Blood Royal

by Blood Royal (retail) (epub)

  …and she wouldn’t have had to stump ashore travel-stained and with a smear on her skirt’s arse from sitting in this scow.

  She fumbled for the tiny looking-glass attached to the ribbon of her belt, surreptitiously trying for her reflection by the boat lamp. She saw only crows’ feet at the corner of her eyes and a frown line deepening vertically between her brows. Twenty-five and withered. Adolescence was unreturnable.

  It was presumption to think he’d want her. I am married, dear one. We can be nothing to each other.

  Who asked you, Lady Cecily, Lady Cecily?

  Oh, but he was here. She saw his cloaked figure, a darker patch against the shade of the house behind him, waving, reversing the roles of her dream.

  ‘Pull harder, Edgar,’ commanded Cecily the Wake. Haste, haste me to my home and my love.

  The thump of oar in rowlock kept up the rhythm maintained since they had left the uplands, no faster, no slower, pulling her nearer to the figure on the jetty. An oddly smooth shape, too wide, too short.

  It wasn’t him.

  It was a nun. Did the ghost of mad Matilda, maddened further by the loss of her cloister, beckon to her? In fenland twilight anything was possible. Nor did her great-great-niece care. It isn’t him.

  Then she did, because it was Anne Insh.

  * * *

  When Cecily let her go, Anne asked: ‘Do you forgive me?’

  ‘I never blamed you in the first place.’ They had been two women acting out of love. Nobody was to blame for love. ‘I’m so sorry about your father, Anne.’

  The moment his father was dead, the new Lord Insh, Anne’s brother, had ingratiated himself with King George, condemning his late parent’s involvement with the 1715 Jacobite rebellion in terms barely decent for a son to utter but which had, nevertheless, enabled him to win back the attainted Insh lands.

  If there was fault, it was that Anne hadn’t been in touch before; obviously she’d known of Cecily’s descent into the depths, was even aware that she now kept an inn.

  ‘Spender Dick,’ explained Anne. ‘He crosses the Channel regularly to bring news to us exiles. He travels the Great North Road frequently for the Cause and saw you outside the Belle one day as he passed in a coach. He made inquiries.’

  Did he, indeed? The Jacobite network was more efficient than she’d thought. ‘Why didn’t you write to me? I’ve worried and worried about you.’

  ‘Walpole’s spies open all letters from France. It would have done you no good that you were in touch with an attainted traitor.’

  Spender Dick could have brought a message, thought Cecily. She didn’t say so: there was more to this. The old Anne would have hugged her with abandon but, even as they’d embraced, there’d been resistance, a drawing-away. Don’t leave me now we’ve found each other again.

  But something of Anne had already left: she was telling Cecily so by persisting in wearing a Catholic nun’s habit when she was already risking arrest merely by landing on English soil. Noli me tangere. It was like that. As if renunciation of the flesh prohibited hugging a dear cousin. Not that she’d renounced all fleshly pleasures: Anne had become fat.

  ‘Where’s Sophie? Where’s Fraser?’ Cecily was already walking towards the house.

  Anne stopped her. ‘Before you go in…’ While Tyler and Edgar carried baggage and supplies indoors, the two women sat on a bench in what had been the cloister before Peterborough plundered its flagstones.

  ‘Sophie’s upstairs in the Rupert room. She’s in labour.’

  ‘So soon? I thought she wasn’t due yet.’

  From a window at the front of the house came a remote and angry mooing that ended in a huffed ‘aaahbuggerit’. Sophie, at least, even in the throes of a contraction, had not changed.

  Cecily stood up. ‘I must go to her.’

  ‘No. Not yet. She has her woman with her. Cecily… the earl… her husband is dead.’

  ‘No. Oh, no.’

  ‘He died of smallpox on the way from Paris,’ Anne said. ‘She brought his coffin to my convent and we buried it there.’

  ‘Oh, Sophie.’ Sophie’s happiness in her marriage had been Cecily’s only refreshment through the misery of her own.

  ‘It was her wish to come on here, she was quite violent about it, that his son should be born in England. She was desperate to see you. I couldn’t let her make the voyage alone but the crossing, perhaps her loss, affected her condition.’

  ‘Why did it happen to her? Not Sophie.’ There was a joyousness that should never be dulled. ‘Why her?’

  Anne answered dutifully: ‘God willed it.’

  ‘Why? Why we three? Look at us.’ All of them bearing crosses and – the stillness of the woman at her side reminded her – perhaps Anne’s the heaviest of all. Sophie would have her baby, she herself had her inn, both of them growing things, future things. Anne, the celibate, the cloistered, had only a present that would never change.

  Cecily put her hand on her cousin’s. ‘Tell me. I wrote to your brother asking after you, twice. He didn’t reply.’

  ‘He wouldn’t.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Lord Insh,’ said Anne of her brother, ‘saw fit to renounce me for helping to deprive George of Hanover of his prisoner. He also saw fit to negate my father’s wish that I should receive a portion of money. I was alone and penniless in a foreign country.’ Gently, she withdrew her hand from Cecily’s. ‘I was happy to enter the Order of St Agnes’ Martyrdom and am happier still to have risen in it to the position of Prioress of the Order’s daughter house in Dunkirk.’

  She spoke like someone reciting a times table. Happy? Obliged, more like. And making the best of it. Anne’s only alternative would have been marriage, but her fellow exiles were so equally poor that their unmarried sons were forced to look for wealthy brides among the French.

  Someone had given the lawn a last scything before winter and the evening was scented with bruised grass, overlaying the pungency of vegetation from the fens. It had been a St Martin’s summer and swifts, soon to be replaced by bats, turned and swooped in the air.

  Princess Caroline’s lost maids of honour stared ahead of them, untouching, as a last band of red in the sky caught the stippling of rushes in the blackening water of the mere. Edgar’s boat tapped against the jetty, there was another snarl from Sophie’s window.

  Cecily forced herself to sit still. Anne’s need seemed to take precedence. Of the three little girls who had played out their summers here, it had been Anne who carried a rag doll, Moppet, everywhere; Anne, always the instigator of their games, who insisted they scatter hempseed on St Martin’s Eve to raise the wraith of their future husbands. With rakes over their shoulders, they’d circled the church twelve times as the clock struck midnight, frightened silly, excited.

  Hempseed I set, hempseed I sow,

  The man that is my true love,

  Come after me and mow.

  If she could hear their voices now, a thin, off-key pipe among the ruins, how much more could Anne.

  This was maudlin. She said: ‘And now. Where is Fraser?’ She had been concerned for others long enough.

  ‘Who?’

  They stared at each other.

  No, thought Cecily, no, no. She used anger to withstand the sudden chill. ‘Guillaume Fraser. Anne, you owe him your father’s escape. Where is he? Sophie wrote… she was bringing him here.’

  ‘There is no man here.’

  ‘But she wrote. She was bringing someone I should be pleased to see, she said.’

  ‘That was me.’

  Of course, of course. Sophie had meant Anne. She’d used her own code to thwart Walpole’s letter-openers. But the expectation had been so strong since the letter that Cecily couldn’t rid herself of it. She stood up, poised to go to Sophie and ask her what she had done with Fraser.

  From the reeds that freckled the mere, the heavy, dark shape of a bittern, legs trailing, flapped over the water giving its dusk-flight call, kwah, kwah. It was answered by a rasp
from the upper window: ‘Aaahbugga-a-ah.’ Anne made no move.

  Cecily went. He must be here. Let him he here. A little happiness, God. In the name of Christ, give me some recompense.

  The smell of marsh had insinuated itself into the house during its long neglect; portraits that had lined the wall of the Jacobean staircase had been removed, leaving bleached squares and rectangles on the plaster.

  Yet the great wrought-iron wheel of a candle-holder still hung from its long chain, warming the lovely brick of the floor below and the nymphs and gods painted on the high ceiling. Furniture remained – the massive oak pieces too old-fashioned for a Peterborough Whig. And in the passage that ran back from the foot of the staircase to the servants’ quarters a partly opened door let out light and the smell of cooking and a voice talking above the rattle of pans.

  Edie, the only constant in a childhood kaleidoscope of governesses, attendants, duennas, chaperones; Edie and Hempens. Hempens and Edie. For this much, God be thanked.

  But she must go to Sophie first.

  The scene in the Rupert room was a Rembrandt. Candle-flame against reflectors sent all light towards the bed, illuminating the sufferer on it and leaving the woman who sat beside it an inclined shape in the shadows. Sophie’s red hair was dark with sweat, her small face brick-coloured. She radiated a furious energy. ‘God’s taken my earl, Cessy.’ It was a shout.

  ‘I know.’ Cecily crossed to the bed and kissed Sophie’s hand, holding it in both her own. ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘It’s not fair, Cessy, it’s not fair. I want him back.’

  ‘I know, darling, I know.’

  ‘But I’ll have his son, I’ll have a bit of him back in his son.’ Sophie’s eyelids drooped. ‘A bit of him back, a bit of him back.’ Then her eyes opened to stare. ‘Here it comes again, sod it, oooh, buggerit, buggeraaah.’

  The yell was reassuring. Anybody capable of issuing so uninhibited a sound still had strength.

  When the contraction was over and Sophie dozed, Cecily looked across the bed. ‘It’s straightforward, isn’t it, Matty?’

  ‘I’m hoping so, Lady Cessy. But ’tis early and us Hatfields ain’t strong with babbies. Her dear ma lost three before we had our ladyship.’ Matty, having been Sophie’s nurse and her mother’s before that, regarded herself as family.

  A pink-cheeked, solid West Country woman, neither her years of service nor, more recently, her travels around Europe with the honeymooning couple had weakened her manifest capability or her Somerset accent.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here, Matty.’

  ‘And ah’m glad you are, Lady Cessy.’

  ‘Matty, did nobody make the crossing with you?’

  Matty took it as a criticism. ‘Ah couldn’ stop her. You know her ladyship, mule-headed like all Breffnys. Cecily, got to see Cecily, ’twas. French ship ut was, tew, tossing and rolling, typical Frenchy – she’s coming back to fetch Miss Anne laader. Then lowering us into a liddle biddy boat to come up the Windle. Miss Anne showed un how to follow they lights or we’d have drowned surely. ’Tis no wonder that poor babby’s coming afore its tahm.’

  ‘Sophie didn’t mention a Mr Guillaume Fraser?’

  Matty shook her head and saw Cecily droop. ‘You’m not too viddy, seemingly. I’ll watch here. Ut won’t be yet. Down ee go to your dinner, Lady Cessy, afore Lady Anne eats ut all.’

  Wearily, Cecily made her way to the kitchen and stood in its doorway to rest her eyes on the thick-bodied old woman who stood against the glow of the fire, stirring a pot with a long spoon and talking through the window at Tyler, who’d been sent with a rushlight to pick wild celery from the reeds by the kitchen stream – all Edie’s herbs had to be gathered with night dew on them.

  After a while, Edie looked round. Without a change of expression, she put down the ladle, wiped her hands on her apron and lumbered over to a battered wicker chair. Then she held out her arms.

  * * *

  Anne had overseen the dinner, much to Edie’s disgust. ‘Gone to garlic, she has, bor,’ she said, as if it were to the devil. ‘And what good’s it done her?’

  At least it had animated her cousin. ‘I’ve brought you a wine we grow in our own priory vineyards. Quite an acceptable white, I think. Try some, it will go well with the fish.’

  They ate alone; Tyler, with Edgar and some of his brothers, was below stairs, tucking into Edie’s lamb stew and ‘floaters’ – light, delicious, fen dumplings.

  In the dining room, candlelight was reflected in the polish of the black oak board and sent gleams from the crystal. Through the open windows came moths, a lapping from the mere and short, sharp intervals of swearing.

  They served themselves, or, rather, Anne did the serving, piling her own platter, raising her eyebrows at Cecily’s lack of appetite and commenting on each course as if she gossiped of old friends. ‘Nowhere produces lampreys like the fens, not even Normandy… I cooked the duck, I could not trust Edie to leave it pink… At the Priory my kitcheness stuffs it with pâté made from goose-liver with just a touch of thyme…’

  Cecily had hoped her cousin might have found at least some solace in God, but to listen to Anne was to gain the impression that her priory bell rang less for prayer than for meals. From her end of the table she watched her cousin, trying to see in the face of the prioress, with its soft, clear skin bulging round the edges of the wimple, the ascetic, caring, daughterly girl. Don’t leave me.

  ‘I want you to tell me of England,’ Anne said, using a carving knife. ‘Now taste this lamb, I made Edie broil it in prunes…’

  She’s nervous, realized Cecily. She’s making me nervous. We should be with Sophie. ‘The politics? The countryside? Old friends?’

  ‘Not old friends.’ The knife sliced deep into the lamb.

  ‘No. Well, I’m cut off too. Mary Astell has—’

  ‘Tell me of the Cause. I rejoiced to hear you’d joined us.’

  ‘Did you? But I’ve been so busy with—’

  ‘I’ve seen him.’ At last the chewing and chattering stopped. They had arrived at whatever it was: it was old, intense Anne looking at her. ‘I went to Rome first, then he did me the honour only the other day of visiting my priory. It had to be in secret, of course, and by night.’

  ‘The Pope?’

  ‘Cecily.’ For the first time Anne grinned. ‘The king.’ She rolled her eyes in pretended patience. ‘The Chevalier St George. James Stuart. The king.’

  ‘Ooh-er.’

  ‘Ooh-er indeed. Ecce homo, Cessy. Our Deliverer, chaste, pious, brave, the man to return our country to harmony…’

  Anne had found her god after all, but the altar before which she prostrated herself was to a living man, the Pretender, and the exultation of her chant was secular. Her devotion blazed down the length of the table, certain it was received with similar fervour.

  Cecily’s enthusiasm for the Cause had become thin through lack of nourishment. The fight for her own and Lemuel’s and Dolly’s survival since the bursting of the South Sea Bubble had left her no resources with which to aid anyone else’s war. Had she really felt strongly enough to spy for the Cause? What a lass she’d been.

  Anne was still exulting, demanding her attention. ‘Cecily, Cecily, do you realize of what use you could be to him?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The opportunity to serve? Now that you have Hempens back? The isolation, my dear, its proximity to the Continent. Cessy, Hempens is a postern into England. His emissaries could come and go…’

  Anne’s plump little fingers were steepled in prayer. Just so, though slimmer, they had besought Cecily’s help once before. My father is taken ill… I beg you to come with me.

  ‘He… he wants to… he asks me if you will receive one such emissary a week from now. Can I light the Lantern, then? Can I? Can I?’

  Amazed, Cecily stared at her. I beg you to come with me. And she’d gone. To ruin. As this woman knew. Who was asking again.

  She stood up. ‘I’m going to Sophie,’ she sa
id. ‘Are you coming?’

  Anne put her hands over her face. ‘No.’

  Haring furiously upstairs, Cecily thought: How dare she? How can she? She’s prepared to risk my life – and Sophie’s – all over again. Is doing so merely by being here. But to allow a Jacobite spy into my house on his way to blow up Parliament or whatever the plan is…

  By the turn at the top of the first flight, Cecily paused, indignation expending with the thought that Anne had only the Cause to give meaning to her life, doomed to childlessness as she was.

  After all, the danger was fractional. Nobody but Edie’s family, whose loyalty to Cecily and her friends was absolute, had seen Anne arrive or would see her go. Her cousin was right: in its difficulty of access, Hempens was as isolated as any house in England. Through the hidden waterways it did provide a secret back door into England…

  Well, and it was engaging to have power again. To be begged for help by a king, even one who lacked a throne…

  We’ll see.

  First of all there’s a baby to deliver. Cecily went in to help Matty deliver it.

  * * *

  Sophie’s baby came with the dawn, a girl already dead from the cord strangling her neck.

  Cecily picked up the slippery, still warm, little body. She took it to another room and laid it on the bed. She ripped up a petticoat of Brussels lace and lined a drawer with it. She kissed its forehead and laid the baby in its improvised coffin.

  I thought I knew grief. She’d never felt any like this.

  * * *

  Sophie contracted birth fever and for some days her unwillingness to fight it seemed likely to kill her as well. The other four, Anne as desperately as any of them, fought it for her.

  The nearest doctor was at Ely, too far to be brought to Hempens in time for the crisis that was undoubtedly coming. In any case, Cecily doubted that any leech could better the experience of Matty and Edie, who used herbs gathered from Hempens’ overgrown garden to make simples that brought some relief and sleep.