Acknowledgements
I’ve been in love with Henrietta-Anne Stuart for as long as I can remember, first drawn like a moth to a flame by the impertinent little Mignard portrait of her on the front of my grandmother’s copy of Royal Flush by Margaret Irwin and then utterly besotted once I was able to learn the details of her short sad life for myself.
This book was originally intended to be one big gorgeous retelling of her life but as its size became increasingly untenable I made the decision to make it the first of two, with the first looking at Minette’s early life as the Stuart Cinderella and the second concentrating on her short but exceedingly dramatic career as the Duchesse d’Orléans or rather Madame, the third lady of Louis XIV’s opulent court.
I’ve immersed myself in the life and times of Minette, Charles II, their family, friends and, occasionally, enemies while writing this book - particularly enjoying Alison Morton’s book about Henrietta Maria; Antonia Fraser’s books about Charles II and Louis XIV; Bryan Bevan’s Charles II’s Minette; Ruth Norrington’s superb My Dearest Minette: Letters between Charles II and his sister, the Duchesse d’Orléans; A Gambling Man by Jenny Uglow; Ian Dunlop’s Louis XIV and Royal Palaces of France; The Sun King by Nancy Mitford; Athénaïs by Lisa Hilton; The Winter Queen by Carola Oman; Versailles by Tony Spawforth; Daughter of France by Vita Sackville-West and The Kings’ Mistresses by Elizabeth C. Goldsmith among several others.
I’d like to give thanks to my husband and sons for their mostly unfailing support; the readers of my blog for their kindness and cheerleading skills as I worked on this project; my favourite band Mesh for unknowingly providing the soundtrack for my writing endeavours, Paris for being its lovely self; Lucy Worsley and Tim from the Historic Royal Palaces; GIN and last but not least my readers for being absolutely amazing.
About the Author
Melanie Clegg is a blue haired art history graduate, casual historian, GIN taster, lapsed goth, failed Parisienne, Versailles obsessive, proud Ripperologist, Georgette Heyer fanatic and Victorian Prostitute re-enactor who lives in deepest darkest Bristol with her family.
Melanie is now working on the sequels to Minette and From Whitechapel and a novel about the German WWII heroine Sophie Scholl.
You can find out more by visiting Melanie's popular art, history and writing blog at www.madameguillotine.org.uk.
Melanie’s latest book, From Whitechapel, a tale of bittersweet love, loss and redemption set against the infamous crimes of Jack the Ripper in the autumn of 1888 is out now.
Chapter One, Emma, Calais, August 1887
I knew at the time that I should never have looked out of that window. In fact, I could kick myself now when I think about it. It was Marie’s idea of course, just like everything else, good, bad and downright awful, that happened to us both that long hot filthy summer at Madame Lisette’s and, knowing that, I really should have known how things would be as soon as my friend, for that’s what I thought she was back then, pulled the grimy red velvet curtain aside and gave a theatrical gasp of shocked surprise, the one that made the other girls, the silly cows, say that she really ought to be on the stage instead of making a living on her back.
‘Come and see this, Em.’ She leaned heavily against the dirty glass, her gin scented breath steaming up the cracked and mould covered pane so that she had to scrub at it squeakily with her black lace mittened hand to be able to see again. ‘What’s that thing down there?’ She demanded in a dramatic whisper, screwing up her freckled face as she peered into the gloom. ‘Can you see what it is?’
She impatiently beckoned me over and I rolled my eyes but still rather thankfully put aside the red woollen stockings that I was clumsily darning and went to the window, expecting to see nothing more remarkable than some cats having a fight or a drunk fast asleep and snoring noisily on the doorstep while a dark little puddle of urine spread silently around his feet. Life was boring as hell at Madame Lisette’s, when we weren’t on our backs anyway, and even then, it could be a chore pretending to look interested when all the while we were thinking about what to have for dinner or totalling up how much money we’d made that day and wondering if it would stretch to a new pair of gloves and maybe some stockings too.
‘Look there.’ Marie pointed, squashing her finger flat against the window and I heaved a great sigh and looked into the yard, preparing myself to be thoroughly underwhelmed. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness but I instantly wished it had been something as ordinary as fighting cats or a passed out drunk when I finally made out the two figures, a man wearing a cloth cap and a woman with fair straggling hair, struggling frantically on the slippery, rain slicked cobbles of the yard.
‘They’ve got a bit of a cheek doing that down there,’ Marie observed with an angry sniff, turning her head to the side as she tried to make out what was happening down below. ‘Taking bread out of our mouths, she is.’
‘Maybe it’s one of our girls,’ I said uneasily, thinking that there was something wrong, that the woman’s feet drumming and kicking against the cobbles and her muffled squawks of alarm had little to do with the feigned passion that Marie and I both knew so well and, in fact, specialised in. ‘Do you think we should go down and see if she needs help?’ I said doubtfully, wondering why the woman had agreed to lie down on the wet cobbles when it would have been dryer and easier by far to do the business standing up in a nearby alleyway.
‘Not a chance,’ Marie scoffed. ‘And get an earful for scaring off her client? Business isn’t exactly booming right now, is it?’
‘I’m glad of the rest,’ I said with a sigh, tossing back my hair, which I had spent the best part of the day painstakingly bleaching with ammonia and rinsed with dye to make it even more brassily yellow and which still clung in damp annoying tendrils to my neck. ‘The hot weather does something terrible to men, doesn’t it?’ There’d been a heat wave a few weeks back and we’d spent most of our days exhaustedly entertaining one gentleman after another in the sweltering little rooms, painted pink and stinking cloyingly of musk and roses, at the back of the house. It was a blessed relief when the weather finally broke and the rain came thick and fast, thudding against the rattling window panes and drumming noisily on the roof tiles above our heads, clearing the air and driving all the men away.
‘Look there.’ Marie grabbed at my arm in genuine alarm, sinking her fingers into my flesh so that I yelped with pain. ‘He’s got a knife.’ We both stared in horror as the blade flashed once and then again in the dim light cast by the sliver of moon high above and the woman’s feet became ominously still.
‘What should we do?’ I whispered, licking my lips and clearing my throat which had suddenly gone completely dry. I looked at Marie and with a certain grim satisfaction saw that for once she was struck dumb and pale with fright, which made her freckles stand out like brown lace on her face. ‘Should we go down there and see him off?’
Marie stared at me, working her mouth angrily as she tried to find the right words. ‘Are you completely off your head?’ she said at last, gripping my arm even tighter and enunciating each word coldly and carefully from between gritted, chattering teeth. ‘He’s. Got. A. Knife.’
I shook her off and even as Marie flung out a hand to stop me, I’d forced up the window and shouted ‘Murder!’ as loudly as I could down into the yard. The man paused and I caught my breath, my heart lurching in terror as he looked back up over his shoulder at our window before carefully pulling down the woman’s disordered skirts which had been lifted to just above her hips and wiping his hands on them. ‘Murder!’ I shouted again, more shakily this time but louder as he calmly got to his feet and walked briskly away, tucking his bloody knife into an inside pocket as he went.
‘If we go out now, we can still catch him,’ I said, rushing to the door, pausing only to throw a tatty silk shawl over my corset and white chemise. I planned to run down to the porters downstairs, four taciturn and burly local men, who were employed to act as both doormen and protec
tors of the poor geese working upstairs but before I could leave the room, Marie had planted herself in front of the door and was staring at me with her mouth hanging wide open. ‘What did you do that for?’ she demanded shrilly, sounding more Irish than ever despite all her pains to hide her real accent. ‘The silly cow was already done for so why did you have to go and let him know that we had seen him?’ She was trembling with fury. ‘You could have sent one of the men out to him. They’d have known what to do.’
I stared back at her. ‘I couldn’t just stand there and do nothing,’ I said, flustered. ‘That poor woman...’
‘Never mind that poor woman,’ Marie snapped, interrupting me. ‘What about us? I bet he clocked a right old view of the pair of us standing there at the window like a pair of lemons. What’s to stop him coming back for us one day?’
‘Why would he?’ I asked, but my mouth was suddenly so dry that my voice came out as a pathetic squeak of panic. ‘I could hardly see anything of him so I doubt he could see either of us clearly.’
‘You willing to stay here and take that chance are you?’ Marie shouted at me, her hands on her hips and cheeks flushed with anger. ‘You happy to stay here in this stinking hovel and wait for him to come for us with his knife?’ She stormed across the room and dragged her battered brown trunk out from beneath her bed then started flinging clothes into it. I noticed one of my own new dresses get dumped inside but decided to hold my tongue and quietly retrieve it later on. ‘You can do as you please but I’m not hanging about this bloody place, waiting to be murdered!’
‘Oh for God’s sake.’ I pulled the door open and gathered my thin nightdress around me before hurrying down the rickety stairs to the porters’ tiny parlour below, which was thick with smoke and the stink of rum as the men played cards on the beer stained table in the middle of the room. ‘There’s been a murder,’ I gasped as still holding their cards, they stared up at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Une femme mort!’ I tried again, remembering that their grasp of the English language was somewhat imperfect. ‘Maintenant, dans le yard. Elle est murdered.’ I drew my finger across my throat. That they understood and immediately they pushed back their chairs, which fell onto the grubby tiled floor with a clatter then rushed past me down the corridor to the yard door.
‘What’s this bloody racket about?’ I gave a guilty start as Madame Lisette herself appeared at the top of the stairs, a flamboyantly patterned Chinese silk dressing gown wrapped around her generous figure and her brassy blonde hair hanging in tangled ringlets around her face. Without the deceiving layers of rouge, kohl, powder and paint that she applied with a heavy but practiced hand every morning, she was grey faced and piggy eyed with exhaustion. ‘Emma,’ she said with resignation when she saw me standing trembling with fright in the hall. ‘I might have known you’d be involved somehow.’ She hurried down the stairs and I took a step back as her heavy musky scent did battle then resoundingly defeated the pungent fumes from the men’s abandoned cigars which lay carelessly on the table amidst the piles of cards and grimy coins. I wistfully thought about sneaking a few of the coins into my corset but then reminded myself that the porters were as sharp as tacks and had broken dozens of fingers and noses for far less.
‘There’s been a murder in the yard out back, Madame,’ I said, stepping aside and pointing to show where the men had gone. The door was still open and the cold air was creeping towards us, making me wish that I’d put on a coat before dashing downstairs ‘The porters have gone out to see.’
Madame Lisette stared at me. ‘A murder?’ she snapped, the refined almost caressing accent that she so carefully cultivated vanishing at once to be replaced by broad Bristol tones. ‘In our yard?’ A board creaked on the stairs and we both looked up to see Marie standing at the top, her eyes round with fright and a pair of bright green stockings hanging from her hands. ‘Oh, here she is,’ Madame said, rolling her brown eyes. ‘I suppose you know all about it, don’t you. Always poking your bleeding nose in where it isn’t wanted. I knew it was a mistake to take you two sluts on.’ She didn’t wait for a reply but sailed on down the corridor and out through the door.
‘Still leaving are you?’ I whispered to Marie as she came down the stairs.
‘Course I am, but I heard Lisette ranting on at you and thought I’d see what was happening first.’ We were creeping quietly down the corridor now and could hear voices in the yard as Madame hissed instructions at the porters in fluent French. Oh, don’t be fooled. Despite the name, Madame Lisette was about as French as Queen Victoria but she’d done well for herself when she landed up in Calais and decided to set up a knocking shop there, catering mainly for passing English gentlemen but also any locals who fancied an occasional bit of English meat and had plenty of spare money to pay for it.
Once a year, Madame took the trip back across the Channel to London and discreetly scoured the brothels of the West End for disaffected girls who fancied a new silk dress and a free trip to France. That’s how she found Marie and me. We were both working at an extremely elegant establishment on Jermyn Street when Madame Lisette stepped out of the shadows one day and put her glossy calling cards into our unwilling hands as we walked down to Hyde Park in our best silk frocks and bonnets to gawp at the fashionable ladies in their swanky carriages and be seen by all the gentlemen.
‘Haven’t I been saying that I want a change of scenery?’ Marie said, her Irish accent lilting and her eyes round and misty as she fingered the flimsy card and daydreamed of the Eiffel Tower and handsome French men with glossy black moustaches. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Paris.’
I snorted. ‘She didn’t say Paris,’ I pointed out as she gave me an annoyed look. ‘She said Calais.’ I looked doubtfully down at the embossed card in my hand, which had ‘Madame Lisette’s Establishment of Young Ladies’ scrawled across the middle in curly black writing and a cluster of lurid purple pansies printed on the corner. ‘I’m not sure about this, Marie,’ I said doubtfully. ‘My Mam always said that if something seems to good to be true then it probably is.’
‘Well, you can do as you please,’ my friend said with a laugh and a little dance that showed off her pretty ankles and attracted admiring looks from a group of passing gentlemen. ‘I’m off to France!’
I remembered all of this as we crept silently down the corridor to the yard, where Lisette was bending over the body that still lay spreadeagled on the cobbles. ‘She’ll have to be disposed of,’ she was saying in brisk English to someone who was standing just out of sight. ‘We can’t have word of this getting out. Business is already bad enough without my girls getting ripped apart like bags of grain on our own doorstep.’
Marie and I looked at each other in horror - so it was one of our lot after all. I craned my neck, trying to see who the dead woman was but could only see one out-flung pale hand and her booted feet, which lay at odd angles to each other.
‘What about the gendarmes?’ someone said and I recognised the calm Welsh voice of Lisette’s right hand woman, Mrs Bell. ‘They ought to be called, Lisette.’
‘I won’t allow it,’ Lisette replied angrily. ‘I’m not having the police crawling all over this place. They’ve been looking for an excuse to close us down for years - I’m not about to hand it to them on a plate.’ She looked down thoughtfully at the dead woman, gently toeing her with her boot. ‘No, we’ll have to deal with this ourselves before they get wind of what happened here.’
‘The person who did this should be brought to justice,’ Mrs Bell persisted but I could tell by her resigned tone that she knew there was no way of changing Lisette’s mind once she’d decided on a course of action. ‘If you do nothing then you leave him free to kill again.’
‘We’ll deal with him in our own way,’ Lisette snapped before beckoning the porters forward and speaking in incomprehensible French to them again, sometimes pointing to the corpse at her feet and other times out across the town.
‘Lisette, no…’ Mrs Bell interjected, sounding shocked. ‘She should have
a proper burial.’
Madame snorted and gave the corpse another fastidious nudge with her foot. ‘And so she will have. Sailors have been burying their men at sea for centuries and see nothing wrong with it. I’ve told the men to say a prayer over her before they throw her in, that’s no less than any vicar would do for her.’
‘But what of her family?’ Mrs Bell stepped forward from the gloom and I could see that her pale kindly face was drawn close with worry. She knelt down beside the dead woman and gently lifted her head, which lolled at a precarious angle as she’d had her throat cut clean through. ‘Her family deserve to know what became of her,’ she whispered to Madame.
‘If her family gave a damn about what happened to her, she wouldn’t have ended up here,’ Lisette replied coldly before turning and walking away, pulling her silk robe close around her shoulders. ‘I’ve given my orders and expect them to be obeyed.’ She noticed Marie and I skulking in the shadows then and gave a small nasty smile that revealed teeth browned by decades of tea drinking and tobacco. ‘I suppose that I ought to say that you should both let this be a lesson to you about what happens when you tarts don’t know what side your bread is buttered on, but what would be the point?’ she said before sweeping past us back into the house, leaving in her wake a sense of unease and a strong aroma of expensive French perfume.
As soon as she had gone, Mrs Bell stood up and wiped the damp and dirt from her dark grey cotton skirts. ‘I wish that I dared to disobey her damned orders,’ she said wryly as Marie and I crept slowly out of our hiding place, ‘but I’d find my stuff thrown out of a window and myself speedily following it within minutes of the gendarmes arriving at this house.’
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