Blood Royal Read online

  The largest bubble of all soars and shimmers in the national hothouse, its translucent, rainbowed, insubstantial circumference reflecting not only the greed of those who leap after it but a nation’s romance: the South Sea Company, at present offering 1,050 per cent.

  The very name is irresistible, conjuring up doubloons, pearls, Spanish galleons with sails of silk, black ivory and gold moidores.

  It’s patriotism to buy. To help the National Debt and in doing so remember Drake, remember Hawkins, Ralegh, and make my fortune. Buy. Buy. The king’s in. And the Prince of Wales. And Walpole, old Brazen-face himself. Buy, buy. Thomas Guy has just made a profit of £180,428 and will found a hospital with it. And him the meanest man in England. Buy quick, quick, before they close the subscription.

  It was a relief to turn by Charing Cross and hear the tuneful hectoring of the street traders offering a more honest return of flounders, of oranges, delicate cucumbers, twelve-pence-a-peck oysters and lily-white vinegar threepence a quart.

  Oh, God. From down an alley came the echoing tenor of someone singing, quite beautifully, ‘The Pipers of Strathdearn’. My heart’s darling. ‘Stop the carriage. Stop.’ Careless of her doeskin slippers, her skirt ballooning behind her, Cecily ran to the mouth of the alley, fending off higglers.

  It wasn’t him. How could it be? A drunk cradling a filthy blackjack looked up at her out of his only good eye. Irish, probably.

  ‘Damn you,’ she said. She fumbled in her pocket for coins and threw them at him.

  ‘God bless your ladyship. May the road rise up to meet ye.’

  ‘You be damned,’ she said again, quietly. He probably would be – sooner rather than later if he persisted in singing Jacobite songs. She went back to the carriage. ‘Drive on.’

  The sot had transported her back four years and four hundred miles away to an Edinburgh prison cell. Damn him, damn him. She’d accommodated the pain but then some reference, a line of Shakespeare, that wastrel’s song, refreshed the old, beloved agony.

  She’d known it couldn’t be him and still she’d responded.

  The awful little Scotsman in the fox-coloured wig, the one who’d been their gaoler on the journey back from Edinburgh, he’d told her what they’d done with Guillaume, privately, soon after her marriage.

  ‘It is concerning the prisoner Fraser, Lady Cecily. I thought ye’d wish to be acquainted with his circumstance.’

  ‘Indeed?’ She’d kill to know, but damned if she showed desperation to this Presbyterian pen-pusher. That he’d had the temerity to come to her with it at all argued an insight he shouldn’t have – but if he didn’t acquaint her with ‘the circumstance’ in one second she’d tear his heart out. She’d struggled to find out on her own, without success.

  ‘Representations were made and his sentence was mitigated to one of transportation to the colonies,’ the Scotsman had said.

  That was mitigation, was it? But it wasn’t death. He was alive. Somewhere. She’d allowed herself to ask idly: ‘Which colony?’

  ‘It’ll be the West Indies, but which one I do not know.’

  She nodded a thank-you. Horrible little man: he was becoming familiar; he’d set up his shingle somewhere in Town and managed to worm his way into doing business for both Lemuel and Walpole so that his wig for ever bobbed up somewhere at gatherings she must attend.

  She suspected him of at once gloating over her and pitying; he spoke of the ‘representations’ made on Guillaume’s behalf as if he had made them. One of those who wanted a finger in every pie. But not mine, you mannikin; not mine.

  * * *

  At Westminster, the tipstaff regarded her with caution. ‘No Mrs Baker with you today then, Lady Cecily? Only, see, Mr Dodington’s white duffel coat was ruined. And the Scotch member, he’s still complaining his eye smarts.’

  A tap of her shoe on the marble floor of the lobby reminded the man of his duty, but as he led the way to the gallery, she saw his shoulders heaving: ‘Right in the eye.’

  He thought it funny.

  Cecily was constantly amazed at how people mistook Dolly. Not only minions like this, aristocrats, too, forgave her behaviour as an example of rough but good-hearted, low-class, outspoken Englishness, the spirit that won their wars for them.

  ‘Un phénomene. A one, is she not?’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had said, after watching Dolly unblinkingly drink tea from her saucer.

  ‘And thank God for only one.’ But Cecily did not say so: a lady did not run down relations, however gross. She found no good heart in Dolly, merely an inability to recognize any imperative but self-indulgence. It blinded the woman to class so that she used Lady Mary’s drawing room as below stairs. Below stairs she welcomed new servants with camaraderie, demanding their dismissal when they took advantage.

  She was untameable, trusting nobody but herself and her brother – and only him, thought Cecily, because clinging to his coat-tails had dragged her from an early and impecunious widowhood to her present comfortable place in her sister-in-law’s house.

  The day’s debate in the House, concerned with curbing the rash of small bubble companies floated to exploit the present madness for speculation, had attracted a large attendance for June. As Cecily took her seat fifteen feet above their heads the smell of the members’ oranges, boot oil, hair powder and perspiration rose to meet her. What the air would be like if all 508 members of Parliament were crammed into this space of sixty feet by thirty… but they never were nor would be. Below Cecily was a social range that spanned a half per cent of the population, voted into their seats by an electorate of 4 per cent. For the most part they were landed gentry who hunted in the autumn, entertained at Christmas and had better things to do during spring and summer than swelter in the Commons. In January and February perhaps…

  But today the Whigs’ muster-masters had whipped in their hounds. There were some two hundred members present, most of them on the Whig benches, lolling to consider their spurred boots, some cracking nuts or sucking oranges, others whistling or talking. It was made difficult to hear the lonely speaker on his feet on the Tory side of the House, deliberately so. Sir William Shippen MP was a Jacobite, a declared opponent of the Hanoverian monarchy and Walpole.

  He sat down. A Whig member stood up. Cecily composed her face into an attentive mask and prepared to doze with her eyes open. This was Lemuel’s moment: she’d heard his speech rehearsed twice already and had been bored out of her wits both times.

  The House wasn’t waiting to be bored. The Speaker shouted, ‘To order, to order,’ at a stampede caused by members recalling an urgent appointment in the coffee room and hurrying to keep it.

  An attack on him in the Tory press had once said of Sir Lemuel Potts: ‘The honourable gentleman invariably acts as a Dinner Bell so quickly does the House empty when he starts to speak.’ Dinner Bell he had been ever since, even to his own Whigs.

  The top of his head, to which Cecily’s sightless gaze was directed, was an embarrassment in itself. He persisted in a black frontless wig, combing his own, thinning, grey front hair, of which he was proud since he had none on his crown, back over it and blending the two with bear’s grease, giving him the appearance of an ageing, foppish badger.

  His tailor had persuaded him that his figure, which was tall but stooping, suited the martial style, and dressed him in a red coat braced so stiffly in its skirt that, when he walked, his arms swung at an unreasonable distance from his sides. His behaviour with his cane – he was brandishing it with one hand now, his notes in the other – had been invented by himself and included such a variety of actions that it was unsafe to sit within several feet of him.

  Cecily’s attempts to send him to Weatherfield for his coats and Mazzini for his wigs had resulted in a kindly: ‘Permit me to know what is suitable for a man in my position, my dear.’

  It was difficult to argue: such stubbornness and refusal to recognize how ludicrous he was had, indeed, taken him from Cheapside clerk to the status of MP and landed baronet.

/>   That and his marriage to herself, of course. And an inexhaustible capacity for doing what Walpole told him. Walpole, the coming man.

  The same Tory paper that labelled him Dinner Bell had published a cartoon depicting an arched and tiny Lemuel Potts being used as a boot-scraper by a giant Walpole. The balloon issuing from its mouth read: ‘Anything to oblige, Sir Robert.’

  Whether Lemuel had seen it, Cecily didn’t know. Probably he’d not have been displeased if he had: to be Walpole’s slave was not only his means of advancement but his joy.

  He’d served the man first as a minor clerk in the Treasury, then as chief clerk, then in the House itself, fetching and carrying, bringing messages and whispers to and from members, telling his master whose vote could be relied on for which particular question.

  By giving this useful dog a bone, Walpole had provided the House with another loyal Whig MP and increased the dog’s usefulness.

  And Lemuel’s bone had been colossal – a baronetcy, Cecily’s fortune and land, which carried with it the parliamentary seat of Hempens, and Cecily herself, forty years younger than he was.

  In return, he thought and spoke and voted as Walpole wanted.

  There was silence in the chamber. Cecily blinked. Was it over? No, her husband was merely glancing for approval from his master on the front bench to one side of him. Walpole was still there. The man’s huge frame was stretched out, his hat over his eyes, his fat red cheeks displaying the country-bred health so disappointing to Cecily who daily prayed that he would die.

  My life is passing.

  She was having one of her panics. Nausea suffused her stomach and throat. How have I offended Thee? Put the clock back, O God. Stop the coach. Another chance, Lord.

  Lemuel droned on. He’d reached the bit about the Riot Act. What it had to do with anything, she didn’t know.

  Neither, it seemed, did Walpole. He stretched out a hand to catch Lemuel’s cane as it swung. ‘The Riot Act? My dear friend, the Riot Act? No need to read it. The mob is already dispersed.’

  Smiling weakly, Lemuel looked about the near-empty chamber, gave a bow and sat down.

  She followed him out to the coffee room. He was protesting to Shippen: ‘You should not rub Sir Robert so hard, Sir William.’

  ‘But I should, Sir Lemuel. It is for his benefit. The more ministers are rubbed, the brighter they be.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Walpole, coming up, ‘I am the brightest minister that ever was.’ He bowed to Cecily, snatching her hand and kissing it. ‘And how does my freshest primrose?’

  His primrose gave a barely perceptible nod.

  As usual, he radiated fresh-air heartiness, as if he’d just come from ploughing a furrow because his ploughman could not do it as well. His accent was still Norfolk’s; he was everyman’s countryman, the essence of rural England. But the hand that enveloped hers was as soft as her own.

  He turned to his acolyte. ‘And no bud on our primrose yet?’

  ‘Any moment, Sir Robert.’ Lemuel’s voice rose to a tremolo of gratification. ‘We try hard, we try hard.’

  ‘Plant deeper, Lemuel, that’s the way of it. Plant deeper.’ His eyes were on Cecily’s, to involve her in his own sexuality. She stared back at him. You overgrown hog. She had abased herself to this man, pleaded, clung to his ankles.

  Given his master’s permission to be coarse, Lemuel expanded on the theme of his and Cecily’s marital doings, his cane going in all directions, as if the two of them romped the nights away in physical bliss. William Shippen moved off, embarrassed.

  Lemuel knew no better, an ironmonger’s son. He was being manipulated so that Walpole could encompass her in some perverse liaison; that lustful man. He was the supreme manipulator. With Parliament, the source of the king’s money supply, eating out of his hand he’d not only purchased George’s dependence, he’d made him enjoy the sale. Despite the king’s lack of English and Walpole’s ignorance of German or French, they’d become two bluff fellows together, calling their mutual greed ‘being practical’, sharing lavatory jokes, winking at each other when they talked women – all in dog Latin.

  Finding the Princess of Wales cleverer than her husband and father-in-law put together, Walpole had conquered her too, and through her the Prince of Wales, playing the honest countryman still, but cultured this time, interested in art, children. Caroline had adored him.

  How does he do it? Studying the humorous, beefy face, Cecily could see no sign of the artifice that lay behind it. His gift lay in giving any utterance the ring of common sense. He could suggest the House paint itself with woad and make it seem the practical thing to do.

  His platform was peace; keep England out of war. Admirable, of course, and popular, though Cecily suspected his concern to be less for the lives of English soldiers, or even the country’s good, than for maintaining a stability by which its landed squireachy and City men and, naturally, Walpole himself could line their pockets.

  Marvellously, the general perception of him was of his own invention: if it was favourable to Walpole, it was favourable to England. Bridge between King and Parliament, amiable, watchful giant from a Golden Age where sun-browned peasants paused their harvesting to salute the carriages of their kindly, wealthy masters.

  When he’d blackmailed her into marrying Lemuel he’d exuded patriotic, fatherly concern. ‘For your own sake, maid. And your cousin’s, and the country’s. Thee’ll see it in time. He’s a good man is Lemuel Potts.’

  She supposed he was. There was no evil in Lemuel, just mind-withering silliness. Look at him now. Still bleating his is-she-not-beautifuls, such-a-lucky-man-as-I-ams and expect-good-news-any-days.

  The risk he took. He depended on her not to give away the truth, not to cut through the male babble of this coffee-stained, tobacco-smoked room with the shout: ‘The old fool’s impotent.’

  She wouldn’t because he trusted her, because for better for worse she was now Lady Cecily Potts and the old fool’s dignity, such as it was, had become her own. She wouldn’t because of Walpole. Because of Pope and all the rest who found pleasure in her downfall. They’d trussed the calf on their altar, but she’d be damned if she’d give them the satisfaction of hearing it bawl.

  Walpole was becoming restive at her aloofness. He put his huge face close to Cecily’s under the pretence of studying it. She smelt wine. ‘Where’s our lady’s patch?’

  ‘My lady refuses paint, powder or patch, Sir Robert,’ Lemuel apologized with a touch of pride. ‘She leaves her skin as God intended.’

  Another example of his silliness: if God had intended women’s complexions to be shiny He wouldn’t have invented French talcum mines. For Lemuel’s sake she couldn’t proclaim her Tory sympathies by wearing a patch on the left cheek, but damned if she’d be tricked out as a Whiggamore by wearing one on the right.

  Just before the members returned for the division, Sir Lemuel said uncertainly: ‘They wavered a little today, Sir Robert.’

  South Sea shares again, she supposed. Lemuel was obsessed with their price and employed runners to bring him hourly accounts of it.

  Walpole’s hand crashed into his back. ‘Where’s your faith, my lad? I’ve subscribed to more stock myself this very day.’ He grinned at Lemuel. ‘And tomorrow I’m for Houghton. Will ye dine Wednesday?’

  It was Cecily’s misfortune that her estate of Hempens was a bit west of King’s Lynn, Walpole’s borough seat in the Commons, and less than a day’s ride from Houghton, the Walpoles’ Norfolk home.

  In giving Lemuel Cecily, and therefore Hempens, Walpole had strengthened the Whigs’ control of the area and at the same time made Lemuel his neighbour.

  For Sir Robert to put the invitation in the form of a question was rhetorical. They had, in fact, planned to go to Cecily’s manor in Surrey. Now, at Walpole’s intervention, there was an instant change of direction. Lemuel said: ‘Of course, of course, Sir Robert. Thank ee.’

  ‘You may dine at Houghton, Lemuel,’ said Cecily. ‘I shall not.’ It w
as her sticking point. She’d been forced into a marriage, she’d been defrauded and dishonoured. What she would not do was grace the author of these humiliations.

  ‘Eh? What’s this?’

  ‘I am otherwise engaged,’ she said.

  ‘Are you, my dear?’ Lemuel dithered. ‘How?’

  She met Walpole’s eye. ‘Otherwise.’

  As it turned out, the next morning Cecily was given a legitimate excuse not to go into the country at all, though it was one she would rather not have had, in a note from Lady Catherine Jones.

  She took it into the dining room where Lemuel was urging the household into a frenzy of packing. ‘I shall not be accompanying you, Sir Lemuel. Mrs Astell is ill.’

  ‘That old foolospher.’ Dolly was filling a box with plate.

  ‘But, my dear, my dear…’ Lemuel saw the tilt of his wife’s jaw and stopped protesting. ‘You will join us later, I hope?’

  ‘When she’s better.’

  Appallingly, Dolly wondered whether she, too, should not stay behind: she was a townswoman through and through. ‘I hate Hempens. All birds and quiet and them stinking bogs.’

  ‘Fens, Dolly,’ Cecily said. ‘They are tidal fens. Surely you will not pass up dinner with Sir Robert?’

  ‘There’s that,’ her sister-in-law admitted. ‘Lays on good vittles, does Sir Rob. An’ he’s a lad.’ She winked. Dolly flirted outrageously with Walpole, convinced he fancied her person.

  And he probably does, thought Cecily. She stood on the steps to see them off. It was months since she’d seen Hempens and she ached for it, but to visit it in company with her husband and sister-in-law was like watching children in hob-nail boots caper on rare, ancient mosaic.