-old Cecily’s name was on it. Accordingly, after James’s attempted invasion in 1708, Cecily had been forbidden to accept Lord Keltie’s invitations to spend the summers with Anne at his castle of Cairnvreckan as, until then, she always had, in case she was abducted to become a pawn in the Jacobite game.