Blood Royal

by Blood Royal (retail) (epub)

  ‘Get away from me, you fucking bastard,’ she said.

  His nails scratched her arm as he led her to the door. ‘We’ll see, Lady Cecily. Any night.’

  Outside, a cold winter’s rain had emptied the street and its traders had cleared their stalls and gone, leaving flapping tarpaulins and a detritus of orange peel and squashed cabbage leaves.

  Cecily stood in it, her shoes to the uppers in mud, calm at having reached the lowest floor of hell. Here it is and I shall sink no further. Lemuel must fend for himself. Were he in his wits, he’d insist on it.

  Lemuel was the debtor, not she. Pity had kept her by his side. She had done what she could for him but marital loyalty did not, could not, extend to whoring in order to protect a husband she had not wanted to marry in the first place. She must leave him to his fate.

  It is desertion.

  ‘No, I am not abandoning Lemuel. It shall be for his advantage. I shall go to Mary Astell. Yes, yes, that’s what to do. From Mrs Astell’s I can write letters, pester, conduct a campaign for his release. It is not abandonment. Were he in his wits, he would urge me to go.’

  It is desertion. A Fitzhenry does not flee the battlefield.

  ‘What of Maurice Fitzhenry in the Civil War? Sir Thomas Fitzhenry at Bosworth? They lived to fight another day. It is not desertion, it is… strategic withdrawal.’

  Chattering, mad, she picked her way across the street to go and tell her wounded she was leaving him on the battlefield.

  On the Fleet Bridge, a horseman cantering towards the prison saw her and called her name, but his voice was lost in the hiss of rain.

  Lemuel wasn’t in his room. She ran along the corridor to find Carver, who said: ‘Bambridge’s orders.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Bartholomew Fair.’

  ‘Christ God.’

  She ran down flights, struggled through the drunks outside the Commons taproom who grasped at her, across the court where, in daytime, prisoners were confined in the cemetery of the ‘Fair’ and shared the air with the corpses who’d died in the night, down another flight to a keepers’ area which was separated from the Fair itself by a large grilled gate beyond which was darkness.

  She snatched a flambeau from its sconce and went to the gate, ignoring the protest of the night keeper. ‘Lemuel.’

  Figures squirmed into the pool of light cast by the torch, some blaspheming, others pleading.

  ‘Lemuel.’

  To the right someone was mewing. She angled the torch so that she could see him. They’d put his legs in irons, his wrists were manacled to his neck.

  She wasn’t aware of telling the keeper to open the gate, but he did it. She crouched beside Lemuel. ‘There, there. Cecily’s here. Don’t be frightened.’ To the keeper she screamed: ‘Get these fucking irons off.’

  ‘Them’s a Bambridge special,’ he told her, ‘seven and six garnish to get them off.’

  ‘I’ll kill you. Get them off.’

  Behind the keeper a voice said: ‘I should get them off, laddie, or I’ll kill you mysel’.’ It was the Scots lawyer, Archibald Cameron.

  He had some sort of release with him. Grumbling, he paid all the garnishes necessary to get Lemuel past the main gates and out into a waiting hackney, which took them to his rooms in Lincoln’s Inn. Lemuel was put into his bed and a message sent to Dolly where to find them.

  Because Cecily seemed incapable of doing it for herself, he took off her shoes and lodged them to dry on the fender of his not-too-generous fire. He brought her bread and cheese and a hot toddy. He kept explaining.

  After a while, she said: ‘You’ll have to forgive me. I seem unable to stop crying. What is it that you are trying to tell me?’

  It was something about another meeting of creditors. She grasped only the fact that Lemuel was free and would remain so. She cuddled it like a pillow and fell asleep on it, while the lawyer’s voice went regularly on, less like a god’s in a machine than a creaking pump.

  The next morning she woke up, stiff but warm, on the fireside settle, covered by a blanket.

  A bustling, stout woman told her Master Archie had gone out, but his compliments to Lady Cecily and there was breakfast on the fire, Sir Lemuel’d had a peaceful night and she, Mrs Tothill, would sit with him if Lady Cecily wished to avail herself of Master Archie’s purse and go out to purchase herself any garments she might require.

  There was one guinea in the lawyer’s purse. ‘I see he’s not expecting high fashion,’ she said. She was aware it was a shameful comment but she had been mentally denuded, stripped of the person she had thought herself to be – and once again in front of the Scotsman. She had imagined her world to be structured and found that, instead, it consisted of a thin crust over a morass of shit. Blood, breeding availed you nothing if you fell through. Because she had nothing else to do it with, Cecily tried to cover her nakedness with the tatters of dignity and sounded shrewish.

  When Dolly arrived, she and Cecily went out together, Dolly full of questions Cecily couldn’t answer. ‘I don’t know. He seems to have arranged everything, though how… He’s probably acting for somebody.’

  ‘He’s a bloody gift horse, that’s what he is. Don’t you go spitting in his teeth, now. I know you.’

  ‘I have no intention of spitting in his teeth.’ But it persisted in rankling her that she was indebted to him. She comforted herself that he must be the agent for someone greater than himself. He’d taken his bloody time. A day earlier, and she wouldn’t have had to contend for the rest of her life with the knowledge that she’d lost courage.

  The rain had stopped, though it was still a grey day. A wind scurried gowned lawyers and white specks that looked like snow around Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Not snow, but early May blossom from the hawthorn trees.

  ‘Oh, Dolly, it’s spring.’ She, who hadn’t once cried in the Fleet, now couldn’t rid herself of a tendency to weep.

  It was calming to cross the great square of the Fields and let their eyes travel the long, uniform lines of Inigo Jones’s terraces.

  ‘I’d better buy a dress, I suppose.’ The two women strolled on into Clare Market, without discussing their mutual irritation over the last few months, not so much forgiving each other as forgiving themselves.

  Cecily bought herself a serviceable bodice and petticoat, a pair of pumps – and a rabbit-skin muff for Dolly.

  Returning, they climbed a stone staircase to the top floor, past progressively smaller doors bearing the name of a legal firm. The smallest read: Archibald Cameron, Attorney-at-Law, D.LL. (E’burgh). Inside, it was both his home and office, cheaply and sparsely furnished, but neat. He’d saved on his furniture, which was of deal, presumably to buy the books that were piled on all available surfaces.

  The bed’s cupboard doors were closed and Lemuel sat on the settle, apparently listening to the lawyer who was repeating the explanations he’d made to Cecily the night before.

  ‘He don’t understand,’ Dolly said. ‘You tell us instead.’

  Archibald Cameron began again. They gathered, picking it out from the Habeas Corpuses, statutes, chattels, equities and the Debtors Act 1678, that he had called another meeting of creditors which, this time, had agreed to a settlement. ‘Done this all by yourself, did you?’ admired Dolly. ‘What about Brandling, Whatsit and Howsyourfather?’

  ‘It was necessary to act without consultation, and I’d be grateful if, now, Sir Lemuel or, in view of his weakness, Lady Cecily could regularize my position by a signature on this wee document. Desperate situations demand desperate measures. I’m only sorry it took sae long.’

  As she signed the wee document – a straightforward enough authorization – Cecily couldn’t rid herself of the idea that the man was laughing at them. He had small, bright eyes, which avoided hers, and a mouth so thin and wide it turned pedantry into a joke; the face of a comedian. What were they to him, or him to them, that he should have gone to such trouble on their behalf? A suspicion began to form.

 
‘What now?’ asked Dolly. ‘Are we still in the sirreverence or ain’t we?’

  ‘Would that be a euphemism for excrement, may I ask?’

  ‘It is.’ They nodded solemnly at each other.

  ‘I can safely say that the, er, midden has been avoided,’ Cameron told her. ‘I am even in a position to offer a property for your consideration as a refuge. For now, at least.’

  ‘We’ll take it.’

  ‘What is it?’ demanded Cecily. She wasn’t keeping up, and her distrust was growing by the second. ‘Is it one of my properties?’

  ‘I fear not. Your entire estate has mitigated the debt. I’m rare sorry. This is an inn.’

  ‘An inn?’

  It had been an inn. The Bell at Woolmer Green. Relinquished by the former landlord, who’d fallen prey to the disease common to landlords…

  ‘What disease?’

  ‘The drink, ma’am, demon drink. I’ve nae seen the property yet mysel’ but the agent impressed me with its qualities and, since it was going cheap, I ventured the capital given me on your behalf by an anonymous well-wisher…’

  ‘I have no well-wishers,’ said Cecily.

  For the first time that day the man in the fox-coloured wig looked her straight in the eye. ‘Ye have, ma’am, ye have indeed.’

  ‘It’s Walpole, isn’t it?’

  ‘Walpole? D’ye mean Sir Robert?’

  She was not taken in by his flummox. ‘You may tell your master, sir, that I am not accepting the gift of some mildewed ale-house as his conscience’s price, not a spar, not a twig, not a penny. D’ye hear me?’ She reached for her cloak, urging Lemuel to his feet. ‘Come, Dolly.’

  ‘For Chrissake, Cessy…’

  ‘IT‘S NOT WALPOLE, WUMMUN.’ A fire-iron clattered into the hearth, the fire blinked.

  Cameron himself seemed surprised and said quietly: ‘Your pardon, mistress. For certain Sir Robert would assist your plight did he know of it, but will ye not accept my word that he has no hand in the matter. Nor is he my master, though I’ll not deny that much of my work just now is on his behalf…’

  ‘Who is it, then?’

  ‘Anonymous,’ said the lawyer, thinning his thin lips. ‘Ye’ll know the meaning of the word, mebbe?’

  Cecily was unimpressed by people whose lack of breeding led them to show anger. However, it seemed the fellow was telling the truth. Satisfied it wasn’t Walpole, she lost interest in the anonymous donor; no doubt some acquaintance was trying to help her while sparing her pride. She didn’t want to know. She had to accept the offer: they were financially and physically exhausted; the ‘refuge’ could harbour them until she had the strength to consider what to do.

  She ached for her lost Hempens. However low the Fitzhenry fluctuating fortunes had sunk in the past, the family had managed to retain possession of their fenland home as a den in which to lick their wounds; had it been still hers she would even now be heading for it to lick hers, to lay her head on her old nurse’s lap and be comforted. While in the Fleet she had written to Hempens’ new owner, a Peterborough builder, begging him to allow Edie to stay on in the gatehouse as caretaker.

  ‘Where is this Woolmer Green?’

  It was in Hertfordshire, thirty miles north of London; she envisaged something secret, thatched and small, hidden and bowery, where Dolly could dispense ale to the local bumpkinry while she sat under a tree and an assumed name to breathe in hay-scented, throstle-songed air. She could think no further. ‘Please order the carriage at once.’

  ‘Ye canna go yet. I’ve had nae chance to examine its condition, nor will have for a while – I’ve an important court case. The whiles Dame Tothill here will provide ye lodging…’

  But in this Cecily wouldn’t be overborne. She could examine the property as well as he. ‘We must go now.’ Privately, she couldn’t bear to stay in London: it had contaminated her, she wanted to burrow into wholesome country earth until the sickness passed. Also, she wanted to be away from this lawyer who’d seen her total debasement and, if he’d acted quicker, could have saved her from it.

  They left for Hertfordshire that afternoon. Not in a carriage, but a carrier’s cart that had transported chickens enjoying the best digestive health to Clare Market from a poultry farm near Stevenage and was now returning.

  ‘Aye, well,’ had said Cameron, braving Cecily’s eye, ‘we’ll clean it up for ye, but there’s no siller left for carriages and such.’ To Dolly he doled out enough for their midway overnight stop at Potter’s Bar. ‘And there’s twopence to send me word by the post ye’ve arrived.’

  Cecily said stiffly: ‘In the Fleet there was a man called John Cassels, an architect I think he was. I’d be grateful if you would find out for me what happened to him.’

  ‘Cassels, is it? I can tell ye what happened to him. He was a friend of a friend of mine by the name of Oglethorpe. He died in a sponging house of the smallpox.’

  Something caught up with Cecily on that windy, plodded journey north. It chased after her, sometimes blending with the shadowed road. Until then it had been kept at bay by the necessity for movement, Lemuel, avoidance, all the activity that had enabled her to argue with the lawyer, buy a dress. She, who had been too sophisticated to credit the supernatural before, had been presented with it, subjected to emotions at their extremes that had made her aware of a presence outside herself.

  The Devil? Then the forked and horned picture they painted of him was a cartoon; what was following her was vast and dark, the true ruler of the world. More wonderful than God, that powerless force for goodness. There was no goodness. But there was Something and it was following her.

  Dolly attempted conversation but gave up and addressed herself only to Lemuel, since the driver was as taciturn as Cecily.

  Late next day, the cart lurched to a halt on a dark section of road at the bottom of a steep hill. ‘Here y’are, then.’

  Dolly gave an anticipatory: ‘Ooh-er.’ To their left, almost hidden by trees, were the gables of a considerable, if ancient, building, a carved stone arch providing an entrance to one side. It was difficult to see its condition by a moon that came and went between fast-moving clouds. No candles or lamps burned behind the mullions of its windows.

  Dolly was asking the driver to light them in.

  He shook his head. ‘’Aunted, my missus says.’ Released from the concern that they might have cancelled the journey and, thus, his carrier’s fee, the carter quoted his wife at length: ‘Ol’ Rosy, he conjured up the Devil while he was ’live an’ left un in possession now he’s dead. Nobody don’t come near the place but that ol’ bell do ring for corpses.’ He pointed to a small white bell tower perched among the black angles of the roof. ‘Ol’ Nick rings that, my missus reckons. Nobody else, only wickedness. So my missus do say.’

  Yes. Old Nick. He would be here.

  The driver wouldn’t help them in. Out of compassion for Lemuel he allowed Dolly to borrow the cart’s lantern, saying his horses could see their way home and that he’d call for it when he again came south. Then the iron-bound wheels rumbled him away into the night.

  They crossed the weedy forecourt to the arch and found themselves in a long, rubble-strewn yard. The balusters of the narrow flight of steps, which led to an upper storey, had gone.

  Dolly was cursing all Scottish lawyers and their antecedents. Cameron had given them a key, an enormous thing, but it wasn’t needed. They turned left into the inn through a doorless doorway.

  Inside there had been a taproom once: ale-soaked wood mingled with mildew and the sour smell of torn lath and plaster. The space was huge; perhaps it had been divided into other rooms – here and there broken wainscoting, which had once held panelling, ran across the floor.

  There was even a suggestion of beauty in its dimensions but, like Cecily, its substance had been stolen from it: needy, greedy hands had torn up most of the elm floorboards, rolled away the great barrels, ripped out wood and moulding and unputtied the glass to fit into less lovely windows.

 
; ‘Where can we go now? We’re finished, oh, Lord, oh, Lord.’ Dolly sank to her haunches, Lemuel worriedly plucking at her.

  There was nowhere to go. This ragged, beaten floor was the undercroft of the levels through which they had fallen.

  But this is where I stop.

  Cecily was amazed at the energy of the thought, the first activation in her lassitude in two days, as if from some remnant of gut overlooked by the depression that had disembowelled her.

  The March wind outside howled like a dog through the gaps of the room and shifted the bell in its high cupola so that it swung against its clapper, emitting a light clang. Dolly screamed.

  In the centre of the rubble there was a splay of moonlight that came from a hole in the roof. Cecily stepped into it and looked up through bare rafters to the moon. Then, as her first Fitzhenry ancestor had done when he watched his enemies and sons burn his birthplace, she took her soul away from God.

  Clearly, almost conversationally, she said: ‘Since God had no use for what I was, I offer what I am now to you, Prince of Darkness.’

  She waited; she didn’t know what for. She heard Dolly gasping, heard the wind and another ring from the bell. She said: ‘I shall break all laws but yours, follow you all my days, if you will help me prosper so that I can take revenge on him who has brought me to this. This I swear.’

  It didn’t sound absurd; the night was ready for such a profession and she felt it stream upwards towards the moon, that ultimate warlock. And anyway, the Devil answered her.

  He said, ‘That’s handy.’

  Chapter Six

  The Devil’s name was Tyler. As he and his companion clambered down from the rafters where they’d been hiding, silver coins fell out of a handkerchief into which he’d been counting them. He made no bones about it: ‘Ill-gotten gains.’

  They were at the mercy of two armed men who, satanic or not, were demonstrably criminal and using the inn as a hiding place. Yet from the first Cecily experienced little sense of threat. Even Dolly, once she’d stopped screaming, chided them for the fright they’d given her.