‘Shtill full of dishgushting hypocrites,’ he said aggressively. He turned around and peered at me. ‘Who are you? Are you one of the theatre people?’
‘Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart,’ I said, bowing without being quite sure why I should bow.
‘Used to see a lot of theatre people,’ he said, his voice quieter. ‘When I was a child.’
‘I suppose you would have.’ There was a moment’s silence, as he seemed to be groping among his memories.
‘Did shoo know my mother?’
That I could respond to unreservedly.
‘I did indeed, though not as well as I would have liked. We didn’t work for the same companies – in fact there was rivalry between the two companies. But I admired her enormously – as a woman as well as an actress. She was a remarkable person.’
‘She was a lovely person. The besht woman I’ve known in my whole life. Worth a thousand of –’ I think he had been about to mention the new Queen, but he had just enough sense to amend it to ‘– any woman in there.’
‘She was, she was. And not just generous and charming, but wonderfully gifted.’
‘Wonderfully gifted,’ he repeated. Then he added, ‘And rottenly treated.’
I left a silence. He was clearly not referring to her treatment by theatrical managements or the British public, and I did not care to abuse the King while I was his guest in his castle.
‘She loved shildren,’ he said into the darkness. ‘She was always pregnant, and she never complained, never said there were too many.’
‘Your father the King seems to love children too,’ I put in. ‘He knows how to talk to them.’
‘Bit of a child himself in shome ways,’ he said brutally. ‘Doeshn’t shee through people. Doeshn’t shee he’s shurrounding himshelf with …’ he searched for a word, but could only come up with the old one: ‘hypocrites.’ Then he found a new one: ‘flatterers. People who are only out for what they can get. Instead of relying on people he can trusht. Wouldn’t you expect a man to rely on his own children? On his shon?’
‘I’m sure he does rely on you greatly.’
He leaned forward and began speaking more controlledly, more intensely.
‘Then he’s a funny way of showing it. Lets that woman walk all over him. Lets her treat his children like dirt.’
‘That woman?’ I asked, thinking I knew the answer.
‘That woman the Duchess. Mother of the sweet little heiress to the throne. Widow of the sainted Edward. Sainted my arsh! I’m a military man, Mr – whatever you’re called. I know the sainted Edward’s reputation in the army. Ask Hattersley if he was a white-robed shaint. If you could … Hypocrites! Bashtards! Look at how they’re treated, and then look at how they behave, what they’ve done. I hate the lot.’
‘The Duchess is in a difficult position,’ I timidly said.
‘Difficult position!’ he exploded. ‘Bloody wonderful position! Mother to the next queen. Poor old Adelaide would like to find herself in that position! And doesn’t the Duchess preen herself! I’d like to wipe that self-satisfied smirk off her face! And I will too! You’ll see!’
I had clearly touched a raw nerve, triggered off a naked expression of his ever-present sense of grievance.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said meekly. ‘But splendid positions can also be difficult ones.’
‘Ha! Difficult positions! I’ll tell you who are in a difficult position. It’s the men and women who are the King’s children and are not the King’s children. It’s the men and women who ought to be the highest in the land, but in fact nobody knows quite what they are or how they should be treated. It was difficult for us when my father was a Royal Duke. Now that he’s King it’s damned impossible! And the one who it’s most impossible for is his eldest son, when he thinks what he should be, and sees what he is!’
There was a force and a drunken eloquence in what he said. I could not rid myself of the thought that there was something else – something that Lord Melbourne had identified as madness. I tried to calm him.
‘I apologise. I should have realised how very difficult things must be for you at the moment.’
‘Oh, they’re difficult all right. But carefully does it. One step at a time. Feel the way. Does it sound funny, a drunk man talking about taking care? Well it’s not. I’ve taken so much because it’s a damned strain, taking care!’
He looked at me through the darkness, his dark eyes glistening. He suddenly seemed to resemble someone I had once known, someone in my own very distant past. He remembered his glass, and downed what smelt like neat brandy, a good inch of it. Then he turned and began staggering back to the castle. I knew better than to follow him. I had got all I was likely to get out of him tonight, I thought. But I was wrong. When he had lurched a few yards he turned back to me.
‘I tell you what. Ashk yourshelf why he didn’t marry that – that woman till the year’eighteen. Eh? Eh? Ashk yourshelf.’
I stood, making no reply – knowing of no reply I could make. After a moment he turned and resumed his stumbling progress towards the castle. A drunk man, in a sort of maze, in darkness. It was a miracle he found his way, but he did. As he climbed the steps to the door I heard the sound of glass shattering – he had dropped one of the castle’s priceless brandy balloons. No doubt it happened all the time. Then a door opened and shut and I was alone in the darkness.
He was, I could see now, a figure to be pitied. He mingled in Society, which despised him for his illegitimacy. He mingled with the rich, but had himself no fortune. He was the Sovereign’s eldest child, and yet a person of no importance. It was a position as different as it could possibly be from the aristocrats with whom he mixed – with a title, an estate, an assumed place in the world that was theirs by birth. His birth assured him only trouble and uncertainty, or so it must have seemed to him. It was not to be wondered at if he and the other FitzClarences were determined to make hay while their sun, briefly, shone.
And yet he asked for pity too insistently to get pity. And there was more than that, there was something else behind his self-pity. Raging against the legitimate members of the Royal Family was understandable, chafing at the interest shown in the Heiress Presumptive was natural – and yet there was behind all that something darker and nastier. A mystery, a threat implied, something which I could not fathom, and which probably only drunkenness had brought out.
What in the world could he have meant by asking why the King had not married the Queen until 1818? As far as I knew there had been no lengthy courtship. In fact, I rather thought (my memory is not what it was, and I am in any case not one of those that follow in meticulous detail the doings of the House of Hanover – that way madness lies) that the courtship had been entirely businesslike and epistolary, and that the first time the then Duke of Clarence had clapped eyes on his bride (or, which was perhaps more to the point, vice versa) was when she came over to Britain for the wedding.
Was he implying that his father couldn’t marry until his mother Mrs Jordan was dead? She was dead by 1818, as far as I remembered. She had been pursued by debt-collectors and had died in obscurity in France some months, I thought, after the Battle of Waterloo. But this was nonsense! No one, to my knowledge, had ever suggested they had been married, and if they had the marriage would have been invalid under the Royal Marriages Act (that foolish measure of the old King that in effect forced his children into adultery – a sin to which they were in any case not averse). He could have married again when he liked. To take a comparative case: having been married to Mrs FitzHerbert hadn’t stopped the late unlamented King from marrying his awful Brunswickian legal consort.
What then could he have meant?
I puzzled the question some minutes more, and then made my way carefully along the patterned paths to the eastern front of the castle.
When I let myself into the noble pile it was almost silent. I made my way towards the staircase, eager to hike up it for the last time in a long and tiring day. I was surprised to see,
emerging from the doorway and clearly intent on waylaying me, the last figure I would have expected: it was Lord Howe, the Queen’s Chamberlain. On his handsome, remote, conceited face was the sort of expression that said that talking to fellows like me was something that as a rule he would prefer to leave to his servants.
‘Mr … er … Mozart?’
I bowed.
‘Lord Howe?’
He had to repress a grimace, as if somehow I had made free with his name, which should have remained sacred and unvoiced, as Jehovah is among the Jewish.
‘If I may have a moment, Mr … Mozart. I gather from Her Majesty that you are engaged on a matter of some delicacy for the King.’ I remained silent. ‘I would not of course want to trespass on your discretion, naturally not, but I do want to assure you of my complete co-operation in every way.’
I bowed again.
‘I am much obliged to Your Lordship.’
‘The Duke of Cumberland, as you know, is of my party, and a man of excellent and steadfast Conservative principles.’ I made no response to this. His party was not mine, and was an irrelevance. ‘However, I have a higher loyalty than party loyalty, and that is to the Royal House.’
‘I think we all have that loyalty, Lord Howe.’
I can bootlick with the highest in the land. I’ve done it all my life. However, he bowed in a way that seemed to doubt the quality of my loyalty, or its value.
‘The Duke’s behaviour this afternoon was contemptible and ridiculous … I noticed you go out on to the terrace. I believe George FitzClarence was out there as well.’
‘He was.’ I took a sudden decision, not to trust him, but to use him. ‘May I ask, Lord Howe, if there is any history of … of mental instability in that case?’
He pursed his lips.
‘Rashness, choler, great unwisdom. He ruined his military career by a combination of such qualities – and it was, by all accounts, a promising career. But madness, no. On the other hand the accession of his father—’
‘Understood, My Lord. There is no need to put it into words.’ I paused, to choose my words with care. This was a delicate subject. ‘His mother, I seem to remember, died soon after the Continental Wars ended.’
‘In eighteen-sixteen.’ He mentioned her as if she were a bad taste in his mouth.
‘I never remember any talk of there having been a marriage ceremony between his mother and his father.’
He became very frosty.
‘There was none. This is naturally not a matter I could take up with the King—’
‘Naturally not.’
‘—but I think I can say without fear of contradiction that there was not. In any case such a ceremony would have been invalid.’
‘Of course it would. But to a mind diseased … It is all very puzzling. The King and Mrs Jordan had in fact separated some time before, I seem to remember.’
‘Yes, in eighteen-eleven.’
‘Yet the King did not marry the present Queen until eighteen-eighteen?’
‘There were … attempts. Best not spoken of.’
‘Of course, of course … There is one other matter you may be able to help me with, My Lord.’
He inclined his head infinitesimally.
‘The late Duke of Kent. What was his connection with a man called Hattersley?’
He nodded, perfectly in command of the matter.
‘He was an insubordinate and unruly soldier in the regiment the Duke commanded in Gibraltar. He died after punishment.’
‘Ah,’ I said.
Oh really? I thought.
12. Picnic
I slept the sleep of the just, whether or not I deserved it. Though I suppose exhaustion in the service of the King (or, rather more particularly, a tiny, threatened, though not entirely defenceless Princess) would traditionally be considered a noble cause. It was difficult though to see myself in the role of knight errant so popular with writers of the present medieval school. I awoke shortly before nine greatly refreshed, took some time over my toilette – though probably nowhere near as much time as the fine ladies of the party – and then sallied out in search of people, news, further enlightenment.
I first went in quest of the room where poor old Popper had died. This was not easy, but as with a maze that one thinks one will never find one’s way out of but eventually does, I did at last come upon the room. There was no sign of life there, nor any of death: it was empty, the bed unmade. Only a faint smell of disinfectant told me that someone had been at work scrubbing away the stench of vomit and death. A very under-footman, a mere apprentice at the castle’s lack-of-charm school, told me that Mr Nussey was in attendance on one of the housemaids. I demurred at entering the servants’ quarters, fearing either to lose my way again in a still worse warren of corridors, or else to encounter things that would shock the sensibilities even of a man of the theatre (for the King had inherited his servants from his predecessor, and it is notorious that the moral tone below stairs is taken from the moral tone above them). I therefore charged the footman with a message to the good apothecary saying that I would wait for him on the terrace. The man did my bidding with the merest suspicion of a sniff. He would learn.
I turned and made my way back through the corridors, which were beginning to show signs of life. As I started down the wider corridors close to the stairs I saw hurrying towards me the Princess’s maid.
‘Oh, Mrs Hattersley—’
‘Mr Mozart, I canna tarry. There’s talk of a picnic.’
‘Of a what?’
‘The King’s sent a message to the Princess. He’s planning a picnic for the children and all the folks else, in the Great Park. Though what the Duchess will say when she gets wind of it, the Guid Lord kens.’
I let her bustle on. She would keep. She could surely be no more than a minor piece in the puzzle. Her news, however, was upsetting, and I descended the staircase in a worried state of mind. The project of the King was typical of him, in his desire to give pleasure to children – particularly to children like the Princess, for whom pleasure was a scarce commodity. It was also typical of him that, where his family was concerned, common sense tended to fly out the window.
On duty at the foot of the stairs was the unfrocked Bishop, standing immobile, seeming impervious to any signs of humanity in the rooms around him, the only evidence of life in him being the occasional wobble of his formidable double chin. He looked like a statue Mr Gillray might have carved, if he had had talent in that art. I screwed my courage to the sticking place and approached his majesty.
‘The Great Park is now open to the public, is it not?’
‘Yes, sir,’ he said, from a great height. ‘The present … King reversed the decision of the late King, and the terraces and the park are now open to the … public.‘
Along with the other vermin of the insect and animal kingdom, his manner implied.
‘Every day of the week?’
‘Every day except Friday, sir. Today is Friday.’
I refrained with difficulty from bowing, and walked through the door and down the steps to the terrace and garden. I reflected on the odd fate that made a castle footman (however majestic) one of the few who were privy not just to the death that had taken place last night, but to our suspicions of what lay behind it. The King, myself, Mr Nussey – and the unfrocked Bishop. And did that mean the whole regiment of castle servants? And if so did that mean the visiting servants as well? If so it could only be a matter of time before the grand guests at Windsor knew of our suspicions as well.
I paced the terrace and looked out on to the Great Park. It looked from that point as if the picnic party would be easy to guard. In fact there was already a member of the Household Cavalry by one of the gateways in the railings, and I could see in the distance (or thought I could, because my eyesight is by no means what it was) a party of gardeners and groundsmen inspecting coppices and ha-has for intruders left over from the day before. All to the good: the King was concerned about his niece’s safety. Or
just possibly he was anxious to allay the perfectly justifiable fears of the Duchess of Kent. Either way my own anxieties for the safety of the Princess would now restrict themselves to the present denizens of the castle – inhabitants, guests, domestic staff.
‘Mr Mozart?’
I was standing at the parapet where I had stood with George FitzClarence the night before. Mr Nussey came busily up, the much-in-demand family doctor to the life, but mixing ingratiation with his self-importance to a degree he would only do when attending at a royal palace. I think I was in his good books for having introduced him to the King, but I didn’t expect it to last. He was not the sort of professional man likely to give a proper respect to artistic genius.
‘Ah, Mr Nussey,’ I said, somewhat commandingly for me. ‘I wanted to be au courant with what has gone on. I note that the body has been moved.’
‘It has indeed,’ he said, with immense self-satisfaction. ‘Removed, in fact. On the orders of the King.’ His voice was hushed, though we were alone on the terrace. ‘Four members of the castle staff removed it in the early hours, Mr Mozart. Such a death at the castle would never have done at all. The body has been transported to London, to Mr Popper’s abode.’
‘I see.’
‘Was Mr Popper married?’
‘No, he was not married.’
‘Good, good.’ He rubbed his hands. ‘Then there will only be his servants to cope with.’
I did not enlighten him on Mr Popper’s domestic arrangements, which included a shrew of a mistress who had once played small roles at the Queen’s Theatre, a woman who made Mr Popper’s home so hot that not a member of the present Queen’s company would go near it. I did not doubt she would make trouble, but equally I did not doubt she could be bought off.
‘So all trace of Mr Popper has disappeared from the castle?’
Too Many Notes, Mr Mozart Page 12