Blood Royal

by Blood Royal (retail) (epub)

  A boy ran alongside to open the door and let down the step even as the stage juddered to a stop. Ostlers unbuckled the horses’ traces, luggage was hauled from the bustle-like net on the coach’s rear, the landlady spoke the welcome of all good inns: ‘Please to alight.’

  Archibald Cameron watched her face take on the guardedness it always assumed when she saw him. ‘How nice, Mr Cameron. Here for the fishing again?’

  She looked bonnier than she had at Sir Lemuel’s funeral, not so wraith-like and mad. She’s out of the long sands, he thought. It’s the child. ‘How’s my Eleanor?’

  The Belle was flourishing. He looked about him at the large, tidy yard, its stables and coach-house into which the stage was even now being manoeuvred to leave space for other arrivals. Above him ran an elegant and ivied gallery with geraniums peeping over the rail; before him the open door of the inn showed a passage of polished flags with a low, pargeted ceiling. He sniffed the scent of apple-log fires, wine and good cooking. Who’d have thought a body as chancy as Lady Cecily Fitzhenry would have made so excellent an innkeeper?

  Cameron stretched and stamped to get stiffness from his bones. A broken trace had slowed a journey from London made longer by his companions, a wordy Yorkshireman and two other gentlemen, one large, one medium-sized, whom he’d seen once before at the Belle and summed up immediately as glorified cattle-stealers. Sharing a coach with the callants hadn’t changed his opinion.

  ‘A fine morning to ye, Ned.’

  ‘Good to see you back, Master Archie.’

  ‘Are ye well, Cole?’

  ‘The better for having ee with us, Master Archie.’

  A happy discipline pervaded the Belle: she kept a good staff; another facet to her character he wouldn’t have gambled on had he been a gambling man.

  Marjorie unpacked his case, the lad cleaned his boots and Cameron joined the common table. The two cattle-stealers, he noticed, took their meal in a private room to be served by the landlady herself. And long-faced she is at doing it, he thought, seeing Cecily going in with a tray.

  ‘Rusty-wigged crop we came up with, my dear,’ Sir Spender was saying. ‘The sawney. Holy fella. Close as wax. Wouldn’t bet with me. Name of Cameron. Been here before, ain’t he?’

  ‘That’s my lawyer.’

  ‘Is he now? Useful, very useful. The Cause finds him worthy of investigation. Got its eye on him, it seems. Becoming a big toad in the Whig puddle, they tell me.’

  ‘Not that holy,’ Maskelyne said. ‘There’s a woman in Kent.’

  ‘I shall not spy on my own lawyer,’ said Cecily, firmly. What woman in Kent?

  ‘Nevertheless, no harm in keeping an ear stretched and an eye open,’ Sir Spender told her. ‘For the Cause.’

  At the end of his meal, as he always did, Cameron sent for the cook. ‘Ye still wield a saintly saucepan, Master Quick. It was a happy day Mrs Henry hired ye.’ The chef’s reputation had spread to the point where the rival White Horse at Stevenage had hired a black cook in hopeful emulation.

  ‘Happy day for me, Master Archie, thanks to you.’

  The Scot had a joyful reunion with Eleanor in the taproom, where she was taken to say goodnight to him and Colonel Grandison. He’d brought her a little wooden horse on wheels.

  The Yorkshireman didn’t like the attention paid to the child. On the journey down he’d entertained the coach with details of worsted manufacture – an enterprise through which he was acquiring a fortune though not, it seemed, the confidence to dispel his suspicion that servants would take advantage of him if he didn’t shout.

  He’d already expressed his disapproval on finding that a black man had cooked his dinner, though he’d eaten it and called for more. The south of England’s growing Negro population he regarded as infestation. ‘They’d not be let in Yorkshire, I tell thee.’

  Now, the sight of the child Eleanor being made much of by the Belle’s regulars further offended his amour propre.

  ‘What’s that? I’m asking thee, what’s that? The chimney broosh or the entertainment? Doos it dance with a dog or what? Hey, missis?’ Cecily had appeared at the door. ‘Is this a clean inn? Or a breeding ground for Negroes? What I say is…’

  Cameron rose, Colonel Grandison’s hand went to his sword-hilt and Warty Packer lumbered forward from his place by the barrels.

  Cecily was quicker. She smiled at the Yorkshireman. ‘If I may have a word with you outside, sir. It’s to do with your portmanteau.’

  Cameron followed them outside to the yard, on watch for trouble. He heard the Yorkshireman say: ‘What’s to do with my portmanteau? Mislaid it, have thee?’

  ‘Yes,’ said his hostess. ‘It is already on its way to the White Horse up the road, and if you will be so good as to mount this horse, Ned here will guide you in its wake. You’ll find it more congenial there. The coach will stop for you in the morning. Get him up, Ned.’

  That the Yorkshireman’s rage was only bluster had to do with the fact that Stabber and Cole stood like Gog and Magog in the lengthening shadows of the yard. The Yorkshireman’s shouts diminished into the birdsong of a summer evening as his horse was jog-trotted out of the yard on Ned’s leading rein.

  ‘Neatly done,’ said Cameron, as Cecily came back indoors.

  ‘Thank you. Are you staying long?’

  ‘Aye. I thought I’d do a wee bit of angling.’

  Cecily went back out to the yard. ‘Keep an eye on Master Archie’s room when he goes to bed,’ she told Cole. ‘I don’t want him wandering tonight of all nights, not with Tyler coming.’

  ‘He’d not give us away,’ Cole said.

  You don’t know the half. The Packers were cognisant of – indeed, willing participants in – Cecily’s smuggling activities. What else she had to do that night was between her and the Jacobites alone. ‘He’s a lawyer. Angling, indeed. He’s angling for something, and it ain’t fish.’

  Cole shook his head as he watched her return to the inn. He wondered when she’d see it. Everybody else could.

  ‘Tonight of all nights,’ Cecily said to herself. ‘Damn him.’ Then she thought: What woman in Kent?

  It had been dismaying that her conversation with James Stuart at Hempens had been so quickly followed up by his secret agents – even more that the agents were a couple of Jacobites from her past and that their visits were frequent.

  Their arrival always induced tension, partly because of what it entailed, partly because they invariably got drunk – Sir Spender indiscreetly, Maskelyne with aggression to anyone who looked at him sideways.

  Secret my arse, Cecily thought. She’d seen more reticent fairground barkers. As usual, she tried to persuade them not to go into the taproom after dinner. As usual, they did.

  ‘No, no, my dear,’ Sir Spender said. ‘Skulking only attracts suspicion. What should seem more natural than drinking with one’s fellow men? We must congregate in order to feel the country’s pulse. No, once more we’ll wet the sawdust with these ascriptus glebae, these ploughers and reapers. Damask the claret, dear lady.’

  ‘And put it on the sconce,’ Maskelyne said. They never paid.

  In the taproom Cameron settled himself next to Colonel Grandison, who was still fulminating against the Yorkshireman: ‘Upstart Whigs, all damn unmannerly boors, begging your pardon, Cameron.’

  A Whig upstart granted his pardon and, for a while, sipped his glass of bishop, listening to the colonel’s conversation, enjoying the scent of wallflowers coming through the window and watching his other two coaching companions across the room get drunk.

  ‘I’m away to bed, Colonel. It’s the early bird catches the fish.’

  Upstairs, Cecily snatched a moment to make sure Eleanor was asleep and to marvel at the perfect mattness of the child’s skin against the sheet.

  To begin with she’d left the baby’s care to Polly, the wet nurse, but a busy summer had called Polly into service as starcher, needlewoman and cleaner so that the child was passed around, turning up on each woman’s hip at one tim
e or another, including Cecily’s, strapped to Ned’s back as he curried his horses, in a pannier when Quick went to market, in the wash basket, on Colonel Grandison’s knee in the taproom.

  Her status was established: a charity orphan destined as a servant of the Belle Sauvage.

  At first she was a curiosity with the locals, then a favourite. A healthy child with an easily gained chuckle, her confidence in everybody’s goodwill rendered her vulnerable. In any case, the Packers, male and female, were her champions and nobody was going to argue with them.

  Her blackness flickered in the eye of the beholder; sometimes marked, as when she played with the Packers’ fair-skinned children, only to blend out when she was among adults, no more noticeable to those who were used to her than the mole on Marjorie’s cheek or the tick of the parlour’s grandmother clock, only to become surprising again when new guests commented on it.

  In Cecily’s mind the conviction that the child was a replacement grew rather than diminished. She had battled for a baby’s life at Hempens and lost. This time she’d won. Obviously, it was inferior compensation – it was only a black beggar’s child – but it counted as a victory among a series of defeats, an erratic, minuscule evening-out of the unfairness of things.

  As time went on, what she began to see when she looked at the child was Sophie. The good humour, the trust in being loved, the response to make an audience laugh, these attributes were Sophie’s as surely as if Sophie were whispering instruction into the baby’s ear. She was nagged by the heresy that Sophie’s baby had found a home in the body of this strangely sent Christmas child.

  She put off naming it and it was variously known as Sootykins, Africa, Molly (from molasses) and, behind Cecily’s back, not unkindly, ‘that little black bugger’, until Archibald Cameron, on one of his visits, had told Cecily she was acting like a heathen and that if the child wasn’t received by the Church of England through baptism forthwith he’d personally see to it that she became a Presbyterian.

  Contrite, Cecily said: ‘I don’t know what to call her.’

  ‘Grisel. A good Scottish name.’

  ‘Indeed. We’ll call her Eleanor. I meant, what surname?’

  ‘The Lord’s sake. Cameron, if you must.’

  She was as surprised at the freedom with which he passed around his name as he was that she withheld hers. Fitzhenry? It couldn’t be given to anybody, especially a black anybody, however miraculous. And she wouldn’t inflict the child with Potts.

  Eleanor Grisel Belle Cameron was baptized at the font of Datchworth church the following week, with Cecily and Marjorie Packer as godmothers, Cameron and Colonel Grandison the godfathers.

  Then, one day, Cecily had entered the kitchen to talk to Quick. Eleanor, playing in the apple barrel, looked up, stretched out her arms and said, ‘Mamma.’

  Quick’s reaction was curious. He squatted down by the barrel as if putting his body between the child and Cecily. ‘She don’t mean it, Miz Cec’ly. She hear the Packers call you “mum” and she just added a piece.’ To Eleanor he said: ‘You don’t call mistress that, chil’, you speak respec’ful. You speak humble an’ respec’ful to eve’ybody.’

  He thinks I shall berate her, thought Cecily. It came into her head that Sophie’s child would not have been made to show humility.

  She said sharply: ‘Why should she be humble?’

  Quick stood up, his shoulders bowed, eyes studying the ground. ‘She a black girl, mistress. She got a long hard row to hoe.’

  ‘I shall teach her manners, thank you, Quick.’

  After that Cecily increasingly interfered in Eleanor’s upbringing. She talked to her more so that the child might not acquire a Hertfordshire accent, she had her clothes made by her own seamstress, she refused to let Polly cut the woolly hair: ‘She’s not a boy.’

  ‘You can’t keep a cap on it else,’ protested Polly. ‘Looks like a scrap o’ lace on a dandelion.’

  ‘Then she’ll go capless.’ Cecily considered that the wide mop balanced on the child’s tiny neck looked charming, like topiary.

  Polly gave in her notice. She was expecting her sixth, anyway. ‘It ain’t I don’t love that little one,’ she told Marjorie, ‘but she mun know her place. Mum’s storing up trouble with her.’

  On the night of Polly’s departure, Cecily heard crying from the nursery. When she opened the door, she saw a small white nightgown standing by Polly’s empty bed.

  She picked the baby up. ‘This won’t do, will it? You must get used to sleeping by yourself.’ There was wet on her neck from the face against it, a tiny heaving ribcage against her own, small feet and hands scrabbling for a hold.

  She carried the child to her own bed. ‘We’re not making a habit of this, mind.’

  The next night Eleanor’s cot was put in Cecily’s room and had remained there.

  * * *

  In the taproom only the Jacobites sat late. Warty Packer was clearing the tables when Cecily entered. Sir Spender was calling for more liquor. ‘Where’s me aqua vitae? Why’s me glass empty? Is this damn Hanoverian tavern or – or place for gentlemen?’

  Warty glanced at Cecily: ‘They drunk nine men dead already.’

  She nodded. ‘Go and get the cellar doors open for Tyler, then come back.’

  She took the drink to the Jacobites’ tables. Sir Spender regarded her blearily. ‘Are you the lad who took me order ’n hour ago? My, you’ve changed. No, Masky, ’s our delectable hostess. Drink with me, madam. Another round with Aphrodite.’

  ‘You’ve had nine bottles already,’ Cecily told him. ‘No more tonight.’

  ‘No alehouse keeper’s going to tell him when he can drink and when he can’t,’ Maskelyne said.

  ‘Have you work for me or haven’t you?’ Cecily took care not to show she was afraid of Maskelyne, though she was. When he was drunk his verbal attacks on her or any of the inn’s women were filthy. ‘Or shall I call Cole Packer?’ Maskelyne had made the mistake of insulting Marjorie in Cole’s hearing and been thrown in the horse trough, since when he’d curbed his tongue slightly. None of the staff understood why he was still given house room. If it hadn’t been that Sir Spender pleaded with Cecily on his companion’s behalf, saying he needed the man for protection, he wouldn’t have been, Cause or no Cause.

  Sulking, Maskelyne rummaged in his pocket and produced a packet of letters. ‘Put these in. And in the bag there’ll be one addressed to Clonkilty in Edinburgh. Copy it.’

  ‘Franked, nat’lly,’ Sir Spender said. ‘The Whig bastards rob us blind. B’God, as soon’ve a Turk for a ruler as ’s bloody German. Lady Cecily, join me in a toas’ t’ when our king enjoys ’s own again.’

  ‘You’ll toast us to the damned gallows,’ Cecily told him. In a Tory taproom where expressions of disloyalty to George I were frequent, Sir Spender went more or less unremarked. But one of these days…

  Warty came back and helped her get the knight upstairs to his room, Maskelyne following like a cold-eyed nursemaid.

  Are they sodomites? Yet she’d heard them boast more than once about their exploits in brothels, Dick with ridicule of the prostitutes they’d used, Maskelyne with something nearer hatred. She supposed they were not untypical Englishmen in their contempt for women but neither among the aristocracy nor here, at the lower end of the scale, had she encountered it in such ferocity.

  ‘You want me to wait up for Wallie?’ Warty asked.

  ‘I’ll see to Wallie. You go and help Tyler.’

  Returning downstairs she felt a tremor in the floorboards, the sign that the barrels on Tyler’s pack mules were being unloaded. They were wrapped in felt but nothing could stop them vibrating the Belle’s timbers as they rolled down the chute into her cellar. The cellar itself ran the length of the inn, a brick wall dividing the half shown to guests who wanted to choose their own liquor from the half containing the contraband Tyler brought from Hempens four times a year.

  The entrance to that section was a concealed trap on the Belle’s south side hid
den from the road by trees. The only likelihood of its discovery by the authorities lay in someone informing them of it and, since most of Woolmer Green’s and Datchworth’s population – including, of course, the local magistrate – profited from her smuggling, Cecily believed herself safe on that score.

  She went into her office to wait for Wallie. She wished she didn’t have to tackle this, her other illegal and much more dangerous enterprise, without the knowledge of Tyler and the Packers. Compared to those reliable men, allies like Dick and Maskelyne were unnerving.

  What had surprised her was the efficiency with which the ramshackle Jacobite spy network they represented had involved her in the Pretender’s scheme for making the Belle Sauvage his poste restante.

  Walpole’s formidable system of intelligence to counter the Jacobite threat included the state monopoly of the General Post Office, and saw treason in every mail-bag. One of the complaints against the Royal Mail, especially by Tories, was the delay caused by the ‘secrets room’ in the GPO basement in Cornhill, where suspicious letters were carefully opened and scanned for seditious content before being sent on.

  So well known was the tight watch on communication, that Cecily had at first disbelieved Sir Spender when he told her that ‘for the Cause’ the Belle was to become one of the receiving houses for the mail.

  ‘The White Horse at Stevenage is the receiving house for this area,’ she said. ‘Always has been.’

  Sir Spender tapped his nose. ‘No more. We of the Cause have… what is the word?… infiltrated, that’s it, infiltrated the inner sanctum of the Hanoverian’s Post Office. One of our agents, a Master John Lefebure, has breached that armoury of mail, holed its defences, has, in fact, been given high place in its employment. I think, dear lady, that you will soon receive official notification of some interest.’

  Not for the first time Cecily winced at Sir Spender’s lack of caution. The name of a man of utmost value to the Cause, who, if caught, could be disembowelled, ought to be kept secret even from his fellow Jacobites. Does the old fool bandy mine about like that?