by May Woodward
‘I have to say I believe you were right, sir! These figures mean a profit of seven thousand pounds!’ He handed the document back, eyebrows still raised. ‘I took the liberty of checking the company out – obtained a copy of its annual report. Perfectly sound to my professional eye. I’m just surprised I’ve not heard of anyone else investing apart from you and Spuffington.’
‘It does not astound me, Boscawen! Gold mines abroad – risky business. Stick to solid, English companies. That’s the way most of these dullards think. No imagination. And that’s going to be to my advantage.’
Richard met Roger Cormorant for supper one evening.
‘My treat, sir,’ Richard told him as the two men settled at table. ‘We’ll have a bottle of Château St Emilion,’ he told the waiter, ‘and I recommend the Dover Sole,’ he said to his companion.
‘I take it you were pleased with your share returns,’ Cormorant said, tucking in his napkin.
‘Most satisfied! In fact, I have a proposition, Sir Roger, which I will tell you over dinner.’
They ate their entrée and listened to the orchestra. Richard drank half a glass of wine. He eyed the older man.
‘You do not seem to be attracting many investors,’ Richard said. ‘Lord Spuffington is the only one I know of beside myself.’
‘Yes. I am rather disappointed. More publicity is needed perhaps.’
‘That is what my idea involves, Sir Roger. I have many contacts in the government and society. Publicity in newspapers is – forgive me – not the route forward. It is too much like advertising. The nasty word ‘trade’. Personal contact however – that is the way to proceed. The upper and middle classes will buy a product because the Duchess of Somewhere recommends it, but not if some dirty little costermonger advertises it.’
‘I see your thinking, Sir Richard. I like your style. And you talk sense.’
Richard leaned across the table. He looked the other man in the eye.
‘What I’d like to suggest, therefore, is that I become a kind of unofficial agent for you. I persuade my friends and colleagues what a strong investment I’ve made… they’ll be keen as mustard, believe me. They, in turn, will spread the word among their own circle of acquaintance. We can form a discreet network.’
‘Ingenious!’ Cormorant sipped his wine. ‘Keep my name secret, perhaps? I’ll be the puppet-master behind the scenes, you the public face of the company. Yes…’ The man’s grey eyes gleamed. ‘The mystique will be part of the attraction! But I’m waiting for the coup de grâce, Sir Richard. You would expend much time and effort on this. What would your expected remuneration be?’
Richard sat back, clasping his fingers over his dinner jacket.
‘I want part ownership of the company.’ He fixed his companion with a shrewd look. ‘Fifty per cent ownership.’
Sir Roger dabbed his lips with his napkin and eyed him right back.
‘Twenty-five.’
Richard leaned forward again.
‘Forty per cent.’
The waiter arrived with the fish course. Cormorant ignored him. He gave Richard a faint smile.
‘You’re a hard man to do business with, Somerlee, but, by God, I don’t think I’ll rue the day. You’ve a deal.’
As Richard left the restaurant later, he put up his collar. A moon peeped now and then from behind the clouds. The night had grown chilly, and rain was on the way. The first overtures of autumn.
Ever so slightly tipsy, he raised his cane and summoned a cabriolet. He was smiling to himself as he climbed inside. The future looked good.
1859
Six months later
SIXTEEN
A blizzard was blowing through the city streets as dusk fell. Around the church lichgates shivered the homeless who had gathered there in the hope of a bite to eat. Every roof, fence, gate and pane were buried beneath bluey-whiteness. The dome of St Paul’s rising above them all was a grey blur.
The wheels of a gold-painted brougham crunched to a standstill in a quiet sideroad. A coachman perched on top plumed the air with steamy breath.
Three passengers peered from the glass to see the cause of the halt.
A plain box of a coffin was being hurried across their path. There came the sound of a woman’s sobbing.
Inside the coach, the Duke of Ardenne removed his top hat as the dead one and his shabby attendants passed.
‘Bless us! Looks like we’ve another epidemic on our hands!’ Philoctetes said.
Clemence could just make out the funeral procession through the thick, fast snowflakes. The crying they could hear came from a creature all in rags who was following behind the box. The coffin must carry her husband and wage-earner, Clemence thought. She watched the bearers pile it onto a cart which already held others, stacked like crates.
A weeping daughter came behind the first woman. A second was keening in Irish. The sound of the mourning-song made Clemence uneasy. She thought of the malnourished tenants who her father, and now her brother too, had turned out into the cold for want of a few pennies’ rent.
‘You’ve seen many dead then, Philo?’ asked Lysithea.
‘Aye! It’s an old friend back calling! King Cholera,’ the duke said. ‘Took a whole family out two days ago from one of the cottages on the estate. All caught it from each other.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen it too,’ said Clemence. ‘I was delivering food to the village only yesterday. I nursed two I found there with the fever.’
‘Oh, Lord! And breathed in the miasma I suppose,’ sighed Aunt Lysithea. ‘Oh, you and your kind heart, Clemence!’
‘Well, I think you’re noble, Miss Somerlee,’ said the duke.
‘Thank you, Philo.’
‘And as for airborne infection, Countess,’ Philo went on, ‘do you know there’s quite a modish notion in the medical fraternity that infection is waterborne, not bred through poisonous miasma as we’ve always believed?’
He rapped on the roof with his cane and called to the driver.
‘Alston – see if we cannot find another route to Apsley House. A backstreet if you must. We don’t have all night.’
The Ardenne brougham lurched around and retreated the way it had come. Clemence kept her head turned and eyes on the wake, until Lysithea pulled down the blind.
The Queen was to be a guest at the ball they were on their way to so a smattering of snow would stop no-one.
A dance given by the Wellingtons to rejoice for the birth of Victoria’s first grandchild… new arrival in Berlin’s royal palace for the new year of 1859. Born with an arm crippled after a traumatic and protracted labour, and probably mildly brain-damaged although no-one knew it then – little Wilhelm of Prussia held the future of a continent in his frail baby fingers. A truly winter prince.
Was that shellfire which Clemence thought she could see above the towering cream façade and Corinthian portico of Apsley House? No – a pyrotechnic. Someone was letting off fireworks. Bulbs of light burst in the sky, then passed away in showers of winking silver and violet starlets.
Clemence clutched the blind of the coach window she was peeping out from. As the fireworks went off, her fingers looked as if they were alight with white fire.
‘All right, darling?’ Lysithea touched her hand.
‘The fireworks. They remind me of the shells in the war.’
The young duke laughed.
‘I should hope not, Clemence! To the Queen, young Wilhelm is her first bonny grandson. To our two nations England and Prussia – he is supposed to be a beacon of hope and lasting peace! Or so we’re told.’ Philo raised a teasing eyebrow. ‘Don’t Wellington’s little place evoke kindlier memories than gunfire in the Crimea? It ain’t so many years since your début season. Didn’t you attend the Waterloo Banquet here that year? Sissy did.’
‘Yes… I think so…’ said Clemence. ‘You seem to rem
ember my début season better than I do, Philo. I didn’t believe I’d made much of an impression, really…’
‘Ah, no, you had more admirers than you credited, dearest,’ Lysithea put in. ‘But you had eyes only for your hussar captain!’
‘Indeed! And did not notice any other – such as me,’ the duke said. ‘I was in the throne room the day you were presented, cousin Clemmie. You and sissy was up on the same day. Thought you was a stunner then! And you had a prettier dress than Amathia.’ He put his head on one side and smiled at Clemence. ‘Quite stole my heart.’
‘Your heart, maybe. Not your nose, though, if you’d whiffed my sore feet that night!’ she said. ‘Standing about in pinching shoes, waiting to be called into the royal presence! In a rather itchy, once-occasion dress which cost enough to feed half the poor of London!’
‘You wouldn’t have believed you had sore feet, sweet one. Ravishing you looked! I still call to mind that Yew and Quatrefoil stitched on your bodice in all those thousands of diamonds and pink pearls. And that legend picked out in sapphires on the train. What did it say, pray?’
‘“Tempestibus hiemis defendimus” – the family motto,’ supplied the countess.
‘Quite,’ said the duke.
‘And then I was perspiring, too, beneath so many petticoats! Which ladies are not supposed to mention! And unable to visit the water closet!’ Clemence gave a shrill giggle. ‘You know, Philo, I have become quite foul-mouthed since the two of us became friends! Anyway, what was your court presentation like, Aunt Lizzy?’
‘You make me feel my age by mentioning it, chicken!’ Lysithea laughed. ‘My father said we could have ransomed half the prisoners taken at Trafalgar with what we spent on my dress. I was presented to old Queen Charlotte. The girl before me passed wind as she curtseyed.’
‘Imagine going down in history as the débutante who passed wind in front of the Queen,’ Philo remarked.
‘That’s nothing to the thrill Isabella had, though,’ said Lysithea. ‘When my other niece, Lady Markham, was presented, a crowd of Chartists pelted the carriages with eggs. Yelling “death to the aristocracy!” and such. Bella dined out on the story for months.’
‘Hah!’ Philo laughed. ‘And the lower orders are soon running to us when they want to be kept safe from foreign oppression, and shelter from the winter wind.’
‘Undeniably,’ said Lysithea. ‘That’s what the Somerlee motto means of course, Philo. “We shelter you from storms of winter.”’
‘Does it? Afraid I spent most of my school days smoking behind the sheds,’ Philoctetes bragged.
Clemence kept her eyes on the carriages pulling up in the forecourt of Apsley House, and their descending occupants. Blurry forms wrapped against the weather, one and all. You glimpsed their features in firelight as they passed along the colonnade where two torches burned. Now and then – someone she could name.
To be honest, she didn’t feel so very well. Nor had the Wellingtons’ ball seemed frightfully appealing when Philoctetes had invited her and her aunt to accompany him to it. But Fanny Fanshawe would be there.
Alston the coachman swung open the door. In blew the snow.
‘Ready, Clemence?’ Lysithea slipped an arm around her shoulder. ‘You look very pretty, you know.’
Clemence gave her hand to the coachman and stepped out.
‘Do you intend to spend much time in the Lords, Your Grace?’ asked Lord Tewksbury over dinner later that evening. He had been a friend of Clemence’s father and had accompanied her into the dining-hall.
‘Expertise to dabble in politics I don’t possess, old fellow!’ replied Philoctetes, who had been placed opposite at the table with the elderly Lady Croombe. ‘I shall leave the tedious stuff to you chaps in the know. Just spoke to young Kennilworth, you know, who’s just come into his title. He asked me what I think of that bounder Mr Lincoln. Should bring back slavery in this country, what, and get some of these good-for-nothing mouchers off the streets. His opinion, not mine! That’s the type you’re getting in the Lords nowadays, Tewksbury! So, I’ll stay well away, methinks!’
Tewksbury gave a harrumphing kind of cough.
‘Well, if you do consider attending the Lords, Your Grace, would you be Whig or Tory, do you think?’
‘My dear Tewksbury, I believe a wig is something one wears.’
‘So do I!’ said Tewksbury with a grimace. ‘Very wearing.’
That was Philo’s second glass of wine. Clemence was keeping watch as she moved a few pieces of fish around her plate to make it look as if she was eating her meal. And his voice was growing louder. Well, if he could damn well please himself, why not she? She waved an empty drinking vessel in the direction of one of the dozens of wigged footmen who were waiting at table.
The gentleman sitting on the other side of Lady Croombe, meanwhile, was talking about the grand opening of the new clock and bell tower they’d built for the Houses of Parliament. He was wondering if His Grace and Miss Somerlee would care to join the party he was getting up to welcome “Big Ben” to the city’s landscape.
Clemence sipped and sipped. The clack of cutlery and voices of hundreds of diners was going on all around. The orchestra was playing Wiener Karneval.
She cast her gaze the length of the long, long hall. Cerise-coloured wall-hangings, gold-sculptured ceiling, paneling and painting frames. Two Siberian porphyry candelabra stood each a third of the way along the dining-board, which was spread with a white, white cloth, festoons of winter flora, and set with a Meissen porcelain dinner service. Chandelier whose eight points and droplets seemed to engorge as you looked on, like ice crystals hanging from the eaves as the morning sun rose.
Her chaperone, Lysithea, was remote from her, thank Heavens – sitting two silver épergnes away; she could do without Lizzy’s worried eye on her. And the overfed sparrow that held half the world in her diminutive talons was a squat, ivory and royal blue splotch in the far, far distance.
‘What is your taste in art, Miss Somerlee?’ Tewksbury asked after a few mouthfuls of Salmon Coulibiac. ‘Only reason I ask… I’m thinking of bidding for a Frith when it is auctioned next month.’
‘Oh, I much prefer the Pre-Raphaelites, Your Lordship. And Ingres, and Delacroix, and the coming man Monsieur Manet. Frith paints crowds. Vulgar, and quite threatening, I think. Those great Frenchmen paint mankind as he should be – baring his soul.’
‘And in the buff,’ said the duke.
Lady Croombe turned from speaking to the person on her other side.
‘I believe the countess has just returned from Austria, Miss Somerlee? I trust she found the Emperor well?’
‘Oh yes… keeping well as ever, the dear fellow,’ Clemence said.
‘Myself and Lord Croombe have been travelling on the continent too. But, oh dear, we did find Venice and Sardinia in revolutionary ferment when we stopped there! So much talk of throwing off the Austrian yoke and you cannot imagine what! Did you know, Miss Somerlee…’
Clemence kept one ear open while her eye strayed elsewhere.
Lord Brandon Fanshawe was sitting on the opposite side of the table from her, about six places away.
Clemence’s second glass of wine was half finished by now.
Between where she and Brandon sat was one of the branched candelabra. Its sixteen points of light appeared to be reproducing themselves as she tried to blink them into focus… and Mr Darwin, bless him, was right: the new generation was brighter and unspotted. So, this was what being tipsy was like? Hey… she could see what her late Uncle George had seen in it after all.
‘’Tis a fine vintage, eh, Miss Somerlee?’ The duke was waving his own glass towards her.
‘I wonder if you are quite well, Miss Somerlee?’ came Lord Tewksbury’s distant, tinny voice.
‘Miss Somerlee is flourishing, sir, flourishing!’ Philo shared with her a wicked smile.
&nbs
p; The sound of the twittering and music kept booming loud, and then fading. The room and all the creatures in it had become in her eyes a blurry Arctic blizzard haunted with spots of feverish colour. Must be fire somewhere… she was starting to grow warm and feel unwell. Oh, to be out, alone, in the snowstorm…
For the first time Brandon Fanshawe did catch her eye. He at once looked the other way. Lady Croombe was talking about the weather to someone else. Rather loudly.
‘…discussed it at length, haven’t I, Miss Somerlee?’ She focussed on Philoctetes who’d just spoken, and the ghostly doppelganger sitting beside him. ‘With your admirable brother Sir Richard?’
She blinked from one Philo to the other.
‘Our possible nuptials, Miss Somerlee…?’ Philo supplied.
‘Are congratulations in order, then, Miss Somerlee?’ asked Tewksbury.
‘Oh… oh…’ Clemence glanced at Fanny again. ‘Oh… yes, My Lord! I do very much hope so—’
‘Well! There you are, Your Grace!’ said Tewksbury, and got on with his dinner.
Lady Croombe was starry-eyed.
‘Did I hear correctly, Miss Somerlee? You intend to accept the duke’s offer? Oh, how very charming! A wedding! At Westminster, I am sure.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Philo, eyeing Clemence with a gleaming smile. ‘No expense will be spared for this loveliest of brides.’
Lady Croombe returned to her other interlocutor.
‘What splendid news I have just heard! Miss Somerlee has…’
Said yes to Philo. So it seemed. With a roomful of witnesses.
She stumbled to her feet. A footman rushed to draw back Miss Somerlee’s seat. She stuck a hand on the tabletop. Stop the damn thing rocking so. Wait for the uneven floor to steady itself.
‘You are leaving us, Miss Somerlee?’ asked His Lordship.
‘Do excuse me, Lord Tewksbury… ’
Bumped into a chair on her way out…
‘I’m so sorry…’ Clemence mumbled to its occupant. ‘I think I am unwell. I need a little air…’