by Karleen Koen
“Beware of Lord Sunderland,” Slane said to Wharton now. “He has not survived as a King’s minister for all these years by being sincere. Rochester says that Sunderland promises much but delivers as little as possible—Why do you laugh?”
“Barbara said just that of Charles, more than once. Don’t worry over me, Slane. No one is more duplicitous than I. Therefore, I recognize duplicity in others.”
Here you are again, Barbara, thought Slane.
“I have a New Year’s gift for the Bishop,” Wharton continued. “Charles has found a man who says he can recruit many soldiers within the army for us.”
Christopher Layer, thought Slane, and a feeling suddenly went through him, the tingling in his middle that always presaged success.
“His name is Christopher Layer. He has an impeccable background, comes from a good family in Norfolk, has been to Rome and sworn loyalty to King James.”
“How will a man from a good family in Norfolk recruit soldiers within the English army?” asked Slane.
“A servant of his was once a soldier. The servant knows a man, an ex-sergeant, who knows many soldiers, many sergeants still on active duty. Layer says with the help of that man—who will not come to us cheaply—they can put together groups of soldiers out of nearly half the King’s regiments who will fight for Ormonde. Those who don’t do it for love will do it for the proper coin. Look”—Wharton held out a piece of paper—“what Christopher Layer gives us to show his loyalty, his sincerity, to show he knows of what he speaks.”
The paper was a listing of regiments on duty, with the name of the town or village within which troops were barracked.
“We must verify this,” said Slane. He was tingling all over. This was priceless information. If it was correct, Christopher Layer was a gift beyond measure to them.
“Of course.” And then, in a way unlike himself, so that Slane was reminded how young Wharton was, in some ways younger than his two-and-twenty, a boy with no war, no stretch of hardship, no sorrow to make him grow: “Slane, persuade the Bishop not to doubt me. King James has my heart. I swear it on the soul of my little son.”
Frowning at the thought that Rochester had been openly rude to Wharton, Slane said, “I didn’t know you had a child.”
There was a wife somewhere. Slane knew that, but she never came to London. It was said that Wharton would not allow it.
“I no longer have him. He’s dead. Smallpox.”
Gussy looked down into his cup of ale. So, I was wrong about no sorrow, thought Slane. Rochester is too open, if Wharton has known his distrust; too open, too angry all the time…. So the two men I have grown to care for have both lost sons. We share that, don’t we, gentlemen, a grief for which there are no words, and at times, no healing.
He stood, the sadness vibrating in him so that he knew he’d have to walk it off, walk the feelings into numbness before he could be what he had to be, clear and alert, open to his instinct, at the performance tonight.
“This is not the day to deliver your gift,” he said, softly, kindly, as an older brother or uncle might speak, “but it is a fine gift, precisely the gift we need. If you two will excuse me, I leave you to your plotting. I must earn my keep. I go to perform like a trained bear before the Princess of Wales this evening.”
“Give her my regards,” said Wharton, evilly. “I host a final party for the luckless groom tonight. We’ll be at Pontack’s tavern while you’re declaiming lines. Join us.”
“I shall.”
SLANE WARMED his hands a moment at one of the street fires lighted to keep beggars from freezing.
The Duke of Ormonde was in Spain, buying arms for the invasion. Agents in France and Hamburg were purchasing more arms and ammunition, sending them to Spain. The Jacobites in England had just sent a packet of money for that. There was a chance that France would breach her treaty with England and provide regiments to invade with Ormonde. If France would be the ally to Jacobites that she had been under Louis XIV, if enough troops here would rebel, declare for James, then Jamie would ride down these streets as King.
Someone brushed against him, and Slane put his hand to his sword. This part of London, a good brisk walk from Westminster, was a wretched warren of narrow, labyrinthine lanes and alleys and dark courtyards. Here lived and worked the sellers of dog’s and cat’s meat, of watercress, old iron, coal, tripe, and used clothing. Here lived chairmen and sailors, watermen and porters, brickmakers. It was a brawling, ruthless world; the strongest, the largest, ruled.
In every lane down which he walked, there was a fire burning in the street, around which stood shapeless, cloaked women and ragged children, a few men. The water in the gutters that ran down the middle of the streets was frozen. The sky was gone, lost to lines of frozen wash strung from one side of the street to the other, blocking out dreary winter sunlight. I miss Italy, Slane thought. The sunshine. The people.
He went into a building with boarded-over windows, like closed eyes. There was no door, only the opening where a door had once been. This was one of his lairs, his burrows. Like a fox, he had several hiding places. Two flights up, at the second door, he knocked, and a boy opened a door.
Slane stepped into the room. Its windows, like the rest, were boarded up so that the landlord did not have to pay the tax on windows. A single candle guttered on the floor, highlighting the bed, upon which a woman and several children sat. There was a malodorous chamber pot and a dark hole of a fireplace. It was freezing in here. Why was there no fire? The woman stood up, and the smell of fermented geneva floated across to Slane. Geneva, gin, was the lifeblood of these rookeries, these slums, this England that King George and his ministers had had to themselves for eight years.
“Geneva” was a corruption of the word genever, meaning juniper; the liquor was distilled from malt or barley or other grains and then flavored with oil of juniper. The butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, the weaver sold it. A favorite trick was to give children, buying for parents, a free glass, until the drink became a necessity to them also.
The first time Slane had walked down London’s back streets and seen men and women lying where they’d fallen in their drunkenness, seen their children around them, unheeded, abandoned, he had been disgusted. “You must forbid the sale of gin when you are crowned king,” he’d written to Jamie, “for the sake of the people here.” The coins he’d given for coal for the fireplace had gone toward gin.
The woman smiled drunkenly, brazenly at Slane. Most of her teeth were gone. She was probably in her early thirties. Her son had been outside to the water bucket; he brought the dipper for Slane, who saw, as he took it from the boy, how red the child’s hands were. He motioned for the boy to follow him outside to the dark stairs.
“Any letters?”
The boy and his friends served as couriers, going into the various coffeehouses used as receiving points for letters from Italy and France, so that Gussy did not always have to do it. Slane knelt and handed the boy several coins. He felt as if the woman saw him through the door as he gave the coins. He could feel her hunger for the gin. It was a live thing with a will of its own.
“This is enough for food and coal for days if you are careful with it.”
“Mam will take it from me.”
“You buy geneva for her, enough so she goes to sleep. You wait until she sleeps, and then you and the children eat. Hide the coins, and you drink none of the geneva. Promise me?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
If the children were lucky, she would go to a gin cellar, places where men and women sat on straw in a stupor, waiting for the drink to wear off until they could drink again. If she died, the children were better off than they were now.
Slane tried not to feel the whole of his disgust for her, his pity for the children, all the children of these streets, Jamie’s children, all of them. Despair was all around him, on every street, in every house, here. If he began feeling it, there would be no ending to it.
The news is good, he re
minded himself to pull his spirits up from the children, from the squalor and ruin sitting on the bed, living all among these streets.
Everything was falling into place as if meant to be. Why could Rochester not appreciate that? Wharton, clever boy-man that he was, had simply said one day, I’ll go to Sunderland and tell him I’m bored with Tories. And he had.
Everyone was happy—Sunderland, who now had the notorious, influential Duke of Wharton among his followers; King George, who had grown to dread Wharton’s barbed speeches—honed to absolute ruthlessness during the South Sea Bubble—against royal policy; Whigs, who saw Wharton’s defection as a clear symbol that the Tory party was finished, who saw the coming election as theirs.
The quarrel between Whigs and Tories was deep, ruthless, something Jamie would need to deal with when he was king. It was too divisive, the determination to see the other side ruined costing time and effort that might have gone to better things.
Slane sat down on a chair. So Gussy and Wharton had lost sons. My son, he thought, no longer able to hold at bay sadness for his son and wife gone, the pair of them dying in childbirth, a woman’s battleground. He’d loved her with his boy’s heart—he’d been younger than Wharton when she died—and she’d loved back, clean, pure, open. The boy in him remembered her, remembered the sweetness between them. Barbara had looked at him with clear, girl’s eyes, but she had been married, and he had been busy, and there was only time for a kiss under the cypresses in an Italian garden. He must go now and find a church, light three white candles for three small hopes stillborn.
ON HIS way, later, to Leicester House, the London home of the Prince and Princess of Wales, Slane passed Saylor House. If Richard Saylor had stayed loyal to me, I would never have left England, old King James, Jamie’s father, used to say.
Slane stood a moment before the ornate iron gates that opened on the courtyard. Huge lanterns beside the massive front door spilled out soft winter light. The house sat solid and splendid in its bare gardens.
Our house in Ireland was beautiful, Slane’s mother had told him. Three-storied, it was shaped like an E, for the old Queen Elizabeth in whose reign it was built. Ireland is green, my Lucius, green like the most tender of spring grass. He’d never seen the house, nor Ireland. Among his memories were no paintings of ancestors and relatives such as were in other houses. His mother and father had left with what coins and jewels they could sew in his mother’s skirts, after that last battle in Ireland that finished James II’s hopes.
Slane had walked the huge, echoing, ornate chambers of Versailles and the Palais-Royal, had been a guest in the palaces of Venice, Rome, Vienna. As he stared at Saylor House—no palace, but a great and beautiful house, a monument to Richard Saylor and the glory of the French wars—he thought: When Jamie is king, I will ask for this house as my reward.
A woman crossed the courtyard, her hair red and gold, her face shaped like a heart. Barbara. Slane’s heart beat fast. The image was as quickly gone as it had come. Would she forgive him for taking her family’s house? To the victor belong the spoils. Did she still have girl’s eyes? He would take her, too, if she did.
SLANE PLAYED from one woman to the next in the front row of chairs.
“‘This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, / This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid: / Regent of love-rimes, lord of folded arms, / The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans,’” he said, but he was thinking that at a signal, the clans would rise in Scotland, and there would be a rising in the west, under Lord Arran. They needed a rising in the south, too, so George’s army might split itself in three directions—west, north, south—as Ormonde came in at the Thames River. There was no one yet designated to head a rebellion in the south, closest to London. The rising closest to London would be the most dangerous. King George’s troops would reach there first.
The chamber in Leicester House was beautiful, an elaborate painting across the ceiling, intricate cascades of molding along walls lined with velvet, portraits in heavy frames hanging from ribbons. Small armchairs, their legs and arms crusted with gilt, had been pulled into rows, a dozen or so women sitting on them: the Princess of Wales; her maids of honor; the bride-to-be, Harriet Holles; her mother; and her groom-to-be’s relatives—his mother, Lady Saylor; the Duchess of Tamworth; Lady Shrewsborough.
Slane stood before the Princess of Wales. A man who knows many sergeants, Wharton had said. Sergeants and corporals were the heart of an army. Take them and you had the men under them.
“‘See!’” said Slane, giving the Princess a passionate, languid look, “‘how she leans her cheek upon her hand: / O! that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek.’”
King George and his family would have to be taken into custody. It was the Jacobites’ plan to capture the Tower of London, which would become the prison of King George and his ministers.
Slane stood at last before the slight, dark-haired bride-to-be. She had a chipped tooth, which showed when she smiled. Her family had much land, several houses. She’d have to go to one of them when he took Saylor House.
“‘I would have thee gone;’” he said to her. “‘And yet no further than a wanton’s bird, / Who lets it hop a little from her hand, / Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves, / And with a silk thread plucks it back again, / So loving-jealous of his liberty.’”
The young maids of honor sat staring at him with rapt faces, their eyes adoring. But the older women—the two mothers and the Duchess of Tamworth—were something else again. Thank God I don’t have to seduce them, he thought. Let’s end this.
He pulled Harriet up from her chair, walked her around, reciting love poetry, then went to one knee and stared up at her, as passionate as a bridegroom. “‘Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow, / That I shall say good night till it be morrow.’”
He bowed his head, closed his eyes, listened to the applause. Charles was leaving in another month to make certain of their support to the north. Slane would do the same thing to the south.
“Thank you so much,” said the young woman he knelt before. “It was beautiful, quite beautiful, a lovely New Year’s gift. Come and meet the Princess. Your Highness, I have the honor to present Laurence Slane.”
“My maids of honor have been slain by you, Slane,” said the Princess, and Slane bowed very low, thinking, Plump arms, hair frizzed by keeping it falsely blond, diamonds everywhere, eyes that do not smile.
“You were very good. You’re from Ireland, yes?”
“Ireland and other places, Your Highness. I left Ireland long ago. A man can starve there, and too many of us do.”
“What other places?”
“Any small town that has honest labor to offer.”
“You haven’t the look of a man who does much labor, honest or otherwise. It’s said of you that you’ve never acted before, yet you made all my young ladies fall in love tonight, Slane. What a light you’ve hidden under the bushel of honest labor.”
She had not fallen in love. Again, he took a moment to deliberately meet her eyes. You could read a man’s soul in his eyes. It was like going before an opponent in a duel to look into hers. A keen intelligence, he saw, made formidable by years at court. She trusts no one, thought Slane. And she is absolutely right. She’ll remember that I played before her, remember this night, when she is in the Tower. She’ll plot escape during every moment of every day that she is in the Tower. I must remember to tell Jamie that.
He smiled.
“Go and say a few words to my maids of honor,” said the Princess. “I promised them they might have you to themselves for a few moments. I am so kind.”
You are ruthless, thought Slane.
“Not too long, Slane,” the Princess said. “I want none of them seduced by your dark eyes.”
Slane stood among the young women who served the Princess as companions and surrogate daughters. They were the cream of society, the blossoms of the realm, offering large dowries and immense family connection
s, offering access to the court because of their service to the Princess. Tamworth does well to ally himself here, thought Slane. Of them all—he felt he was surrounded with delicious young flowers—he liked Harriet best. She seemed pleasant and bright.
The circle around him was broken up by a raucous cackle. Aunt Shrew—Louisa was how Slane thought of her—stood before him, rouge and patches vying with her wrinkles, jewels sparkling everywhere, as if she would make up in jewelry what she might have lost in youth.
“Enough, now,” she said, moving young women aside. “He’s mine for a time. Come along, Slane, meet my sister-in-law, the Duchess of Tamworth, and Lady Saylor and Lady Holles. Shoo,” she said, “go on,” waving her hand to the maids of honor as if they were dogs.
Slane stood before the Duchess of Tamworth, the great hero’s wife, once a player among those who decided the fate of this kingdom. Richard Saylor had adored her, it was said. Coming up to London several months ago, in a carriage so ancient that it was the talk of London, she’d made certain the marriage moved forward as if there’d been no duel.
She sat regally, arrogantly, in a black gown and many emeralds. There had been a time when the only way to find favor with Queen Mary, and with Queen Anne after Mary, had been to find favor first with this woman. She might have been a dowager queen, now, staring back at Slane with dark eyes. She has no higher authority than herself, thought Slane. If I take her grandson’s house, she will not forgive me. Like the Princess, she will plot against me. Where is Barbara in this tiny, arrogant woman?
“Irish, are you?” the Duchess said. “Where is your accent?”
“I lost it long ago. A man with an Irish accent finds little acceptance in England.”
“Yes, we haven’t been kind to your land, have we? My husband always said that we erred in Ireland from the beginning, and were too foolish or too proud to make amends. Are you Catholic, Slane?”