Blood Royal

by Blood Royal (retail) (epub)

  She wined and dined him and his retinue quickly so that they could scatter before dawn came up.

  Anne, it appeared, was to go back to France in James’s ship. The cousins parted on the jetty. Anne’s small portmanteau was neatly packed; she had the air of business well completed. ‘Say goodbye to Sophie for me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I knew he had to ask you himself. The postern, the Post Office business… you wouldn’t do it just for me.’

  Cecily thought about it. ‘No,’ she said, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

  The wind had dropped, allowing mist to return; Cecily stood and watched until the boat disappeared into it. James Stuart waved. Anne, facing him, talking to him, had her back to the shore and didn’t.

  Three days later, Cecily stood on the jetty again and for the last time thanked Sophie for her gift of Hempens, aware that Sophie, blaming the journey to the island for the loss of her child, wished she’d never made it.

  Helpless, she’d watched Sophie hedge her pain behind a furious bitterness, seen herself reflected as hideous by association in Sophie’s eyes. When Cecily had promised that the baby’s grave would always be lovingly tended, Sophie became impatient. ‘What does it matter? I seem to have scattered graves all over Europe.’

  ‘Come to the Belle,’ begged Cecily.

  ‘I’ll see she do,’ Matty said.

  But Cecily, watching the frail, swathed figure rowed away from her, refusing or, like Anne, forgetting to wave, knew she wouldn’t.

  Herself, she stood on the jetty long after the boat was out of sight, flapping her handkerchief back and forth, not so much in farewell as in an unconscious, pleading signal for the return of a childhood that was departing for ever.

  Chapter Nine

  The St Martin’s summer still held in Hertfordshire. Tyler and Cecily avoided the traffic of the Great North Road and approached Woolmer Green by the deep lanes of the east, their horses’ sides brushed by blackberried branches from the hedgerows, by rose-hips, hemlock and wild parsley. Women gleaning with their petticoats pinned up wiped sweat from their eyes to wave as they went past.

  At noon they breasted the hill that led steeply down to Watton-at-Stone. Tyler pointed to the next ridge where Datchworth church’s tower with its spike showed above the trees.

  The church’s builders had known little more of ecclesiastical architecture than how to keep a pitch roof supported on a rectangular box for six hundred years. Twelfth-century Datchworthians had carted flints from the fields for its walls because they were too poor to afford stone.

  What they did have was one of Hertfordshire’s highest prospects and on it they’d sited a church that could be seen for miles from all directions.

  The first time Cecily had passed through its Norman doorway, she’d been shocked by the starkness of the interior, plain windows, plaster walls, roof-beams like those of a barn put up by a local carpenter. Here were none of the stone scrolls, brasses and monuments with which benefactors endowed richer churches. Only a sword carved into a plain stone slab set in the south wall recorded the unknown Datchworth man who’d gone to the Crusades.

  She’d yet to meet the rector, an absentee pluralist who cared for more important souls in London parishes and instead paid a weary curate five pounds a year to ride up the hill from Aston on his donkey once a month to administer communion and give a sermon which invariably irritated Colonel Grandison into interrupting it to give his own.

  Despite outbursts of mirth among the congregation at abstruse doctrine – ‘What’s that transsubstation we’re not supposed to believe in, then, Parson?’ – with hens pecking the straw at her feet, the bats that hung like reversed gargoyles from the chancery roof, Cecily found periods of peace during prayers at Datchworth church that had escaped her fashionable attendance at St James’s, Piccadilly.

  There were moments when her fellow worshippers’ soil-engrained fingers entwined so tightly they became bloodless and when the bubbling of larks came through the open doorway with the scent of grass and cow-pats and when house sparrows clattered among the roof beams, when the church became an extension of its surrounding countryside where forest edge ran along the rise of a field like a graceful eyebrow.

  Not a spectacular landscape this, but its contours had a dignity reflected in its people. Archibald Cameron, an enthusiastic fisherman, had told her it had been the favourite county of his hero, Izaak Walton, and on reading The Compleat Angler she’d found an echo of her surroundings in its quiet rivers, its singing milkmaids and well-kept inns, such as the Belle was attempting to be.

  She was amazed at how this glimpse of a poor church on its hill was a homecoming. Airy lightness after Hempens’ darkness and grief.

  Tyler had been silent for much of the journey. Whether he was aware that Cecily’s visitor from France had been the Pretender, she didn’t know. Judging from his unspoken disapproval, she thought he probably did.

  Now they were back on his native heath, she was his comrade again. He began to hark on the subject of smuggling and the ease with which Edgar and his brothers brought in the small amount of contraband for their own consumption.

  ‘I told Edgar, I said he’d got to think larger as the saying is. There’s the makings of a rare little business there. Be criminal not to exploit it.’

  She laughed for the first time in days. ‘Be criminal to do so.’

  He grunted. ‘Far as I can make out, you’d be the first Fitzhenry to think so.’

  She didn’t think so. Nobody thought so. Except the customs.

  Where they could, all sane souls avoided paying duty on imported goods. Society hostesses invariably served their guests best leaf tea and, almost as invariably, it was smuggled, brought in by East India Company captains whose profit was thereby equivalent to a year’s wage – the duty on legal tea, like tobacco and sugar, was as high as its cost of production.

  A tap on the window of a respectable parsonage preceded an exchange of silver for brandy or silk handkerchiefs. Lady Holdernesse, a former acquaintance of Cecily’s, found her position as wife of the Warden of the Cinque Ports handy for illegally importing French gowns. Robert Walpole thundered against smuggling at the House of Commons while using Admiralty barges to bring him in untaxed Flemish lace for his mistress. Everybody did it. What had galled Cecily, as landlady of the Belle, was that, through lack of knowing how, she hadn’t. Cellarsful of dutiless gin, wine and brandy piled themselves up before her mind’s eye.

  ‘How do we go about it?’ she asked.

  ‘I thought we might go into the hemp trade.’ Tyler had regained his element, risk. His plan was to use Hempens as the landing and storage place. It involved buying a bigger boat and another, a barge, ostensibly to bring the hemp, the cover for the real cargo, through the waterways of East Anglia to Cambridge where it could be loaded on to mules for the thirty-mile journey to the Belle.

  Cecily considered. Edie’s sons, she knew, had little trouble avoiding patrolling customs cutters. The danger of discovery would lie in the remainder of the route, especially at the inland port of Cambridge. ‘Won’t customs officers at Cambridge search the barge?’

  ‘They might,’ Tyler said, ‘but they won’t.’ He scratched the palm of his left hand to show that they were bribable.

  Cecily considered. The original outlay would be daunting – she’d have to borrow again – but worth it if they could bring in enough contraband. The profit in supplying the coach trade with liquor on which she’d paid no duty would be enormous.

  ‘Very well.’ Her conscience was untroubled: this wasn’t like going on the pad, more a joining in with a general pastime, a happy avoidance of a tax that would otherwise go into Walpole’s pocket.

  Despite their preoccupation with the project, they became aware as they approached Woolmer Green that few people were about.

  ‘Market day,’ Tyler said. ‘They’ll all be gone to Hertford.’

  But that didn’t account for the emptiness of the Belle. The stableyard lacked people
and most of the horseboxes were empty. Only Ned was in it, sweeping out – and crying as he did so.

  Cecily’s immediate thought was for Lemuel. She left Ned to Tyler and ran indoors.

  Lemuel was seated in the taproom talking to a packman, his face intent with the effort of enunciation. The packman’s polite, fixed smile was thinning and his eyes roamed the ceiling as if looking for sublime rescue.

  She knelt down beside her husband. ‘All you all right?’

  The mobile side of his mouth turned up and his right hand kneaded hers in the pleasure of seeing her and to show her how its grip had improved. ‘Well. Well. All. Well.’

  ‘Good.’ Whatever had happened here had left Lemuel untouched; she must look to someone else for its explanation. There was no one else. The rest of the inn was deserted. She saw Tyler still talking to Ned out in the yard. On her way to join him she heard a movement from the open trap of the cellar and saw Marjorie and Cole’s elder daughter coming up its steps with a bottle in her hand.

  ‘What’s happened here, Nancy?’

  ‘They left me in charge, missus. Master Lemuel wanted the French brandy so—’

  ‘Where have they all gone?’ The girl was barely adolescent and distressed. You turn your back for a minute…

  ‘Hertford, missus. To stop the hanging.’

  ‘Whose hanging?’

  ‘And Colonel Grandison, he’s gone with ’em and Warty’s gone to Lunnon to fetch Master Cameron…’

  ‘Whose hanging, blast you?’ As Cecily shook her, the child dropped the bottle, which rolled down the steps and smashed on the brick of the cellar floor.

  The girl’s face creased. ‘Miss Dolly’s, missus.’

  ‘Oh… clear that up.’ Crossly, Cecily continued into the yard to get some sense from Ned. He was holding two horses so that Tyler could saddle them.

  ‘They all seem to have absconded to Hertford for some reason,’ said Cecily.

  Tyler tightened a girth, then took her arm and led her to the horse. ‘Get up, my duck,’ he said. The kindness in his voice localized an unformulated fear.

  ‘Tyler,’ she said, ‘That child wittered something about Dolly.’

  ‘Yes. Up you get, now.’

  He mounted the other horse and led hers through the yard gates, across the road and back up the track they’d travelled down minutes before. ‘Seven mile,’ he said. ‘Thank Gawd the fields are mown. We can gallop ’em. Be a short-cut.’

  ‘Tyler,’ she begged.

  ‘I don’t know, Duchess,’ he said, ‘Seems Dolly burned down a hayrick.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t…’

  ‘Can’t make sense of it. Warty went to London to fetch the Scotch lawyer. Maybe he’s there already. He’ll stop it if anybody can.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Gallop now.’

  Cornstalks flipped up in the air behind them as they went. Gleaners scattered. They jumped gates and hedges that threw afternoon shadows over dry, pale fields. They ducked under Tudor oak trees sheltering deer that raced before them.

  Cecily became two persons, one who noticed these things, amused at the ludicrous haste. How could Dolly be hanged? She wasn’t that sort of person. It was too nice a day. This wasn’t Hempens, where momentous things took place: it was Hertfordshire. The other Cecily rode blind, sobbing when Tyler insisted on walking the horses.

  From the rise after Bramfield they saw the spires of Hertford where the town stood on the marshes of the three rivers’ confluence that Alfred the Great had drained to build it.

  Market-day had coincided with the end of the Assizes. That morning the judges had left in their gilded coaches for another part of the circuit, trailing trumpeters, leaving the words they’d pronounced to be translated into bleeding backs and the slamming of prison doors or to burgeon into fruit on the tree set up in the square.

  The gallows were the attraction. They might have been a lodestone instead of two twelve-foot trestles supporting a long beam over a stage, as if Hertford’s citizens, its market sellers and buyers from out of town were iron filings that had been jumped out of their houses, streets and stalls to be pressed in a struggling mass against it.

  Tyler was looking over the crowd from his vantage of horseback. Cecily saw only the three nooses dangling from the beam like empty dog collars.

  Tyler pointed: ‘My Christ, there she is.’

  Cecily dragged her eyes away from the gallows. A farm cart parked against the right-hand trestle had three figures in it, a man and two women, one of them Dolly whose mouth was open in an endless scream that couldn’t be heard.

  As if she’d been expecting her, Dolly saw her over the heads of the crowd and threw herself against the side of the cart. ‘Cesseeee.’ The cry carried through the noise like the far-off yelp of a seagull.

  ‘Get the sheriff,’ Cecily said. ‘I must get the sheriff. Get the sheriff. That’s what I must do.’ To search for help so that she need not stay; she wanted it more than her existence. She couldn’t. To turn away from that beseeching body: there could be no greater betrayal.

  ‘I’ll get him,’ Tyler said. ‘You go to her. Delay ’em somehow.’

  She supposed she rode forward but it seemed an involuntary progress, as if the distance between her and Dolly shrivelled like scarred skin pulling them together.

  The crowd was good-natured with expectation. It was prepared to suffer pain in the cause of pleasure, to burn itself on the charcoal-lit trays of the muffin-sellers, get its purse stolen, lose its children in the press, all in a good cause. It gave way to the woman lashing out with her whip and maddening her horse with her spurs, as long as she didn’t obscure its view.

  ‘Cessy.’

  ‘I’m here, Dolly. I’ll stop it.’

  Dolly was in her shift, her arms were pinioned at the elbow. Her eyes were opened so wide that the iris showed as a complete blue circle in the white. Her mouth was a rictus.

  Cecily edged her horse against the cart. ‘I’m here, Dolly. I’ll stop it. I’ll go to find somebody…’

  ‘No.’ Dolly inhabited a dimension of minutes where the only imperative was not to be alone. She pushed her body further over the cart side. Her face knocked off Cecily’s hat. Her teeth closed on a piece of Cecily’s hair to keep Cecily with her, so that the two of them should be joined together. Behind her locked teeth, her breath huffed in and out of her throat; Cecily felt its heat come and go against her scalp.

  The horse shifted and moved away, so that Cecily had to grab one of the cart’s struts and was left clinging to it, like a bear to a tree. She pulled her head round, not to shift away from Dolly but to beg. ‘Help us. Won’t anyone help us?’

  The only faces that weren’t laughing were familiar – Colonel Grandison’s, the Packers’, Squire Leggatt’s.

  Cole pushed through to her and held her up. Colonel Grandison ducked under somebody’s arm so that he stood below her, his face turned up, a white miniature.

  ‘Stop it,’ she told it.

  ‘We’ve tried. My dear, we’ve tried.’

  ‘Haven’t you told them who she is? Tell them who she is.’

  ‘I will. I will. Who is she?’

  There was movement at the rear of the cart. The male prisoner and the other woman were being taken off it.

  Colonel Grandison was quarrelling with a hooded man. Cecily screamed at them: ‘This is Sir Lemuel Potts’s sister. He’s a friend of the prime minister. She’s Sir Lemuel’s sister. You can’t hang her.’

  The hooded man patted his leather jacket. He was telling her he had a legal paper and would hang Dolly, whoever she was. Cecily wasn’t hearing properly through the hubbub in her ears from Dolly’s panting. Someone was slicing her hair with a knife, her head jerked free. They were dragging Dolly off the cart and on to the platform. The crowd’s roar came in waves, like Dolly’s breath.

  ‘Come away, my dear,’ Colonel Grandison said. ‘You shouldn’t see this.’

  The hangman was putting one of the nooses around Dolly’s n
eck. Dolly had passed from the human world into an animals’ abattoir. The rictus stretched her mouth into a smile and she uttered eek-eek noises that made the crowd laugh, but her eyes never left Cecily’s.

  ‘I’m here, Dolly.’ She whispered it. They were still joined; Cecily felt Dolly’s disintegration in her own arms and legs; they were coming away from her trunk. Her eyes stared through Dolly’s when the rope tightened and lifted her off her feet. She rose as the rope winched Dolly up, choked as Dolly began to choke.

  Then Cole Packer did the kindest, bravest, most terrible thing Cecily had ever seen or ever would see. He hauled himself up on to the platform and lumbered forward so that his arms could wrap around Dolly’s waist. He lifted his feet and swung. There was a snap. Dolly’s eyes released Cecily’s and closed for the last time.

  * * *

  Later that night Archibald Cameron entered Cecily’s bedroom to find her sitting in front of her looking-glass with scissors in her hand.

  ‘Did you get the body?’

  ‘Aye. She’s in the taproom, in her coffin. The Packers are guarding her.’ He looked from Cecily’s shorn head to the pile of fair curls that lay in her lap.

  She picked them up. ‘Put these in with her.’

  ‘Ye shouldnae blame yourself.’ He drew up a chair and sat beside her, so that they stared at each other’s reflection in the mirror.

  The candlelight made Cecily’s short hair into an aureole. She thought with hatred that she looked like a putto on some Renaissance frieze. I should have shaved it. ‘I wasn’t here.’ She added, with venom: ‘Neither were you.’

  ‘I came as quick as I could.’

  ‘Did you discover the reason for it?’

  ‘Reason,’ he said. ‘Reason, Lord save us.’ He was slouched and unshaven, the dust still on his wig and coat from the ride. It was the first time she’d seen him dishevelled.

  Cecily thought: He could save Cole Packer but not Dolly.

  ‘The reason is Act 9 George l.c.22, a Black Act well named.’ Almost to himself, he chanted: ‘‘‘If any person or persons shall set fire to any house, barn or out-house, or to any hovel, cock, mow, or stack of corn, straw, hay or wood, being lawfully convicted…”’