‘Don’t speak it, don’t even speak it. What did you find out?’
Watching him in the looking-glass as he told the tale distanced her from it – and from him. In any case, his level, pedantic voice robbed the story of passion, though passion was what it was about.
During his absence, Cameron told her, Dolly had returned to the Belle to look after Lemuel, leaving Tinker Packer in his cottage to look after himself. ‘A Lothario, that one,’ Cameron said. ‘Having rid himself of one woman for Mistress Dolly, he now rids himself of Mistress Dolly for another, a tinker female whose trampings through the countryside he has followed, the Lord knows where.’
When Dolly returned to the cottage to be told by a neighbour that Tinker had gone off with his new inamorata, she had smashed what items of his furniture could be broken by an axe. ‘For which, mebbe, she wouldnae be blamed too much in a magistrate’s court,’ said the lawyer.
But Dolly had gone on to commit one of Parliament’s new capital offences. In Tinker’s yard – ‘and ye’ll remember that the laddie resides in the forest, making this a messuage under the Black Act…’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Cecily.
…there’d been a hayrick which Dolly herself had helped to gather and build on Tinker’s behalf. She set fire to it. One of Lord Letty’s keepers had reported her.
Immediately she became subject to prosecution, not in the petty sessions of Colonel Grandison as she would have been only a year before, but by His Majesty’s judges anxious to display to King George and the prime minister their zeal under the new Act.
‘Even then a plea by such as mysel’ could have had the sentence commuted,’ Cameron said. ‘At worst she’d have faced transportation. God forgive me for it, when Warty Packer came to fetch me I was away in Kent.’
And God forgive me. She had been at such pains to keep her identity secret that nobody’d known Dolly had once had powerful connections. Had her judge been made aware that in her day Dolly was entertained by the very prime minister who’d framed the Act that condemned her… as it was, he’d seen in the dock before him a literally defenceless woman and an opportunity to make an example of her that would deter other forest-dwellers from attacks on property.
There had been no time such as had allowed the lawyer to get Cole Packer’s similar offence struck from the list. It was Mistress Dolly’s misfortune – Cameron used the word ‘misfortune’ – that the legal process had gone through quickly, that the Assize judges were at the very moment in Hertford, that death sentences were carried out two days after they were pronounced.
Dolly had been hanged alongside a man who’d robbed and killed a Tewin house owner and a woman who’d smothered her baby.
Cecily felt Cameron’s hand take hers. ‘No need to shear your head, my poor lass. It wasnae your fault, it wasnae mine.’
She snatched her hand away. ‘Tinker Packer,’ she said.
‘Mebbe no’ even his. She was a gey passionate woman.’
Perhaps, but Tinker Packer would never set foot in the Belle again.
Cecily knew whose fault it was. Before she’d cut her hair, she’d written a letter to a priory in Dunkirk saying that she was willing to co-operate in any activity to advance the cause of James III, thereby overthrowing the throne of George of Hanover and the government of Sir Robert Walpole.
Tyler would deliver it on his first excursion as a smuggler.
She wasn’t acting from principle; she couldn’t honestly say that it was her answer to the cry of the oppressed people of England, though perhaps they were part of it. Nor had she chosen treason as a source of revenge. She was doing it because there were some political crimes that had to be refuted.
Parliament and the judiciary had co-operated to lever the avalanche of their authority down on a creature whose only crime had been that she was human. Such power used against such helplessness necessitated reaction or the world would be too unbalanced for Cecily to walk on its surface.
Dolly had been part of her life. It didn’t matter that sometimes she hadn’t liked her. It did matter that, at the end, the two of them had been joined by their insignificance. She’d felt Dolly’s breath on her head as she wrote the letter. In the looking-glass she saw Dolly’s face staring at her over the lawyer’s shoulder. She would hear Dolly calling to her for the rest of her life. And something had to be done about it.
‘What shall I tell Lemuel?’ It was a question to herself.
Archibald Cameron said: ‘Will I do it for ye?’
‘No.’ Lawyers. Co-operators in murder. State bandits. Cecily stood up and looked down at him. ‘I assume you’ll be continuing with your present profession?’
‘I will.’ He rose as she turned away from him, taking her arm and turning her round to face him. ‘Ye may not regard the law too highly at this instance, mistress…’
‘Law? What law? Law made by murderers? Law that hangs Dolly? Law of greedy tradesmen who’ve no care for the land except to stop anyone else having it? What do these vulgarians know of England? My ancestors owned it and kept it safe. Peasant, aristocrat, they all co-operated. Each in his place respected the other and the soil they came from. People had rights that we gave them. Upstarts like George, like Walpole, they give nothing. They’re bludgeoning England to death from a whim that gives them profit and calling it law.’
She was panting with the effort of putting into words what had until then existed in her blood. She pulled her arm out of his clutch. ‘So get away from me.’
‘I’ll not. Ye’ll understand if I die for it.’ He grabbed her shoulders and shook her so that her head snapped back and her face was turned up to his.
‘Law has form, procedure: there’s nae point to it if it serves only the powerful. It must aye extend to others or else it’s tyranny – and the powerful are fine aware of it. Sometimes it must work against them. Hear me when I tell ye the law is greater than a form of legitimizing property or class or ruler. Aye, it’s conflict. It’s not even justice, it wasnae justice today. But it’s no’ tyranny. Tyranny has no law.’
He shook her again. ‘D’ye see? And I’ll tell ye this, mistress, it’s given commoners like mysel’ a mercy we nae had under your aristocracy – Habeas Corpus, privacy, protection against the absolute rule of monarchs. King George is inhibited in his actions and those inhibitions were placed on him by law. By law.’
Credo countered credo. It was an intimacy of antagonism that reached into them both. His thin mouth made patterns that riveted her even while she refused to understand the words they made.
‘So you’ll go on serving Walpole.’
‘I’m serving the law.’ He shook her again. ‘Take law away and what are we? Savages rending each other over a carcass. Aye, Walpole’s bent it for his own ends and ye hate him for it, so do I. Shameless, shouts you. Unfair, shouts I. But ye know it’s shameless and I know it’s unfair because we possess an ideal of what law should be and that ideal has been given us by grand jurists and grand men. And I tell ye, mistress, I’ll fight for that ideal while there’s breath in this body.’
Another breath on her hair, heat from another body. She was being drawn so close to him she could see the candlelight on stubby eyelashes that were too white to be seen in daylight.
He spoke low, seeming suddenly disconcerted. ‘It’s important, d’ye see, Cecily? The law’s important. I’m important.’ The naked eyes were asking a question.
She said: ‘Not to me.’ And he let her go.
* * *
She told Lemuel that Dolly had died in an accident and trusted to the grace of her people not to disabuse him. Nor did they.
He cried, but it was as if the news was incidental to him and she thought that, as with someone very old, his fight to stay alive took all his concentration and left no energy with which to grieve for others.
* * *
That winter, just before Christmas, a beggar crawled into the Belle’s stableyard. A not infrequent occurrence: London attempted to reduce its begging pop
ulation by transporting offenders thirty miles off. Woolmer Green was on the line of its northerly thirty-mile limit.
The Belle had got used to them, gave them its scraps and sent them on in a cart to Stevenage. Stevenage people complained that the beggars put up their Poor Rate. But, as Cecily pointed out, Stevenage’s was the nearest poor-house ‘And they’re not staying at my inn.’
It was evening and she was in her office, listlessly going through the ledgers. Regular coaches had stopped running for the winter, giving the Belle an intermission with only locals and passing trade to entertain.
Marjorie Packer reported the arrival: ‘Another shabberoon at the gate.’
‘Put it in one of the stalls for the night, then.’
‘Done it. It’s another Negro. And it’s a she.’ Marjorie was fidgety.
Cecily looked up. ‘We’re not a haven for Negroes, Marjorie. One’s enough.’
‘From the looks of it, her’ll make it three. Any minute.’
‘Damn.’
Cecily felt her slippers skid on the ice of the cobbles as she crossed the yard to the stables. Ned had hung a lantern from a manger to make a Nativity. Yellow light concentrated on the black-skinned, black-shawled figure who lay on the straw, glossing a horse’s head as it looked over the partition, turning Ned, Stabber and Cole into helpless, watching shepherds.
The woman was dying, her eyes fixed with the stare of the moribund. She could have been between sixteen and forty; famine had aged her face and robbed it of individuality so that it was the mask seen everywhere on the streets of London that made the starving, black or white, appear members of the same family.
What little nourishment her body had received had been absorbed by the foetus in her distended belly. She was already advanced in labour.
‘Will I carry her indoors?’ Stabber asked.
Cecily glanced at Marjorie, who shook her head. ‘She’s better not moved. This’ll do.’ The straw was clean, the air heated by horses.
‘Tell Quick to warm a flip, lots of eggs, milk, brandy.’ Cecily was invigorated for the first time since Dolly’s execution. She felt a fury directed at the stupid black female’s indifference. The carelessness of these indigents. The woman had been granted the opportunity to give life and was throwing it away by dying. What wouldn’t Sophie give for the chance? What wouldn’t I?
She got down on her knees in the straw and snapped at the woman: ‘You’re going to have this baby, like it or not.’
Marjorie was Cecily’s ally and adviser. The two of them became the unborn baby’s champions pitted against a mutual enemy, the mother. They forced flip down her throat, they slapped her face when she lost consciousness, they bathed her, demanded her name, crooned to her, shouted at her. It was a race, literally, between life and death.
The men sat on bales of hay at the stall entrance, puffing pipes. ‘Leave the poor soul die in peace, Marje,’ Cole said.
‘Go stick your head ’n a bucket,’ said Marjorie.
Quick came to lounge against the stall post. ‘Know her, Quick, do ee?’ asked Stabber.
The black man shook his head.
‘Thought you’d a known her,’ Stabber said.
Cecily told the cook: ‘Ask her who she is. Where she comes from.’ Perhaps blackness was another language.
Quick said slowly: ‘Who are. You? Where. Come from?’
Useless. The woman’s head lolled, only her womb responding to the urge of the child trying to get out of it. ‘Push, you bugger,’ said Marjorie. It was like helping somebody escape from a collapsing building. ‘An’ again. There’s the head, I can feel un.’
‘Push, damn you,’ said Cecily. ‘Damn you, push.’
The only sounds the woman made were involuntary huffs as air was expelled from her lungs by the last contractions.
The head was visible. Marjorie’s hands cupped round it as if she would pull, but from a final heave the body came squirming out and plopped between its mother’s thighs, a shining mole in its sac.
Cecily probed her little finger into its mouth, which issued a mew of sound. Thank you, God, thank you, thank you.
Sobbing, Marjorie cut the cord with a kitchen knife and tied it with baler twine. Cecily held the baby up before its mother’s eyes. It was a girl. ‘Look how clever you’ve been.’
But the woman had gone. The afterbirth would remain inside her. As Cole said, wiping his eyes, ‘One in, one out. Same minute.’
They wrapped the child in a fleece to carry it into the inn and drink its health, showing it to Lemuel, exulting in it as in a trophy from a battlefield. Marjorie sent Stabber into the forest to fetch her cousin’s husband’s sister, Polly, who’d just lost her fifth and was well in milk.
‘What we going to do with un?’
‘Shame to put her to the poor-house.’
‘Train un up to be useful. Grow your own help, like.’
They were all looking at Cecily. Good God, they want me to keep her. Delivering a living baby had been the triumph; she hadn’t thought beyond that. ‘We’re too busy,’ she protested. ‘There’s no…’
There’s no room at the inn.
‘Damn,’ she said.
* * *
Perhaps, after all, Dolly’s loss penetrated Lemuel’s mind and tipped the balance of his battle against him. On a bitter morning in the following February, Cecily took him his breakfast and found him dead.
He was buried alongside Dolly in Datchworth churchyard. Cecily had a block taken out of the Belle’s wall to make them both a gravestone and hired a mason from Stevenage to incise it with the inscription: ‘There the wicked cease from troubling and there the weary be at rest.’
Job, she felt, was appropriate.
The funeral service was well attended and there were tears from some of the Belle’s staff, and even a few of its clients who had watched Lemuel’s struggle to gain mobility and speech. ‘A sweet gentleman,’ Colonel Grandison called him in his oration. Cecily’s eyes remained dry. Dolly’s stared at her from behind the reredos, just as they looked at her from every corner of the Belle.
At the graveside she was joined by Archibald Cameron. There’d been no contact between them since the day of Dolly’s hanging but it had seemed necessary that someone who remembered Lemuel in his great days should provide official sanction to his death.
‘I gathered ye didn’t wish me to inform Sir Robert.’
‘No.’
Birdsong had been stilled by the cold. Some mast from the leafless beech tree over the mourners’ heads was frozen into the ground. The sheep that usually grazed the churchyard had gone in the winter slaughter, like the cows, and only Colonel Grandison’s red bull peered over the hedge, sending streams of steam from its nostrils. Beyond the moat the earth of the fields fell away, showing pinkish brown against a colourless sky.
Would Lemuel have been content with these bucolic obsequies or, in his long-imposed dumbness, had he still hoped for the muffled drums, the minute’s silence in the House, a memorial service at St Stephen’s? Oh, Lemuel, I had neither the time nor patience to find out.
‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,’ chanted the curate.
Cameron stooped and took up a clod of clay displaced from the grave and put it into her hand. She let it fall. It was common Hertfordshire clay and didn’t sprinkle but landed with a thump on the coffin.
‘Ye harboured him well,’ Cameron said, as they walked away.
Why did the man persist with the idea that she needed comfort? There’d been no requirement to love a plebeian husband foisted on her, no requirement to love his sister.
But, oh, God, I want them back.
On the way out of the churchyard, Cameron paused by the grave of the black woman with its low headstone that had been cut from the same block as Dolly’s and Lemuel’s. The inscription was from Exodus, chosen by Marjorie and Quick: ‘I was a stranger in a strange land.’
‘Did ye ever find out who she was?’
The Packers had tried but admitted defeat. The
beadle of Welwyn, the parish on Woolmer Green’s south, had denied knowledge of her, as had Stevenage’s, though Cole suspected one or the other of pushing her over his boundary so that she and her child wouldn’t be a charge on his parish.
‘She didn’t exist at all,’ Cecily said. ‘She was invented.’
She felt Cameron’s arm tuck under hers to lead her away. He thinks I’m not sane. She wondered if she was.
After Dolly’s hanging, she had known she was not – or, rather, that she wandered by herself in an insane world, staring at familiar objects and faces that had become distorted, studying her own hand as if it belonged to somebody else. Greyness closed in. Waking to the days had become as dreadful as the nightly encircling dolmens, Sophie’s baby, Dolly, the death of friendship; colourless but of a mass which sucked at her ability to breathe so that she woke up choking.
Then one night, quite recently, light had come into the circle with a child, white as it began weaving in and out of the standing stones, emerging black at the end of its dance, yet still luminous. It had become a recurring dream and not even Lemuel’s death had extinguished it.
It brought back the ability to function. It seemed to Cecily that the black woman had been invented somewhere on the Great North Road specifically to restore symmetry, to limp into the Belle’s yard and deliver the baby to it. Birth for death, spring for winter. She’d been a requirement, a vehicle, to balance the scale left empty by Sophie’s child.
Cameron persisted anxiously in his comfort: ‘Ye’ve still the Belle to see to,’ he said, ‘and the wee girl.’ He’d taken to the black child.
Cecily’s smile of agreement appeared to worry him the more.
And a government to overthrow.
Chapter Ten
The coach leaned horribly as it rounded the bottom of the hill before righting itself to go through the Belle Sauvage’s great arch, flecking the pillars with mud and sweat.
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