Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  XXXVI. GEORGE AUGUSTUS, PRINCE OF WALES, MAKES A PILGRIMAGE

  THERE WAS A man in Hanover sunk fathoms deep in remorse whilst Clara von Platen was still exulting.

  Mr Anthony Craston had been the first to betray the woman he worshipped and the man who had been his friend. He had betrayed them in an ignoble jealousy to Bernstorff their greatest enemy. It was in vain for him to argue. “The affair was notorious. Others would have told.” He had told and he slunk about his work thinking that he must bear the mark of Judas upon his forehead. His misery was made the greater in that it fell to him to prepare the précis of the affair for his Ambassador’s signature. He must follow step by step the long process of the divorce. He must read the passionate refusals of the Electoral Princess Sophia Dorothea to defend herself. He must record her condemnation to lifelong imprisonment in the Castle of Ahlden. He even went beyond his duties to suffer a needless torture. For on the morning of her departure, he crept after a pitiless night of vigil to the corner of a street and saw her close-shut carriage surrounded by an escort with gleaming swords drive her away to her lonely prison in a little village on the edge of a moor.

  Nor did his punishment end with his self reproaches on her account. Philip Königsmark was not. Rumours ran the town, wild as a winter storm, Königsmark had fled to France; Königsmark was in the dark of a dungeon in the Leine Schloss; Königsmark was dead. No one knew. Philip’s sister Aurora rushed to Saxony and obtained the help of Philip’s friend the young Elector. Even he got no answer to his enquiries. The English Ambassador took the disappearance in a lighter spirit.

  “Our Prince, you must remember,” he said to Anthony, “has often visited Italy and may have learned the humour of that country of despatching people without noise. I am told that Königsmark’s sister raves like Cassandra, but they answer her like Cain that they are not her brother’s keeper.”

  Philip Königsmark was not; unless the pale spectre with the red gash above the heart which stood nights at Craston’s bedside and talked to him of the dreams they shared and of the love they had had for one another not so many years ago, was something more than the fabric of Anthony’s contrition. In those days, he recalled, he had looked upon himself as the sturdy earthen vessel and Philip as the silver flame which it was his business to protect.

  But time brought its anodyne. Craston was promoted to Berlin, passed on to Vienna and after some years became the Minister of Queen Anne at the Hague. He retired from that post with a knighthood in 1712 and gave himself to the pleasures of a country life in his Manor House in Essex. So for four years. But in the summer of 1716, when George Louis had reigned in England for two years, he received an unexpected summons to the house of George Augustus, Prince of Wales, in St. James’s Square.

  Sir Anthony Craston was surprised and disturbed. He had not seen the Prince of Wales since the days when His Royal Highness had been a child playing with his mother Sophia Dorothea in the garden of the Leine Palace. But he knew of him as a peppery little round man, very military and formal, who hated his father with a hatred which was returned with interest, and adored his imprisoned mother. Sir Anthony had a foreboding. He was comfortable and had reached that later period of middle age when the troubled events of youth are becoming biography and ceasing to be emotion. He had no wish to breathe into life again the embers of remorse. However, the summons of so august a personage was not to be neglected. Sir Anthony travelled to London and on the appointed day presented himself at the door of the Prince’s house. He was mystified rather than alarmed now. For there was a concourse of carriages in the road, and mounted guardsmen and a cloud of powdered lackeys about the steps.

  Sir Anthony gave his name and was unceremoniously shouldered into a small room at the back of the house.

  “If you will have the kindness to wait here, sir—” said the footman and shut the door upon him softly.

  There Sir Anthony remained for the best part of an hour, during a portion of which hour it seemed to him that two royal voices were having a royal row. At the end of the time there was a great stamping on the stairs, a great clatter of horses in the street and at last silence. In a little while, a servant with a staff and a chain of office opened the door. He was a hot and flustered man.

  “His Royal Highness regrets that you have been kept waiting,” he said. “His Majesty paid an unexpected visit upon His Royal Highness this morning. Will you be good enough to follow me?”

  He preceded Sir Anthony down a corridor and ushered him into a fine big room looking on to the square.

  “If you will wait for a minute longer,” he said and he looked about the room, thrusting back a chair and pushing forward a table. Then he drew a breath of relief and sent it whistling again from his mouth.

  “Yes,” said Sir Anthony drily. “I seemed to hear the sound of a disagreement.”

  The servant became human. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “There’s been such a howdyedo as nobody ever did hear outside a laundry,” he said. He suddenly walked across the room. Against the wall hung a picture covered with a shawl.

  “’Tis fortunate that I remembered to hang up this piece of drapery in time. His Majesty cannot abide the sight of this picture”; and removing the shawl, he revealed a portrait of Sophia Dorothea in the loveliness of her youth, her mass of dark hair threaded through with white flowers, her red lips smiling, her eyes lustrous and gentle, her white shoulders rising with the gleam of satin from her gown.

  Anthony Craston was taken aback. He didn’t want to look. He could not but look. The overlay of the years was swept from his memory like dust from the cover of a book. He was in the reception room at the Alte Palace making his first awkward obeisance to that young and gracious lady. He was in the Park at Celle on a bitter night of March listening to the Folies d’Espagne whistled softly a few feet away and seeing her face lit by a lamp at the window. And alas! He was in Bernstorff’s room babbling out the story of his vigil between his sneezes.

  The servant had gone from the room. It was his business to cover the portrait before the King came to the house and to remove the covering as soon as His Majesty had gone away. There was no magic in the picture for him. But for Anthony Craston it made a temple of that sunlit, quiet room. It was hung nobly in the place of honour, the picture of a radiant, lovely girl painted on the eve of her ill-fated marriage thirty-four years ago. And she was still a prisoner in the Castle of Ahlden — graciously permitted to drive as far as seven miles in any direction so long as an escort of soldiers surrounded her carriage.

  An equerry came into the room in full dress.

  “I am Captain Holmes,” he said pleasantly. “His Royal Highness wished to receive you in person but an unexpected honour has disordered his morning. He asks you to do him a service, Sir Anthony, which may cause you some inconvenience.”

  “I am at His Royal Highness’s commands,” Anthony replied.

  Captain Holmes, thereupon, repeated the instructions which he had been given and Sir Anthony returned to his home.

  A week later, Craston ordered a valise to be packed and a horse saddled and left ready at eleven o’clock of the night. He then sent all his servants to bed and waited up alone in a room at the side of the door. At one o’clock in the morning he heard the trot of horses and a riding-crop tapped gently on his lighted window. He put out the lamp, took up his hat and went out. Captain Holmes was the rider who had tapped upon his window and a little apart from him a second man wrapped in a cloak with his hat pulled forward over his brows, sat on a great charger, as still as a statue. Crason fetched his horse out of the stable and the three men rode away without a word spoken. They came to Harwich in the morning and embarked on a small ship which was waiting for them in the river wither mainsail hoisted and her anchor short. They sailed with a fair wind and on the morning of the third day reached the mouth of the Weser. They waited for the tide and carried on to the town of Bremen. There they landed. Horses were already waiting for them and under Craston�
�s guidance they rode by heath and byway, stopping late at night at small unconsidered inns and starting again in the cool of the morning. Throughout all this time the Prince had addressed no word at all to Craston and the fewest possible to his equerry.

  On the afternoon of the second day the travellers reached the village of Ahlden on the edge of the Lüneberger Heath. Hanover was no more than ten miles away, Osnaburg a day’s journey, Celle little more. Yet on the border of the great heath they were as remote from the business and hurry and the unfailing entertainment of the world as if they had been dropped from the clouds into the middle of an enchanted forest. Anthony Craston left his companions in a private room of the one inn the village possessed and was absent for three hours.

  “It is arranged,” he said on his return to Captain Holmes. The Prince of Wales was sitting apart in a window, seeming not to listen but listening with both his ears. Craston knew not what title he should use in denominating the Princess of Ahlden, but he took a risk. “Her Majesty is so beloved by these villagers that no arrangements could be easier. At ten o’clock!”

  They snatched a meal and a few hours’ sleep. At ten o’clock Craston led them from the inn. A hundred yards away, the entrance of that old red-brick Castle faced them beyond a moat and a tangle of trees. The drawbridge was down but sentries paced in front of the closed doors. Craston led his companions away to the left. The Aller River cut them off from this side of the building. Below the bank a boat was waiting with a boatman in the bows.

  “Have a care, gentlemen,” he said in a low voice, and he had reason for his warning. For lying along the thwarts was a ladder against which anyone might stumble and raise a clatter.

  The travellers climbed down into the boat and were slowly and silently rowed across the stream to the farther bank. It was but a strip of earth between the river and the sheer wall of the Castle. But halfway up the wall a light shone in a rift of the curtains. Very carefully they disembarked and lifted the ladder against the wall. It needed the efforts of all four men to raise and settle it. But as the topmost ends of the two uprights grated against the wall just below the lighted window, the curtains were drawn aside and shading a lighted candle with the palm of her hand a woman looked out.

  It was as well that Anthony Craston had finished his share of the work with the ladder. For he staggered back and could hardly repress a cry. It had been reported more than once by travellers that the Princess of Ahlden had retained surprisingly throughout her long captivity, the lustre and beauty of her youth. Craston had ascribed the reports to the inclination for the fabulous which misleads all travellers. But in this case at all events he was wrong. For the woman who looked out of the Castle window was in lineament and colour, the woman who had looked from another Castle window in Celle on an unforgettable night of March.

  The next moment the light was extinguished. There was a noise of a window thrown open and out of the darkness a faint cry floated down to the little group at the ladder’s foot.

  “George! George Augustus! Is it you?”

  George Augustus was climbing the ladder whilst the words were spoken. No one of the three by the foot of the ladder looked up. No one of them heard what sacred living words passed between mother and son, or saw how for a little while they clung together. A caricaturist of the day might have tried to raise a laugh by making the scene ridiculous, but to those who witnessed it, it was too homely and poignant for anything but tears.

  When the Prince descended, he spoke apart with his equerry and the equerry turned to Craston.

  “His Royal Highness says that he will wait whilst you receive your due.”

  Field sports had fortunately for Anthony Craston kept his head steady and his joints limber. He mounted the ladder in his turn. A white hand was extended to him. As he bent his lips to it, he heard Sophia’s voice gentle and kind.

  “I thank you. But I remember you and you were always my friend.”

  Her friend! He whose treachery had first set her enemies snapping at her heels!

  He climbed down the ladder with a most pitiful prayer in his heart that never in an after life when all things are known, he might stand face to face with her or with Philip Königsmark his friend.

  Musk and Amber (1942)

  Set in the eighteenth century, this novel was published in 1942 by Hodder and Stoughton and by Doubleday in America. Mason was in his seventies and coming towards the end of his career and so he had settled into a familiar genre of romantic historical drama, with numerous twists in the plot. The New York Times in their review of 23 August, 1942, described it as ‘at once strange, romantic, exciting and pathetic… The author has caught the flavor of the time, its curious mixture of the brutal and the exquisite, of cruelty and the love of beauty.’ The title of the story comes from Sir Thomas Browne’s work Christian Morals: ‘Too many there be to whom a dead Enemy smells well and who find Musk and Amber in Revenge.’

  Mr. James Elliot is visiting a grand country house, Grest House. Through his eyes, we see the building for the first time. It is a relatively new building, tastefully furnished: ‘One moved in a world of white and gold, of space and grace and high colonnades…[yet] There were small rooms where one could be private, with open fireplaces and sweet-smelling logs burning in the iron baskets.’ Elliot was a friend of Philip, the incumbent of the house, who died the year before; he is here now to meet the new lord, Julian John Philip Challoner Carolus Scoble, Earl of Linchcombe, Viscount Terceira. His first experience of the young man is to hear his exquisite singing voice emanating from another room and on meeting him, he finds the boy to have ‘the beauty of a Greek statue’, tall and slender and also shy and demure in his manner; perhaps a little too other-worldly for the high rank in life he has been elevated to. In contrast to the delicacy of Julian’s good looks are the darker features, more athletic build and sardonic manner of cousin Henry Scoble, also a guest at the house — a man whose manner is more abrupt and mocking than the gentle demeanour of Julian

  Julian is merely a boy and his half sister, Lady Frances Scoble, is his guardian and in charge of his education, but she is unmoved by the idea that he should continue with the voice training that his father had initiated. Questions as to the suitability of Lady Frances and Henry Scoble as mentors for Julian begin to arise in Elliot’s mind, especially when he witnesses the alarming scene of Julian experiencing night terrors in his sleep.

  The narrative now moves to Naples, a year later and at Elliot’s hotel a crowd has gathered. Someone is singing, a sublime, enchanting voice that has the crowd in the street calling for an encore – an unmistakeable voice that can only belong to Julian. He is correct — the young lord is there, with Lady Frances, Henry Scoble and a small retinue. Elliot is horrified to overhear a conversation between Frances and Henry that confirms that they are having an affair and there is clearly a secret pact between them. What could the secret pact be – an elopement, or something more sinister involving the innocent Julian?

  Elliot’s suspicions are heightened when Julian goes missing one evening. It is suggested that he has been kidnapped and a ransom will be demanded, but no such demand comes. The days pass, with no news at all, until tragic news is revealed. Fishermen in the bay have recovered the body of a boy, of the right proportions to Julian, who had been enjoying some sailing trips in the bay during his holiday. The body wears Julian’s clothes, from which the jewelled accessories have been roughly removed. Frances and Henry seem inconsolable and prepare to leave Naples after the formalities have been taken care of. However, in a peasant hut a boy with head wounds is lying, tended by the poor fisherman and his family that occupy the dwelling. On his recovery, he begins to sing, a sweet and beautiful voice such as his poor carers have never heard before…

  This is good, solid old-school melodrama from an accomplished author, perhaps a little out of date even at the time of publication, but a pleasant read and to the reader at the time, picturesque with its Italian backdrop. The plot is classic mystery and adventure, the
characters well-drawn and there are entertaining twists to the story.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  I. AT GREST PARK

  II. MR. ELLIOT IS PUZZLED

  III. TWO TRUANTS

  IV. ON A BALCONY

  V. MR. ELLIOT GIVES AN OPINION WITH CONSEQUENCES OF WHICH HE IS UNAWARE

  VI. DISQUIETUDE

  VII. A CHANGE IN THE PEERAGE

  VIII. A SONG IS SUNG TOO WELL

  IX. JULIAN’S CHOICE

  X. A PRESENT IS GIVEN AND A DEBUT MADE

  XI. THE NEW BARONET SUFFERS A SHOCK AT VENICE

  XII. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE THIRD BOX OPPOSITE

  XIII. A VISITOR FROM LONDON

  XIV. JEALOUSY AND YET ANOTHER DEVIL

  XV. JULIAN FINDS A FRIEND AND A WAY OF ESCAPE

  XVI. THE CONCERT AT THE REZZONICO PALACE THE ESCAPE FORESTALLED

  XVII. THE CONCERT AT THE REZZONICO PALACE DISASTER AND RECOVERY

  XVIII. THE REFUGE

  XIX. OLD CONSPIRATORS CONSPIRE AGAIN

  XX. THE PLAN OF ESCAPE

  XXI. A WATER-PARTY ON THE BRENTA

  XXII. THE INCORRIGIBLE PAST

  XXIII. THE PROOFS ARE FOUND

  XXIV. A LETTER FROM LONDON

  XXV. KIDNAPPED AND GLAD OF IT

  XXVI. JULIAN RETURNS TO GREST

  XXVII. AN OLD SONG IS SUNG AND AN OLD HIDING-PLACE DISCOVERED

  XXVIII. AFTER EIGHT YEARS

  XXIX. MUSK AND AMBER

  XXX. A DAY IN THE COUNTRY

  XXXI. A HAVEN OF A SORT

  I. AT GREST PARK

  MR. JAMES ELLIOT reached Grest Park in his coach at half past seven of the evening. He was not an assiduous visitor of country houses, for he preferred the artistic society of Continental cities. But Grest held a special place in his affections. It was not a castle, frowning from the top of a rock over a country of serfs; nor a Tudor Palace of dark panels and diamond-paned windows; but a mansion of his own eighteenth century, spacious and light, and, whilst reserving its own privileges, paternal. A great Whig house in fact. Wide corridors with white walls ornamented with plaster plaques by Adam led to long oblong rooms lit by high rounded windows. Big mirrors in gilded frames of Chinese Chippendale hung on the walls between the windows. Lofty ceilings, barrel-shaped and painted, spread a panoply above the head. Nothing frowned. There was a suggestion of humanity. One moved in a world of white and gold, of space and grace and high colonnades. Yet comfort was not lacking. Deep carpets of soft patterns made walking a caress. There were small rooms where one could be private, with open fireplaces and sweet-smelling logs burning in the iron baskets.