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  Of all her estates, Hempens was the smallest and most impoverished and held most of Cecily’s heart and history. Her nickname among the maids of honour had been ‘the Wake’ from her family’s claim of descent from the great Hereward, he who’d carried on England’s fight against William the Conqueror after all other Saxons had surrendered. Whenever circumstances became too hot for them in the outside world, generations of Fitzhenrys had taken to their island on the fen-edge to lie low, unpursuable and unbetrayed, until things cooled down and their enemies went away.

  One quarter on Cecily’s coat of arms gratefully featured a bittern, that hider in the reeds.

  Fitzhenry tradition had it that an admiring Conqueror had married the Wake’s daughter to one of his own men, Rollo the Dapifer, and it was a descendant of that union who had married Geoffrey Fitzhenry, Henry II’s only faithful, but bastard, son. The same tradition existed among the long-memoried fenlanders: kings came and went unheeded; it was the Fitzhenrys who ruled that secret area of England and even now, because Saxon custom allowed women right of ownership, in the fenlanders’ mind Cecily was more their lord than the unknown George who sat on the throne in unknown London.

  For her part, she was more at ease among those ill-favoured, web-footed men and women than with all the fashionable of Town. They were her people and she was embarrassed when they had to bear with Dolly’s insults, keep their faces straight at Lemuel’s attempt to play the squire, bring down birds with their ancient fowling-pieces and pretend it had been his shot.

  The few with a vote had been bewildered by Lemuel’s demand to cast it for him, a Whig. They had returned a Tory since voting began but, because he was Cecily’s husband, they’d sent him to Parliament and Lemuel had said: ‘See, my dear, what a few casks of free ale can do.’

  As a girl she’d spent hours at the top of the Lantern, Hempens’ little lighthouse, watching the sea, weaving a beleaguering dragon around the base of the tower and concocting the hero who would one day come-a-sailing to the island to rescue her from it; brave, of course, tall, handsome… but she’d never been able to limn his face.

  It certainly hadn’t been Lemuel’s.

  Time and again since her marriage, she’d remembered that pubescent dream with bitterness. What fools ye young girls be.

  Well, Cecily thought, as she watched the coach wobble round the corner of Spring Gardens and out of sight, with luck, Dolly will drown in the mere. ‘Free,’ she said. Upstairs in her bedroom, she shut the door and twirled towards the powder room. ‘Free,’ she shouted at Lemuel’s empty wig-stand, ‘free,’ as she dragged a pillow off their bed and kicked it.

  Of such transitory, petty liberties was her life made up; they enabled her to keep going, like a drunk making from chair to chair to cross a room.

  On her wedding night she’d made a prepared and dignified speech to her husband: ‘You know I come to this marriage unwilling, Sir Lemuel. You possess my lands and my fortune, I do not expect you also to possess my person. I shall be a loyal wife in all matters but this.’

  Even if he’d been a sensible man his blue-veined legs would have been too much for her. As for the tasselled Turkish nightcap…

  He took her declaration for the timidity of a virgin. She hadn’t yet learned his greatest strength: he saw things as he wanted them to be.

  ‘I understand your nervousness, my dear lady, but I shall be tender. I have experience in the arts of love.’ He’d been married before, to a shopkeeper’s daughter who’d given him four children, none of whom had survived the age of twelve.

  ‘Your arts will not be needed here. Not tonight, nor any night,’ and she’d retired to bed in her dressing room. But another of her husband’s strengths, she discovered, was perseverance. He insisted with a persistence and ardour that could almost have been rape. However, with what she regarded as the grace of God, his firm stand on his marital rights did not extend to anywhere else. There were protests on her part, much puffing and blasphemy on his, but in the end he penetrated her body no more than her mind.

  He didn’t apologize either for insistence or impotence. Instead, in the morning, he was smug, as if they’d achieved perfect union.

  She came to think he believed they had, that by every morning some alchemy had altered his perception of the night before and gilded it. Adding to horror, he winked and beamed at every acquaintance, especially Walpole, as if he were invested with the prowess of a bull.

  It was lesser inflictions such as that, such as Dolly, slapped on her like mortar, cementing the greater awfulness of the marriage itself more closely, that had very nearly crushed her.

  She couldn’t eat and became ill, missing Sophie’s wedding – though, in many ways, it was a relief that she didn’t have to encounter her former friends.

  Lemuel for once listened to good advice and called in the only physician who could have saved her. Dr John Arbuthnot, formerly a royal doctor, had treated Cecily’s childhood ailments. Like all Queen Anne’s courtiers, he blamed Walpole and the Whigs for the loss of his position under George.

  He sent everybody from her room. He didn’t take her pulse or look at the pot of her urine which Dolly had put out for him to sniff, but sat on the bed and told her straight out that she was dying… ‘from an affliction known as Walpole poisoning. How and why did the Whiggamore bastard marry ye to this gawk?’

  Cecily shook her head. Arbuthnot still kept in contact with Society; if he didn’t know her connection with Lord Keltie’s escape, she wasn’t going to tell him.

  ‘Walpole poisoning,’ continued the doctor, ‘is fatal to those without courage or spirit. As in this case.’

  ‘I’m too tired.’

  ‘Ye’re too proud. You always were. For whatever his reason, and for his own betterment if I know the man, Walpole’s rolled you in the midden and you’d rather sink than stand. That’s my diagnosis. Good God, girl, the world still spins. And, though maybe I shouldn’t say it, ye’ve more years in which to watch it do so than has Lemuel Potts.’

  ‘I know what you’re doing, old leech,’ she said, ‘but I can’t.’ She turned her head away from him.

  He sat on by the bed, watching her. He knew his Cecily.

  I can’t rally, she thought, there’s nothing to rally for. Walpole has murdered me, he might as well put me in my coffin.

  She could hear the mourners. Poor Lady Cecily, so young, once so promising. And Dolly standing, smirking, by the graveside. Wearing my clothes.

  At that Cecily had sat up in bed. Was it for this that Hereward had held out against the Normans?

  If, somewhere, her beloved was enduring the humiliation of slavery, then so could she. Give me my Romeo: and, when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars.

  The doctor was right: Lemuel was an old man. Her sentence was lighter than Guillaume’s: his was for life, whereas hers had a term.

  She was Lady Cecily Fitzhenry: she would live on – if only to spite Dolly.

  So she did. It was a more remote, sterner Lady Cecily who arose from that bed. On the nights when Lemuel shared it with her – they became fewer – she tried to blank her mind and anaesthetize her body, not only to combat revulsion but in order to empty both of the memory of Guillaume Fraser’s touch.

  Remembrance of that was kept for the luxury of when she was alone, for when Lemuel went from home, which, thank God, thank God, was today.

  Her bags packed, she left the house in Spring Gardens and was driven to Mary Astell’s cottage in Chelsea. Which was where she became a Jacobite spy.

  Chapter Four

  Cecily was met at the door of Mary Astell’s Tudor cottage by Lady Catherine Jones. ‘Thank the Lord you’ve come. Can you stay?’

  ‘Of course. How is she?’

  Lady Catherine put a finger to her lips, tiptoed Cecily past the stairs into the book-crammed parlour and shut the door. ‘She’s had the breast removed. The surgeon said he’d never seen such endurance. Quelle femme. She refused to let us hold her down nor made a sound.
’

  ‘Will that cure it?’

  ‘We must pray that it will.’ She was only a few years younger than Mrs Astell, but whereas Mary looked her age, Lady Catherine retained the fine-boned delicacy that asceticism and breeding had given her. Today, however, her face was gaunt. Having been instructed in which remedies must be applied, Cecily packed her off to get some sleep; she owned a large Stuart mansion further along the road.

  The Astell cottage was the smallest of the residences that lined this part of the Thames; Chelsea had become fashionable and, although it was still a village bound by the river on one side and pasture on the others, Society was beginning to buy up such land as was available. Mary Astell had been offered a large price for hers but had refused, saying she could not lose the view.

  Cecily stood for a few moments at the window to look out on it, sniffing the memories the parlour held in its store of books and the acrid bunches of elder and wormwood which Mrs Astell hung from the beams to repel flies, watching the river through the railings which bounded the other side of the cow-patted road. The railings were new: no longer could a stag, escaping from the Battersea Hunt, swim the river and leap up the bank from the beach to find sanctuary in the woods behind Mary’s garden, as one had, disrupting the lesson of the small Cecily, Anne and Sophie who had sat in this room.

  It had been a history lesson, if she remembered right…

  ‘Now then, young ladies, do we believe that Richard III killed his nephews in the Tower?’

  ‘No,’ said Cecily, defending her Plantagenet blood.

  ‘And why not, Lady Cecily?’

  ‘Because he didn’t.’

  It wasn’t good enough. She, Anne and Sophie had to study Holinshed’s Chronicles and compare those with Buck’s vindication. They acted Shakespeare’s Richard the Third with a cast of four before setting it in context both with Richard’s time and with the age in which it was written. They’d come to no definite conclusion on Richard’s guilt, nor did Mary Astell give them any, but this and other examples had taught them that a saint could be depicted as a villain, a bloody conquest as liberation – or vice versa – depending on the political leaning of the historian.

  Pope had once remarked to her of the pupils in Mrs Astell’s tiny academy: ‘An Englishwoman, you, a Scotswoman, Miss Insh, and an Irishwoman, the Hon. Sophie – you were the makings of a joke.’

  But only we three know just how great a joke it was.

  When Queen Anne had seen fit to entrust her ward’s education to Mary Astell, Lords Breffny and Keltie had followed suit, thinking themselves daring in boarding their daughters to school instead of educating them at home but considering it would advantage their girls to know something of the classics, as well as music and needlework, like the daughters of damned nonconformists did. Wasn’t Mrs Mary Astell an acknowledged scholar, for a woman? And a good Tory? Wouldn’t it help the girls to an even greater marriage? They’d thought no further.

  Smiling, Cecily left the window and climbed the angled staircase to tend to the greatest revolutionary of the age.

  Mary Astell was asleep, her hair in neat plaits, her plump face yellow-grey against the pillow. With its narrow bed, a prie-dieu and a linen press, the room was as sparse and clean as a nun’s.

  Cecily settled herself on a stool by the bed. Compared to you, little woman, Cromwell was a stick-in-the-mud and Guy Fawkes a pillar of convention. Levellers, Diggers had only tried to turn the world upside down; Mary Astell cored it like an apple. The centre on which it had spun so far, she said, was rotten. There was no divine rule that men should govern women, it was merely an arrangement that suited them. Women and men should be partners, not ruled and ruler.

  At first her teaching had been unexceptionable. They learned no Latin or Greek for Mary Astell had none, so they read Homer, Xenophon, Virgil, Cato, and Caesar’s commentaries in translation, without the weariness of labouring through the originals as boys had to.

  Botany studies were conducted on walks along the hedgerows and water-meadows of Chelsea, herbal lore in Mrs Astell’s Elizabethan garden, deportment from graceful tea-times at the house of Lady Catherine Jones or that of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

  Only gradually, as they grew older, did they realize that they were being taught to question the status quo.

  Men, said Mary Astell, gave themselves a superior education and women little or none. And then blamed women for ignorance. ‘Too often we appear silly,’ she told them, ‘but even while men castigate us for being foolish, they cajole us into more foolishness that they may seem more masterful. Have not their vast minds laid kingdoms waste?’

  She looked at Sophie when she said: ‘Men who try to woo you by praising your incompetence are false lovers. Their words are but deceitful flatteries to keep you from obtaining those very qualities that could make you admirable and strong.’

  They recognized the circumstance. The muffed throw in Dutch pins, the arrow flying wide of the target, being outrun and therefore caught by a boy in May Day games, these instances were chaffed at by Anne’s brother and his friends at house parties.

  But where was the harm? Chaffing was better than exclusion. And as for being outrun – one wanted to be caught. Often, one pretended vapidity for the sake of that warm, male laugh.

  You didn’t secure a boy’s attention by a dissertation on the Beatitudes: Cecily had tried it and knew. Better to pretend: ‘Are those the Surrey Beatitudes? Related to the Copelands?’ Thus gaining the epithet ‘delightful’ and being drawn into the dance.

  ‘I don’t wish to be strong. I don’t want to carry my husband over the threshold,’ said Sophie. ‘And I’m too pretty to be a virgin, everybody says so.’ She may have missed the point, but in one sense she spoke for the three, who all dreamed that the outcome of the marriage to be arranged for them would be tall, handsome and enveloping, though they were realistic enough to know it might not be.

  ‘Yes, and your intended husband will say the same,’ Mrs Astell told her. ‘You will be flattered into becoming one he can entirely govern. You will be under his will, you will be his for life, and cannot quit his service, let him treat you how he will.’

  She said something bewildering. She said: ‘Do not accept the male version of the universe. I want for you the freedom and the power to decide for yourselves what is important.’

  And the Cecily sitting now beside her teacher’s bed thought: I’m beginning to. I didn’t then.

  Privately, the cousins had agreed that on the subject of the sexes they could learn nothing from Mary Astell who, like all ladies past nubility, assumed the title of Mrs but was a spinster, poor thing.

  Nevertheless, they never betrayed her subversion, knowing that they would instantly have been taken away: they feared she might be burned for a witch. Though she had lunatic ideas, they were invigorating. The girls found themselves secretly light: they had the sense that Newton’s Gravity went up instead of down, a nonsense law that nevertheless pulled them out towards new stars.

  Nor did they betray the dawning realization that Mrs Astell adored Lady Catherine Jones in a way no woman should adore another.

  ‘She’s a Sappho, I’m sure that’s what she is,’ Sophie whispered, wide-eyed, as she reported to the others in their bedroom one night after sneaking a look at Mrs Astell’s diary. ‘You know, belongs to the isle of Lesban. That’s why she ain’t married.’

  ‘Lesbos,’ said Cecily. ‘You’re right. Of course.’

  They discussed but discarded the idea that she and Lady Catherine were physical lovers. Cecily’s bed was nearest to Mrs Astell’s bedroom and she never heard anyone else in it, though sometimes, through the intervening wall, had come the hiss of a scourge and the flap as it hit flesh, and the sound of weeping.

  They were less shocked than the daughters of chapel-going dissenters would have been. They were from the class that didn’t consider itself bound by the petty morality of the bourgeois; they knew that ‘goings-on’ were not restricted to couples of opposing sex. H
ad not dear Queen Anne’s friendship with the Duchess of Marlborough been extremely close before it degenerated into animosity?

  Cecily would have liked to talk to her guardian about Mrs Astell, convinced that the queen would not have been surprised by her teaching, had even procured her as tutor to Cecily because of it. But by then Anne had begun her slow decline and was too harassed by her ministers to see her ward more than once a year.

  According to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the queen, when a princess, had wanted to endow with £10,000 an academy for girls which her friend, Mrs Astell, intended to set up. The project had been stopped on the grounds that it smacked of popery and convents.

  With all this, there was not a hint of impropriety in their teacher’s dealings with them, no breath of unnatural affection. Her only passion was for the expansion of their minds and that passion so selfless, so ferocious, they had sense enough to be grateful. ‘You are fortunate young women,’ Lady Mary told them, ‘but I beg you to guard your learning with as much care as you would hide a crooked leg. Learning in a woman is a deformity.’

  Sophie was too young, too flighty, and Anne too dependent on her father’s love for either of them to accept Mary Astell’s strictures against Society as anything more than eccentricity. For Cecily alone the tuition went deeper, although it wasn’t for many years that she realized that the unconventionality of her response to disaster, her ability to survive it, was grounded in Mary Astell’s questioning of the world according to men.

  Even now, in the marital desert in which Cecily found herself, she was able to draw sustenance from the secret well of philosophy and poetry which Mrs Astell had created for her. Without it and without her pride she would have become sourer than she was, would have bickered like a fishwife with Dolly, would have treated Lemuel with open contempt instead of polite reserve, and generally deteriorated into spite.