‘But your son is alive,’ Spandrel hopelessly repeated.
‘Yes. And if I believed you’d tried to save him out of Christian charity rather than a concern for your own skin, I’d thank you fulsomely enough. But I don’t believe it. And I doubt you have the gall to try to persuade me otherwise.’
‘I did my best, sir.’
‘To serve two masters and outwit each of them in turn. That’s what you did your best to accomplish, Spandrel, and you failed, as you were bound to. Well, there’s a price for failure. And you’ll have to pay it. Mrs Davenant tells me she gave McIlwraith some sort of undertaking to save your neck, but I have to tell you she was in no position to give such an undertaking. Your neck is at my disposal, not hers. And her whims are not my will. That is something both of you need to understand. She seems to think I should set you free. But then Kelly would squeeze the truth out of you and Atterbury would know better than to carry on with his treasonable designs. As it is, he still doesn’t know the extent to which I’ve seen through them and I mean to keep him in ignorance as long as possible. I also mean to teach you – and Mrs Davenant – that disobeying me is a grievous offence.’
‘What are you going to do with me?’
‘Send you to Amsterdam.’
‘To hang?’
‘That’ll be a matter for the Dutch court to decide.’
‘But you know what they’ll decide.’
‘Not at all.’ For a moment, Walpole seemed about to smile. Then his face hardened. ‘You must address yourself to your own salvation, Spandrel. I’m done with you. Tomorrow, you’ll be moved to the Tower of London and held there while a message is sent to the Sheriff of Amsterdam and a reply awaited. You’ll be allowed no visitors, I’m afraid. I can’t have your situation becoming the talk of the city. As for letters, you may send one to your mother if you wish. I’ll read it before it’s delivered, of course, courtesy of the Postmaster-General, so you’ll need to watch what you say in it. A flight to foreign parts might be a merciful lie to tell in the circumstances. Your mother needn’t know anything of events in Amsterdam. I shan’t inflict them upon her. Nor, if you conduct yourself with suitable reticence at your trial, will my wife’s jewellery ever be found about her. You have my word on that.’
‘Your word … as a statesman?’
‘That blow clearly hasn’t addled your memory. Yes. My word as a statesman.’ Walpole walked slowly across the room towards the door, then stopped and looked round at Spandrel. ‘We shan’t meet again. Nor will you and … Mrs Davenant. If you have a message for her …’
‘There’s no message.’
‘Good.’ Walpole permitted himself a grin. ‘I wouldn’t have passed it on if there had been.’
Spandrel was surprised by the mildness of his own reaction. This was, after all, the plight he had been struggling to evade, one way or another, for more than a year. Perhaps that was the reason for the fatalistic lethargy that held him in its grasp. He could do nothing. There was no escape. He was done for. Days would pass, journeys be undertaken, procedures followed. But the end was fixed and known. In that certainty lay a strange kind of comfort. He did not have to think any more. He did not need to struggle. Everything would be done for him. Except dying, of course. He would have to do that for himself.
Looking through the window, he thought how easy it would be to scramble out onto the chamfered sill and decree his own end, falling through the Windsor air to the ground far below. It would spare him a deal of suffering later. But he had not the courage for that. And his store of hope, he realized, was not quite exhausted, though why not he failed to understand. ‘While there’s life,’ his father had often said, ‘there’s hardship.’ And so it seemed there was.
Spandrel pulled his bed across to the window and sat by it to write the one letter Walpole had said he could write and for which a single sheet of paper had been provided. He would tell the lie Walpole had suggested. He would let his mother go on believing that she might yet see him again. At least she did not have to do so as a washerwoman living within the rules of the Fleet Prison. As a well set up widow, she might find a new husband and forget her wayward son. She might, indeed, be better off without him. She could hardly be worse off.
The letter written, he lay down on the bed and stared out at the sky, watching the afternoon wear towards evening. How odd it was, he thought, that a man who has never done anything wrong, nor borne anyone the least ill will, should nevertheless be required to pay with his life for the crimes and conspiracies of others. It was not fair. It was not right. But it was how the world turned. From light to dark. And back again. For some.
Robert Walpole’s arrival that evening at the Townshends’ London residence was a surprise, though a pleasant one, for the Viscountess. The Viscount pretended for his wife’s benefit that he shared her surprise. The truth was, however, that Walpole had said he would call upon his return from Windsor, to speak of matters which his sister knew nothing about.
After an exchange of family gossip which the Viscountess found disappointingly short and shallow, Walpole and his brother-in-law retired to the Viscount’s study, where, behind closed doors, fortified by port and tobacco, they turned at once to urgent debate.
‘Edward is well?’ Townshend asked, knowing already that his nephew-in-law was safe, but not yet certain that safe also meant sound.
‘Oh yes,’ said Walpole, smiling the broad smile of a relieved parent. ‘He doesn’t seem to have had to endure anything worse than I was put through at Eton in the normal course of a typical day. You oppidans never knew the brutalities we collegers were subjected to.’
‘I did, Robin. You complained to me of them in unfailing detail at the time and have often reminded me since.’
‘Lest you forget.’ Walpole laughed. ‘Edward will be able to entertain you with tales of his incarceration when you see him in the summer. He’s likely to mention a dark-haired lady who’ll sound confoundedly like Mrs Davenant.’ He held up a hand. ‘I know you’ve always wanted to know nothing about my mistresses, Charles. I blame your prudery on a happy marriage. And I thank God for it as well, of course. You and Dolly are luckier than you know. It was because of your … sensibilities … that I failed to tell you of the lady’s involvement in this matter.’
‘Say no more.’ Townshend gave his brother-in-law a knowing look. ‘I gather there was … some kind of explosion.’
‘The tower where Edward was held turns out to have been mined. It was blown to blazes.’ Walpole chuckled. ‘My son seems to have enjoyed the fireworks.’
‘Were many killed?’
‘Negus’s adjutant and two soldiers. Along with two of the kidnappers. A third made off. I needn’t tell you I’d like to have had at least one of them to squeeze for evidence. As it is, we’re back where we started so far as Atterbury’s concerned. The fugitive’s called Plunket. He’s known to the Secret Service as a Jacobite hanger-on. The smallest of fry, but worth landing if we can catch bigger fish in the same net.’
‘This dishes your efforts to tempt Atterbury with the Green Book, I assume.’
‘I fear it does, Charles. That, as you might say, is now a closed book.’ Walpole smiled wryly. ‘We must make the best of what we have.’
‘Should we show our hand, then?’
‘Not yet. I want our discredited emissary safely lodged in a Dutch gaol before we make the threat to the King public. Horace is ready to leave for The Hague tomorrow. How many troops do you think he can persuade Hoornbeeck to promise us?’
‘Not as many as Heinsius would have done.’ (The previous Grand Pensionary of Holland had indeed been an unswerving ally. His successor was a notably cooler one.)
‘Hoornbeeck may feel more accommodating when Horace tells him that the Englishman who murdered one of Amsterdam’s most eminent citizens last year and then escaped from custody can now at last, thanks to us, be made to answer for his crime. We’ve neatly, if in advertently, attended to the destruction of the blackguard responsible for h
is escape as well. All in all, I reckon the burghers of Amsterdam are greatly indebted to us.’
‘So, it’s the noose for your redundant mapmaker?’
‘Indeed. Which is nothing less than he deserves.’ Walpole took a thoughtful puff at his pipe. ‘Irksome as the fellow is, though, I’ve done my best for him. Horace will ask for an assurance that he won’t be tortured into confessing.’
‘Nor into disclosing anything not strictly relevant to the case, presumably.’
‘True enough, Charles. But mercy was naturally my prime consideration.’ Walpole blew a noose-shaped smoke-ring towards the ceiling. ‘As ever.’
Chapter Forty-Two
Dutch Reckoning
SPANDREL SPENT A week of comfortable if scarcely contented solitude in the Tower of London. By coincidence, his quarters were next to those previously occupied by Sir Theodore Janssen. But though the view they commanded of the river and the wharves of Bermondsey was the same, there was an important difference ever to the fore of Spandrel’s thoughts. Sir Theodore had been waiting for his case to be heard by Parliament, fearful about how much of his lovingly accumulated wealth – of land and houses, jewels and china, paintings and tapestries, horses and carriages, cochineal and pepper – he would be allowed to keep. But his life had never been threatened. He sat now at his house in Hanover Square, less wealthy but at several fortunes’ remove from poverty, contemplating an old age of ease and security. For Spandrel, old age had joined a long list of experiences he knew he would never have.
Being led in chains through Traitors’ Gate, loaded aboard a launch and conveyed downriver to a waiting Dutch frigate was, by contrast, an experience he had never expected to have and would have preferred to be spared. But his preferences counted for even less than they ever had. The Kampioen took delivery of its prisoner in Limehouse Reach on a dull May morning of spitting rain. And turning for a last glimpse before he was led below, Spandrel took his leave of the city – and the country – of his birth.
The day after Spandrel’s unheralded departure, Viscount Townshend wrote to the Lord Mayor of London, instructing him to expel all papists and non-jurors from the city by reason of the Government’s recent discovery of a Jacobite plot to overthrow – indeed, assassin ate – the King.
Even as the papists and non-jurors left in their paltry hundreds, the troops arrived in their armed thousands to set up camp in Hyde Park. The King, it was announced, would not now be going to Hanover. A threat to his life, as well as his crown, was said to have been revealed in an anonymous letter to the Duchess of Kendal. Arrests, trials and executions were promised. And the London mob settled to await an exciting summer.
For Spandrel summer was less of a prospect than a memory. Not that the seasons made themselves apparent in the cells beneath the Stadhuis in Amsterdam. There the shadows were always deep and long and the days very much the same. Spandrel’s cell was not the one he had been incarcerated in fifteen months before, but might as well have been for all the differences there were. Big Janus was still the friendliest of the turnkeys, bearing no grudge, it seemed, over the affray at Ugels’ shop. He seemed, indeed, positively sorry to see Spandrel back, though not as sorry as Spandrel was to be there.
How and when the authorities would deal with him Spandrel did not know. Soon and summarily was his expectation. This time, he felt certain, the British vice-consul – if one had been appointed in succession to Cloisterman – would not come calling.
In that he was correct, though only because the dandily attired visitor shown into his cell a few days after his arrival was not the vice-consul. Evelyn Dalrymple, as the plum-voiced fellow introduced himself, was at pains to emphasize that he held a senior post at the British Embassy in The Hague. He would not normally endure a trekschuit journey halfway across Holland for the dubious privilege of visiting the Stadhuis cells. That he had done so was a measure of the British Government’s concern for the due and proper process of the law.
‘I’m not sure you appreciate how much we’ve done for you, Spandrel.’
‘Oh, I do appreciate it, Mr Dalrymple, believe me.’
‘We’ve specially requested that you be spared torture.’
‘That was good of someone.’
‘Indeed it was. But it was only a request, you understand. Throw wild accusations around at your examination – muddy the water, so to speak – and the Sheriff may seek what he conceives to be the truth by rack and screw. The Dutch are a tenacious people, especially if you try to put them right. Are you familiar with the concept of Dutch reckoning, Spandrel?’
‘I don’t believe I am.’
‘Query a bill at an inn in this country and the landlord’s apt to send it back to you with further additions. In the same way, if you protest your innocence overmuch, you may find yourself punished more harshly. Hanging can be mercifully swift, if competently done. And the Dutch are a competent people. I should look more to their competence than their tenacity, if I were you.’
‘Thank you for the warning.’
‘Don’t mention it.’ Dalrymple glanced around at the four dank walls and up at the ceiling – though he scarcely needed to, given how close it was to the crown of his hat. ‘It’s not too bad here, is it?’
‘No, no. A regular home from home. I can’t think why I wanted to leave it.’
Dalrymple looked at him sharply. ‘I shouldn’t recommend sarcasm at your examination, Spandrel.’
‘I’ll remember that.’
‘I have to ask you … if you’ll require the services of a priest.’
‘Won’t that question arise only after I’ve been condemned?’
‘I suppose so.’ Dalrymple shrugged. ‘But there’s no harm in looking ahead.’
‘In that case … no.’ Spandrel forced out a smile. ‘A priest might muddy the water.’
In London, muddied water was available by the bath-load. Hardly a day passed at the Cockpit without the questioning of one or more specimens of unpatriotic riff-raff. But where were the serious plotters, where the genuine conspirators? Ten days after the papists and non-jurors had been sent packing from London, an answer seemed to be supplied by the arrest at his lodgings in Little Ryder Street of George Kelly, secretary to the Bishop of Rochester.
It soon became common knowledge, however, that Kelly had been able to hold the arresting officers at bay for some time, thanks to his distinctly unsecretarial skills as a swordsman, while most of his presumably incriminating correspondence burned merrily on his sitting-room fire. Walpole, it was said, would make someone suffer for such bungling, not least because he was bound to suffer for it himself.
‘We’ll have to release him,’ was Walpole’s conclusion when he and Townshend met two days later to consider the Deciphering Department’s report on those papers of Kelly’s not consumed by the flames. And it was a conclusion that clearly pained him. ‘There’s nothing here.’
‘But if we can’t touch Kelly …’
‘We can’t touch his master. I’m well aware of that, Charles. Damnably well aware.’
‘What’s this about … Harlequin?’
‘Atterbury’s dog, damn his paws. Half Europe seems to have been writing to Kelly enquiring after the cur’s health, obviously as a cipher for the vitality of the plot. But we can’t prove that’s what it means.’
‘How are we to proceed?’
‘Stubbornly, Charles. That’s how. Stubbornly and tirelessly. We can’t dig this fox out of his hole. But he’ll have to come out of his own accord eventually. And when he does … we’ll be waiting.’
At the waiting game Walpole knew no peer. For Spandrel, however, waiting was a game he could only lose, though one he was nevertheless forced to play. While in London the First Lord of the Treasury and the Northern Secretary pored glumly over the Deciphering Department’s report, in Amsterdam Spandrel was taken before Sheriff Lanckaert for examination.
Lanckaert himself said very little, and that in Dutch. His English-speaking deputy, Aertsen, conducted the brie
f but pointed interrogation. He and Spandrel had last met on the occasion of Spandrel’s escape from custody, an event to which neither of them referred directly. In short order, however, the long dormant evidence of Spandrel’s association with Zuyler that had emerged just prior to McIlwraith’s dramatic intervention at Ugels’ shop was cited as confirmation that Spandrel and Zuyler had conspired to rob Ysbrand de Vries and had ended by murdering him. The even hoarier accusation that Spandrel was a secret agent of the government of the Austrian Netherlands was not revived, due, Spandrel assumed, to some subtle change in the balance of political expediency. Instead, Aertsen invited him to admit that he had killed de Vries when discovered by him in the act of breaking open the chest in his study in search of the money and valuables Zuyler had told him he would find there.
‘No,’ Spandrel hopelessly declared. ‘That’s not so. Zuyler tricked me into sneaking into the house so that I’d take the blame for his murder of de Vries. I told you the truth last year and it hasn’t changed.’ No more it had. But he knew more of the truth now. He knew it all. Yet there was nothing to be gained by telling it. ‘You should be looking for Zuyler and Mrs de Vries.’
‘We have looked for them. But we have found only you.’ They had in truth not even done that. Spandrel had been served to them on a plate, lacking only a sprig of parsley by way of garnish. Zuyler was dead, but they did not seem to know it. And Estelle de Vries had transformed herself into Mrs Davenant, mistress of Phoenix House and Robert Walpole, for which information they would probably not be grateful. ‘We have a sworn statement from an elderly servant of Mijnheer de Vries that you killed his master, Spandrel. Against that all your denials and allegations count for nothing.’
‘I didn’t do it.’
‘Then why did you flee when you had the chance to prove your innocence?’
‘Because I had no such chance. As this examination demonstrates.’
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