Blood Royal Read online

  ‘Now ’ere is a magnifico. Roman bust. I dig it up my own self at Pompeii.’

  ‘Got it’s head missing,’ Dolly pointed out. ‘My brother ain’t buying that.’

  Spizzini had hardly blinked. He found a Greek head in his pannier and cemented it on the bust. The result had pride of place in the hall. Dolly said it gave the place ‘grander’.

  ‘Sir Lemuel is not home,’ repeated Cecily.

  ‘Will he return this night?’

  ‘No.’ She was surprised, not for the first time, at how her memory shortened him: he was probably three or four inches taller than herself but his neatness and pedantry appropriated the epithet ‘little man’. He’d learned to ape his betters in the matter of dress – on the journey to London he’d worn the outrageous best of some Lowland back-street tailor – and the ee-aw Glasgow accent had softened into something approaching English. The wig, however, was still fox-coloured. He said: ‘Is he gone far, may I ask?’

  ‘He is at our Norfolk home.’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ He seemed agitated. ‘Could ye take him a letter frae me, Lady Potts?’

  ‘Lady Cecily. I fear not. I shall not be seeing him yet.’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ Still he hesitated. At last he burst out: ‘Lady Cecily, have ye no influence over your husband? I’m afflicted with concern that he’s maybe too rash with his investment in the South Sea Company. It’s a chancy business, looking e’en more chancy as the days pass, and I’ve told him so but he’ll no heed me. I spiered, as it’s your fortune too…’ His fervour dwindled as he caught her eye.

  ‘Mr Cameron,’ Cecily said, ‘Sir Lemuel’s business is his own. As for my fortune, it is handled by three gentlemen, Colonel Brandling, Mr Phipps and Mr Tate, whose expertise in these matters I trust as, I am sure, does Sir Lemuel. I bid you good day.’

  ‘Colonel Brandling…’ he began, but Cecily was tinkling the bell for the footman to show him out.

  The vulgarity. Had nobody told him one did not mention money to a lady?

  Queen Anne had appointed the solidly impeccable Colonel Brandling, Mr Phipps and Mr Tate to handle Cecily’s estate; they had seen to it that her yearly allowance was appropriate for her style. Occasionally they had asked her to sign documents concerned with rents, tenures, etc., all in such order that it didn’t occur to her to question them.

  When the lawyer had gone, Cecily set off for Wales. On the Great West Road her carriage passed that of Sir John Blount of the South Sea Company, returning unexpectedly from Bath. Cecily waved. Sir John did not wave back: he appeared too preoccupied to see her.

  * * *

  In the veiled sunlight of coal-smoked London, the South Sea bubble that had floated so entrancingly, and so long, blurred and wobbled from the slightest of tremors, as if an earthquake in China had sent a vibration along a fault to disturb England’s air. Sir John, somebody said, was selling. Selling his own shares. It was enough. The breath on which people told each other the rumour spread the contagion of panic.

  By September, South Sea price had dropped to 135. King George was summoned back to reassure the stock-market but reports of the directors’ dishonesty were too widespread. There was no El Dorado in the South Seas or, if there were, the Company hadn’t found it.

  The news was slow to climb the sheep-cropped slopes of the Brecon Beacons and Cecily remained untroubled by anything more than Lemuel’s letters asking for her return before Parliament met for a new session. She arranged to meet him and Dolly on 1 October at Cambridge, where Lemuel hoped to address the students, before travelling on to London together.

  At the inn she found Dolly packing. ‘Where’s Lemuel?’

  ‘London. He had a message this morning. We’re to follow him immediate.’ Dolly looked accusingly at her sister-in-law. ‘He’s been very worried.’

  ‘Indeed? His letters said nothing of it.’

  ‘Mustn’t upset Lady High-nose,’ said Dolly.

  ‘What has he been worrying about?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ He hadn’t confided in Dolly either.

  They arrived in a London that looked much as usual, perhaps better, in the amber euphoria of an autumn evening, the low sun touching everything with slow, unreal contentment – the immigrant women still harvesting the fields along the Edgware Road, the murderess hanging from Tyburn’s gallows, yoked maids returning with empty buckets to the milk-walks.

  Crossing Hyde Park, a far-off roar coming from Whitehall told them a mob was rioting in the manner of mobs.

  As the coachman helped her out to the steps of Spring Gardens, Cecily saw Lemuel at an upstairs window, watching her. She waved to him while the second driver unloaded the boxes. He didn’t move.

  ‘He’s rum,’ said Dolly, joining her. ‘What’s a matter with him?’

  Very slowly, still looking at Cecily, Lemuel raised his arm as if in valediction, then turned away.

  The coachman was knocking on the front door for a footman to come and let them in. Dolly pushed him aside and began slamming the knocker. Cecily had packed her key: she scrabbled for it in her travelling case, scattering smallclothes over the steps, found it, and rammed it into the lock.

  They heard the shot as the door opened.

  Lemuel was in his powdering room. He’d left a note pinned to a wig stand but he’d fallen against it and blood mingled with its ink, rendering it unreadable. He was still alive.

  ‘The ball will be lodged in the cerebrum’s cortex,’ said Dr Arbuthnot, interestedly, an hour later. ‘He’ll have put the pistol to his left temple but angled it too far upwards. If he’d pointed it straight, he’d be dead this minute. D’ye see the paralysis to the right side? The facial palsy? The cortex of the cerebrum, sure enough.’

  ‘Why don’t you do something? For God’s sake, Dolly, stop screaming. Why don’t you do something, damn you?’

  ‘There’s little enough to do.’ Dr Arbuthnot crossed the room, hit Dolly across the face and helped her to a chair. Returning, he said: ‘There’s little enough to do. Keep him still. Keep the bandage dry. Reassure the poor fellow. If he lasts the night, he’ll maybe see out his allotted span, God help him.’

  As the doctor turned to leave, Cecily asked: ‘What could have possessed him to do it?’ He’d given the servants the day off. His face at the window had been a child’s, lonely and afraid, waiting for the mother who would never come home.

  ‘What’s possessing men all over the city to do the same.’

  She still didn’t understand.

  * * *

  If there was a time for the Pretender to retrieve his crown it was now, while the Hanoverian throne rocked from the biggest explosion ever produced by the pricking of a bubble.

  Revolution seemed likely: people raged against a government which had acquiesced in a plan that ruined them. And against a royal family – mistresses and all – which, as it turned out, had accepted bribes from the South Sea Company, as had ministers and MPs.

  Editorials called for the directors to be hanged and said, if they weren’t, the defrauded might do it themselves. Mobs attacked culprits’ coaches. Lord Lonsdale, who’d speculated disastrously, tried to stab the arch-villain, Sir John Blount. Not only the high but the low had paid heavily for now worthless bits of paper; some too heavily. Suicides took place in garrets and in mansions; overcrowded lunatic asylums had to shut their doors against the lines of broken, staring men and women who were guided to them.

  Eight days after Lemuel’s attempt at suicide, in a counting house just off Threadneedle Street, Lady Cecily Fitzhenry put her fingertips carefully on the documents she’d been examining and raised her head: ‘I don’t understand. Everything?’

  ‘Everything,’ said Colonel Brandling. Mr Tate began his long explanation all over again, but she kept her eyes on Brandling. He’d been stout in all senses; the essential country-gentleman-in-the-City Tory. She remembered him galloping beside Queen Anne’s hunting carriage as it jolted through Windsor Park, waving the stump of an arm he’d lost at Ramillies, hallooing. No
w, he seemed to have shrunk inside his clothes. His eyes stared back at her from under fronded eyebrows with the tranquillity of despair.

  She leaned forward and shook him by the stock round his neck. ‘How can it be everything? It can’t be everything. Surrey? What of the Cheapside tenements? The farms? Dorset. What about Dorset?’

  ‘Lady Cecily. I beg you.’ Mr Tate disentangled her hand. ‘We were powerless. Sir Lemuel ignored our advice. He seemed influenced by Sir Robert’s example and frantic to outdo it. We sent letters to Hempens in August when the fall reached nine hundred but the mail’s delay…’

  Walpole. ‘Has Walpole lost too?’ It would be some satisfaction.

  Mr Tate ran his finger round his collar. ‘Gibson, Jacob and Jacombe are no ordinary bankers. Jacombe acted on his own initiative and managed to extricate at least some of Sir Robert’s investment…’

  She said flatly: ‘But you didn’t manage to extricate mine.’

  ‘We’re not bankers, Lady Cecily, merely advisers. Sir Lemuel…’

  Around her, the darkly respectable linenfold panelling, the portrait of Queen Anne when she was still sixteen stone, the chased red-leather cases on their shelves, were unwavering, substantial. A thrush sang on the cherry tree in the tiny backyard. ‘Where’s Mr Phipps?’ She’d get sense out of Phipps.

  ‘Phipps cut his throat yesterday,’ Colonel Brandling said.

  After a while she asked: ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ She wasn’t referring to Phipps. It hadn’t occurred to them to tell her, she could see that. At the moment of her marriage she’d become a woman couverte, her legal existence obliterated by the body of her husband, no matter that the husband had less financial acumen than a carrot, nor that he’d gambled – and now lost – an estate worth £70,000. Her estate.

  She said: ‘And what do you intend to do about it?’

  Tate burbled something about a meeting of creditors. She watched Brandling watching her, seeing no more pity for her in his eyes than hers had for him; he’d gone beyond pity, even for himself. Presumably his losses were as great as hers. She hoped they were.

  ‘Hempens too?’ she asked.

  He nodded.

  She got up and walked to the door, collecting her parasol from the hat-rack, turning to look at them for the last time. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ she said, ‘since you have no advice for me, may I suggest that you follow the most excellent example set by the late Mr Phipps.’ But still she hadn’t taken it in.

  The City was abnormally quiet. The only disturbance came from a mob at Ludgate applauding a preacher who was advocating a return to the ways of ancient Rome where parricides were stitched up in sacks and cast, alive, into the Tiber… ‘for are not these South Sea rogues the parricides of their country?’

  Part of the crowd rushed her carriage – a coat-of-arms suggested royalty – but John stood up from the driving seat and called: ‘She’s lost everything, an’ all,’ so they left her alone, some of the men taking off their hats, as if a funeral was passing.

  Still Cecily couldn’t take in the magnitude of what had happened. The city that had rebuilt itself so magnificently after the Plague and the Fire stood around her like a monument to survival, assuring her that she, too, could not be permanently ruined. Like the last Roman matron, fleeing her home as the Vandals broke down the gates, Cecily was unable to understand that she wouldn’t be back.

  Disbelief and her carriage took her to Spring Gardens – to lose both. As she went in, the footman holding the door for her asked for his wages. She stared at him.

  ‘I want my wages, my lady,’ he said again. The rest of the staff crowded up from below stairs, emboldened by his example. Icily, she gave them what money was in her purse. She paid the rest with a diamond ring, off her finger, throwing it on the floor.

  Dolly was in Lemuel’s bedroom feeding him his supper, scooping up the residue of each mouthful as it fell from the slack side of his mouth and spooning it in again. ‘He said “Dolly,” today,’ she said. ‘How’d you get on?’

  Cecily told her. She snatched Dolly’s spoon away so that she could lean down and put her face on a level with her husband’s. ‘Bravo, Sir Lemuel,’ she said, clearly. ‘You have achieved what six hundred years failed to do. You have brought down the house of Fitzhenry.’

  ‘Don’t talk to him like that. Look at him,’ Dolly said. ‘What d’you mean, “everything”?’

  ‘Your brother mortgaged every property I own to buy South Sea stock. He borrowed to buy more by using my name and jewellery as security. The servants did not receive their wages this year and the beef which made that soup, so the cook has just informed me, was obtained on credit.’ She cocked her head. ‘Yes, I think that constitutes “everything”.’

  ‘Gawd.’ Dolly venerated money, even if she didn’t venerate people. She regarded her sister-in-law with something like respect, seeing her for the first time as a person wronged. Then came the realization that Cecily wasn’t the only wronged soul in the room. ‘I gave him my savings,’ she said. ‘Hundred and forty-two pound what Daniel left me. Lemmy said he’d triple it. That ain’t gone too, has it?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Oh, my lord.’ Dolly covered her mouth and rocked. ‘What’m I going to do?’ Weeping, she shook her brother, making his head loll. ‘How’d you do such a thing? You was always so clever.’

  ‘If he’d been clever,’ said Cecily, going to the door, ‘he’d have shot straighter.’

  * * *

  Walpole didn’t return to London until November. It was wise of him to stay away and keep his boots clean while everybody else stumbled crotch-deep in revelation and recrimination: it fostered the illusion that he’d been uninvolved in the speculation hysteria, a sober man who’d evaded the disaster that had overcome others.

  He didn’t see fit to mention that he’d shown no more foresight than anyone else. He hadn’t bought as extensively as some, but he’d done it at the wrong time and had only been saved by the skill of his banker.

  No matter. Other ministers had been exposed so deep in bribery and corruption that they’d lost the country’s trust. Floundering Britain needs leadership. The throne, the City, trade, business are drowning. Here comes Walpole, consummate politician and, seemingly, wise with money. Save us, Sir Robert.

  He did. At least, he saved the throne, City, trade and business. He did it by stifling inquiry. He protected King George and the bribe-accepting royal mistresses – if the house of Hanover fell, the house of Stuart would be back.

  He fought off the country’s demand for the heads of the South Sea directors, even saving most of them from loss of wealth. They numbered thirty-three and between them commanded perhaps £2 million in capital as well as international interests; ruining them would be a disaster to commerce. (Also, there was to be an election within the year and the directors had powerful connections.)

  Robert Knight, cashier of the South Sea Company, escaped to France and took incriminating evidence with him. Relieved, Walpole and the king opposed any attempt to extradite him.

  Suspected of deep involvement, James Craggs, the Postmaster-General, and his son, the Secretary of State, hastily and obligingly died; the father by an overdose of opium, young Craggs through smallpox.

  As Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Aislabie bore much of the country’s blame and was condemned to the Tower, crowds dancing in the streets as he went. His estates were sequestered but, thanks to Walpole, he got them back later. (Aislabie had political influence in a large area of Yorkshire.)

  Sir John Blount, who’d amassed £183,334, was stripped of all but £1,000. (He’d offended Walpole by providing the House with details of the Company’s and ministers’ peculation.)

  The only person in the affair to be hanged was a South Sea clerk who’d absconded with £4,000. (Nobody bothered to save him.)

  It seemed well, therefore it was well. It was a matter of perception: with no revolution and no witch hunts, trade began again and the economy mended itself.

  T
he triumph was deservedly Walpole’s. He had two great allies: the rioters – the establishment had been frightened when it saw common people getting out of hand – and the Jacobites, who informed the Pretender that the country was in such turmoil he could take over successfully without any foreign aid. A bungled invasion plot was quickly discovered and suppressed, and again the establishment closed ranks. Better the devil you knew…

  Walpole received the gratitude of his king and power of such supremity that he began to be known as ‘Prime’ Minister.

  A vitriolic press drew parallels between highwaymen who were hanged for a few shillings and well-connected robbers of millions, who weren’t. The South Sea investors and annuity- holders yelled even ruder names as they gathered in large numbers at the door of the Commons, demanding their money back.

  But Walpole was unmoved: Tory scribblers weren’t his constituency, nor were the poor, nor those whose ruin had left them useless – such as his former henchman Sir Lemuel Potts. Perhaps he was unaware of Lemuel’s condition: he had high matters and a thousand petitioners competing for his attention.

  Cecily refused to approach him for help but Dolly did, running after his coach with other angry, pleading men and women.

  She left notes at his house but suspected the footman of tearing them up the moment she turned away. ‘Robert wouldn’t do this to me, not if he knew,’ she said. ‘We used to have great laughs together.’

  ‘He’s still laughing,’ said Cecily.

  The creditors’ meeting had not gone well. Mr Tate had advised her not to attend. Legally, he explained, all Lemuel’s creditors had to settle for the percentage that he was offering them, on Lemuel’s behalf, of the amount owed. ‘If even one demurs there can be no agreement to save the debtor. Sir Lemuel will have to pay in full.’