by Angus Donald
Holcroft looked at his feet. He realized that he had been boasting crassly. He felt ashamed and did not know what to say next.
His mother did not seem to notice. ‘As you can see we are all at sixes and sevens here,’ she told him, ‘but there is a bite of pie left if you are hungry. But I have such a deal to do: I daren’t join you. The carter is coming at dawn tomorrow and I must be ready for him. So much to pack – so little time to accomplish it in! Where are those scrapegrace children?’
She looked owlishly around the tiny room as if they might be lurking somewhere among the packing cases. ‘Charlie!’ she cried. ‘Where are you? Come: I need you to help me with the linens.’
‘I can help you and . . . I brought this for you,’ said Holcroft, and he stepped forward and offered her the half-crown, holding it out flat on his palm like a man feeding a horse a slice of apple.
‘Oh, you are a good boy,’ said Mary, seizing the coin and slipping it into a pocket of her apron. ‘I’m so pleased you’re doing well. Rising in the world. You’ll be a proper gentleman soon!’
‘Where is the baby?’ asked Holcroft. Mary stared at him. Her face, so animated a moment before, suddenly froze, then fell and she said with a weird calmness: ‘He died. He died on Wednesday last. We baptised him Neptune, for your father’s uncle, and just in time because, well, the next day I buried him . . . I buried my poorly little boy in St Leonard’s churchyard.’
Holcroft embraced her properly now, felt her melt into his chest and begin to weep bitter tears on his golden coat. He was dry-eyed himself; somehow he had known that the infant was not long for this world and if what the minister said was true, the mite would now be with the angels. So what was there to cry about? The baby was with God in Heaven, surely a better fate than enduring a miserable existence here in Cock Lane.
After a while he gently pushed his mother away from his chest, offered her a clean kerchief from his pocket and said: ‘Why are you packing, Mother? Where are you going? Has the landlord lost patience with us?’
His mother half-laughed through her snot and tears as she wiped her red eyes: ‘That lustful hound lost patience with us months ago but . . . but I came to an, ah, accommodation with him. No, it is my mother in Lancashire – you remember your Granny Maggie? We stayed there after – after Dublin. Well, she has been kind enough to invite us to come and bide with her for Christmas and the new year, Charles, Elizabeth and me. I didn’t ask for you or Tom; you’re almost full grown now and I thought you’d much rather stay with your nice duke. And Tom, well, as you know, we don’t see much of Tom these days; he’s always up to something with your father.’
She was composed by now and almost cheerful. ‘Your father came to see us a few days ago, did I tell you? In the dead of night like some creeping house-breaker. He’s had to go back into hiding, some bad business with that cruel old devil Ormonde, the man who had us tossed out from our lands in County Meath. You remember Sarney, Holly, and our lovely old house there? Or were you too young to recall?’
Holcroft remembered Sarney perfectly: a high, square, stone-built house, draughty and damp even in summer but surrounded by bright fields and clumps of shady woodland where he had spent hours at play with Tom, his other brothers or the local boys, or sometimes escaping from his noisy peers and wandering his father’s lands all alone and perfectly content.
He had been happy there but, at the age of seven, it had all been rudely swept away. They had all left the country house and moved into a low, cramped, wood-panelled set of rooms above a coffee house in the stinking and crowded streets of Dublin. It had been a shocking fall from grace. The Dublin apartments belonged to a grim Presbyterian schoolmaster who, while he could be terrifying when he flew into a rage about the new laws benefiting Catholics, or if he heard anyone speaking well of the recently restored King, had at least laid down a sound basis for Holcroft’s education during the year or so they had all lodged there. He and his brothers had been taught to read, mostly from the Bible, but also from numerous anti-Catholic tracts. The schoolmaster, William Leckie was his name, had instilled the basics of mathematics in Holcroft too and given him a smattering of French, law, philosophy and rhetoric – not that he would ever be much of a public speaker. It had taken a month of daily lessons before he had found the courage to speak a single word aloud to Leckie.
‘Will Father go with you to Granny Maggie’s house?’
‘Not him,’ Mary replied. ‘He’s got to stay out of sight, by which he means away from me, until all the fuss dies down. He’ll lie low for a few weeks; then he promises he’ll join us. But he can’t be too badly off – he gave me a golden guinea to pay the carter and fetch the children some decent victuals. Wasn’t that lovely of him? He’s such a good man at heart.’
Holcroft felt punctured. He had hoped that the half-crown he had given his mother would have made her bloom with happiness, but the knowledge that his father had given her eight times as much cast a shadow over his own generosity, made it seem paltry and, worse, an unnecessary sacrifice.
For the first time in his life Holcroft felt a flash of hatred for the old man. All those years of poverty and hunger, all those times when his mother had been humiliated not only by her lack of a visible spouse but also by the lack of means to buy a loaf of bread or a cup of milk for her children, when the dashing Colonel Blood had been absent, getting into scrapes, having to lie low again for a few weeks or months, challenging the law, the government, the world – and inevitably, constantly, losing to them – all that, and now he swooped in and presented his bedraggled wife with a gold coin and an empty promise, and Holcroft’s gesture was rendered meaningless.
Suddenly Holcroft hated his mother, too. Why did she allow herself to suffer this indignity? He was fairly sure that his father had other women, his two villainous friends had even made comments about it in his presence, yet his mother sat patiently at home, stomach empty, cupboard bare, shaking for lack of a drink, children wandering shoeless in the street, waiting for his father to come, waiting for him to love her again and make everything right.
‘I have to go,’ he said.
Mary Blood clutched his arm. ‘You said you would help me.’
‘I have to be some other place,’ he lied. Then he knew that what he said was strictly true. If he stayed a moment longer in this hovel, this place of silent desperation, with this haggard, drunken casualty of his father’s lust and lies, he would scream. Or hit someone. Maybe even his mother.
‘I will find Charles wherever he is and send him in to help you,’ he told her. Then he turned his back on his mother and walked out of the door.
*
Careless now of the street mud that splattered his shiny black shoes, white stockings and the hem of his golden coat, Holcroft ran the whole four miles from Shoreditch back to White Hall. After locating his younger brother and directing him homeward, he felt compelled to get back to his own home before dusk, and the December day was short. But more than that, it was an instinctive running, a running away from his mother’s misery as if it were a disease that might spread to him. He also had a longing, a craving almost, to sit in the Privy Garden – the King’s elegant pleasure ground, which was situated between The Street and the royal apartments – before it got dark.
The Privy Garden was a place of imposing bronze and marble statues and neat squares of mown grass. It was a place of order and quiet, which had once been reserved for His Majesty’s personal use, but now was frequented by many of the grandees of the court and a favourite location for lovers’ trysts – even more scandalously, it was occasionally used as a place to hang drying laundry. Holcroft had no desire for either of these activities. He merely wanted to sit alone as the dusk gathered, in the security of its neat geometrical layout and gaze upon the King’s new sundial, a marvellous candelabra-like contraption nearly ten foot high made of brass, stone, wood and gilded ironwork.
The sundial held nine glass spheres on extending arms that depicted the earth, moon and the planets and had
two hundred and seventy different dials – Holcroft had counted every one of them. It showed not only the hours of the day but many other things devoted to astronomy and astrology, that Holcroft did not fully understand. He loved it nonetheless. It did not lie. Or weep. It did not tell jokes. It merely told you what hour it was and whether the moon would be full and which constellations might be seen in the night sky.
Holcroft arrived at the sundial, hot and breathless, his side aching from the unaccustomed exertion. He had devoutly hoped that he would be alone there – for all its semi-public status the Privy Garden was often deserted, particularly in winter – but he was to be disappointed. There were more than a few solitary people walking in the gardens in the last hour of sunlight and, worse than that, a young man and an older woman were seated on a stone bench before the majesty of the sundial, both rapt in contemplation of its mechanical beauty. Holcroft approached cautiously, unwilling to break the spell of their intimacy, but equally unwilling to cede his usual place on the stone bench to these interlopers. He stopped about ten yards away and contented himself with glaring at their backs.
Then the man turned, as if he sensed that he was being watched, and Holcroft saw that it was the soldier from the gatehouse from his first day: his friend Jack Churchill.
If the ensign of the King’s Foot Guards objected to being gawped at by a lowly page while he enjoyed a private hour with his lady-friend, he did not show it. Indeed, on seeing the boy he rose gracefully from the seat and said, ‘Good evening, Holcroft, I wondered when I’d run into you again. I trust you are quite well?’
Holcroft smiled at him, his former pique quite forgotten in the pleasure of seeing Jack again. ‘Very well, sir, as I hope are you.’
‘May I present to you my cousin Barbara Villiers, the newly made Baroness Nonsuch, Countess of Southampton and Duchess of Cleveland.’ Holcroft saw that the lady grasped a short white stick that held up a vizard, a small black velvet mask decorated with clusters of emeralds, before her face. He had seen ladies of fashion about London toying with these devices to hide their identity and add an air of coquettish mystery.
‘This is my young friend Mister Holcroft Blood, who is a new page in the Duke of Buckingham’s service.’
‘No longer a page,’ said Holcroft proudly. ‘I am now His Grace’s confidential clerk.’
‘So, you begin to rise already. Bravo, my young friend, you will finish up a duke yourself one day, just like your master!’
‘How do you like the Duke of Buckingham’s service?’ asked the lady, casually sweeping the vizard away to one side to reveal her face. ‘My Cousin Georgie can be a taskmaster, I fear, and brusque when he is out of humour.’
With the mask gone, Holcroft saw that she was quite as beautiful as her male companion: a great pile of luxuriant chestnut hair under a broad straw hat, the violet shade of which perfectly matched her slightly slanting, heavy-lidded eyes. She had a black diamond-shaped beauty spot below her left eye and an elaborate spot in the shape of a tiny coach and horses under her right cheekbone, which seemed to be dashing down towards the corner of her mouth. She was very tall, yet her long body was also voluptuous, perfectly in proportion and clad in a shimmering silvery-gold silk gown and a blue silk mantle. She smiled at him and Holcroft was instantly smitten. He had never been so close to someone with so much power over the onlooker. And while she must have been nearly thirty, she still had the effortless ability to command a young man’s full attention. By the time Holcroft had recovered from the shock of her beauty he had almost forgotten her question.
‘It is . . . it is not at all what I expected,’ he said. ‘I had thought that I would be fetching and carrying, delivering messages about the town, perhaps tidying his apartments. But instead, I spend most of my time writing letters for His Grace, or copying his rough notes out into . . .’ He stopped. He had been about to speak of the code but a part of his mind told him that the duke would take this ill. ‘. . . a fair copy,’ he finished lamely and looked down at his mud-splashed shoes, suddenly overcome with a raw shyness.
He knew who she was, of course. Albert St John had told him all about the King’s legendary mistress: Barbara Villiers, the woman who had given him five bastards, all of whom the King had graciously acknowledged as his own. Yet Holcroft had also heard rumours that she was being supplanted in the King’s affections by the actress Nell Gywn, a woman ten years younger.
‘I am sure he must be pleased to have such a diligent and, dare I say, handsome young man to serve him,’ said Barbara. ‘No wonder he has made you his confidential clerk.’ Holcroft looked up at her and smiled.
‘You look as if you have travelled far today,’ said Jack.
‘I went to see my mother at Shoreditch. I had not seen her once since I came here.’
‘I trust she is flourishing – and proud of you.’
‘She was drunk again.’
There was a slightly uncomfortable pause.
‘We have been abroad today, too,’ said the lady. ‘Jack and I went to see the unicorn at the Tower.’
Holcroft looked up at her in wonder. ‘Did you truly see a unicorn?’
‘It was no true unicorn,’ snorted Jack. ‘It was merely a grumpy old rhinoceros – I saw a similar beast in Tangiers in the sultan’s menagerie. We did see a lion, a mangy brute and toothless, but definitely a lion, and a huge white bear from Norway half-mad from boredom. A very sad creature.’
‘I believe it was a true unicorn,’ said Barbara firmly and Holcroft felt a little shaft of envy when he saw how Jack smiled lovingly at her and she returned the look. They were more than mere cousins, no doubt about that.
‘We also saw the jewels,’ said Barbara, fingering a string of fat pearls around her own slim neck. ‘They are locked up tight in the Irish Tower, of course, but Jack slipped the keeper a shilling or two and we were allowed to view them privily. Quite magnificent! The crown of Saint Edward, the Imperial State Crown, which contains the Black Prince’s Ruby – it really is the size of a hen’s egg, you know’ She held up a her thumb and index finger two inches apart to show him. ‘We saw the golden orb of state, the royal sceptre, too, golden salt cellars, golden plates and cups, diamonds, rubies, jewel-encrusted swords and spurs. And so much more besides, I felt quite overwhelmed by the presence of so much royal splendour.’
‘This is the King’s treasure?’ asked Holcroft.
‘Oh yes. The Crown Jewels of England,’ she replied, her eyes glowing with pleasure.
‘Does the King ever put them on?’
‘Not since his coronation nine years ago,’ Jack told him.
‘Then what is the use of them?’
‘They are very beautiful,’ said Barbara, ‘and some shallow souls might see that as a great virtue all in itself . . .’
‘Oh yes indeed,’ said Jack, smiling. ‘I most certainly do.’
‘. . . and they are also worth a great deal of money – as much as a hundred thousand pounds, some say.’
Holcroft said nothing. Just like you, he thought, beautiful and useless and worth a great deal of money. Despite his exposure to the duke’s secret letters and their talk of vast subsidies, his mind could not readily encompass a set of ceremonial baubles worth a hundred thousand pounds; a sum that it would take him five thousand years to earn on his present – and very generous – clerk’s salary.
A church bell began to toll from the chapel to the northeast of the Privy Garden. ‘I am sorry,’ said Barbara, ‘but I must go. I promised Father William that I’d attend a Mass this evening – for the good of my soul.’
Holcroft had not known she was a Catholic and the shock must have shown on his face. She gave him an amused look under her heavy eyelids and another little smile that hollowed out his heart. ‘But I am not always so pious, you know, sir. Quite the opposite, in fact. Indeed, I have private apartments off the Stone Gallery yonder, the white door at the end of the yellow gallery, and the King does not choose take up so much of my time these days.
Perhaps, when you are at leisure, you might come and pay me a visit – for a dish of tea. You could tell me all about yourself.’
‘I shall escort you to your Romish rite, my dear,’ said Jack, ‘before you put your soul at risk with any more sinful ideas than a dish of tea.’ He grinned crookedly at Holcroft, and raised one eyebrow. It was a jokily conspiratorial look that irritated the boy. He wished the young soldier was a little more jealous about the invitation that this lady had extended to him.
‘I’ll bid you good evening, my friend,’ said Jack as he and Barbara, vizard once more in place in front of her beautiful face, glided away towards the Stone Gallery on the eastern side of the court. ‘I hope to see you about the palace again soon,’ Jack called over his shoulder and gave a little wave.
When they had disappeared into the gloaming, Holcroft felt strangely bereft. He was a buffle-head, he told himself. She was the King’s mistress and probably Jack’s too, and not for the likes of him. He would not visit her – not for a dish of tea or for any other reason. To calm his mind, he sat down on the bench, let out a breath and began to contemplate the perfect sundial.
*
Holcroft looked approvingly at the fir-tree-shaped device, admiring the planetary spheres of glass on their moveable arms, decreasing regularly and pleasingly in size as they rose higher up towards the apex. After a while he got up and walked around the dial, and studied the enamel panels on four sides that depicted the King and Queen Catherine on the front and the Duke of York, the Queen Mother Henrietta-Maria and Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the King’s war-hero cousin, on the other three sides.
Albert St John had told him that this magnificent object was a symbol of royalty, of the King’s family, of their place at the centre of his realms, and of the world itself, but Holcroft did not see how a structure of brass and steel, no matter how elegant, could be the same as a living family of flesh, blood and bone. Nevertheless, he knew that it was due a certain reverence, so he carefully examined the pictures, bending down to peer at them in the gloom, noting that the King looked rightly magisterial with his golden sceptre in his right hand and his queen perfect and lovely. He studied the intricate gilt-work on moveable arms, admired the glass planets and, of course, the dials themselves – although it was now too dark to tell the hour.