Blood Royal

by Blood Royal (retail) (epub)

  A marsh priest, a ragged old man, was fetched and agreed to perform the baby’s obsequies though, as he pointed out, it had never lived and therefore could not properly qualify for the ritual of death.

  ‘Do it,’ hissed Cecily the Wake, so he did it.

  The child was buried with Cecily’s ancestors in Hempens’ graveyard. Cecily and Anne stood by the tiny oblong of earth long after the others had gone back to the house.

  It’s not my child. Why do I feel this anguish? As she’d taken vicarious joy from Sophie’s happiness in marriage, the advent of Sophie’s baby had substituted for the one that Cecily, in all likelihood, would never have.

  It was a fine day. The mere reflected a sky like blue enamel. Hidden in the reeds, a hundred species of wildfowl cheeped and dived. A late iridescent dragonfly hovered over the grave before flicking away. A thrush tapped a snail shell against the tomb of Sir Francis Fitzhenry.

  Walking back to the house, Anne said: ‘If I may, Cecily, I should like the Lantern lit tonight.’

  It was badly timed. Cecily’s thoughts, still with the baby, were too distressed to stop the rebuke that came into them. ‘You’re a stranger to me, Anne.’

  After a pause: ‘You think I have no feeling,’ Anne said. ‘Sometimes I think I have none either. But Sophie will marry again; there’ll be other babies. And I’ll tell you this much, cousin, I want for them that they grow up in an harmonious society, not one as dishonoured as England’s is now.’

  They went round to the rear entrance of the house where the Lantern key hung with others on hooks in the passage, then through the orchard and down to the tower, neat and erect against its foreground of slithering grey marsh. Sticking out from one side of its base was its candle house, actually a round beehive of stone which, with its juxtaposition to the Lantern’s column, had once caused Sophie to remark that the whole thing put her in mind of a single-testicled but very happy man.

  Anne’s snort, as she remembered too, was good to hear.

  Cecily turned the key in the iron-bound tower door and they went in together, unlocked the low connecting door of the candle house and, bending, began dragging out the candles. Finest beeswax, these, and made for processions, each one four foot high and weighing over forty pounds. By the time they’d carried eight up three hundred steps to the Octagon and lifted them into the sconces, Anne was near collapse and Cecily glad to sit on the window-sill and consider the view to the sea.

  The tide was out. Immediately below them, Hempens sheep grazed on reclaimed land, then came a sheen of silt dotted with wading birds and runnelled with shallow streams among which the deeper Windle was barely distinguishable. As far as the eye could see, the tallest object in the landscape was a foreshortened Edgar gathering samphire, with boards strapped to his feet, to make one of Edie’s strengthening messes for Sophie.

  She opened one of the Octagon’s windows and called to him. They’d need his expertise to place the secondary beacon on the other side of the river, whose light, when brought in line with the Lantern’s, gave a boat safe passage through the ever-changing silt of the estuary.

  Unhurriedly, he tied his slithery harvest into a bundle and began his stump back across the marsh towards them.

  Visitors found the flatness of the view depressing. To Cecily, it had always held expectation, a hand laid level to receive the unknown, some portent, a bolt of lightning, a lover, a miracle, the word of God. In mountainous country whatever-it-was had already happened; fenland was always waiting for it to happen.

  It comforted her. Perhaps the baby will be born again. Perhaps one day the man in the boat will be Guillaume Fraser.

  Anne caught something of it. She said: ‘Souls are never wasted.’

  They went down to give Edgar his instructions.

  * * *

  Nobody came up the Windle that night, nor the next, nor the one after. Mist came in with October and turned Hempens sombre.

  With so few people, and those too busy, to care for it, dust dulled the surfaces of the Jacobean furniture and autumn leaves lay in the hall. Extra shadows gathered in corners and along the cloister walk. Jack-o’-lanterns glittered out in the marshes. In the suffused light of the Lantern, pelicans riding the mere became phantom flotillas.

  The fever diminished but left Sophie so weak as to keep her hold on life still uncertain. Matty wove agrimony and vervain round her bed. ‘To fend off evil,’ she said. They all felt it. To Cecily it centred on the awaited emissary, who nightly assumed more and more sinister proportions in her dreams just as, by day, the half-glimpsed shape of a heron was a watching Walpole spy.

  Tyler had chopped kindling from an old elder tree to start the fire they now lit every evening to counteract the damp. When Cecily saw it, she went out and sawed boughs from an overgrown rosemary bush instead. Elder had made Christ’s cross; no need to release the death within it into a house already grieving.

  A dark figure appeared out of the mist and took the basket from her. ‘Why you keeping that light lit, Duchess?’

  How much did he know? Or guess? ‘I’m expecting another visitor from France.’

  ‘There’s enough of them here already.’ Tyler hadn’t taken to Anne. Her nun’s habit made him nervous.

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘It’ll be my business when we all end up dancin’ at Tyburn.’

  ‘That didn’t worry you when we were on the pad.’

  ‘The pad’s one thing. So’s smuggling. Entertaining traitors another.’

  ‘Go home, then,’ she said, and was terrified he might. His grunt told her he wouldn’t.

  A wind came up that set the leaves in the hall leaping around it like tiny animals in agony trying to bite their own backs. It creaked the weathercock on the roof with nerve-scratching insistence, slammed doors and moaned through windows. Cecily lay awake listening to Hempens’ history return to it in noises resembling mailed boots marching the passageways and shrieks from the crenel where a serving girl hanged herself in the days of lecherous Giles Fitzhenry.

  Somewhere in the cacophony was a new disturbance. She got up and from her window saw cloaked men climbing on to the jetty in the moonlight. A figure in religious habit crossed the lawn to greet them.

  Dammit, dammit. She dressed slowly, begrudging the effort of finding something pretty to wear.

  Anne met her at the bottom of the stairs. There was light from the dining room where men had gathered round the table but the prioress led her past it to the door of the parlour. ‘You know who is here, Cecily?’

  ‘Yes.’ From the window she’d seen Anne’s deep curtsy.

  As Anne opened the door to lead her in, Cecily stopped her. ‘And I shall see him alone.’

  Anne glared, but Cecily’s resentment was too high to collapse. It wasn’t only that the Act of Attainder made anyone harbouring the Pretender liable to execution, it was the slight to her, that he had been invited as if she weren’t to be trusted with the knowledge.

  ‘This is my house,’ she said.

  And because this was her house, by God, she’d meet her guest on her terms, untrammelled by sycophants.

  She went in alone to meet James Francis Edward Stuart, Chevalier of St George, Pretender to – or rightful heir to, depending on your point of view – the throne of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, son of King James II, direct descendant of a line of monarchs that had ruled Scotland for four centuries and the United Kingdom for one, and which was so unlucky and so obstinate as to have had two of its number exiled while six more had met violent deaths.

  Anne had lit only two candles and the fire so that the parlour was in semi-darkness as befitting a man who must stay out of the light. Cecily saw that her best crystal decanter and glasses had been set out on a table beside one of the chairs. Busy little Anne.

  A figure came forward with hands outstretched. ‘Lady Cecily, Lady Cecily,’ it said.

  She had told herself she would not succumb: she was a working woman with no time to spare and an
investment she was not prepared to lose. She told herself she wasn’t succumbing, but from that moment the old mystery took hold again. Cecily had come to Hempens to meet a lost lover and here, in his place, was a lost king; as once before, the two were inextricably combining.

  He took her hands to raise her from her curtsy. ‘I wish you to know that I am conscious of the sacrifice you made seven years ago in returning to me a dearly loved adherent. I am in your debt, madame. I should have communicated my gratitude earlier had it not meant endangering you further.’

  He was thirty-five years old, slender enough to look younger. He spoke English easily but with a French accent. As had someone else.

  I didn’t do it for you, she thought, struggling. But not for a long time had someone addressed her with courtesy like his, genuine courtesy; whatever else, the man was sincere to the bone. She was in the presence of the blood royal.

  He handed her to a chair and sat himself in one across from her, on the opposite side of the fire. He had the Stuarts’ long eyes and nose, the heavy lower lip. On the father they’d formed a sneer; they gave the son a mournful intensity. He’s not Guillaume, she insisted to herself, he’s not. Yet in the poor light and the presence of danger, James was his representative. Seven years had faded the exact features of the man with whom Cecily had fallen in love at Edinburgh. To remind herself, she had looked long and often at the profile on the medal she had been given during the Jacobite gathering at Battersea so that the memory of Guillaume Fraser had become that of James Stuart. And vice versa.

  He was dressed like an ordinary traveller, clubbed wig, a mulberry coat with plain metal buttons and vertical pockets, buff breeches. The long lawn tie bound round his throat had its plain ends tucked into a plain waistcoat and was slightly grubby. His excellent boots had a white tidemark round the uppers from boat bilge.

  Her parlour suited him. The dark linenfold behind him, the blazon of the chair he sat in, Grinling Gibbons’ profuse mantel, the worn and beautiful Isfahan rug at his feet, these were dark varieties of shade forming a setting that matched him as if he, like all good things, was out of date. Not a Palladian man, this. No cleared, sterile landscape for this king: he belonged in the tangled, peopled, wooded tapestry of Toryism, as did she.

  The decanter reminded her that she was the host. She got up and poured him a large brandy and herself a small one. She rarely drank nowadays. ‘Have you eaten, sire?’

  He shook his head; it wasn’t important. When she’d sat down he said: ‘Lady Cecily, I have only trespassed on your home because I was persuaded that I have your allegiance. Am I wrong?’

  Anne had been busy. ‘Always your servant, sire.’ Polite, noncommittal.

  ‘I was further persuaded that the fens can provide a postern through which I may come and go in secrecy when I wish to see my friends. As long as I have your permission.’

  Certainly this was one coast impossible to secure; once landed, he could travel unremarked through a country he’d been smuggled out of when a baby. She said: ‘You take a hideous risk, sire.’ And so do I.

  He nodded. ‘It is a risk worthy of taking. Of necessity I must be in touch with those who will uphold my right when the time comes. You know they increase daily?’

  She thought that English Jacobites were undoubtedly telling him so, citing every petty squire’s and every yeoman’s discontent with the Hanoverian millstone round their neck. They would say that Oxford openly toasted the king over the water, that Winchester’s aristocratic pupils were so equally and deeply divided into Jacobites and Georgites that each party refused to take lessons with the other.

  As Walpole’s hold on government strengthened so did the desperation of an opposition with no chance to dislodge it. Even at the Belle, the local Tories pondered on whether another bloodless Glorious Revolution, such as had got rid of James II, should reinstate his son. Squire Leggatt and Colonel Grandison, incensed by the Black Acts, had worn white cockades in their hats for a week. But underneath the bawling and protest lay England’s antipathy to papism.

  Lodged in John Bull’s mind, even if he were poor, in prison or about to step on to the gallows, was the belief that his was a better country than any other. It wasn’t merely that his racial memory retained pictures of Protestant martyrs burning on Bloody Mary’s bonfires, but that in his nostrils popery had acquired a foreign scent, a flavour used by overdressed, capering frog-eaters that went uneasily with good English roast beef.

  Cecily knew it because, even while she was aware it was illogical, she felt it. Can you know it, she wondered, you, who smell of incense, who believe yourself an Englishman? Have your Jacobites in sending you so much information told you this? That, honourably as you compare to the fat, wenching German who occupies your throne, we English understand him through our shared Protestantism better than we do you?

  You don’t and they haven’t. She should have realized he was here to plot his return to the kingship. Where did they get their energy, these seekers after power?

  England had made it a condition of her peace with the French that they drive this man from their soil. Jamie the Rover. Walpole’s assassins harassed his travels, so that he had to hop out of windows and adopt disguises to escape them. Other countries, equally unwilling to offend Walpole, had chivvied him from place to place until the Pope had taken pity on him and lent him and his Clementina a palazzo in Rome.

  Why didn’t he stay in it, peacefully enjoying his young wife and the son she’d given him?

  Open an inn, lad, that’ll keep your mind off politics.

  But, of course, he couldn’t. The voice of all his ancestors since Robert the Bruce tormented him, waking and sleeping. The vein at his temple throbbed from an invisible crown.

  Oh, poor young man, she thought loftily. I know what it is to have a lineage so threaded through a country that it feels every pull of its land. Then she thought: Don’t get involved.

  But it seemed she was being asked to. James was requiring her co-operation, something about the Post Office. Incredulously, she applied herself to what he was saying…

  ‘…ideally placed to circumvent the spies whom Walpole has set to open letters in the sorting house in London.’

  ‘What is?’

  He was startled by her inattention. ‘Your inn, Lady Cecily. With your co-operation and, I think, without endangering you too much, it could be my poste restante. Sister Ascension suggested that you might be persuaded to send and receive letters on my behalf through the mail.’

  Sister who? Anne, of course. Such a name. Risk the Belle? Like fuck, I might.

  In that moment, Cecily was vouchsafed another revelation.

  A log dropped in the grate so that the glow of the fire’s innards spilled over the man opposite her, lighting his wet, dark, elongated eyes, warming his sallow face and hands. All at once she was in the room not only with Guillaume/James but with an icon come to life. Her breath was taken as if a flat, painted Christ had acquired three dimensions, stepped from its frame and addressed her: Lady Cecily, Lady Cecily.

  ‘Yes, my lord?’ she answered.

  ‘Lady Cecily, do I ask too much?’

  ‘No, my lord.’ All the atavism, all the mystery of kingship was here, with her, in Hempens’ parlour. In the rosemary-scented woodsmoke, in the fumes of brandy from her glass, Cecily thought she caught a whiff of the anointing oils that awaited him.

  What would await her if she helped him to his crown and he gained it?

  In her temptation, all the kingdoms of the earth unrolled themselves before Cecily’s feet: a duchy, her lands returned twenty-fold and, most glorious of all, a prone Walpole trussed for trampling.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ she said, ‘I wonder if you remember one of your captains in the Fifteen, Guillaume Fraser.’

  ‘Most certainly. A gallant soldier.’ James’s face was eager. ‘Have you received word of him?’

  ‘No. I hoped that you had.’

  ‘We made efforts to trace the transportees. We know he was shippe
d to Barbados but could discover no further word of him. God send he is still alive and may the angels guard him.’

  Cecily leaned forward so that she was almost on her knees to this most worthy king. ‘Oh, sire,’ she said, ‘if you would only become a Protestant all England would rise for you.’

  He was kind about it. He took her hands and helped her back to her chair.

  ‘I swore to my father on his deathbed that never would I put the Crown of England before my eternal salvation, nor will I. I cannot gain a kingdom by losing my soul. But, Lady Cecily, I have promised liberty of conscience. I have brought with me men on my staff, here at your own table, who are Protestant and they will tell you I have never interfered with their worship.’

  His earliest proclamation to the British people had been an assurance that he would guard the Protestant faith as he guarded his own. ‘I show tolerance for men of all religion and hope they will do as much for me.’

  Cecily believed him; the rest of England would not. It had believed his father when he made the same promise at his coronation. She thought: But you are a more honourable man than he ever was.

  Slicing through the brandy fumes and anointing oils that were making her head spin came a draught of air: I helped another honourable man once and was sent to hell for it.

  Perhaps he felt it. He said: ‘I ask much of you, Lady Cecily. It may be too much. Consider carefully, and when you are certain, send me word.’

  He got up. ‘May I command your waterman to row some of my fellows to the uplands? They have horses awaiting them and will command little attention. They are, after all, Englishmen. They merely carry certain messages from me to my supporters.’

  ‘And you, sire?’

  ‘I shall return to my ship. I came only to see you.’

  As they moved to the door, she noticed that his brandy glass was still full and hers was empty. But it wasn’t the brandy that intoxicated her.