Blood Royal Read online

  It had been bitter to learn of her uncle’s death soon after his escape to France. Unworthily, but frequently, the question had recurred: ‘Why didn’t he die sooner?’ Anne would not then have been forced into exile, a traitor, nor she, Cecily, into marriage with Lemuel Potts.

  Toby roused himself. ‘I wrote too. He wrote back saying he’d cast her off. He’s wriggling himself back into German George’s favour, d’ye see, trying to regain the estate. Denounced his father’s part in the Fifteen, his escape, everything. Won’t have anything to do with a rebel sister.’

  Damn the Fifteen, thought Cecily. So many people made barren. Anne, Guillaume, Toby here. Me.

  She sat on, holding Toby’s hand, watching moths hitting themselves against the glass of the lanterns.

  The Quaker bustled up to them. He had a portable writing desk held by a leather strap round his neck, giving him the appearance of a pedlar. ‘Art thee Cecily Fitzhenry, also called Potts?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think they heard you in Chelsea,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you should say it louder.’

  ‘She is,’ said Toby.

  The Quaker ticked a list. ‘Thy title in the Cause shall henceforth be Mrs Butcher.’

  ‘It won’t,’ said Cecily with energy. ‘Butcher, indeed.’

  ‘Put her down as Mrs Shakespeare,’ Toby said. To Cecily he said: ‘We’ve all got code names. Mine’s Rowbotham, God help me.’

  She spent much of the evening aimlessly following Toby around, listening to conversations that did nothing to reassure her about the Jacobites’ efficiency as plotters.

  ‘I say we march on the Bank of England first. Then the Tower, then the Exchange.’

  ‘No, no. Tower first. Then the Bank of England. Then the Exchange. Er, where is the Exchange?’

  She nudged Toby. ‘Are they really planning to rise?’

  ‘One day. When the time’s ripe.’

  She shook her head. If it was left to these incompetents the time would never ripen: they’d be rounded up by Walpole’s agents long before. She felt nervous just to be in their company. And the way they bandied names around…

  ‘Sir William Wyndham will lead it in the West Country, of course.’

  ‘Of course. But he says it’ll have to be after the harvest’s in.’

  Hopeless. And yet also innocent, so English in their amateurishness. (Cecily was typical of her countrymen in believing that stealth and deception were attributes that flourished more happily among foreigners.)

  But if the naïveté was endearing, it was also dangerous, and she would have left the lodge then and there had it not been vital to her to learn how much progress Sir Spender had made along the trail that led to Guillaume Fraser.

  * * *

  He didn’t put in an appearance until after midnight, and she was only alerted to it then because a disturbance broke out by the stairs and she saw him – brawling. Swords were out. Sir Spender was duelling with a thin man in grey and displaying an excellent command of oaths if not swordsmanship. Maskelyne defended his friend’s back, swinging his rapier in a semi-circle, daring anyone to take him on. Nobody was.

  It was Toby who, with ease, put up the two men’s swords with his own. They seemed grateful for his intervention. He took Sir Spender off to a corner to cool down while others did the same for the man in grey.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Cecily asked, when Toby came back.

  ‘Oh, Sir Spender wants Viscount Bolingbroke to take command of the Cause on his return. Mr Chalmers thinks Bolingbroke’s a traitor who deserted once and might again.’

  ‘Does this sort of thing happen often?’

  ‘I’m afraid it does, rather. We’re leaderless, you see.’

  ‘It’s hopeless, Toby.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ His tone caused her to look up, to see he was nearly crying. ‘We’ve got to keep the flame burning, Cessy. There’ll be no good times until King James comes again.’

  ‘You really believe that?’

  ‘Give my life for it.’ He swallowed. ‘Sorry for the Enthusiasm.’ Enthusiasm was the dirtiest word in upper-class vocabulary, applied to the rantings of Puritans and similar riff-raff, to hellfire sermons, sectarianism, praising-the-Lords, and other embarrassments.

  They were summoned up the stairs to a gallery room where, to Cecily’s relief, Sir Spender, Maskelyne and a few others were plotting nothing more seditious than their next news sheet which, as it turned out, was seditious enough.

  ‘We must belabour the German rat,’ a man in a bag wig was saying, ‘tell the public how he murders his wife by keeping her in a Hanoverian dungeon that he may disport with his whores.’

  At her place on a bench at the back of the room, Cecily’s foot began to tap. She was curiously affronted. Sophia Dorothea had committed adultery, after all. And the ‘dungeon’ was the castle at Ahlden where, admittedly confined, she still managed to spend 18,000 taler a year. The king might be a usurper but he was no wife-murderer; indeed, it was in his interest to keep Sophia Dorothea alive, since there was a widely believed prediction that her death would be closely followed by his own.

  ‘Nominally, the poor female is Queen of Great Britain,’ persisted the bag wig.

  ‘They’re divorced,’ Cecily pointed out.

  Maskelyne gave her a look that said: Who asked you?

  ‘We are grateful for any contribution Mrs Um-shakespeare can make to our knowledge of court matters,’ Sir Spender said, firmly.

  Under cover of other conversation, Cecily whispered to Toby: ‘Why does Maskelyne treat me as if I’d murdered his father?’

  ‘Didn’t have one,’ Toby murmured back. ‘I’m given to understand the man’s a bastard, actual or figurative.’

  The other purpose of the meeting, it transpired, was to gather news which could be of use to the Pretender, who now had no access to the larger, international scene since the death of his supporter Louis XIV and was wandering, homeless, in Italy. France, beaten to her knees, had perforce become an ally of England, and one of the conditions of the alliance was that she turned James off her soil.

  Cecily’s foot jittered faster as she listened to gossip considerably more ill-informed than the man whom it was meant to inform. One of the gathering presented an item that was supposed to throw light on the government’s policy towards Sweden and which, it seemed, had been garnered from Lord Townsend’s footman. Another had been to the Channel Islands, where it was common knowledge that the young Louis XV was to be affianced to the Prince of Wales’s daughter, Anne.

  This caused excitement. A Protestant princess of England married to a Catholic.

  Cecily’s voice cut through the babble. ‘I know for a fact,’ she said, ‘that young Louis will marry the Infanta of Spain.’

  Walpole had entertained a dinner table at which she’d been present with this gobbet from his agents and had waxed coarse on the projected wedding of a boy aged ten to a two-year-old bride.

  She was getting on the meeting’s nerves, but Sir Spender Dick’s eyes lit up like an angler who’d hooked a fish. ‘She knows,’ he said.

  Downstairs, after the meeting, he said: ‘It would be interesting, dear madam, to learn the details of the Quadruple Alliance, should you learn of them.’

  ‘It would be more interesting to learn what has happened to Mr Fraser,’ she said back.

  He nodded. ‘Touché. But a thousand men were transported after the Fifteen and if records were kept they are sparse.’

  She was suddenly weary. This large, overshadowing man was embroiling her in his game and returning nothing.

  He saw her droop. ‘No, no, no, no,’ he reassured her. ‘Maskelyne has already talked to a ship’s captain who believes there was a Fraser on one of the boats headed for Barbados. The name is common among Scots, we know, but we have a sympathizer in Barbados and have sent inquiry. We must be patient. In the meantime, our hope lies in the restoration of King James which, in turn, will bring our lads home to us.’

  It was said without his
usual forced gallantry. It caught her off guard and brought tears to her eyes. She felt his hand pat hers. ‘Despair not, madam. He is alive. You have it on the word of Spender Dick.’

  A priest had entered the hall and the Jacobites were gathering round him on their knees. Cecily and Toby joined them.

  The service was carefully oecumenical in view of the disparate religions represented by the hall’s Jacobites, and the more touching for that. The priest prayed for King James III and those who had lost home, love and life through duty to him.

  The concentrated silence in the lodge allowed in the sound of nightingales singing in the forest. A woman near Cecily was weeping. For the first time, Cecily had a sense of inclusion with the group. Others here had suffered loss. Guillaume, I’m so lonely for you. So lonely.

  The material the women had embroidered hung on a wall behind the priest’s head like a reredos, displaying the profile of James Stuart and a caption echoing the Jacobite ballad, ‘The Lost Lover’. If the needlework was crude, the words spoke to Cecily as if only now were she being given sympathy. These people grieved not only for their king but for Guillaume, for those who’d gone into captivity with him, for her. She was caressed by mutual understanding.

  Instead of communion bread, a newly minted medal was put into the cupped hands of each of the congregation. Again, it showed the head of the Pretender.

  ‘Cuius Est’ asked the lettering around the obverse; at once ‘Whose is it?’ and ‘He whose it is.’ On the reverse was a map of Great Britain and Ireland and the word ‘Reddite’. Restore.

  Look at him to whom I belong, said the medal. Therefore give me back to him and unite the images on my sides. The king cannot regain his kingdoms alone. Help him. Awake, you brave, the barbarian invades us. Defend your mystical, Christ-like, anointed master.

  Like a horn calling the fyrd from sleeping farmsteads, the legend of the medal summoned Britain to its ancient duty. It was Arthur’s banner streaming from the hilltop of Baden, it was the moon of the Grail shining through dark ages.

  And it spoke to Cecily and, through her, to a thousand Fitzhenrys. Are you to bend under the yoke of Walpoles? Be trodden under the boots of German kings? Become a Potts among Pottses? Enlist with me and this pathetic army around you and march out against the host of Whiggery. Better death than dishonour.

  Above her head, somewhere in the gallery, a flute began to play. The tune was ‘The Pipers of Strathdeam’.

  Cecily heard it with little surprise. Here was confirmation. Her lover was lending his voice to a song which, however faint, was the sweet antiphon to the paeans of her humiliators. We Jacobites cannot be defeated; we have all the best tunes. The Whigs appeal to head and pocket, they cannot prevail against this oldest and deepest of mysteries.

  One by one, the kneeling men and women around her kissed their medal as an oath of fealty to their absent king.

  Cecily didn’t. Against the unseen hands that dragged at her emotions, she found herself holding back: they were demanding her total allegiance, and a Fitzhenry didn’t give it just for the asking. True, the night was filled with portents and luring, siren voices. But it was also full of bloody fools and she wasn’t one of them.

  Common sense insisted on knowing why she should risk her life for a Cause which was very pretty in its way but for which she’d felt no previous strong allegiance. Turn back, it said, romance is dangerous. You’ll be betraying your country.

  But romance had its own logic and questions. Betraying which country? The market-place that Walpole has made of England? Which sold you to the highest bidder? The country of Lemuel and Dolly Potts? Shall I walk away from here to that?

  Oh, God, don’t magic me. Give me a sign that has reason.

  She stared down at the medal in her open palm, swaying her hand from left to right in the tension of decision. Light from a flambeau caught the lines of the long-featured face at an angle so that it more closely resembled that of a man she’d only seen by the flickering flame of a candle in a prison cell. Guillaume.

  After all, there was no decision, dammit. You could only choose love. Cecily bent and kissed the profile of her lost lover and her king. She would go to war for them both.

  Watching her from the shadows, Sir Spender Dick uttered a Nunc Dimittis. Landed.

  Chapter Five

  England was so peaceful that summer of 1720 that at the end of June King George felt safe in indulging himself with a visit to Hanover.

  Walpole stayed on at Houghton, where his daughter Catherine was in a decline, and occupied himself by buying every available estate in the vicinity in order to strengthen his hold on the Norfolk vote.

  Lemuel kept to Hempens, despite Dolly’s protests, in order to be near Walpole.

  Sir John Blount, the man behind the South Sea Company’s flotation, went to Tunbridge Wells to take the waters. (Nobody was quite sure what the Company did. Blount talked impressively of a plan that involved exchanging Gibraltar for a rich section of Peru, but it didn’t really matter: something wonderful would come from the South Seas. People still jostled to have a part of it, though, strangely, the Company’s stock price was suddenly refusing to rise.)

  Cecily returned to her house in Spring Gardens. She wrote to Lemuel, telling him that her absence from Hempens would continue: ‘My patient is not yet recovered. Therefore, I am accompanying her to Lady Catherine Jones’s castle in the Welsh mountains as a retreat from the summer’s discomforts and infections.’

  It was almost true. Mrs Astell’s health was not making the progress her friends wished to see: mountain air was called for. But it was Lady Catherine Jones who accompanied Mary to Wales. Cecily delayed joining them for two weeks.

  As if to gladden her husband’s heart, she began issuing invitations to tea to such Whig ladies as still stayed in Town, among them pretty Maria Skerrett, Sir Robert Walpole’s latest mistress. The ladies accepted with alacrity – the high-nosed bitch was paying them attention at last – to find their hostess flattering in her assumption that their knowledge of world affairs was as great as their husbands’, or in Maria Skerrett’s case, her lover’s. Mostly it was.

  After some of these gatherings, not all, Cecily wrapped herself in a cloak, tiptoed from Spring Gardens with stealth and at Charing Cross hired a sedan chair to take her to her destination – usually some dire alley off the City where the chair excited as much comment as a gold coach with trumpets – gave her name as ‘Shakespeare’ to the lounger at the door, climbed a rickety staircase and passed on her information to Spender Dick, large and florid, in the dingy room at its top.

  The role of spy was invigorating. It gave her purpose and a delicious naughtiness. They think they’ve tamed Cecily Fitzhenry? They can think again. She liked the risk entailed in these outings; even more did she enjoy the sense that she was fighting back. If her snippets of information advanced the Cause, good; if they brought forward the release of Guillaume Fraser, wonderful. But it has to be said that these were peripheral advantages: what she was basically doing was making rude gestures in the direction of Sir Robert Walpole’s arse.

  She had her own code of honour. Nothing Lemuel had mentioned to her in private was given to the Jacobite news-gatherers, however useful it might be to them. What the wives told her, or what could be elicited from other sources, was fair game. It was a fine and perhaps ridiculous distinction but it made her feel less of a Clytemnestra.

  She didn’t separate her new Jacobite conviction from her desire for personal revenge: the two were inextricably mixed in her mind. When she looked at her medal she saw Guillaume’s face on it. When she pictured that poor, landless nomad, James Stuart, she saw her cousin Anne and her forced celibacy, her own lover slaving under a tropical sun, her blighted present and future.

  By July the heat had driven everybody who was anybody out of London to the country. As Cecily prepared to leave for Wales – she was actually putting on her dust veil in her bedroom, ready for the journey – she received another visitor, this one uninvited.


  ‘Mr Archibald Cameron, my lady.’

  Damn, damn. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  She loathed the man. Through being in charge of her during her journey in disgrace from Edinburgh to London it was as if he’d seen her naked. It was humiliating to keep encountering him now that he’d inveigled himself into Walpole’s and Lemuel’s business.

  It disadvantaged her, too, that it was he who’d brought her the news that Guillaume had been sentenced to transportation rather than death. He’d paraded it as kindness, but it was gall and wormwood to her that he was aware she’d cherish the information. He knew.

  Of all things, the most terrible to Cecily as Lemuel Potts’s wife was pity. Not compassion, not the understanding she received from true friends like Mary Astell and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, but pity mixed with satisfaction, the what-a-shame, the sighed: ‘Poor soul, what does her breeding avail her now?’, the shake of the head that said: ‘Ah, looks and wealth are no defence against disaster.’

  The thought that fashion, that Whigs especially, might use her condition as an Awful Warning while revelling in their own was intolerable. She almost literally had not been able to bear the glimpse in the faces of acquaintances, who’d once envied her, of how-the-mighty-are-fallen. It was why she allowed no trace of hurt on her own and took her gruel with apparent composure. They’d get no extra enjoyment from her pain to take back to their coffee houses.

  It was into this category that she docketed Archibald Cameron: the jumped-up clerk sneered at her. She adjusted the veil over a face that had stiffened into impassivity and stared through it into the Florentine looking-glass. I look old. My youth is passing.

  She swept down to the hall. ‘Sir Lemuel is not here, Mr Cameron. And I am just leaving.’

  The lawyer was staring, puzzled, at one of the busts. Cecily gnashed her teeth in chagrin. Lemuel had begun to buy art the moment he’d learned that Walpole was collecting paintings and statuary. She’d suggested he use William Kent as his buyer – Lemuel had the judgement of a lemming. But, with his usual permit-me-to-know-my-dear, he’d instead employed a trickster he’d met in a coffee house. Spizzini declared himself Italian and a painter. ‘Newgate and inn-signs,’ was Cecily’s opinion.