Blood Royal Read online

  Instead she scrambled into Lord Keltie’s bed, pulled the covers over her head and attempted a masculine cough. It sounded like a fox in rut. This couldn’t work. She heard the cell door unlocked, the ‘Time, ladies, please’ of the gaoler, knew it couldn’t work, heard the cell door close behind shuffled footsteps, knowing it couldn’t work. They’d gone.

  After a while she raised her head, into silence – and darkness: the gaoler had taken the lantern. She got up and felt her way to the table, taking the stool opposite Fraser; she couldn’t see him but she knew he sat three feet away from her, listening.

  They listened together. They could hear the normal sounds of the Castle, or whatever passed for normal in that place. An exchange of shouts echoing up from a courtyard made her start, but Fraser’s hand pressed down on hers. ‘No. They change the guard only.’

  She strained her hearing to catch the sound of a coach driving down the setts outside the gateway, but it wasn’t possible over the wind which had got up and now moaned through the grating. He stood up – she could just see the paleness of her shawl against the wall. ‘Nor’west. Fair stood the wind for France. Shakespeare’s wind.’

  He came back and sat down again. ‘And Scotland’s. It whistles “The Pipers of Strathdearn”, did you know that?’ He crooned the song, in a shaky, ridiculous baritone, to calm her.

  ‘They must be away by now,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ Her hand was raised and she felt his face against it. ‘You are a most gallant lady.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She didn’t take her hand away. ‘When do they come?’

  ‘At dawn, if we have luck. Though there’s a particular sergeant, if he’s on duty we are turned out to shiver at any time, day or night. He says he looks for arms. We say he’s a Presbyterian bastard.’

  ‘It’s a pity we have no light or cards. I’m a good card player.’

  ‘As well we haven’t, then. I’m not. Let us discuss Shakespeare.’

  They discussed Shakespeare. It made him seem very English: she’d somehow thought St-Germain Jacobites would prefer Molière.

  ‘Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic, you know that?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said, enjoying the intimacy of arguing with him.

  ‘But yes.’

  The extraordinary thing was that even had he not been so personable, she would have liked him; she was almost giddy with recognition, with the sense that they’d held this conversation before. She had never come across a mind so attuned to her own. Even when they disagreed they understood each other.

  He said his favourite was Romeo and Juliet. ‘I staged it for Her Majesty at St-Germain. I was Romeo.’

  It was a ruse. They both knew it. So that he could quote the balcony speech. There was nothing else to do but fall in love. Under sentence of death it was necessary to affirm youth and life. There was no time for flirtatious exchanges with an abyss about to claim them; at least they could fall into it in each other’s attractive arms.

  She listened to him making verbal love to her, absorbing every word through the darkness, every inflexion of his voice, hoarding them against the years to come, silently begging what light beyond the window breaks to stay unbroken for ever and leave them in this noisome, lovely darkness, wishing he’d make the move they both knew he was going to.

  She’d had no use for her virginity the moment she’d set eyes on him. Bewigged, posturing, rouged courtiers, how could they compare with this raw man? What time had been wasted on the artificiality of puppets now that her future had contracted into what minutes were left with flesh and blood, this gladiator in the ring of life and death?

  In the circle in which Lady Cecily moved, chastity was not the ball and chain it had been to previous generations of girls. As Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had once pointed out: ‘No one is shocked nowadays to hear that “Miss So and So, maid of honour, has got nicely over her confinement.”’ But the convention of allowing the man to make the first move still held firm, and so Cecily, dying for him to make it, waited until he did. And waited too long…

  They weren’t lucky. From the world outside came the stamp of boots, orders, protests from prisoners rousted from other cells. The Presbyterian bastard was on duty.

  Immediately, he moved. The table was shoved aside. His arms were round her, she had her cheek against his neck. ‘My heart’s darling.’ He held her away from him for a moment. He said: ‘They can hang me but I’ll return for you, Lady Cecily, Lady Cecily.’

  ‘And I’ll be waiting.’

  She was taken to the governor of the Castle, who didn’t know what to do with her and kept her in his own house while he sent to England and King George to find out.

  Eventually she and Sophie and Mary Astell were driven back to London under guard and in the charge of a Scots Presbyterian, Archibald Cameron, a lawyer from the Procurator’s office who was going to England on his own business. He was a penny-pinching young man, who made them stay at the cheaper inns and accounted for every expenditure in a notebook, a Lowlander in a fox-coloured wig. Sophie taunted him, singing ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ out of the coach window to where he rode beside them on his inferior horse. Cecily didn’t speak to him at all.

  The king refused to see her. She was taken instead to his minister, Sir Robert Walpole. They’d already met at court where she’d watched with surprise his success at worming his way into the Princess of Wales’s favour – and thought less of Caroline for allowing him to do so: the man was of no blood whatever, a jumped-up squire, a Whig nakedly out for power. His own advance on her – ‘We must be close friends, Lady Cecily, as we’ve been close neighbours. I’m a Norfolk man with acres not far from Hempens’ – she’d treated with the contempt it warranted: ‘Indeed?’

  Now he was her inquisitor.

  She faced him out over the matter of Sophie’s involvement, stating the truth that Sophie, like Mary Astell, had known nothing of the plot. ‘Nor did I, until we were in the cell. I’m no Jacobite, but my uncle was dying. Anne is my cousin and my friend. He was dying – ask the warders at the Castle. The only one betrayed is the executioner.’

  Again, she was unlucky. Rebels were escaping their prisons like bubbles blown in the air. Old Borlum Mackintosh, the sixty-year-old defender of Preston, had broken out of Newgate with thirteen other Jacobites, one of them his son.

  The Earl of Wintoun used a watch-spring to saw through the bars of a window in the Tower and got away safely into exile. In Lancashire, four slipped out of prison. Thirty more took over the ship transporting them to the colonies and sailed it to France.

  The English public, ever admiring of slippery coves, had begun to jeer as it counted.

  One escape in particular that caught its fancy was yet another from the Tower of London, this time the Earl of Nithsdale’s, which had been procured by Lady Nithsdale – he’d walked out in her cloak – as Anne had procured Lord Keltie’s. And exactly two days before.

  ‘They’re laughing at us, maid,’ Walpole told her, mildly. ‘And this little exploit by Miss Insh’ll have ’em laughing the more. That’s iffen they find out about it. But p’rhap they woon’t, p’rhap they woon’t.’

  Cecily shrugged as if she had no care either way. In fact, she was more afraid than she had been in the Edinburgh cell. Walpole stood in front of her chair, with his back to the Whitehall window, legs apart, arms behind his back under his coat, his thick belly extended until it almost touched her, cutting her off from light and, it seemed to her, from air.

  ‘’Tis you I’m thinking of,’ he said. ‘Your reputation.’ He pronounced it ‘repootation’, acting the Norfolk bucolic, not to put her at her ease, but to emphasize that he, a simple country squire, wielded power over lineage. ‘Cavorting in a cell, with a bed in it, with a young Jacobite? What’d your ancestors think? What’ll the world think?’

  She kept her face expressionless.

  ‘Nice little tidbit that’d be for the presses, wouldn’t it?’ He put up his hand and stroked one of his chins. ‘No, n
o, I think – and His Majesty do agree with me – we’d better get thee safely married. And I know just the man as’ll make ee a fine husband.’

  She refused and he broke her. There was no outright coercion: she was merely allowed to read a paper, a letter from an agent in the pay of Lord Stair, British ambassador in Paris. It reported the recent arrival in France ‘of the traitor Keltie and his so-called daughter’.

  It added: ‘The old man is near defunct but we may have the lady spirited away back to England, if so your Ldship wishes, to face what punishment for her treachery yr Ldship thinks fit.’

  She knew Stair to be the most efficient spy-master her government had possessed since Elizabeth’s Walsingham: he could lay his hand on Anne whenever he wanted. And would.

  ‘And what do thee think fit for a wench like Miss Insh as betrays king and country, Lady Cecily, eh? Perhaps we do need an example as’ll stop the mob’s laugh, eh, Lady Cecily?’

  The memory that she’d pleaded, wiped her face on Walpole’s boots, was a scar she carried for the rest of her life, being aware, even as she did it, even as she couldn’t help doing it, that it was futile.

  She was married to an old man called Sir Lemuel Potts two months afterwards.

  ‘Thee’ll learn to love ’un as I do,’ Walpole said. ‘He’s a fine man, fine, he’ll be a proper husband to you, and as good a neighbour to me.’

  Chapter Three

  At her London house in Spring Gardens, Lady Cecily Potts awoke with a headache: she’d drunk a bottle of claret before retiring. Come to that, she drank a bottle of claret before retiring every night: four years of marriage to Lemuel had taught her the value of going to bed insensible.

  Her sister-in-law’s voice rasped from the doorway: ‘Ain’t you dressed yet? There’s the carriage downstairs.’

  ‘Go away, Dolly.’

  ‘Shan’t then. ’S Lemmy’s big speech today. We got to be in the gallery for it. You promised him.’

  Oh, God, another day. ‘Send Jane up.’

  ‘What we wearing today, your ladyship?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Be-stayed and be-skirted she descended to find her sister-in-law handsome in a hat and next-to-best summer dress.

  ‘You are not coming,’ Cecily informed her.

  ‘I am, then.’

  They jostled in the hall until Cecily stood back. ‘You are not coming, Dolly.’

  ‘And who’s to stop me?’

  ‘It pains me to tell you,’ Cecily said, gloating, ‘that the Strangers’ tipstaff informed me you wouldn’t be welcome. Not after the last time.’

  Dolly Baker wagged her head in derision. ‘Pains-me-to-tell-you, pains-me-to-tell-you. I can’t help if me bladder’s weak. They should’ve let me out when I asked.’

  ‘A lady holds her water,’ said Cecily, who, on days like these, carried a small portable pot-de-chambre attached to the right-hand underside of her hoop; a skirt the size of a tent might be hell in a crowd but it had its advantages.

  Dolly bared her teeth. ‘And I wouldn’t know about that, I suppose?’

  ‘Indeed.’ Dolly was not the least of the crosses Cecily had been forced to carry these last four years. She was a well-favoured female, Cecily’s senior by ten years, with a natural taste for dress, but she was so far down the scale of civilization that, as far as Cecily was concerned, she was off it.

  Sharing a house with the woman was like being caged with one of the less mannerly animals. Dolly was no more capable of considering her effect on others than a wild pig rampaging through a forest.

  Even to be irked by the creature was demeaning, still more to glory in putting it in its place. In any case, overall victory in humiliation belonged to Dolly whose piss had overflowed between the balusters of the Strangers’ Gallery and dripped on two honourable members seated below, one of whom had been leaning backwards and received a direct hit in the eye.

  The only comfort to be gleaned from the occasion, as far as Cecily was concerned, was that the afflicted members were Whigs.

  She, Cecily, had been sitting next to her at the time, might even have been taken for the culprit had not Dolly sung out her apologies and gone on to give the amazed House a dissertation on urinary problems in general and hers in particular until the tipstaff ushered her out.

  Whether, at that moment, Lemuel, who’d been seated not far away from his unfortunate colleagues, prayed for death as she had, she didn’t know. With his usual pretence that all was perfect in a perfect world, he’d made no mention of the incident.

  Neither, thank God, had Pope: she’d feared he would hear of it and write one of his lampoons. But that gentleman was waiting for a greater degradation, she realized: some act of her own, taking to opium, procuring a lover, as did other despairing wives. And, God knows, she’d been tempted, if only to break the boredom.

  Then he’d place her. Then would come the squibs, the ballads, the sniggers, her reputation shrivelling under his acidly disappointed satisfaction. He’d done it to others.

  Not yet, Mr Pope. Not ever. I am Lady Cecily Fitzhenry, whoever my husband may be.

  When she’d known the marriage that was to be forced on her, she had gone to him, unsuspecting, at Twickenham, expecting for herself the compassion she’d always shown to him. He could be kind: he supported with a pension some sick woman he’d befriended and had been known to weep at man’s cruelty to animals. Also, as a Roman Catholic, he would have some sympathy with what she had done in Edinburgh.

  Instead of the friend, she’d encountered the wit: ‘My dear, the degradation. Potts. A cataclysm. Such a clanking name. You might cook with it, or piss in it, but never, never marry it.’

  She’d turned on her heel then and hadn’t spoken to him since.

  As she left the house in Spring Gardens that June morning of 1720, Cecily stepped into a heat in which stock and share prices were soaring along with the temperature. So was insanity. London, like other financial centres, was infected by a new plague – speculation. High and low had contracted it. Away in the City, emblazoned coaches blocked the narrow lanes as their owners fought with commoners in the doorways of ’Change Alley to put their money into companies that had risen like buns in the heat of somebody’s imagination.

  The noise from Drummonds, the Scottish bank, where it stood on the corner of Spring Gardens and Charing Cross, attracted her attention so that she paused on the steps. It appeared from the crowd at Drummonds’ doors that Jacobites were struggling to buy South Sea shares as loudly and patriotically as anyone else. How vulgar.

  Cecily, having never wanted for money, had no care for it. In any case, her interest in national affairs had dwindled now that she had to view them as Lemuel Potts’s wife. The rage which had overtaken an entire society, even its elite, left her uninterested and dull.

  She’d forgotten that Drummonds was Pope’s bank. He was in the crowd milling in the street, distinguishable in his black, shorter by a head than anybody else, even the women, his body like a hunched bat’s topped by the head of a cherub. She wondered why his defection should have hurt her almost more than the others.

  It was to be expected that Lady Cecily would be shunned by the royal family she had offended. Her expulsion was immediate. No explanation was given – Walpole had advised King George that it would render him ridiculous were it known that two of his own daughter-in-law’s women had assisted the escape of an enemy. Word of it got about at court, though it was kept from the general public.

  However, Cecily had not expected that her contemporaries among the courtiers would shun her too. Couldn’t they admit her action as an impulse of family loyalty and not a Jacobite plot? They could not: she was invited nowhere, no cards were left for her, no congratulations sent on her marriage – they’d have been a mockery, in any case.

  A proud head had fallen into the basket, hurrah. It shouldn’t have been held so high. Mary Lepel had flung herself on Hervey like a wolf and married him; at a chance meeting in Hyde Park, they tiptoed, arm in arm
, past her as if avoiding a turd, seeming triumphant.

  What Cecily missed in interpreting the attitude of her former friends was the influence of fear. The Fifteen had been a closer-run thing than the government liked to admit: the number and quality of those who’d joined the rebellion indicated that George of Hanover’s throne was not on firm foundations and it was in the interest of Sir Robert Walpole, struggling for top place in the cabinet, to keep telling him how shaky it was.

  Look to me, Your Majesty, I’m the man to save you from your danger. If Jacobites had not existed, Sir Robert would have had to invent them. To a certain extent he did: the court had begun to see them under every bush. To proclaim oneself a Tory, even, was becoming grounds for suspicion as Sir Robert spread his gospel: who opposes the Whigs must, ergo, be Jacobite. If even maids of honour proved faithless, who could be trusted? Why did this minister not say ‘Amen’ to the final ‘God Save the King’ when a brief was read in church? Why was there a white rose among the embroidery on that lady’s petticoat?

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who remained Cecily’s friend, would have pointed out to her that her former colleagues were not necessarily triumphing over her. That the shadow, perhaps of plotters or assassins, certainly of suspicion, loomed across palace corridors and nobody who wanted to keep their place dare allow it to fall on them by associating with Lady Cecily and her darkened name.

  But Lady Mary had gone on her travels again. Among the loyal, only Mrs Astell remained in England. Anne was exiled. Sophie had been taken by her young husband on an extended Grand Tour. Which left Cecily in a desert of middle-class Whiggery. With Dolly.

  Pope, emerging from Drummonds, glimpsed Cecily where she stood on the steps of her house. She saw his look. Immediately, her chin and her parasol went up. ‘Westminster, John.’

  It gave her satisfaction that her carriage wheels sent dust over poet and crowd as it passed. Though the poet noticed, the crowd did not: it was too intent on getting rich. You can transmute fluid mercury into silver and give me 200 per cent return? I’ll buy in. Intend to trade in hair, 400 per cent return? Take my pension. Settle the Tortugas? Mine copper from the Welsh mountains? Make butter from beechnuts? Turn salt-water into fresh? Revolutionize the art of war with Puckle’s Machine Gun? Yes, yes, I believe in square cannon balls: 800 per cent return? Here’s cash for which I’ve mortgaged my cottage/house/castle. Make me rich. A new nostrum for the clap? Only let me buy in.