The Duchess keeps the keys herself.
Oh I am sure she is past caring for such matters.
I will inquire.
Do not trouble, this is a woman’s matter. I will inquire myself.
Wait a moment, if you would.
And I was as quick out of my chair as a flushed partridge that I might reach the door to Nan’s chamber before Lady Ogle.
Nan was herself half-asleep, but I saw the keys firmly grasped in her fist.
Lady Ogle requests the keys to the jewel cabinet for her daughter, I said.
Nan did not speak but shook her head twice and clasped the keys more firmly.
I returned to Lady Ogle, and said that Her Grace was unable to let her have the keys and would in my opinion surrender them only to her son.
Fiddlesticks, said Lady Ogle, and went off downstairs.
Twenty minutes later, up comes Kit sweating and flushed.
Where are the keys, Jem?
Keys?
You know which keys.
Your mother has them.
He went in.
He came out carrying the keys.
A fortnight later, she died as quiet as her husband. I went in to her to kiss her one last time. The pale waxen figure was a stranger’s. I remember only how grey her hair had grown as though death had silvered it overnight (it was only that she had ceased to dye it).
I stood beside her bed and prepared to weep for her, as her waiting-women (Mrs Lascelles and the other one that limped) were already weeping. Yet my ducts were dry as a river-bed in the desert. Indeed my whole being was dried up and withered so that I could scarce breathe and I coughed as though I was an Asthmatique which I never had been. Nor could I speak, even had I words to say.
Then, I remember thinking to myself, how should this be? When my mother died, in the year before the Great Plague, I thought little of it, for we had met but once since I had joined the service of the State, yet I wept easily enough, and for my father too who had predeceased her, but less so, for he was only a dull farmer, no more worth grieving over than a tree that had got the scab. Yet for Nan, no tears.
Go now, sir, you are tired, the waiting-woman said. You must sleep.
Then in my little narrow bed that had been poor Peter Llewelyn’s before me (he had sold it me for 5s though it fitted his miniature frame but not mine), there at last I began to shed tears, not so much for Nan as for myself, no, for both of us, but more for me. For she had triumphed over her low birth, over the whispers against her chastity and the lawfulness of her marriage (it was said that as she lay dying old Radford had been seen skulking round the back-stairs of the Cockpit), over the contumely of the Court. She had served her husband loyally and faithfully – well, after her fashion – and she had served me – ah how she had served me. Through my tears, I remembered our first meetings at the Gypsies and the Turk’s-head knocker behind and the night when we had decked ourselves with her jewels though we were naked and many another night under the great fur coverlet that was a gift from the Muscovy merchants. She had melted my frozen heart and taught me the fluent habits of affection. At times, I was angry with her that she had degraded me to a servant and had betrayed her promises of advancement. Yet I was proud to serve her, and when I stood before her at some great banquet of State and bowed even as she curtsied to the King or the Duke of York, I was happy and thought that to be in her service was no more than the minstrels of old Provence had prized as their dearest wish on this earth.
She was not admired as a beauty – Pepys had spoken of her once as ugly – yet she had more true beauty than all the sickly ladies of the Court, for every atom of her being was instinct with life. Yet – this was ironical – now that life had ebbed from her, she was beautiful in that classical sense also, for her colour had fled and her cheeks were of alabaster, her brow ivory, and the last wrinkle had vanished from her face. Only her hair was grey.
My tears ran down my chest, and I shifted in the bed to dry them upon the bedsheet, when I found that these inward memorials had stirred my flesh. At first this rising seemed an impious recreant impulse. Then I thought, well, at least I shall sleep. Then I thought, Nan would say, go on, do this in remembrance of me (for she had a free tongue when the old General was not by). So I did it, and I slept. It was a final salutation.
The next morning, the tortoiseshell cabinet was taken down to the chamber that had been prepared for the new Duke and Duchess, and they spent most of that day trying the jewels, for Nan had a collection that was second only to the King’s.
Meanwhile the old Duke’s body lay unburied, unvisited, rotting, at Somerset House. Nan died almost a month after him but was buried two months before him. After she was buried, I crawled from one tavern to the next to souse my sorrow, and when I came back to the Cockpit, I preferred to lie downstairs on two old bolsters in the dusty linen store where Nan had kissed me once, for my own chamber was too near the young couple’s, and I did not care to hear the noises of their pleasure that were so like and yet unlike the last groans of their predecessors dying.
The time came when even that dallying Court was ready to bury its last hero, though the leaves were already on the trees again by the time the procession set out from Somerset House. It was the greatest funeral known to history save that of kings and queens.
First marched the troops of the guards with the Coldstreams at their head, as having been the General’s own regiment, all in excellent funeral order. Then a train of poor men in mourning gowns with their conductor. Then trumpets and heralds and banners, and the principal officers of the King’s house, bearing white staves; barons, bishops and earls.
Then came the great banner, the horse caparisoned with black velvet; then an open chariot covered with black velvet and a canopy of the same, in which lay the effigy of the Duke in azure armour (the body itself went privately by water to the Abbey), a golden truncheon in his hand, having on his ducal robe and coronet, a collar of the order about his neck and a garter on his left leg; the chariot drawn by six horses caparisoned with velvet, with escutcheons, chafferoons and plumes. The Poele was supported by three barons and the Treasurer of His Majesty’s Household and on each side of the chariot were carried five banner-rolls of arms of the Duke’s paternal descent. Next after the chariot came Garter principal King of Arms with a gentleman-usher preceding His Grace the present Duke of Albemarle, the chief mourner.
The gentleman-usher was I.
After his mother’s funeral, Kit had said to me:
Now, Jem, you’ve got no one to serve. So I had better take you, for no one else will.
Oh, I said.
Well?
Yes, I am obliged to Your Lordship.
Grace, Jem, Your Grace.
Just so, Your Grace.
It’s our turn now.
So it is, I said.
VII
The Hospital
SHE IS DEAD, you know.
Yes I know, how should I not know? She was the one love of my life, Will, and I was with her to the end.
I never knew that. I had thought her faithful.
And so she was, oh so faithful – and I began to weep.
I did not see you at the funeral, Will said.
What funeral? She isn’t buried yet, the King won’t appoint a date.
The King? Jem, I am talking of Mrs Pepys.
Mrs Pepys?
Yes, she died in November, of a fever. They had made a journey, to Holland and Paris, so that she might see her old haunts, and she took a fever in Flanders when they were coming back and died at home three weeks after. She wasn’t yet thirty. I didn’t know you were so warm toward her.
She – but I could not think what to say, for I repented of my earlier confession, that I had loved Nan, because I did not wish Kit to know of it and to tell a secret to Will Symons (if he should understand it) was to tell the town crier. And I was struck dumb to hear that Elizabeth was dead too. I felt as though I were a ghost wandering a graveyard and upon every tombstone was c
arved the name of one I had loved.
But Will had no patience with lacrimosities. He had lost his own wife so long before and his heart was now adamant.
She was a handsome woman, he said. Too good for Master Pepys. I hear he is broken-hearted, and remorseful too, I trust, for he used her shamefully.
He did, he did, I said. And to my mind came the image of his pure young wife resisting my clumsy approaches, then, simul, of his joggling buttocks in Fleet Alley, and I wept again, for all the imperfections of this world.
Come, come, Jem, no more blubbering. Think on the bright aspect of the matter. Pepys is weak and griefful now. He survived the Committee for Miscarriages, but the Committee for Accounts will be too much for him. Once they have the evidence, Jem, the evidence will do for him.
What evidence? I said, but listlessly.
Carcase, Jem, he’s the key that will unlock the door.
He’s a madman.
I have rehearsed him thoroughly. And being the Clerk to the Committee I can have him shut off when he is prolix and lead him back when he strays.
He’s a madman and –
Hush, here he comes now. Be gentle to him, for he is easily downcast.
Not easily enough, I muttered, as the bedrabbled figure stumbled across the tavern floor, knocking against the other topers as he came. He looked like a scarecrow that had been left out in a ploughed field all night, but his yellow eyes were alight with triumph.
I have the ticket, boys, I have the ticket – and he waved a stained old sheet of paper.
Hush, Mr Carcase, sir, do you want the whole world to hear?
Look, there, to John Capps of the HMS Lion seven pounds ten shillings and there – that is the hand of Carteret’s clerk – ‘paid to Mr Pepys’. He’ll deny it but there it is, ticket-broking plain as a pikestaff. He’ll go to the Tower for it, sure as –
Now, now, Mr Carcase, stop waving it around like a prick in a bawdy house and give it to me and I’ll deliver it to Lord Brereton.
You’ll let me testify, won’t you? I have so much to tell.
Now then, sir, you shall testify but you must take direction, you must not wander.
I looked at the stained and tattered piece of paper as Carcase handed it to Will who shut it away in the little satchel he carried his papers in. Could so mean a paper destroy a man? Could this shrivelled unsteady creature really break the Secretary to the Navy? Well, stranger things had happened.
But I could not be there to hear the outcome. My new master was whirling about the country to view his estates, which were vast and multitudinous, for the old Duke had squirrelled away every acorn that rolled into his path. New Hall was but the seat principal. There was the royal park at Theobalds, and Norton Disney, Lincs, and the ancient Monck demesne of Potheridge in Devonshire, and Midgeham Hall with its tide mills, and Moore Park near Windsor which the King had later, and Grindon Manor in Staffordshire that came with Elizabeth Cavendish, and half a dozen more that we scarce knew the names of.
They say Ormonde and Buckingham have more, but I’m the third subject in the kingdom, the Brat said, you’re fortunate to be in my service, Jem. This afternoon we’ll course the greyhounds. They want exercise. Monmouth has a dog that he wants to match against mine.
He talked only of dukes now that he was one, and although he had not reached his eighteenth birthday, he looked nearer my age than his.
Yet I cannot say that I hated him, for he guided me through a realm of pleasure that I had not known of, and wherever he went his lightest whim was jumped to, for every servant wishes to endear himself to a new master, knowing that if he be not turned off at the beginning he may well survive till the end.
We went first to Devonshire where his aunts lived. The weather was wet and windy and the ground had turned to a red mire. Kit (I shall call him the Brat no more in deference to his new dignity) took it into his head that the two villages which were his (Potheridge and I forget the other) should play at football.
You shall be the captain of one, Jem, and I of the other.
Sir, you forget I limp still from having broken my leg with your father in the Dutch war.
God, man, I didn’t mean that we should play with these varlets. I’ll have a platform built that we may judge the match.
His woodmen put up a dais of plank and canvas above the road between the two villages, and we and the young Duchess and the aunts and their people sat upon it, while the muddy bodies, fifty of them to each side, pushed and kicked each other. At the outset, they had worn white and blue favours to distinguish them but after half an hour all were obscured by the red mud.
Isn’t this great sport? Kit bellowed, to make himself heard above the noise of the rain upon the canvas canopy.
I would rather be indoors, my lord, his wife said, she being a pale and peaking thing.
Look, there goes the ball, he shouted, paying her no heed at all.
And there was the muddy bladder, sneaking out of the ruck down the hill like a fox stealing out of a covert while the hounds are all faced the other way.
After her, boys, after her – and he leapt down from the platform and charged down the field, giving the ball a mighty kick which sent it soaring high into the leaden sky. And fearing to seem deficient in sportful spirit, I limped after him but was overtaken by the besmirched throng and trampled to the ground with my face down in the mud.
Such was the introduction to my new life which was to be one unbroken riot of sport: wrestling (in both the Northern and the Grecian mode), coursing after hares, hunting wildfowl in the flat boats of the Fenland, more football, hawking on the Essex plain, and above all else racing and gambling on Newmarket Heath which was for Kit a veritable Paradiso. And indeed it was pleasant to rise early at New Hall and trot along the lanes while the frost of morning dispersed the fumes of last night’s wine. At Saffron Walden or Chesterford, we would change horses. Before dusk, we would come down the straight old Roman road into Newmarket where you never saw such fine carriages or such ladies tossing their heads as if they too were pure-bred like the horses, which they were not. In that confusion of nobility, with my height and carriage, I passed off well enough as a minor gentleman of the Court and took my share of the beauties that were displayed. Ah such a curve of breast, such swan-like necks, ivory and alabaster alighting from gilded coaches, the smiles beneath the nodding plumes, the high-stepping racing horses with bright sheen on their quarters, the click of cards at the tables, the windows thrown open to the starlight when the room grew hot, the noise of hooves trotting off to greet the dawn. None who did not know Newmarket in the first years of its splendour has known what true pleasure is.
But there were days after the racing and gaming when even Newmarket staled and we must stare out of the windows to see nothing but the rain and the flat ground and the cabbages growing. Then was the prince among men the one who knew how to entertain the King with a lewd jest or a masque made impromptu or – a sermon.
We sat in the long hall, I think it was at Lord Cornwallis’s, on such a dreary Sunday afternoon, when a minister, a tall man in gown and bands and spectacles, came in and begged leave that he might make the King a sermon. Picture the fellow rolling his eyes and sniffing and snuffling like the Puritan preachers that pour hellfire down upon their congregations.
My text, dearly beloved, he began, is divided into three parts. First, a lewd woman is a sinful temptation. Second, her eyes are the snares of Satan. Third, her flesh is the mousetrap of iniquity.
The King began to smile.
The conversation of a lewd woman is dangerous, for she flatters with her tongue and charms with her tail till her languishing looks and lecherous kisses have roused up the devil in the flesh. There then arises a hurly-burly in nature. He embraces the temptation in his arms, and casting her on a couch full of crackling infirmities she tussles, he bustles, the couch shrieks out to discover the baseness they are acting – But alas! it being in the tents of the wicked, nobody will hear till they have glutted their so
uls with forbidden fruit and sowed their polluted seed amongst the thorns of abomination.
The King was laughing now, and even the slower gentlemen had begun to smile. The fellow whoever he was had so well caught the ranting manner of the Puritan.
I shall now proceed to the second part of my text, viz. her eyes are the snares of Satan. That is, my friend, they are the deluding baits which first influence your frail natures by their pinking and winking, their rambling and rolling, their long and languishing motion. They are the very allurements with which Satan baits his mousetrap of iniquity; this is the ignis fatuus that leads you into dark pits, stinking bottomless pools, and filthy water-gaps of destruction.
They had ceased smiling now, so powerful was the preacher’s denunciations. But with a swirl of his gown and a pointing of his bony finger at his royal hearers, he went on:
I come now to the third and last part, wherein I shall endeavour to handle the mousetrap of iniquity, which I fear, dearly beloved, you have all been handling before me . . .
– at which the entire company broke out laughing.
. . . This trap of Satan lies hid like a coney burrow in the warren of wickedness between the supporters of human frailty, covered over with the fuzzes of frailty which grow on the very cleft of abomination. A lewd woman, beloved, I say is this warren of wickedness; therefore let not her eyes entice you to be fingering the fuzzes which grow in the cleft of abomination, lest Satan thrust you headlong into the mousetrap of iniquity.
Thus shall I conclude with all my hearty wishes for the congregation here present. May Providence hedge you and ditch you with His mercy and send His dung-carts to fetch away the filthiness from among you, that you may enter undefiled into the congregation of the righteous. A – a – men.
At which conclusion the preacher took off his spectacles and his cap and revealed himself to be – the Duke of Buckingham, that chemist, republican and reprobate who cared naught for God or man and least of all for the King whom he played with and tickled as one does a child or a kitten. But when he set the table on a roar, the King was the first to applaud and none of us dared be the last.
Jem (and Sam) Page 25