Blood Royal Read online

  ‘And a bonny bride King James would have found ye,’ said Lady Petrock, heartily.

  King James? Had Lady Petrock intended a compliment? That the marriage would have qualified James to be king? Or did the woman always refer to the Pretender in such a manner? Cecily sat up straighter and began to look around for signs of Jacobitism.

  Her study was inconclusive. The priest next to her, whom she’d first suspected to be a papist, turned out to be Episcopalian, Scotland’s equivalent of the Anglican Church. On the other hand, many of the ’15 rebels, like Lord Keltie himself, had been Episcopalian.

  This was the Scottish Lowlands, territory loyal to King George, and it had suffered as badly as anywhere when the Highland army came rampaging down from the hills on its way to the Border. Lady Petrock had already apologized to the company for the quality of the cheese, ‘for didn’t the damned caterans burn down my dairy when I refused them comfort. “Friends or unfriendlies I can neither help the one nor frustrate the other,” I told them.’

  Yet, the next minute, tears were in her eyes as Cecily and Sophie told her what they knew of the executions of Lords Derwentwater and Kenmuir. ‘God save their faithful souls.’

  Cecily thought: I wonder, am I in a nest of Jacobites? (Jacobites, like vipers, always had nests.)

  Lord Petrock came in and, to her relief, gave the loyal toast.

  Nevertheless, she watched carefully to see which hands passed their glass over the finger-bowls as a sign that their owners were pledging not George but the king over the water. She sighted so many that she failed to see whether Lady Petrock’s had done the same.

  Anne had not appeared by the time the ladies left the gentlemen to their port and tobacco.

  Because of the short winter daylight, dinner had been early. It was only six o’clock when the two girls and their teacher, pleading fatigue, retired.

  By then, Cecily had reached the conclusion that the Petrocks were as politically ambivalent as so many of their class, as she was. Possibly the execution and imprisonment of their friends had rekindled a waning admiration for the Jacobite cause while convincing them at the same time of its hopelessness.

  After they’d helped a tipsy and ecstatic Mary Astell to her room – ‘Did you taste of that potailzie pie, Sophie? Cecily, what is potailzie pie?’ – Cecily told Sophie her conclusions as they readied themselves for bed, a four-poster known as ‘The Forfar’, presumably because it could have accommodated most of Forfar in it.

  ‘These people are sound enough,’ said Sophie, yawning. ‘They congratulated me on my earl.’

  ‘Proving them incapable of treason,’ Cecily said. ‘Sophie, don’t you ever think of national matters?’

  ‘No.’

  Sophie was the only one of the three cousins with a settled future. She was contracted in marriage to the Earl of Cullen, even younger than herself but whose charm of appearance and disposition had won her heart at their first and, so far, only meeting.

  ‘Where can Anne be?’

  She woke them up. ‘You must dress, Cecily. I’ve told Hobson to have the coach ready but he’s balking. Sophie, wake up. Tell Hobson we’re for Edinburgh at once.’

  ‘Now?’ Cecily looked at the candle: four of its divisions had burned down. ‘It’s ten o’clock, for Lord’s sake. It’s still nighttime. Why must we go now?’

  ‘Now. We must go now. Lord Petrock saw him yesterday and says he’s so ill. Cecily, please.’

  Still objecting, Cecily began to dress. ‘They’ll never admit you at night-time. It’s a skidding prison, not a skidding inn.’

  ‘Our pass from the king is for myself and a companion and doesn’t specify hours. They’ll let us in.’

  Our pass. Us. Anne was expecting her to go into the prison as well. She had not envisaged that. ‘But isn’t it too dark to journey?’

  ‘There’s a moon. Hobson can do it if Sophie tells him he must.’

  Cecily’s every instinct was telling her to leave Sophie behind: Anne’s wildness was disturbing and she wanted time to ask more questions and consider the answers – why, for instance, could they not go in the Petrocks’ coach? – but Anne was allowing her none. Anyway, Sophie, with her usual enthusiasm for adventure, was already dressing.

  The brightness of a large moon reflected back a frost which turned the road into a broad, white path on which they were the only travellers. Now was the time to question but, after a few attempts had been brushed aside, Cecily held her tongue.

  An orphan with no memory of either parent, Cecily had been raised by dutiful, kindly but aloof adults without any fervour of affection. In return she’d felt none for them, reserving it for her cousins, her old nurse, Edie, and, later, for Mary Astell.

  Nevertheless, unable to understand it, she admired daughterly love in others. Anne’s consuming, scalding fear for her father awoke pity in her and an almost religious respect: here was agony at the foot of the cross. Not to assist her would be near impiety.

  In any case, she owed her cousin what childish happiness she’d known. During her early years her regular visits to Lord Keltie’s Highland castle were windswept, pony-riding, alien, peat-smoked freedoms that had become invested in her memory with magic. After 1708, when they’d had to stop, Anne had sacrificed a part of each year to spend it away from her beloved father and stay in England with Cecily, occasionally at court, more often on Cecily’s fenland estate of Hempens where, thanks to the lax interpretation of her duties by Lady Black, Cecily’s duenna, the two of them, sometimes accompanied by Sophie, had been able to slip off with Edie’s gamekeeper husband into the watery joys of punting and wild-fowling among the reeds.

  It was a debt. If Anne was calling it in now, Cecily was prepared to pay it.

  Within half an hour they were at Edinburgh’s west gate where a guard of soldiers was sufficiently impressed by the royal pass to let them through with no more than a quick inspection through the coach window.

  As they rattled up the hill towards the Castle, the stone frontages of the city’s astoundingly tall tenements had the sheen of black marble. Ice, however, had not diminished the smell from the contents of a thousand chamber-pots which the citizens emptied from their windows and now crunched beneath the coach’s wheels. Sophie held her nose.

  ‘Auld Reekie,’ Cecily said.

  ‘Sophie,’ said Anne, ‘please stay with the coach while we go in.’

  ‘I want to come in with you.’

  ‘Please. Hobson might go off in search of refreshment, you know what he’s like. We must have you ready to drive off the moment we come out.’

  They’d reached the cliff-face of the Castle. Anne descended, pulling up her hood, pulling up Cecily’s, telling Hobson he must stay here, he must. Cecily followed her, cricking her neck to look up, and saw a body hanging from a wall, its face blurred where the cold had halted its decomposition. A breeze had come up and was swaying it.

  The royal pass was scrutinized by ill-tempered guards, suspicious of a Jacobite plot to arm the prisoners. When they found that the basket Anne carried contained nothing more than a jug of beef tea, a flask of whisky, some food and medicines, they relaxed. On Anne’s offering them the whisky, they took it. They wouldn’t allow the coach in, even though they’d searched it, but Anne said not at all: she and Cecily would enter by the picket and walk the rest, if one of the good gentlemen would be so kind as to light their way.

  Steep, winding roadways, shadows, moon glinting on flintlocks, on the buckles of soldiers’ bandoliers, on faces pinched and mean from cold, the sudden stench of faeces from a grating, tunnels streaked with algae and smelling of urine and flaking whitewash, the echo of a man crying, the rasp of keys… These brought the fact of the rebels’ defeat closer to Cecily than any account of executions and how massive was the authority that they had flouted. This was subjugation.

  ‘Best room in the house,’ said their guide, unlocking a small door. ‘You got an hour and I’ll be back. I’ll even leave the glim, can’t ask more than that.’ He l
eft and the key turned on them.

  Without his lantern there’d have been no light in the room which, if it was the best in the house, spoke badly for the others. It was roughly ten foot square with a sloping ceiling, contained a table, two stools, Lord Keltie lying, coughing, on a box bed, and another man at that moment scrambling up from a pallet on the floor.

  Anne went straight to her father, leaving Cecily and the other man facing each other. He was tall and young, in his twenties, and embarrassed, slyly manoeuvring a lidded chamber-pot further under the bed with his foot. A grating high up in the far wall allowed cold air into the room but not enough to dissipate its stink.

  ‘Do be seated,’ he said.

  Cecily hovered, wanting to assist Anne who had raised her father’s head and was spooning cough medicine into him, releasing into the cell the refreshment of balsam and horehound.

  ‘He’s best left to her,’ the young man said. ‘Be seated, I beg.’

  As she sat down on the stool at one side of the table, he introduced himself – ‘Guillaume Fraser, madam, at your service’ – and took the other opposite. ‘This is most good of you.’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said, amused at the drawing-room exchange. ‘Cecily Fitzhenry.’

  He smiled back and she became aware of a response in herself. He was not conventionally good-looking. Had he been a woman, the French would have called her jolie-laide. The face was a shade too long, its skin too sallow and, at the moment, badly shaven, his lips too full. But the smile took these components and turned them into something to catch the breath.

  ‘I was with others in the dungeons but I begged leave to attend on him,’ Fraser said, nodding towards the bed. ‘He is very ill, I think.’

  Lord Keltie’s cough had the dry insistence of consumption. Anne was weeping as she fed him her beef tea.

  Cecily’s hands twitched at her own inadequacy: she should have brought more food – both men were gaunt. And rugs. Fraser was shivering: his jacket was laid over Lord Keltie, leaving him in his shirt.

  She took off her cloak, unwound the silk shawl she wore underneath and handed it to him without comment. For a moment he wanted to refuse, then wrapped it round himself, smelling it and closing his eyes. She was moved, knowing that the first femininity he had encountered for months was hers.

  ‘Guillaume?’ she inquired; she liked to know to whom she spoke. His speech was cultured enough but there was emphasis on the last syllable of some words and the placing of others was foreign.

  ‘A French mother. My father was the Fraser of Carslaw but followed King James into exile after ’eighty-eight. I was raised at St-Germain-en-Laye at the court of Her Majesty.’ Otherwise known to Whigs as ‘that papist harlot’, though everything Cecily had heard about Mary Modena had argued unvarying fidelity to James II and, since his death, to his cause.

  This young man was the Carslaw, was he? Cecily mentally scanned her exhaustive genealogical lists. The French mother, then, was the daughter of the Marquis de St Jacut. She could excuse herself for the attraction she felt: he was nobly born. Unfortunately, he was also a Roman Catholic. Cecily avoided looking at the crucifix he wore on a chain, not only out of revulsion at its realism but so that she should not stare at his neck, a pleasure to the eye.

  The warders had deprived the prisoners of their wigs to humiliate them, revealing that Lord Keltie was bald and that Fraser’s dark hair, though lank from the battlefield, was fine with a slight wave that Cecily would have liked instead of her own strong blonde curls. He’d tied it back with a piece of string.

  He was still embarrassed. ‘Mistress Cecily…’

  ‘Lady Cecily,’ she said automatically.

  ‘…Lady Cecily, I would not have you associate me with Simon Fraser. My kinsman, yes, but a turncoat. When he saw how things go – went, he ordered us to leave the field. I spat in his eye and marched to join Lord Keltie’s banner.’

  Under the circumstances, she thought, Simon Fraser’s move seemed sensible; she asked whether this Fraser regretted his own.

  He winced as if she’d been rude, then smiled. ‘“If it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive.”’

  Her favourite play.

  He seemed to think it important she should know he’d not laid down his sword at the end but had been physically disarmed. Telling her about the battle, he was a small boy explaining a black eye; he couldn’t help it. The shame of capture made him grimace.

  ‘Cecily,’ said Anne.

  Cecily went to the bed and saw her uncle’s almost luminous, and fatal, pallor. She’d known nothing but kindness from him. She curtsied. ‘I regret to find you in these circumstances, my lord.’

  With effort he said, ‘My dear niece, my dear girl.’

  ‘Cecily,’ said Anne, ‘I am sorry, but in a minute I am going to dress Father in my cloak. I want you to walk with him down to the coach and drive away. The hood will hide his face. They will think he is me, overcome with grief. When you’re outside the city, make for Leith. There’s a boat in harbour there awaiting the tide, the Good Hope. A coaler. It will take him to France.’ She met Cecily’s eyes: ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I… give me a minute, if you please, Anne.’ She walked to the wall with the grating in it and lifted her hands to grasp its bars, pressing her head against stone.

  It had been obvious if she’d only… the duplicity of it. Anger came, then went. Fear came and stayed. The skidding Petrocks had arranged it but shrunk from further involvement. Little wonder they wouldn’t lend Anne their identifiable, skidding coach. Fraser would have known other women in France, prettier and more sophisticated. Why has that entered my head? Anne had no right to ask this. She’s lunatic. Doubtless, one of his Frenchwomen would have done it but I am English and it is treachery.

  ‘Cecily.’

  Which do I betray? My king? My friend? She felt Anne’s hand on her shoulder. It had been there a hundred times, when she’d needed it. ‘You should have told me.’

  ‘Cecily, they’ll never know it was you. You and Sophie shall be in bed at Fetlaw Place by the time it’s discovered. It could be any woman. They don’t know your name – or your face, you had your hood up. They’ll never prove it was you.’

  They’d have a skidding good idea. And if it didn’t work, which was likely, they’d know then. But at the same time as she thought this, she was projecting her imagination to the moment when she refused to do what Anne asked, walked out of this place, an upright and loyal subject of German George, leaving these hopeless, loving lunatics behind her… She could not.

  ‘Very well.’ She turned and saw respect on his face. He’ll pay more than Anne or I. Assisting an escape. If he wasn’t facing death before, he is now. He’s as grateful as if he were going himself.

  Oddly, the conviction that she could do nothing else came when they were helping Lord Keltie to rise and her hand touched his bedclothes to find them cold and mildewed with damp. Such slovenliness. The man was a peer of the realm, whatever he’d done. If they couldn’t treat noble prisoners better they deserved to lose them.

  She was filled with a relief greater than she’d known; she found herself giggling as they draped the cloak over Lord Keltie’s bald head. Anne glanced at her, then had to sit down on the bed to laugh. A guffaw came from Fraser. They were bonded in amusement at themselves, three minuscule Davids against the giant of Gath.

  But oh dear, oh dear, it wouldn’t do. It was inefficient. Reluctantly, Cecily said: ‘It won’t do, Anne.’

  Anne turned, frozen in the act of laughing.

  Cecily said: ‘It won’t do, my dear. It must be you who goes.’ As Anne began to protest, she went on: ‘Consider. I don’t know where Leith is. Neither does Hobson. Nor Sophie. You must be the one. We look enough alike. Go with him to France; it is the sensible course. I shall stay here.’

  Later, over and over, she was to ask herself whether she would have made the offer if Fraser hadn’t been present. And was ashamed of the answer: she might not have
. She condemned her younger self for a child on a high wall, ‘Look at me, how brave I am,’ or, worse, a strumpet strutting before a potential client. Prepared to trade ruin, possibly her life, for one glance of admiration from a desirable man.

  Nor could that foolish young Cecily resist adding the one argument that Anne would never refute: ‘Your father needs you.’ And was immediately terrified at what she had done.

  Her cousin flung herself on her, sobbing.

  Anne was tall, like Cecily – their height came from their mothers who’d been sisters – her father short, so the cloak trailed the ground; good in one way since it covered his boots but bad in that an observant eye might notice it hadn’t trailed before. They put Anne’s muff over his hands. They used the tiny scissors from the hussife in Cecily’s pocket to cut off some of Anne’s hair and Cecily stitched it to the edge of the hood so that a piece curled down his shoulder. They spooned more linctus down him in order that he should not cough, begging him, if he must, to make it high, like weeping.

  Insanity, Cecily kept thinking even as she worked: her uncle wasn’t the right shape, he moved like an old man; in any case, he was too weak, he wouldn’t manage the walk down the hill.

  Lord Keltie took a little food. Fraser ate the rest.

  Anne and Cecily said their goodbyes, knowing they might be saying them for the last time. ‘Theyll not be too hard on you, are you sure?’ begged Anne. ‘Tell them I bombazed you into it.’

  ‘I most certainly shall.’

  ‘You’ll come to France, my dear, my dear?’

  ‘Indeed. And soon.’

  The insouciance was a pretence: she’d never been so afraid in her life. When they heard the rattle of keys and the gaoler’s step approaching along the passageway outside, she wanted to fall on her knees and beg everybody’s pardon because she could not continue with the charade. It can’t work.