February came with floods lying silver across the marshes, and the proofs of The Downfall of Bonaparte by special messenger from London. They were accompanied by an enthusiastic letter from Mr Comfrey, who urged their speedy return, since he wished to publish as soon as possible. ‘I hope you can arrange to return them to me by hand,’ he concluded his letter.
Tremadoc brightened up at this. ‘An excellent notion. I shall take them myself and so get a look at the kind of house the old man runs. And perhaps have a word with the man Grant at the same time, since your father does not choose to answer any of your letters. A fine take-in you were! My mother will be shocked when she hears how I have been treated.’
‘You will stay with her?’
‘I expect so.’ Carelessly. ‘A few days. I wonder.’ A new thought struck him. ‘A week perhaps? Tom Bowles was telling me just the other day of a young man over Hastings way who is prepared to do one’s Sunday duty for a consideration. You’d like a week off your sermon writing, I expect.’
‘I would indeed.’ She put a tired hand to her brow and turned another sheet of the galleys. They were well into the third canto of the poem now and she was finding the cumulative strain of writing and her inevitable domestic and parish duties almost more than she could bear. Tench was a tower of strength, but she was the mistress and must take the lead and make the decisions. And then there were the duties to the old and sick of the parish, whom her husband neglected so shamefully. She had had to cry off an engagement to tea with Mrs Bowles only the day before, on grounds of sheer fatigue and had received a scolding from her husband in consequence.
‘We can’t afford your fine lady airs here,’ he had told her. ‘Bowles was offended, and told me so.’
‘Mrs Bowles was not.’
‘What’s that to say to anything?’
In the end, Tremadoc stayed two weeks in town and Caroline was appalled at the difference his absence made to her life. March was going out like a lamb and the garden full of unexpected pleasures. The snowdrops and crocuses that had come up in the flowerbeds she and Jenkins had cleared had given way to daffodils embroidered about the lawn, and a tree that leaned over the wall at the end had frothed into white cherry blossom. A sheltered bench under it commanded a wide view of marsh and sea and when the sun shone she could sit there in the middle of the day, hemming the sheets they needed so badly and planning the next canto of The Downfall of Bonaparte. It was a pity, she thought wryly, watching brown sails curving down the invisible river to the sea, that Napoleon showed so little sign of downfall. Planning his poem, Tremadoc had assumed that victory was near and would have happened by the time he brought the story of his villain/hero up to the present. But here they were, actually dealing with the events of the previous year, and victory seemed as far off, as unlikely as ever. They had discussed this problem before Tremadoc left for London, Caroline pointing out that Mr Comfrey was bound to want to know his plans for the rest of the poem.
‘We need a hero, on the side of the right,’ she had suggested. ‘Do you think, perhaps, Lord Nelson?’
‘Not precisely my idea of a hero,’ Tremadoc had objected. ‘How would I manage about Lady Hamilton? He flaunts his passion for her more flagrantly every day, and there is even talk that she may have had a child by him. You may think an illegitimate child a great argument for heroism, but I cannot agree with you.’
She had hated him for the hint at her own birth, but been compelled to agree with his argument. Now, as the brown sails glided out to the open sea, she chewed her pencil and cast about for an alternative hero. A year ago, Pitt would have been the obvious choice, but his second administration had been dogged by scandal and disaster and his popularity was waning. Fox, too, was out of the question, an impossibly unromantic figure. The old King was tottering on the edge of insanity, and not even Tremadoc’s habitual sycophancy could accept the bloated Prince of Wales for his hero. It’s not an age of heroes, she thought sadly. Thinking this, she found her mind turn, as it still would, to Blakeney; felt a sonnet form itself almost complete in her head and wrote it down below her random jottings for the next canto.
Tremadoc returned the next day, exhausted from what had obviously been a steady round of dissipation. She thought he looked far from well and made no objection when he insisted on going straight to bed without answering any of the questions that burned in her mind. Wise by experience, she did not ask them and it was only gradually that she learned about his trip. His mother had been shocked by what he had told her about their life, and disgusted to learn that there was as yet no sign that she was to have the grandchild and heir that she longed for.
‘Her new house is well enough, but small. Crammed with furniture, of course.’
‘I imagine so,’ said Caroline drily. Mrs Tremadoc had taken the lion’s share of the furnishings of the old house. ‘What did you think of Mr Comfrey?’ she ventured.
He laughed. ‘What a take-in. I thought him a venerable old wiseacre and he’s quite a young man. I just hope he knows his business, but he is quite properly appreciative of my poem. The second canto is to come out in the autumn, and the third, he thinks, in the spring, though he may bring it forward to Christmas if the first has the success he hopes for. He asked me when he could hope for more and I told him that if the muse was propitious, the fourth canto should be completed sometime this summer. We talked a little about my problem over the heroic figure and he was most sympathetic. He thinks nothing of your suggestion of Lord Nelson, by the way. A vain little man, he thinks him, for all his victories, and quite besotted with Lady Hamilton. Oh, I called on your mamma, by the way.’ The connection was painfully obvious. ‘She is much better, you will be glad to hear, looking quite the thing again. I told her how we were having to pinch and scrape down here and she promised to speak to the Duke on our behalf. He is as much her slave as ever, I am glad to say. Well, and no wonder! You should see the poor Duchess. Quite bloated and all her lovers vanished. When I saw her I quite understood why Mattingley suddenly plunged into the diplomatic service and showed a clean pair of heels to Moscow or Petersburg or wherever. He’s sadly missed in the clubs. And so am I! You should just have seen the welcome I got at Watier’s and the night we made of it. They hung on my words, I can tell you, when I told them about life in Oldchurch.’
‘I hope you didn’t tell them too much.’
‘Too much! What a ridiculous notion.’
But she thought he looked suddenly frightened.
‘I’ve another piece of news for you.’ He hurried to change the subject. ‘What do you think of Amelia’s being married before Charlotte? And you’ll never guess to whom?’
‘No? I don’t suppose I will.’ She must not ask for news of Blakeney.
He laughed. ‘To Ffether, of all people. There’s one in the eye for Charlotte. I never did like that girl. Too high in the instep by a half. The Duke’s little story about you and Gaston don’t seem to have taken so well with the town as he hoped.’
‘Is there any news of Gaston?’
‘Not a word. Sunk without a trace. Do you think he’s gone to France to look for his aristocratic connections?’ He laughed coarsely. ‘Aristocratic garbage, poor Gaston.’ One of his quick, sharp looks. ‘Dying to ask about Blakeney, ain’t you? Your beloved brother. Well, I’m a good husband, I’ll tell you. Had an almighty row with his father, by all reports, and has gone off to sulk and raise a regiment of militia at Cley. Quite the patriotic little nobleman. He’d have been in the regular army if his mother would let him, but he still listens to her.’
‘You are well informed,’ she said.
Chapter Fifteen
The Downfall of Bonaparte came out at the end of April and was an instant and overwhelming success. Its publication almost coincided with the news that the French Admiral Villeneuve had eluded Nelson in the Mediterranean and slipped through the Straits of Gibraltar to join the Spanish fleet at Cadiz and vanish westwards. In London, fears for the British West Indies brought criticism of Nels
on, who was accused of over-protecting his friends at the Court of Naples and thus allowing Villeneuve to escape.
It was just the moment for a rousingly patriotic poem that practically identified Napoleon with the powers of darkness.
‘Your verses are on every lip,’ wrote Comfrey enthusiastically from London, ‘and copies walk out of the shops as soon as I can get them there. I am setting a reprint in train at once. May I venture one suggestion?’ he went on in his elegant copperplate. ‘If your third canto is not yet finished, it might be well to think very hard how you are to treat Lord Nelson. If he fails to make good his initial error, this could be the end of his career. I do not need to emphasise to you, who live on the invasion coast, how appallingly Villeneuve’s escape imperils this country as well as the West Indies.’
‘That’s all very fine,’ said Caroline when Tremadoc’s first exuberance had yielded to a more rational mood and they could discuss Comfrey’s suggestion. ‘But suppose you take Mr Comfrey’s advice and belittle Nelson, and then the canto comes out just when he has achieved one of his surprise victories? Can you imagine anything more disastrous?’
‘There is something in what you say. I shall have to consult my muse. Ring for Barrett. I think this calls for celebration. Lord, what a blessing that I was wise enough to insist on a share of the profits, instead of meekly accepting the miserable £30 Comfrey offered. I should have been finely taken in if I had followed your advice.’
She knew him too well to think of pointing out that in fact their positions had been exactly the opposite, with him eager to take the cash. It was her day to work in John Gerard’s library and she made her excuses and left her husband downing his second glass of laudanum and trying to work out how much he would make from the poem.
Unusually, Gerard was waiting for her in his library. ‘I must congratulate you on the success of your husband’s poem,’ he said. ‘I have sent for a copy from London, and long to read it. And congratulations, too, on the publisher’s timing. The poem could not have come out at a happier moment, either for your husband or for the country. By everything I have heard of it, it should be just the stimulus that is needed at this anxious time.’
‘Anxious indeed.’ She had been hoping for a chance to discuss the political situation with him. ‘Mr Comfrey the publisher writes that Lord Nelson is being savagely criticised in town. He wants my husband to bear this in mind while completing his third canto.’
‘Cry the man down, you mean? I wonder if that would be wise. Nelson has surprised us before, and may again, and, besides, from the patriotic point of view, surely he should be supported?’
‘That is just my view. May I quote you to my husband? He does not set much store by my opinions.’
‘Then he is not quite so wise a man as his sermons — and by the sound of it this poem — would seem to suggest. But no man is wise on every count. Now I must leave you to your studies. What is your commission today, I wonder?’
She had decided some time before that she had better admit to doing what she described as a little work for her husband’s sermons.
Now she laughed. ‘Mr Tremadoc is so elated with the good news about his poem that he has actually commissioned me to find him a text for Sunday’s sermon.’
‘He must certainly expect a crowded church. Really, Mrs Tremadoc, I am inclined to suggest that he simply read us one of the powerful speeches of the Spirit of Good to which I have seen references in the public prints.’
‘Oh, no,’ she protested. ‘He would never do that. My husband is a modest man, Mr Gerard.’
‘You surprise me.’ Was there a hint of friendly mockery in his tone?
She did not pass on his suggestion to Tremadoc, for fear that he would yield to temptation and make a fool of himself. It was bad that he had never mastered the art of reading verse aloud, and worse that he had not recognised this. But Gerard’s suggestion had given her an idea. She took her text for the sermon from the poem, two lines in which the Spirit of Good urged perseverance in the face of heavy odds, and then simply rendered the rest of the speech into prose.
‘I had thought of doing that very thing myself,’ said Tremadoc, when she showed it to him. ‘As to Nelson, you say your mad old hermit advises against attacking him, and that is just what I have been thinking too. Better safe than sorry and all that, and who knows, the new man at the Admiralty, old Barham, may bring things to rights, even if he is over eighty. Now, sit down and write Comfrey to ask when I can expect to see the colour of his money. I’ve had a call from Bowles while you were out. Full of congratulations, all smiles, and the Oldchurch Club seem to expect to be given a dinner on the occasion of my success.’
‘Good gracious. I must talk to M Japrisot.’ She had longed to try her French chef’s hand at a dinner, but so far Tremadoc had refused, saying that if the county would not come to them, he did not propose to start entertaining the town.
‘Nonsense,’ he said now. ‘A dinner at the castle, of course.’
That was an anxious summer at Oldchurch. On a clear day, one could see the cliffs of Boulogne, dangerously near across the Channel, and imagine Napoleon’s invasion army drilling there. Rumours about Nelson, about Villeneuve and the other French admiral, Ganteaume, flew thick and fast. If Villeneuve and Ganteaume could unite and command the Channel for as much as twenty-four hours, with a favourable wind, Oldchurch would find itself in the front line of England’s defences. And the Martello Tower down by the quay was still only half built.
‘I’ve noticed that, too,’ said Gerard, when Caroline remarked on it. ‘It is not something to which I would refer in public if I were you. I had it in mind to suggest to you that it might be wise if you could persuade your husband not to mention it in his sermons.’
Curiously enough, Tremadoc had cut out a reference of hers to the Martello Tower just the week before.
‘You mean to tell me that it is not only smuggling here in Oldchurch?’ she asked now, anxiously.
‘Smuggling and every kind of chicanery always go together. This is a dangerous place, Mrs Tremadoc, as I have told you before. Surely now your husband has made such a name for himself he should be able to find another living?’
‘We’ve no influence,’ she said. But there was more to it than that. Something — success perhaps — had changed Tremadoc. He seemed, these days, almost contented with life in Oldchurch, and scouted a timid suggestion she had ventured about the possibility of moving away when the money for The Downfall of Bonaparte began to come through.
‘Nonsense!’ He turned on her. ‘We are very well where we are. And, besides, when is this money going to come? Here it is August and I have no doubt that Comfrey is dining out very happily at my expense.’
‘He says it takes a while to settle the books,’ she said.
‘Of course he says so, but should we believe him? That’s the point. If you would just bestir yourself with your fair copying of the third canto, I would take it up to him myself and insist on my rights. I’m surprised he has not invited me before this. It is high time I began to move in the literary circles to which I now belong. I should be mixing with my equals, with that Coleridge you so fancy, with Wordsworth and Southey. Who knows? That old fool Pye, the Poet Laureate, might snuff it at any moment. He must be sixty if he’s a day, and then I need to be in town, to be known.’
She thought his chances of the laureateship more than slender, but went to work with a will on her fair copying, his proposed visit to London a powerful incentive. They had been married over a year now and the future loomed dark before her, a life sentence. Her only remissions were the increasingly frequent evenings Tremadoc spent with the Oldchurch Club at the Castle Inn. And even these were paid for when he got home, sometimes euphoric, sometimes in a kind of inebriate despair, always wanting more of her than she could possibly give. And, always, afterwards, the sweating, nightmare-ridden sleep from which they both woke exhausted.
This time, Tremadoc talked of spending at least two weeks in town, and s
he hoped that in the end it would be longer. ‘If that skinflint Comfrey has not settled his books yet, he will just have to give me an advance against my earnings. I do not propose to make my first appearance as author of The Downfall of Bonaparte looking the country parson, nor yet to arrive at the club in a hackney carriage like a Johnny Raw. My first call will be upon Weston for some clothes in which I am not ashamed to be seen, my second on Hatchett for a curricle and pair. You will enjoy being able to drive yourself about the marsh when I have brought it home. Then perhaps we will be able to mix in the society I deserve.’
‘A curricle? You do not think a light carriage of some kind might be more useful? And where will you keep it?’
‘Trust you to make nothing but objections! At the castle, of course. It is all arranged with old Strudwick, the landlord. And as to a carriage, it might be more use to you but it certainly would not be to me, and it is, after all, I who have earned this fortune.’
She did not dare point out that whatever the first canto earned, it would hardly be a fortune, and resigned herself in advance to the fact that he would almost certainly spend the entire proceeds of the poem on his London trip. There was to be no let-up in the stringent course of economy which the steadily rising cost of living compelled her to practise. She sometimes wondered how Mrs Bowles and the other married ladies of Oldchurch contrived to keep up their lavish standard of living. Widows like Mrs Norman were now in visibly straightened circumstances, with tallow instead of wax candles, old dresses turned outside-in to pass as new, and old caps trimmed up with feathers. But Mr Bowles had just bought his wife a fine new landaulet and the day Tremadoc left for town Mrs Bowles invited Caroline to drive out on the marsh with her.
The Lost Garden (The Purchas Family Series Book 5) Page 23