Dynasty 8: The Maiden: The Maiden (The Morland Dynasty)

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Henry Wise, who had been Queen Anne’s gardener, had laid out the grounds, dammed the stream to form a small lake, planted a mixture of saplings and mature trees, and created the formal parterre, which was just now coming into its beauty. The trimmed hedges were of box, lavender, rosemary and yew, and encompassed geometrically-shaped beds of such small flowers and herbs as attracted the bees and butterflies. This parterre was the favourite resort of the Countess’s daughter, Aliena. It reminded her of the Palace of St Germain where she had spent most of her life with King James III and his sister Louise-Marie.

  She was walking with her three-year-old daughter, Marie-Louise, named after that same princess, and they strolled along the gravel walks in silence, the child having for once run out of things to say. It was hot in the sunshine, and the nurse, walking at a discreet distance behind them, doubted the wisdom of having left the shelter of the house, but they had been so much indoors that year that Aliena could not resist the beckon of the Indian summer. The dog Fand ran on ahead of them, burying his nose ecstatically in every bush he passed, drinking in the delicious multitude of smells. In his short life he had been bitten and stung so often that his muzzle was scarred and hardened, and Aliena was not surprised when he suddenly jerked his head back and froze. Then his ears cocked, he broke into a frenzy of barking, and rushed away, and Aliena saw that it was a visitor that had startled him.

  ‘Jemmy!’ Marie-Louise cried as the tall figure came round the corner of the house to receive the excited dog full in the chest, and she snatched her hand from her mother’s grasp and ran towards him.

  Jemmy thrust the excited dog down and walked to the edge of the terrace to wait for the little girl, but his eyes were on Aliena. She was so beautiful, tall for a woman, graceful with a kind of artlessness which he supposed her upbringing amongst the nuns had given her. Her dress of grey silk was barely hooped, her cap and scarf were of untrimmed white lawn, and she ought to have looked as plain as a Quaker; yet in the sweet expression of her face and dark blue eyes, and the natural fall of her soft dark curls, there was a beauty that tightened his throat.

  Marie-Louise was very different. At three she was so precocious as to drive her nurses to despair, especially as her grandmother insisted on having her educated like a young gentleman, rather than concentrating on maidenly virtues such as sewing and modesty and silence. Jemmy had taken care of her riding lessons since she was eighteen months old; Father Renard, Annunciata’s priest, who had taken Jemmy in hand in his wild youth, had been entrusted with the care of her mind. To the scandal of the servants, Marie-Louise had had a fencing master as well as a music-master; Aliena had taught her French and Italian and Court etiquette. It had been left to her grandmother alone to spoil her and pet her, and to fill her mind with tales of her illustrious forefathers and the glory of the Stuart cause.

  Marie-Louise was well-grown for her age, and already beautiful, with tawny hair and white skin and large brown eyes flecked with gold, that would turn pure gold when she was in a rage. Her dress today was a perfect miniature of her mother’s down to the small silk apron embroidered with a border of daisies, which Jemmy was willing to bet was not her own work. But where on Aliena the silvery grey brought to mind images of peace and cool water, on the child it was like a silver lamp to hold the flame of her face and eyes and hair. Beautiful and precocious she certainly was; she was also passionate, vain and imperious.

  ‘Where have you been so long?’ she cried now as she rushed up to Jemmy, seizing his legs in a hard embrace. ‘You have been gone away for ever and ever, and it has never stopped raining, and I have been so bored!’

  ‘Oh, I have been away on business,’ Jemmy said easily, smiling down into the fiery golden eyes.

  ‘What business?’ she demanded. Fand, still circling, licked her face in passing with a swipe of his tongue, but she did not even notice. She was always single-minded about things, and now she gripped the fabric of his breeches so tightly her knuckles whitened, and shook at them to enforce his attention.

  ‘Grown-up things. Very boring things,’ Jemmy said.

  ‘I don’t like it when you are away,’ she said deliberately, as if she had only to speak for her preferences to be fulfilled. Aliena and the nurse had now caught up with her, and it was to Aliena that Jemmy addressed his answer.

  ‘Well, to say true, neither do I, but that is the common fate of us all. Being grown-up often means doing things you don’t like to do.’

  ‘You lie!’ Marie-Louise cried, shaking him again. Aliena stooped and loosed her hands in a way that must have hurt her, though the child did not permit it to shew.

  ‘How dare you speak so?’ Aliena said. ‘You will do a penance for that. You shall apologize at once.’

  Marie-Louise barely gave her mother a glance, and her ‘Sorry, Mama’, was perfunctory. She was frowning at Jemmy, engaged in some thought process of her own. ‘But I have to do things I don’t like all the time,’ she said with great emphasis. ‘And if being grown-up is not any different, then what is it for?’

  Jemmy was laughing into Aliena’s eyes. ‘I don’t know, chuck. No one ever told me,’ he said. The nurse stepped forward and reached for Marie-Louise’s arm.

  ‘Now then, miss, that’s enough chattering. Come with me, and let your Mama speak privately to the gentleman.’

  Marie-Louise snatched her arm away and whirled on the spot, glaring at the nurse. ‘Don’t touch me! And don’t call me “miss”. Jemmy, tell her she must not call me “miss”. I want to stay with you. I won’t go away, just when you’ve come back.’

  The nurse rolled her eyes, as if to say, there, you see what I have to endure from this unnatural child. But Jemmy stilled both women with a glance, and went down on his haunches to look into the child’s face.

  ‘My love, you must learn to be obedient to your mother, and to those that your mother puts in authority over you. That is your duty, and if you fail in it, God will not love you, and neither shall I.’

  Marie-Louise looked defiant, and something in her eye told Jemmy that she valued Jemmy’s love more than God’s.

  He kept his face stern and said, ‘Go now, without argument, and I shall come and see you later, I promise you. You shall have me to yourself.’

  ‘For a whole hour,’ she conditioned. She could no more have gone without arguing than fly.

  ‘For the half of an hour, but only if you are a good girl, and do as you are told.’

  She glared at the nurse, torn between the promise of having Jemmy to herself in the future, and the reality of sharing him in the present. ‘But she shall not call me “miss”,’ she reverted. Jemmy looked stern.

  ‘It is quite sufficient title for such a little girl,’ he said. Her golden eyes filled with tears of hurt.

  ‘But it’s not,’ she said desperately. ‘It’s not. You don’t call me miss.’

  ‘Sweetheart, your titles are between us, for love, not for public use. You have had that explained to you so many times.’

  But she gazed at him, the tears overflowing onto her cheeks, and he did not know, as he never did, how much was politic, and how much her pride really was touched. So he put his mouth to her ear, and whispered,

  ‘Just between us, then. You are the Princess Marie-Louise Fitzjames Stuart, Countess of Strathord. There, will that do?’

  She flung her arms round his neck and hugged him hard, and he could feel the hot wet tears on his neck. Then she released him, nodded, and smiled radiantly, and allowed the nurse to take her hand and lead her away, only turning back for a moment to say:

  ‘Remember, you promised!’

  ‘She is terribly spoiled,’ Aliena sighed when they were out of sight. ‘I’ afraid it is my fault. My mother indulges her, but I am too strict, and the nurses say they could manage her if I would leave her in the nursery as a mother should. But I should not care to see her once a day, for five minutes, as they wish me to. It was not so at St Germain.’ She smiled apologetically for bringing up that subject again. ‘Sh
e will never do anything she does not want to, but it seems only you have the knack of persuading her to virtue.’

  ‘It is only because she is so young,’ Jemmy said comfortingly, drawing her hand through his arm and walking with her along the gravelled path. ‘I, too, was wild when I was a boy, as Father Renard will tell you. She will grow steadier as she grows older.’

  ‘I hope so, if you are to be away for such long periods,’ Aliena said teasingly. ‘You have been back from Leeds these three weeks and never a visit.’

  ‘I would have come sooner, as you must know, but there has been so much to do at home, with my father away. You know that he has gone to London? He went in my absence – this South Sea Company business must have unnerved him mightily.’

  ‘My dear Jemmy,’ Aliena laughed, ‘you need not sound so surprised. The whole of England is unnerved. Thousands of people have been ruined, and lost all they had – not just the gentry, but the common people as well. Everyone who could lay his hand to a sovereign or two invested it in the Company, and now they want to know where the money has gone.’

  ‘Oh, I know, there is talk of corruption and bribery and all sorts of villainy. But why should my father be troubled? You know he sold his shares months ago, when your mother sold hers, and made a very handsome profit by it. She made him do it. She said it could not last.’

  Aliena smiled. ‘My mother was not moved by some mysterious foreknowledge of doom, I’m afraid, but by plain superstition. She feels that gambling, except on horses, is wicked, and she began to be uneasy about getting so much for nothing, and sold out to avoid attracting God’s attention.’

  Jemmy laughed at this accurate portrait of his great-grandmother, the Countess Annunciata, and went on, ‘Very well, whatever her reasons, she saved my father a deal of loss, and I hope he is grateful. But it does not explain why he has gone up to London.’

  ‘Because, my dear Jemmy, the business life of the country has been in chaos, and anyone who has any concern in it is naturally anxious to be on hand and to see what is to come of it all. My mother is gone too, to stay with my brother Maurice at Chelmsford House. Maurice has contacts at Court, and at Leicester House where the Princess Caroline dotes on him. He is one person who can come and go freely between the two royal establishments. He says it’s because he’s a musician, and no one suspects him of listening to political gossip. If anyone ever says to him, ‘What’s your opinion of this, Morland,’ he gives a great start and says, ‘Why, I beg your pardon sir, I had not attended. Were we speaking of the new opera?’

  Jemmy laughed, and said, ‘Very well, your mother stays at Chelmsford House, which is after all her own property, and Maurice visits the Royal family. What then?’

  ‘At Leicester House,’ Aliena explained, ‘Maurice bumps into Lord Newcastle and Sir Robert Walpole and their friends. I think my mother would not be averse to making their acquaintance.’

  ‘But they’re Whigs!’ Jemmy cried in horror. Aliena’s teeth shewed very white when she laughed.

  ‘Oh the monsters!’ she mimicked him. ‘Well, perhaps my mother thinks that a Whig out of office is the next best thing to a Tory in office. If this South Sea Company scandal destroys Stanhope, as seems likely, Walpole may be the next to rise to power. I think mother would like to have a friend in power.’

  ‘Even a Whig?’

  ‘Truth to say, I think she cannot get used to being out of the game,’ Aliena sighed. ‘She has spent all her life in and around Court, and she feels uneasy without her finger on the pulse, even if the pulse is now a minister’s rather than a King’s. And though she will never reconcile herself to the Elector, she quite likes Princess Caroline, though she finds it hard to call her Princess of Wales. When Princess Caroline is Queen, she might find it in her to return to Court.’

  Jemmy considered all this, and then rejected it. The Countess Annunciate had been his mentor and confidante, and he knew the depth of her fidelity to the Stuart cause, and of her rejection of the Hanoverian usurpers. It was she who had encouraged him at the age of fourteen to run away from home to join the Jacobite rising in Scotland; and only last year she had corresponded with Jacobites in Spain who were planning an invasion. She had spent many years in exile with King James II, and her son, the earl, had been condemned to death for his part in the 1715 rising, though he had escaped the Tower with his life.

  Would this great lady, with the royal blood of the Stuarts in her own veins, now be content to be wooing squire’s sons and new-made peers, whether Whigs or Tories, whether in or out of office? Jemmy did not think so.

  ‘She’s plotting something,’ he said, and Aliena shrugged and changed the subject.

  On the last day of December, in the Palazzo Muti in Rome, Queen Clementina, the consort of King James III, gave birth to a healthy son. He was christened Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Maria Sobieski Stuart. The news reached London within days, and not long afterwards was known in Yorkshire and in Morland Place.

  Neither Matt nor Annunciata had yet returned from London, and Jemmy had been thoroughly enjoying his regency. That Christmas was one of the best Jemmy remembered, and the happy atmosphere so filled the house that his step-mother Sabina rose from her bed to join in the fun, and even Jemmy’s brothers, home from their educational establishments for the season, were less disagreeable than usual. Jemmy had appointed himself Master of the Revels, since Robert was too pious and Edmund too sulky to make a good job of it. Robert complained that the servants were slack and that the religious observances were but slightly attended to; and Edmund complained that he was always given the worst old screw in the stable when he went out for a ride; but by Twelfth Night the food and drink and fun had thawed them considerably. George, of course, was always happy as long as he could keep eating.

  The culmination of the madcap Twelfth Night celebrations was the Masque of Antony and Cleopatra, and Jemmy considered it a great triumph that he had persuaded his brothers to take part in it. Indeed, Edmund, his face darkened with lamp soot, made such an impact as Cleopatra’s black slave that one of the servants got a stitch from laughing too much and had to be carried out to recover in the kitchen. Jemmy’s hardest task had been to convince Marie-Louise that she could not, at three years old, play Cleopatra, the role which Jemmy had set aside for Aliena, to his Antony.

  ‘But I am the only person with royal blood,’ she protested again and again. ‘I ought to play the queen.’ In the end Jemmy had to quiet her by letting her play Cleopatra’s daughter, Princess Selene. He had to write in a part for her, and let her make a grand entrance upon a litter, wearing the most lavish of all the costumes.

  The night ended splendidly with a supper and ball at Shawes, arranged by Aliena as her contribution to the festival. It happened to be full moon that night, so all the invitations were accepted, and the long gallery at Shawes saw fifteen couples standing up to dance, reflected in the long mirrors, dazzling in the light from the crystal chandeliers and silver sconces. Aliena was reminded of the New Year Ball at Versailles in the Galerie des Glaces, when she had danced with King James III and her brother Kardlie. It all seemed so far away now, a dream or a fairytale, for though most of her life had been spent in France it was the grey and green of Yorkshire which had now become her reality.

  The ball was a tremendous success, in spite of her worries about what her mother was up to in London, and what new troubles the birth of a Prince of Wales would bring on them all. Jemmy danced every possible dance with her, until she was obliged to force him to dance with someone else, lest he make a scandal of her.

  A week later, on his own authority, Jemmy ordered a service of thanksgiving for the new prince in the chapel at Morland Place. Aliena doubted the wisdom of it, for not all the servants were necessarily trustworthy, but she did not refuse to attend it. The chaplain, Father Andrews, spoke fervently, but obliquely, about the gracious gift from God, and the new hope that had come with the new year, and his references to the King and the Prince of Wales were so couched that
an outsider would have been hard put to it to prove which King and which Prince of Wales he meant. Aliena, looking about her, was sure that some of the stupider servants did not know why they were there.

  She loved the chapel, with its beautiful fan-vaulting, the tapestries and the marble monuments and the dark wood, the candle-light glowing on the silver altar furniture and catching the gilding on statues and decorations. The smell of incense carried her back what now seemed like a lifetime, to Chaillot, so that she almost believed she could hear the pure voices of the nuns as they sang their strange French Latin. She knelt in the place reserved for the family, and prayed for the son of her King, of the man who had been her lifelong companion. Beside her, in the Master’s place, was Jemmy, his dark head bowed reverently, his long curls – for he wore no wig – falling forward to hide the clear, tender line of his jaw. On her other side knelt her daughter, unwillingly, restless as always at being confined. She fidgeted and looked about her, but repeated automatically the words she had been taught since her infancy; praying for the health and safety of the infant prince who was her brother.

  CHAPTER TWO

  April had gone before Matt returned from London. The overwintering beasts, stalled since St Luke’s day, were let out, gaunt and blinking, to feast upon the new grass; the pigeon house had been cleaned out and the precious dung carefully spread and dug in where it was most needed to fertilize the ground; the low-lying ings had been fenced off for hay. The spring seeds had already been sown: beans in late February – beans had to go in between St Valentine and St Chad – and the oats two weeks later; and now there was only the barley to be sown, drage barley for pig- and chicken-feed, and two-row-headed barley for drink, to go in at Hoke-tide.