MARGARET IRWIN
None So Pretty
OR THE STORY OF MR CORK
TO J. R. MONSELL
This novel was awarded the First Prize in Chatto
and Windus’s Historical Novel Competition by
a committee consisting of E. M. Forster, George
Gordon and R. H. Mottram.
Contents
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
A Note on the Author
Part I
A man who had once had a price on his head, who for eleven years had been an exile and a beggar, who had had to pawn his possessions, patch his clothes and cadge his next meal, landed one summer day at Dover to be made King of England. And the country that had beheaded his father and disinherited him ran mad with joy at his return. The streets of London and the cities and villages through which he passed were hung with tapestry and strewn with flowers; the fountains played wine; a triumph of over twenty thousand horse and foot marched before him, shouting and brandishing their swords; noblemen in cloth of gold and silver, and ladies in silk, were pressed together in glittering discomfort on the balconies; aldermen in their chains of gold, the worshipful companies of tradesmen in their liveries and all the maidens of London in white waistcoats and crimson petticoats marched to welcome King Charles II.
For four days, music and fanfares of trumpets acclaimed him on his progress to the capital; and so large a part of the nation swarmed after him, dancing, capering, embracing each other in their delirium, that it took them seven hours, from two in the afternoon till nine at night, to pass through the city.
The new King was very tired and partly deafened by all the noise. He was thirty years old, and ever since he was grown up he had been kept in his place, and that place off the throne. The English had chased him out of the country, the Scotch had dictated and preached to him, the French and Dutch had each tried to pass him back to the other as a troublesome pauper that neither wished to support. The high-spirited French Princess that his mother had tried to marry to him years ago had delighted in snubbing him as a youth not merely ineligible but gauche.
He did not find the joy of his people convincing. He remarked that his long absence from his kingdom must be his own fault, since everybody in it had always so ardently desired his return.
Sentiment had staged a very fine show for what it was worth, but what was it worth? The exact amount of the sums of money sent him from all sides as soon as it was certain he would be King of England.
He told his suite that the only event in his life comparable to the sight of that portmanteau full of coins had been one frozen Christmas in Paris when the Queen Mother had no money for firing and was forced to keep his little sister Henriette in bed out of the cold, but with only one blanket on the bed. Then someone had sent her a present of an enormously fat mutton, a dish of which he was particularly fond, and when he went to carve it open, there were two thousand crowns concealed in its belly.
His audience hoped much from the generous frankness of this King who need not be ashamed of having been a beggar; they were endeared to him by his simple English taste for mutton.
A few weeks after his restoration he pinned up a notice on his palace walls in advertisement of one of his many dogs, which he had come to prefer to human beings. The document ran as follows:—
LOST, STOLLEN, OR STRAYED
We must call upon you again for a Black Dog between a greyhound and a spaniel, no white about him, onely a streak on his brest, and his tayl a little bobbed. It is His Majesties own Dog, and doubtless was stoln, for the dog was not born nor bred in England, and would never forsake His master. Whosoever findes him may acquaint any at Whitehal for the Dog was better known at Court, than those who stole him. Will they never leave robbing his Majesty! Must he not keep a Dog? This dog’s place at Court (though better than some imagine) is the only place which nobody offers to beg.
The bitterness that inspired these pleasant thrusts was not suspected by the gentlemen who escorted the new King to London. They found him easy, open, approachable. On discovering that the ship’s crew that transported him from Holland were fed on pork and peas and boiled beef, he insisted on making a breakfast of the same fare. He walked up and down the quarter-deck with long strides that outstripped his companions, telling tales of his ludicrous or terrible escapades. He told them well but then he had told them often, and his wit did not prevent the danger of his being a bore. It was said that he found it necessary to change his circle of acquaintance every three months, by which time he had used up his stock of stories and needed to start afresh. This explained the inconstancy of a nature that was otherwise too lazy not to be faithful. Now his royalty would indemnify him; his suite would always laugh heartily, would always answer hastily in the negative when asked if they had heard this one before. An Act of Oblivion and Indemnity absolved him; companion to that which his counsellors were urging him to pass in forgiveness of his enemies.
It would be well if the oblivion could cover his friends also. Everyone who had rendered any service to the Crown, however remote, was expecting recognition, reward, a pension, a regiment, a place at Court. He had waited eleven years for his place at Court. Now it was the others’ turn. In the meantime he had enough cravats and stockings for his immediate needs, he was certain of his next dinner, and on his first night in London he went to bed with Mrs. Barbara Palmer.
The ride to London was the only occasion on which Nan Ingleby ever saw the King, and that at an age so young that later she could scarcely remember doing so. But this home-coming was to colour all her life.
For days beforehand she had been following the elder children about, beating drums or trays and shouting: “The King is coming home again! hurrah! hurrah!” and their father would not let their mother beat or even reprove them for the noise they made. He told them they had all been so poor because the King was poor and so it was the right thing to be, but now they would all go to London and be rich. He would be among the first to be sent for by the King. He had no clothes fine enough for Court; he went about the house collecting and discarding them, saying to himself: “Then they will see, then they will see.” His poor clothes would not matter, they would but show the clearer where his money had gone. He threw the soup his wife had made out of the window and swore they should have no more of such filthy brews from acorns and so forth, fit only for the pigs.
Lady Ingleby began to look more fiercely anxious than she had ever done during the worst times of the wars and the Commonwealth. Her family had been Puritan since the days of Bloody Mary. She had a natural taste for economy, fostered by the wars and the hard times of the Commonwealth into unnatural excesses. Once she had nearly poisoned her household with a concoction of rhubarb leaves. But her opposition to her husband would often drive her into common sense. She pinched her lips tight when he came running to tell her that the maypoles were set up again, that bonfires were lighted all over the country and people were drinking the King’s health on their knees in the streets, that all the great nobles had gone to meet the King in Holland; then that he had set sail at Scheveling, then that he had landed at Dover, that he was coming nearer and nearer, and with him, their good fortune. He could not believe that she would not believe him, his face beamed like a great sun with laughter and triumph. Her bitter certainty of men’s ingratitude fought against his hopes, and he died disappointed, proving her right.
But that was not till Nan was twelve, a long time after the King had come home, a time that seemed all the longer because there was never any minute of it when Sir Roderick did not expect a message to summon him to Court.
There he sat at the head of his table in his broad leather doublet that had been polished by long
wear to a dark tan instead of chrome, a great fat man with a jolly laugh, telling them how he had hid from the Roundheads in a plot of kidney beans while his colonel ran up into the garret, or how that four-legged cavalier, Prince Rupert’s white dog, Boy, used to sit up at table with him and the King, on the King’s chair as likely as not, and fell at Marston Moor like any Christian. The superstitious Roundheads said he was a familiar spirit and “the Mad Prince” a wizard, “and so he may be for he’s the oddest fellow, but the best to serve under that ever a man could know, and if it hadn’t been for all you brats, I’d have been off to join him and his privateers long ago when he was chasing Old Noll’s ships and the Spaniards too, all over the high seas.”
He would sing at table when he was merry and hopeful, when he had written another letter to some old friend now high in the King’s favour and sure to see to it that the King would at last remember his services, for little Turnip or old Scatterbones, or whoever it was, had often borrowed money from him, or had stood by his side in that skirmish on the bridge, or had outwitted the ushers with him when they were at Eton together. They would remember the prayer of their college, “their own friend, and their father’s friend, and their friend’s son, never to forsake.” So that at any moment now they might hear horses’ hoofs clattering into the courtyard and look out of the window to see the King’s messenger come to tell them all that they were to go to London and see the King and wear silk coats and jewels and ride in a painted barge on the river at night with music playing and torchlight dancing on the water. It was a changeable world and anything might happen any minute. “Who’d have thought to see a great King’s head on the block, and a brewer on the throne? And now that same brewer’s dead body is to be hung, drawn and quartered. Up and down, that’s the way of the world.
One foot up and one foot down
That’s the way to London town.
Don’t you lose heart, my Nancy Pretty. You’ve got the world before you, and you’ll be in London yet with the world at your feet.”
And he spread his hand over Nan’s head as she sat perched on his knee, “his youngest wren of nine,” as he called her, for she was small for her age, and brown, with the quick movements of a bird. She was not pretty, in spite of his other pet name for her, “but,” said he, quoting a French soldier and writer he had met in France who was adept in the description of female charms, “she alone in the world had embellished herself with a pointed chin.”
She tried to make her hands meet round his leather doublet, which felt like the skin of a nice horse; she stroked and patted it, chirruping to him to make her ride as he had done ever since she was a baby; first as a lady, ambling and sidling all niminy-piminy, and then as a farmer trotting to market, and then as Prince Rupert leading a charge of cavalry into battle. He mimicked a dapper French regiment marching into the trenches to the music of violins, a custom borrowed from Spain and just suited to the Wars of the Fronde as they called them, after a kind of catapult the street boys used in Paris. A street boy’s game made a very good name for their silly little civil wars, no one knew about what. And in an instant he had ceased to be the French captain, insolent and passionate, laughing and swearing and kissing his hand to his friends all in one breath, while the fiddles went “wee wee wee” high up in his throat; and became a horrid little Parisian street boy with the fingers of one hand to his nose, and the other drawing out his catapult.
But all at once his gay humour dropped from him and he sat heavy and dejected, and Nan, who hated to sit still, remained on his knee knowing that he had gone away where she could not follow. If she spoke to him now or hugged him or tucked her head under his chin, he would either not notice or would answer with savage anger something that she could never have said, for he would not be speaking to her. But she would rather he spoke, however angrily, whoever it was to, than sit there, forgetting to finish the boat he had begun to carve for her, staring at his knife which he turned round and round in his hand so that now the curved blade and now the green bone handle would stick up out of his huge fist, while he muttered, “After all I’ve done. After all I’ve done.”
And once he sprang up with a terrible cry, never seeing that he shook her from him, saying that all his friends had forgotten him. Soon after that, he died.
Their rector, the gentle and pious Mr. Wake, wept at the news and said he had a great heart which had been cracked by the world’s unkindness. “He died of it,” he said, “as surely as ever any man died of a broken heart.” But Lady Ingleby said it was of drinking off a gallon of cider at a wayside inn to ward off a fit of the gout. Both reasons seemed to her equally ill-considered and unnecessary.
Men in her opinion had no stamina and no sense. Sir Roderick had wasted hours in carving lumps of wood into toys for the children, and in playing with them himself; he told them of adventures that only encouraged their wildness; puffed them up with false beliefs of their heritage to worldly glory. But that was all he did for them. He had wasted his whole substance in fighting for the King and sending money to him, so that there was none left for tutors and governors. She was too busy to look after them herself, she was all the time working up the farm, cutting down expenses, counter-ordering her husband’s useless and extravagant schemes for making money, economizing in strange and devious ways. Meanwhile the children ran wild all over the country, and the two eldest boys as far as Flanders, so they wrote back afterwards, asking for money, just when all but their mother had thought they were dead.
A King’s neglect, the coldness and disloyalty of old friends, were nothing to her, as long as her eldest son was alive. She held that men were no better than children, that their wars were children’s games carried into deadly earnest, made for ridiculous reasons of loyalty to a name, made to destroy her flesh and blood. Behind it all was the hope that if you stood by your King or your friend, he would stand by you. They roistered together, drank and sang a song, stood by each other in fight; and this slight thing that they called friendship, that married men in particular had no need of and no right to, since the ties of a wife and family admitted of no fanciful additions; this make-believe that was bred not of their blood and bone but of their casual company, a figment of their minds, no more; this they had invented, extolled, exaggerated, until its failure could hurt them worse than any actual misfortune.
By actual misfortune, Lady Ingleby meant hunger, illness, loss of life, land or money.
But her husband would never listen to her, he was always either up or down, fantastically merry or sullen as a bear, and sometimes he would even burst into tears, frightening the children, embarrassing and wounding her, who had never had the power to move him thus. She had been in love with the jolly laughing young man she had married, she had been able to refuse him nothing, and he had taken it all carelessly. Almost at once she had been sick and ailing with her first child, losing her looks, terrified of losing his love, the strong-minded young woman who had lorded it over her younger brothers and sisters changed to an anxious, nervous, morbidly sensitive woman. She regretted and resented her surrender, she would never be happy, she thought, until he loved her more, or she loved him less. The latter conclusion was the easier, she reached it with the birth of her first baby, and in a savage triumph transferred her devotion to this helpless object. She could salve her pride with the plea that her passions had been merely the unworthy means to this necessary end.
But there had been more passions and more necessary ends, too many of them; once you had given yourself you were never free again, never free from anxiety, suspicion, struggle; her babies’ illnesses, her husband’s casual infidelities, quarrels and rupture in the State, rumours of war, battles, she was vulnerable to them all as to a personal attack, she could never escape them, she was never free again. And it all came of giving oneself to a man, since of necessity he loved more lightly, both his wife and children; he could afford to be inconstant, to share out his affections with occasional mistresses, with friends, with the King and his cause. Because h
e could not conceive and bear a child, this vain idle-witted talkative man who could never know her grim sense of responsibility, and who went to pieces in time of trouble, yet had the advantage of her.
It was for this that Lady Ingleby had never forgiven her husband. A family of fourteen left her little chance of ignoring, as her kind have since attempted, that woman, as receptacle of man’s seed, is by just that much dependent on his whim. For that reason she was passionately of the opinion of a contemporary of hers, though she had never heard of it or him, who “could be content that we might procreate like trees without conjunction.”
Children were as unsatisfactory as husbands, it was of little use to expect anything else, she might tell them to be grateful a dozen times a day and they would never understand it until they had children themselves and saw what was the use of it.
Her eldest, Kate, had long ago married, first of all as was right and proper, and her second, Dorothy, had died of her illegitimate child, as was equally right and proper. All the times she had asked what girls were coming to since the war, she had never supposed her girls could come as far as that. A direct result of the war it had been, with all those soldiers and indigent cavaliers left wandering about for years after it was over.
If Kate were balanced by Dorothy, Eliza, whom she had as good as given up hope of marrying for all her good looks, was balanced by Molly, her best bargain. That again was right and fitting for she had the best market value in every way. She was not as handsome as Eliza but she was softer, more approachable, which more than compensated for any inferiority noted by her mother’s appraising eye in the spacing of her forehead, the size of her eyes and the shape of her ears. She was quick too and clever, and fortunately for her, Eliza, who was her immediate elder, and had always considered herself as specially responsible for her little sister, had insisted on her attending the Reverend Mr. Wake’s lessons as regularly as herself.
None So Pretty Page 1