Mr. Kemble stepped back from the cage. “Caliban, as I live and breathe. What ho! slave! Caliban! Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself, come forth! You amaze me, sir. Where did you find such a monster?”
“I got him off Buffon, before the war. He cost me almost as much as the zebra. But Prince William has nothing like him, I’ll wager. Boy, stir him up with a stick. I warn you, ladies, you’re about to see the face of the devil.”
“What do you intend to do, if I may ask? Poke me with a stick again?”
What surprised her was not that he could speak. The earl had said that he could speak, “A kind of guttural Greek, that my tutor would have caned out of him.” But that he could speak English, with the accent of a gentleman, in which was mingled faintly, mockingly, the accent of the earl.
She shook her head, then realized he might not have seen her. The moon was full—it cast the shadows of his bars over the floor of the cage, over the straw and feces. But he still crouched in a back corner.
“No,” she said. “No, I wanted”—what?
“It’s your own damned fault, Catherine,” said the earl. “Who told you to marry Mad Jack? If you wanted to marry a gambler, you should have married a rich one.”
Catherine turned to the window and put her hand over her mouth. It was a useless gesture—what could she have said? She had married him, when everyone in Bath had warned her against him. “Jack Byron is a devil,” Grandmother Gight had told her, “and your life with him will be a hell. Are you ready to live in hell, my girl, for a red coat and the finest legs in Bath?” And for a year, a year that was heaven and hell both, she had been.
“What has he left you, eh? Tell me that.”
“My clothes. He has left me my clothes, or most of them. Whatever I’ve brought with me. And Gight.”
She could hear the earl shuffling papers on his bureau.
“Well, I don’t want the place, you know. What good is Gight to me? I could give it to Georgie, I suppose. Not that Georgie wants to leave London, damn him. And the roof leaks, like as not. I’ll buy it, but I don’t want it, and you’ll take what I offer, you hear? And I won’t give it to you all at once. Two hundred a year—no, a hundred and fifty, that should be enough, if you live in the country. No more silk dresses for you. No more fine balls. That’s what comes of marrying a blackguard.”
The earl rose—she could hear his chair scraping against the parquet. “When are you going back to him?”
It was spring. The lime avenue was in blossom. She could see it through the window, as though the trees had burst into cloud. “I’m not going back to him. He’s gone to Paris, with one of his—with an actress. I’m never going back to him again.”
“That’s damned foolish. You married him, my girl. Now it’s your duty to make the best of him. Even your grandmother would tell you that.”
When he had left the parlor, she opened the window and stepped out into the garden. She could smell the lime flowers and, beneath them, subtle but persistent, the smell of the menagerie.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He had come to the front of the cage. Moonlight shone on his face, grotesque: the flat nose; the slanted eyes, black in the moonlight; the curving horns. He crouched, bestial, shorter than she was although he would have been taller if he had stood like a man.
“Desire,” he said. “There is nothing in the world but desire. In Paris a man came to me, a man in a black coat, a M. Rousseau. He spoke to me about reason, and told me that I was a pure, an uncorrupted savage. Do you know what I did? I spat in his face. I was in a cage then, in the house of M. Buffon. He wanted to keep me, he would talk to me sometimes in the old language. But he needed money.”
“Would he let you out?”
The grotesque face grinned, and Catherine stepped back, frightened. His teeth were black and broken, and in the moonlight she could see a protrusion from the hair between his thighs.
“He knew better. It was not only the men of learning who visited there, M. Diderot and his friend the mathematician. Poets visited me as well, and one wrote a poem—the incarnate image of man’s desire, he called me. We talked together, he and I—his mother was from the old country. Oh, they knew better than to let me out! What I would have done to their systems, their philosophies!”
Suddenly his voice was low, musical. “Do you fear me?”
She shook her head.
“I can smell your fear.” He reached through the bars toward her, his arm hairy and muscular, the fingernails cracked. “I can tell you what you want, Catherine. You want me.”
“Who is Miss Montrose?” she asked.
Philip Kemble smiled the famous, lopsided smile that had made even Queen Charlotte remark that she liked Mr. Kemble, only not, of course, as Macbeth. “She plays Rosalind in pink tights. Is that enough of an explanation?”
They were walking beneath the avenue of limes. She played with a blossom, idly.
“Does she know that the earl has a wife and five—no, it must be six—children? She was a cook, originally. Now when she drives in the park, everyone bows to the countess.”
“So does marriage eventually imprison us all! It was a doleful day when Miss Gordon became the matronly Mrs. Byron.”
“Matronly!” He was teasing, of course. He was known as the biggest tease in London. But she was vaguely angry.
“Imagine these fingers, as slender and pale as new moons, frying an egg, now. How incongruous an image! As though Ophelia had taken up knitting, or Cleopatra put on an apron. Surely Miss Gordon, the enchanting Miss Gordon, who marveled over Bath like Miranda introduced to a brave new world, will never be reduced to a housewife!”
He had kissed her hand, and then her arm, and then her shoulder, before she pulled away. But it was clear, he had made it clear, that if she could establish herself in London, “where the former Miss Gordon would certainly be welcomed by all the quality,” she could see Philip Kemble any time she liked. “You have but to call me, Catherine,” he had whispered, while she was attempting to untangle herself from his embrace, which had in it a calculated passion, “and I will come to you, like Ariel to his Prospero.”
She remembered that he had just finished a run of The Tempest at Drury Lane.
“They would not let me out,” said the satyr. “Will you?”
When she was a girl, growing up at Gight, she had run through the forest, her bare legs flashing. One day she had found a pool, and she had taken off her clothes, even her shift. She had lowered herself into the cold water. She remembered how cold it had been, how light had fallen through the green leaves, dappling her bare arms.
That afternoon, when she went in for tea, she had been told that she would be sent to Grandmother Gight, in Edinburgh. So she could learn how to be a lady.
“I don’t know,” she said. Although she had brought the keys. She had taken them from the earl’s bureau. They had been in her pocket all afternoon.
“Come, Catherine.” How musical his voice was now, no longer harsh—like a wild music heard among the hills at Gight. “Come, what do you think I am? I am the darkness that existed before the light. How long do you think this age of light can last, this age of reason with its Encyclopédies and Histoires? How long do you think men can deny what is in their hearts? I am madness. I am freedom.”
The key glinted in the moonlight. Then the door swung open with a grating, rusted sound, like the cry of an orang-outang.
His hands were strong, too strong. His stench surrounded her, the hairy thighs pressed against her dress, she felt the broken teeth against her tongue. She cried out, a strangled cry, answered only by one of the pelicans.
The cold night air on her legs, the gravel against her back, and above her the grinning face of the moon, the mad white moon, and she was drowning, drowning in pain and the stench of him, and an overwhelming panic. The night closed over her, and she drowned.
“Oh, they don’t know the worst of it, my dear. They never do.”
Miss Montrose w
as sitting on the side of her bed, in a pink tea-gown.
“You’re lucky I’m the one who found you! What did he do to your dress, shred it? Aberdeen said he would have Ram whipped, for not locking the cage properly. Such a nice boy—once he brought me some of those white flowers for my hair. You should have heard Aberdeen! He was furious about losing his best specimen. But really, after the way that beast, whatever it was, attacked you. Anyway, Ram’s disappeared, and I can’t say that I blame him.
“Don’t sit up. You poor dear. But as long as they don’t know the worst. I won’t let them in here, you know. I’ve got a will of my own, Mrs. Byron, anyone at Drury Lane can tell you that. And I haven’t told them a thing, not about what the nurse said. How can you tell, I asked her. It’s only been a week. But she said she could always tell. We women should stick together, I always say, although you don’t know what they’re like at Drury Lane. A bunch of cats!
“I’ve always wanted a baby of my own, with itty pink toes, but in the theater, you know, we can’t afford to lose our figures. Well, you’ll be fit to travel soon, now that the fever’s over. And then you’ll be joining Captain Byron, I suppose. Not much choice, is there, for us women, with one on the way? A friend of mine, who plays Olivia, said he was terribly attractive. Aberdeen says he’s in France. Perhaps, you know, since I didn’t tell, you could send me some stockings?”
Yes, she would be joining her husband in France. Catherine turned her face on the pillow and wept—for herself and the world, breaking open like an egg.
The Queen and the Cambion
Richard Bowes
1.
“Silly Billy, the Sailor King,” some called King William IV of Great Britain. But never, of course, to his royal face. Then it was always “Yes, sire,” and “As your majesty wishes!”
Because certain adults responsible for her care didn’t watch their words in front of a child, the king’s young niece and heir to his throne heard such things said. It angered her.
Princess Victoria liked her uncle and knew that King William IV always treated her as nicely as a boozy, confused former sea captain of a monarch could be expected to, and much of the time rather better.
Often when she greeted him, he would lean forward, slip a secret gift into her hands, and whisper something like, “Discovered this in the late king your grandfather’s desk at Windsor.”
These generally were small items, trinkets, jewels, mementos, long-ago tributes from minor potentates that he’d found in the huge half-used royal palaces, stuck in his pocket, and as often as not remembered to give to his niece.
The one she found most fascinating was a piece of very ancient parchment which someone had pressed under glass hundreds of years before. This came into her possession one day when she was twelve as King William passed Victoria and her governess on his way to the royal coach.
His Britannic Majesty paused and said in her ear, “It’s a spell, little cub. Put your paw in mine.”
Victoria felt something in her hand and slipped it into a pouch under her cloak while the Sailor King lurched by as though he was walking the quarterdeck of a ship in rough water. “Every ruler of this island has had it and many of us have invoked it,” he mumbled while climbing the carriage steps.
She followed him. “To use in times of great danger to Britain?” she whispered.
He leaned out the window. “Or on a day of doldrums and no wind in the sails,” he roared as if she was up in a crow’s nest, his face red as semi-rare roast beef. “You’ll be the monarch and damn all who’d say you no.”
Victoria didn’t take the gift from under her cloak until she was quite alone in the library of the dark and dreary palace at Kensington. It was where she lived under the intense care of her mother the widowed Duchess of Kent, a German lady, and Sir John Conroy, a handsome enough Irish army officer of good family.
The duchess had appointed Conroy comptroller of her household. Between them they tried to make sure the princess had no independence at all. Victoria really only got out of their sight when King Billy summoned her to the Royal Court.
Nobody at Kensington ever used the library. She went to the far end of that long room lined with portraits of the obscure daughters and younger sons of various British kings, many with their plump consorts and empty-eyed children. Victoria pushed aside a full-length curtain and in the waning daylight looked at the page.
She deciphered a bit of the script and discovered words in Latin that she knew. She saw the name Arturus, which made her gasp. Other words just seemed to be a collection of letters.
Then for fear that someone was coming she hid it away behind a shelf full of books of sermons by long-dead clergymen. It was where she kept some other secret possessions, for she was allowed very little privacy.
She knew the pronunciation for the Latin. By copying several of the other words and showing them to her language tutor, she discovered they were Welsh.
Her music teacher, born in Wales, taught her some pronunciation but became too curious about a few of the words she showed him. Victoria then sought out the old stable master who spoke the language, including some of the ancient tongue, and could read and write a bit.
He was honored and kept her secret when the princess practiced with him. One evening when she had learned all the words and her guardians were busy, Victoria went to the library, took out the page, and slowly read it aloud.
She wasn’t quite finished when a silver light shone on the dusty shelves and paintings. Before her was a mountaintop with the sun shining through clouds. In the air, heading her way, sailed a man who rode the wind as another might a horse.
In his hand was a black staff topped with a dragon’s head. His grey cloak and robes showed the golden moon in all its phases. His white hair and beard whipped about as the wind brought him to the mountaintop.
At the moment he alighted he noticed Victoria. A look of such vexation came over his face that she stumbled on the words and couldn’t immediately repeat them. He and the mountaintop faded from her sight. She, however, remembered what she’d seen.
Victoria was no scholar. But the library at Kensington Palace did contain certain old volumes and she read all she could find about Arthur and especially about Merlin.
An observant child like Victoria knew John Conroy was more than the duchess’s comptroller. She understood it was his idea to keep her isolated and to have her every move watched. From an early age she knew why.
She heard her uncle tell someone in confidence but with a voice that could carry over wind, waves, and cannon fire, “The mad old man, my father, King George that was, had a coach load and more of us sons. But in the event, only my brother Kent before he died produced an heir, fair, square, and legitimate. So the little girl over there stands to inherit the crown when I go under.”
If the king did “go under” before she was eighteen, Victoria knew, her mother would be regent. The Duchess of Kent would control her daughter and the Royal Court, and Conroy would control the duchess.
In the winter before her eighteenth birthday, five years after he gave her the spell, King William became very ill. But even in sickness, he remembered what the duchess and Conroy were up to. And though his condition was grave, he resolutely refused to die.
On May 24, 1837, Victoria would become eighteen. On May 22 the king was in a coma and the duchess and her comptroller had a plan.
From a window of the library at Kensington Palace Victoria saw carriages drive up through a mid-spring drizzle, saw figures in black emerge. She recognized men Conroy knew: several hungry attorneys, a minor cabinet minister, a rural justice, the secretary of a bishop who believed he should have been an archbishop. They gathered in Conroy’s offices downstairs.
Because the servants were loyal, the princess knew that a document had been prepared in which Victoria would cite her own youth and foolishness and beg that her mother (and her mother’s “wise advisor”) be regent until she was twenty-one.
Even those who admired Victoria
would not have said the princess was brilliant, but neither was she dull or naïve. She knew how much damage the conspirators would be able to do in three years of regency. She might never become free. All they needed was her signature.
Understanding what was afoot, Victoria went to the shelf where the manuscript page was hidden. She wondered if she was entitled to do this before she was actually the monarch and if the old wizard would be as angry as the last time.
Victoria heard footsteps on the stairs. She looked at the pictures of her obscure and forgotten ancestors all exiled to the library and made her choice.
The door at the other end of the library opened. The duchess and Conroy entered with half a dozen very solemn men.
“My dearest daughter, we have been trying to decide how best to protect you,” said her mother.
By the light of three candles Victoria stood firm and recited the Latin, rolled out the Welsh syllables the way she’d been taught.
Duchess and accomplice exchanged glances. Madness was commonplace in the British dynasty. George III had been so mad that a regent had been appointed.
They started toward Victoria, then stopped and stared. She turned and saw what they did—a great stone hall lit by shafts of sun through tall windows. The light fell on figures including a big man crowned and sitting on a throne.
Victoria saw again the tall figure in robes adorned with golden moons in all their phases. In his hand was the black staff topped with a dragon’s head. This time his hair and beard were iron gray, not white. He shot the king a look of intense irritation. The king avoided his stare and seemed a bit amused.
Merlin strode out of the court at Camelot and the royal hall vanished behind him. Under his breath he muttered, “A curse upon the day I was so addled as to make any oath to serve at the beck and call of every halfwit or lunatic who planted a royal behind on the throne of Britain.”
Then he realized who had summoned him to this dim and dusty place, and his face softened just a bit. Not a monarch yet to judge by her attire. But soon enough she would be.
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 13