‘Your brother Maurice knows, of course, and the McNabs. Otherwise, no one. I have not written, nor sent any message. I have not had time or opportunity so far.’
She said, ‘I will write to Maurice and to these McNabs, and ask them to keep silence. Better that no one should know. Morland Place and Shawes will have to be told that she is dead, but better that she died of a fever, with no mention of the child.’
‘But—’
‘To what purpose? It can only wound, it can only cause trouble. Let him be brought up here in obscurity, let there be an end to all this—’ She stopped abruptly, and he saw her make the effort to control herself. Then she said, ‘Is he here? Did you bring him here?’
Allen nodded. ‘The wet-nurse has him outside. Shall I bring him in?’
In a few moments, the baby was brought in, and Aliena freed her hands from her sleeves and held them out for him. He was awake, and his dark blue eyes roved unseeingly across her face. Allen watched her, wondering what terrible accumulation of emotions she must feel as she held her grandson, but her smooth face was unfathomable.
‘So,’ she said at last, ‘the curse is not yet worked out. I had thought that I—’ She looked suddenly, sharply at Allen. ‘She paid with her life, don’t you see that? It must not be in vain. If anyone learns who this child is, it will all begin again. You must keep silence for her sake. Did you love her?’
‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘But she did not love me.’
‘No, I imagine not. She loved herself so much, there was no room in her heart for another.’ It was not said bitterly. ‘I shall take care of him – that is my payment. I shall have to give up my vows, leave the convent.’
Allen could only assent to it – he could see the necessity. ‘I will help you. I will try to be—’
‘A father to the child?’ she asked, with a wry smile. ‘No, I pray you, do not take that useless task upon yourself. You have done all you need in bringing him here. I have been happy here, these last twenty years. It was never a sacrifice, you know. I think I should have known a sacrifice would be required at some time, from someone. My mother knew it.’
Allen did not understand any of this, and said awkwardly. ‘There are one or two things of hers – I have them here. Some jewels – she sold most of them for the Young Chevalier – and this.’ He unfolded the thick paper. Aliena smiled without humour at it.
‘Her patent,’ she said at once. ‘Yes, I recognize it. How like her to have taken it with her.’
‘She was afraid the Young Chevalier would not acknowledge her as his sister if she did not shew it. But I don’t think he did anyway, even when he had seen it.’
‘No, I suppose he would not. A proud young man, from what I know of him. Well, Henry shall have her title, there is no harm in that. But not until he is grown up enough to laugh at it as he should.’
The arrangements took time to be made. In October the Young Chevalier, having wandered for five months about the lochs and glens of Scotland, fleeing the Hanoverian retribution, finally reached France, and was received graciously, even affectionately, at Fontainebleau. A few days later he presented a list to King Louis, naming those Jacobite officers to whom he thought the King ought to offer financial rewards. Allen’s name was on the list, and he received a gift of 2,000 livres, which he used to buy a small house in Clichy, a pretty little village on the slopes of Montmartre, near Paris. Henry, Duke of York, was living at Clichy and the Young Chevalier soon joined him, so it became something of a resort for Jacobites. To this house at the end of October came Aliena to set up home with the baby Henry, having given up her vows.
Maurice had agreed to keep the secret of Henry’s existence, and pointed out. ‘That as Marie-Louise will have thus died childless and intestate, the Shawes estate will pass to me as her nearest kin. It seems only just, therefore, that I should pay a pension to you and to the baby, but it shall be done anonymously, dear sister, if that is what you wish.’
The pension was enough to keep them in comfort in the house in Clichy; and Maurice also agreed to write to the McNabs, and to Morland Place to inform them of Allen’s escape and Marie-Louise’s death.
In addition to the monetary gifts, King Louis also offered all the loyal Jacobite officers commissions in his own army, and after some hesitation, Allen accepted. He was not, by nature or training, a soldier, but he had to do something and there seemed no other alternative. Aliena, gently but firmly, was discouraging him from having anything to do with baby Henry, whom she seemed to regard as a kind of living infection which must be isolated, and so at the end of November he accepted a commission in the Royal Ecossais, who were going to Flanders to fight the Dutch and Hanoverians. There was a kind of irony in that.
It was still full dark when Jemima came down into the yard, shivering a little from being so newly awake one April morning in 1747. A boy stood near the door with a torch, which made the shadows darker, and Pask was standing in the middle of the yard, holding Jewel and Pilot, already saddled up.
‘There you are, miss,’ he said. ‘Shall I help you up?’
‘No, it’s all right, Pask, give him to me. I can manage,’ Jemima said, and led Jewel to the mounting block, pushing a crust of bread under his long, enquiring lips. One of the things she had been sure to teach him, because Allen had told her long ago it was important, was to stand still to be mounted, and she swung herself up nimbly and settled her skirts and stirrup while Pask led Pilot forward for her father, who appeared on the steps at that moment, pulling on his gloves, and sniffing at the air.
‘It’s going to be fine,’ he said. ‘Good. Pask, have you the cloth there? Are you ready, Jemima? Excited?’
‘Interested, Papa,’ she smiled at him. He used the block to mount – it was easier so, with his stiff leg. He grunted as he settled himself in the saddle.
‘Of course, you are too much of a young lady to be excited by a cloth-market. Besides, your mother would not approve. It’s bad enough that I’m taking you there, but far worse if you were excited about it.’
‘You do talk nonsense,’ Jemima said affectionately, and in a moment the three horses were clattering out over the drawbridge on their way to Leeds. Away from the torchlight and the yard, the darkness seemed less dense. Sunrise was still more than an hour away, but it would start to grow light soon; in the meantime, they all knew the path well enough not to need the light. They walked briskly, enjoying the freshness of the air. In a while they reached the place where the track turned off for Shawes, and Jemima glanced at it automatically as they passed. The house was all shut up now. A letter had come from Dublin last September to say that Lady Strathord had died of a fever in Glasgow, and the processes of law had been put into motion to transfer ownership, on her intestacy, to Lord Chelmsford.
Maurice had not enjoyed ownership long, for he had not even had time to consider what to do with the house when he, too, died, in December 1746. He was seventy-four, a good age, though he came from a long-lived family. In his youth he had once described himself as a citizen of the world, and there was a deal of truth in it. Exiled from England with his mother in boyhood, he had never again regarded any place as home. He had lived in many places, wandered Europe, written music for patrons of many nationalities, married four times and begotten many children; he had been poor and he had been rich and he had been many times in danger of his life. But he died in the end peacefully, in his sleep, in his own bed, with the slumbering bulk of his last and perhaps most contented wife beside him. Molly Estoyle wept, more than she had expected to, and remembered to send for a priest, and then sat quietly at the bedside to wait, contemplating the dark and noble Stuart face, and wondering where she would order her mourning clothes, and how Maurice would have left his property.
Ownership thus passed to his elder son Rupert, the new Lord Chelmsford, who had had no hesitation in shutting up the house and dismissing all the servants, except for a few kept on as caretakers. Rumour was that he intended to let the house, but nothing certain had
been heard yet. Morland Place had taken one or two of the old servants from Shawes, and tried to find places for others, so that they should not be destitute. Jemmy had offered a home to his former tutor, Father Renard, but he had smiled a mysterious smile, and said that duty called him elsewhere, and a few days later he had left for France. Jemima had thought of asking him to take a letter for her, for Allen, but in the end she had realized that she had nothing to say to him, nothing, at least, that he would want to hear. He had been with Lady Strathord almost until the end, and she did not like to think about that.
She rode up beside her father, and he began to talk about the cloth-market.
‘When I was a child, a lot younger than you – I suppose I must have been about seven – my father took me to the cloth-market. I remember it very well. It was different in those days, of course, a lot busier. The white cloth was sold in the market as well then, but then they built the White Cloth Hall in Wakefield, and that got the merchants thinking how much better it would be to have a market indoors, out of the weather. So they built the hall on Kirkgate, and now it’s only us coloured cloth merchants who have to brave the weather.’
‘But why don’t you build a cloth hall, too?’ Jemima asked.
‘It wouldn’t pay us to. It would cost money, you see, and there’s never been much trade in coloured cloth in Leeds – not compared with the white. Not enough trade to justify it.’
Jemima thought about that, and thought that surely if the hall were built, it would attract the trade from other places, and then it would be worth it. But she did not say anything, aware that she was the most green of novices to the business.
They reached Leeds just before five, and Jemima, who had expected to see a busy market scene, was amazed to discover the street, Briggate, completely deserted, and with no sign of a market except the bare boards laid across trestles which lined the street on both sides.
‘But where is everybody?’ she asked. ‘Are we too early?’
‘Oh no, my lamb,’ Jemmy smiled. ‘It’s the rule of the market. No one may be in the street until the market bell rings, or they will be fined. They are all in the inns, where we shall go now and break our fast with a Briggshot.’
‘With what?’
‘A clothier’s two-pennorth, my child – the ordinary they lay on for breakfast for all the hungry clothiers who have travelled through the night to get here. We’ll go to the Eagle and Two Lambs – that I think will be the best for a young lady. Some of the inns, to tell you the truth, are a little rough – and some of their ordinaries are more ordinary than others!’
After the silence and emptiness of the street, the Eagle and Two Lambs was crowded, noisy and smoky. Jemima pressed close to her father, and felt herself being crushed by the press of enormous men with red faces who were all bawling at each other, in between cramming their faces with food and drink and sucking on noxious clay pipes that smelled like burning rubbish. Jemmy worked his way through the crowd, receiving claps on the back and cheerful greetings, some respectful, some boisterous, from his fellow-clothiers.
‘Now then, Master Morland! How’s the leg?’
‘What hasta brought today, Master? Another bit o’ thy fancy stuff?’
‘Hasta heard about Norris, then, Master? He were set upon coming across t’moor, an’ ’is cloth stolen. Tha s’d mind thy piece has no mud on it, or t’magistrate’ll be axing questions,’ said one man jocularly.
‘Nay, lad, tha forgets – ’e is t’magistrate,’ someone shouted, and a roar of laughter swept over them. Now someone noticed Jemima, clinging to her father’s arm, and way parted for them, making some space for which she was grateful, for she felt as though she could not breathe.
‘Make way for t’little lass,’ someone said.
The jocular man peered at her and cried. ‘Now then, Master Morland, is ’at little maiden thy daughter? Why, she’s grown up into a right handsome little maid, and no mistake. Now lads, step back and let t’little mistress through. Eh, but she’s bonny!’
He clapped a meaty red hand kindly on her shoulder as he passed, and his beery breath whistled around her ears. Grateful as she was for his obvious intended kindness, she was more grateful to slip into the haven of the booth her father had been heading for, where Pask quickly joined them, having taken the horses round the back, and a serving-girl came up at once to take their order. Safe in the booth, with her back to the high wooden partition, Jemima felt able to enjoy the scene, and soon the Briggshots arrived to stave off the pangs of early morning hunger: for each of them a clay pot of ale, a wooden piggin filled with oatmeal porridge, and a wooden platter of cold roast beef and a roll of bread. The jocular clothier, whose name, it appeared, was most appropriately Michael Clothier, came and leaned on the end of the partition to smoke his pipe and exchange gossip with Jemmy, with more details of the accident that had happened to the unfortunate Norris, and a list of the merchants who were known to be coming to the market that morning. After a while he looked across at Jemima again.
‘So, tha’st brought thy lass to learn trade?’
‘That’s right. I thought she ought to know how it’s done, even if she has an agent to come to market for her,’ Jemmy said. ‘After all, I won’t always be here.’
‘You’ve said truth there, Master,’ Clothier said, suddenly serious. ‘Well, I shall keep my eye out for her, if ever the time should come. She’s the properest little maiden I’ve seen for many a long year, God bless her.’
He nodded and moved away, and Jemmy turned and smiled at his daughter.
‘I think you’ve made a friend there,’ he said.
At six o’clock came the sound from outside of a church bell ringing, and at once the most extraordinary change occurred. Suddenly there was silence; everyone in the inn put down his ale-pot, picked up his bale of cloth, and hurried outside.
Jemmy got up too, saying. ‘That’s the bell for the market. Come on now. Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut.’
Outside the clothiers were setting out their rolls of cloth on the trestles, and Pask did likewise, finding a space on a trestle near the inn. Each clothier stood behind his own bale, and everything was done in complete silence, without the least fuss or jostling, in the strangest contrast to the noisy scene inside the inn. The bell was ringing all this white from the old chapel by the bridge, and when it stopped, from both ends of the market appeared other men, some of them richly dressed, all walking in silence down between the rows of trestles.
‘The buyers,’ Jemmy whispered to Jemima. ‘Some factors, some merchants, some agents for foreign merchants. Look at that one – he’s a Frenchman. See his patent?’
Others, Jemima noticed, were carrying small squares of coloured or patterned cloth which they were evidently trying to match. A rich-looking man with a huge fur collar to his cloak came up to the clothier standing next to Jemmy and fingered the bolt of cloth, and then leaned across the trestle and whispered something to the clothier. He whispered something back, and the man in the fur collar shook his head and walked on. All around her the scene was being repeated, everything being done in a whisper, as if no one wanted anyone else to know his business. After a while one or two people began to take cloth away. Jemima watched it all with fascinated eyes. The fur-collared man came back and apparently made a new offer to the clothier, and this time there was a nod and a handshake.
In half an hour the trestles were beginning to empty. Jemmy sold his cloth to a handsome grey-haired man who agreed his first whispered price. He nodded and walked away, and Pask at once rolled the cloth up, put it on his shoulder, and went off with it.
‘He’ll take it to the merchant’s house, and get payment for it,’ Jemmy explained. ‘We can stay and watch if you like.’ Jemima nodded.
At a quarter past seven the bell began to ring again, and everyone began to pack up their belongings, some to take their cloth away to the merchants’ houses, others to take it back into the inn.
‘Everyone has to be out of the market
by the time the bell stops ringing, or pay a fine,’ Jemmy explained. The buyers concluded last, hasty bargains, and hurried away. At half past seven the bell stopped ringing, and Jemmy took Jemima back into the Eagle and Two Lambs from a street which was as deserted as it had been at five o’clock.
‘What happens now?’ she asked.
‘We wait for Pask, and then go home,’ Jemmy said. ‘The street will be open again at eight, for general provisions, an ordinary market – baskets, shoes, pots and pans, that sort of thing.’
‘Did you get a good price for the cloth?’ she asked. Jemmy smiled.
‘I got the price I wanted. One always does. The agents know as much about cloth as we do, or they would not be agents. There is rarely much disagreement about the price – a few coppers this way or that. That was Thoresby’s agent I sold it to. Thoresby’s one of the great merchants hereabouts – you’ll come to know his name. He buys a lot of my cloth. Sometimes I don’t even have to send it to market – his man will talk to Harvey, and they’ll come to an agreement, and Harvey’ll take it over to Thoresby’s house straight from the finisher.’ He looked at her hesitantly, and then appeared to make up his mind. ‘I had better say this – don’t be too trusting of your agent. Harvey’s a good man, I don’t mean otherwise, but any man can be tempted, and an agent has great power. He’ll work better for you if he thinks you are keeping an eye on him. Look over his shoulder from time to time, and it’ll keep him on the straight path.’
Their eyes met, and the unspoken words ‘when I am dead’ hung between them to end the sentence. She went up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. The thought that all he was teaching her was a preparation for when he was gone was always with her, and she hated it.
The family was gathering for Easter. Uncle Robert, recently widowed, came from London where he had been angling for a stall at St Paul’s but without success. His sons Rob and Frederick arrived on the same day, Rob from Christ Church and Frederick from Winchester. Neither of them was in his father’s good books, Rob because he had run up a gambling debt at Oxford which, for lack of funds, he had been obliged to apply to Robert to settle; and Frederick because he was already celebrated at his school for being the youngest pupil ever to be expelled for the dual sins of debauching the maids and smoking in the chapel.
Dynasty 8: The Maiden: The Maiden (The Morland Dynasty) Page 32