Blood Royal

by Blood Royal (retail) (epub)

  Here we are again. Another low-born Whig. That’s why then… you angler for a fine fish. Lady Cecily Fitzhenry and a ginger Scotsman. The effrontery. Marry you? Like fuck I will. But it’s funny. Why is it so funny? What woman in Kent?

  He was walking about as if the meadow were a courtroom and she a hostile witness. ‘I put it to you ye’re in need of a husband. Yes or no?’

  Her jaw was still dropped. He leaned forward and put a finger under her chin to close it. ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Ah-ha.’ He wasn’t put out. ‘But ye’ll soon be seeing the strength of it.’ He perambulated some more. ‘Sir Samuel’d have no grounds to refuse a licence to your husband. So if ye’re to keep the Belle, ye’ll have to wed. Yes or no?’

  He ignored her silence. ‘As for me, I’m in need of a wife, being now in a position to support one in grand style and looked at askance for the lack. Ye’ll admit, I think, that neither of us grows any younger.’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’

  ‘Granted,’ he went on, ‘ye’d be required to pass six month of any year in London wi’ me, but I’d make no objection to ye devoting the rest of the time to the Belle. Excuse me a wee minute.’

  He turned to his fishing rod. Its tip was bent over, the line tight into a dimple in the water. He called over his shoulder between pulls and puffs: ‘Consider, will ye… while I land yon chavender…?’

  The absurdity of it was extraordinarily relaxing. She sat with amusement chasing round her innards and watched a kingfisher hunch on a branch across the river before it dived into the water and rose up again, a tiny flash of sapphire, green and chestnut, with a flapping sliver in its beak. It flew off along the bank.

  So long since she’d had time to absorb the loveliness of England, her England, Tory, Plantagenet England. The England that this little man’s employers were intent on degrading.

  The landlady of the Belle Sauvage intervened, calculating profit and loss.

  An upstart, said Lady Cecily Fitzhenry.

  You could keep the Belle, said the Belle.

  Another voice, elusive and faint, entered the conversation: I’ll return for you, Lady Cecily, Lady Cecily.

  And I’ll be waiting.

  And waiting, and waiting, and waiting, said the landlady of the Belle, childless, innless, sexless.

  Cameron’s coat was warm against her cheek, smelling faintly of clover, good worsted and fish. Tucked in its sleeve’s cuff was a waxed paper packet. She pulled it out, undid it and began to munch on the bread and cheese Quick had cut for him, considering the muscles of his back under his shirt as he tugged and relaxed to land his fish. The sun, the river, induced a languor she hadn’t experienced in years. His wig was the same colour as the kingfisher’s breast.

  The fish came flapping from the water in a spray. Cameron unhooked it and dropped it in a net in the river to squirm with the rest of his catch.

  He came back to her and squatted at her feet. ‘What’s it to be?’

  ‘My dear man,’ she said, all Lady Cecily, ‘I was coerced into marriage before, as you know. It’s not likely I would consent again.’

  ‘A good point,’ he said, encouragingly, ‘but I put it to ye that your price has gone down, your politics are misguided and ye’ve a criminal bent in a crisis.’

  She laughed outright. ‘Where’s the gain in marrying me?’

  He grinned back at her. He had white, uneven teeth, not unattractive. ‘Unlimited free accommodation at the Belle and a half share in young Eleanor. The slip needs a father as well as a mother.’

  She stopped laughing. ‘The child is the orphan of a beggar woman. She is a Negro. I took her in for charity. I do not consider her my daughter.’ He was presuming too much. This banter was enjoyable as long as it remained banter. She said: ‘I presume we are discussing what is at base a business arrangement?’

  His head jerked back in surprise. ‘You presume wrong. No, oh, no, no, no. It’s a true marriage we’re discussing. Bless us, woman, what for d’you think I’ve put up with your havers these last years? It’s not for what ye paid me, I’ll tell ye that.’

  ‘What, then?’ She led him on, not with the idea of accepting him but because she was curious. It was as if she’d been looking at a cloud formation which had refocused itself into the shape of a lion.

  They stared at each other, and if she was expecting his heart to appear on his shirtsleeve she was disappointed, yet relieved, that it didn’t. In both of them, it seemed, was an area of dragon country to which the other would not be admitted. He shrugged. ‘Ye’re no’ ill-favoured. Anyway, I’ve a charitable bent mysel’.’

  She spluttered. ‘And that’s your courtship, is it, Master Cameron?’

  ‘No, no. That’s the argument. This is courtship.’ And he kissed her.

  Her night-time love put up a protest. ‘Lady Cecily, Lady Cecily,’ but it was day-time by a sinuous river, the air heavy with sun and mating butterflies. The cheep of brooding birds and the whirr of dragonflies drowned the bat’s squeak from the dark. His lips were thin and hard and the tongue that ran along her teeth promised fecundity.

  She was taken aback by her body’s sudden liquidity. ‘Well,’ she said at last – they were both panting, ‘well, so it’s coercion, Master Cameron. Marry you or lose the Belle, is that it?’

  ‘That it is.’ He’d snuggled down by her side. He picked a kingcup and tickled her jaw with it. The hairs along his forearm were golden.

  She said: ‘Another forced marriage, then.’

  ‘But this time it’s no’ with an old man.’ The fish had splashed his shirt so that it stuck to his chest, rising and falling with his breathing. ‘This time you get me.’

  He was in command as a lover; to be this sexually confident he’d had success with women. What woman in Kent? She stabbed back. ‘You should know that I love another.’

  He winced, more at the triteness of the phrase than anything else. ‘Ye love a memory.’ He brought his head down to hers so that their noses rubbed. ‘It’s a cold bed to marry a memory.’

  Too confident, too commanding: this was the enemy. The Whiggish maleness of the world had swamped her before and here it was once more pressing her down in a changed and more dangerous form. She was being seduced. And in a field, like a bloody milkmaid. He was kissing her again. The river in her body was dammed somewhere around the lips of her vagina, begging for release. She was beginning to squirm.

  With his lips against hers, he said: ‘Do we marry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sat up, suddenly vulnerable. ‘D’ye mean it?’

  ‘It appears I have no alternative.’

  He was still arched over her, studying her face. She waited for him to kiss her again. Instead he pulled away, nodding. ‘Well done.’ He shook her hand warmly. ‘Ye’ll not regret it.’ He was on his feet, gathering his fishing tackle together. Tidying up. A respectable little man again, doing things properly. And singing. Hideously. ‘Ha til mi tulidh. Let the piper play. A bride to wash ma feet afore my age slips awa’.’

  And she was lying here, feeling squelchy. ‘I suppose you realize I could with as much advantage marry one of the Packers,’ she said.

  Over his shoulder he said: ‘They’re no’ as handsome as me. Anyway, a lawyer’d have to draw up the marriage contract. By wedding me, d’ye see, ye can save the legal fees.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ She sat up – yes, definitely squelchy. Had Cole seen?

  She glanced downriver to where Cole lay, his arm plunged in the water, studiously tickling for trout. She picked grass from her hair, grumbling: ‘First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’

  ‘Dick the Butcher,’ he said.

  ‘Jack Cade,’ she argued, ‘I know my Shakespeare.’

  On the way home, with his coat and hat on, he was entirely the legal man, talking of widow’s rights, free bench, inheritance, all of it designed to give her some independence and all of it suffocating her.

  He seemed to expect th
e marriage to be soon and to produce children. She was to be introduced back into Society.

  She was overcome by a remembered nausea. Whig Society on the arm of a Whiggish commoner, the old shame recreated.

  What have I done? Why have I done it? To keep the Belle, yes. It’s as much a forced marriage as the last. He hasn’t asked me if I wish it; only stating that I shall lose the Belle if I don’t. He pursues his own social and sexual gratification. He wants a wife.

  But as her mind argued, her body retained a temperature it had forgotten it could reach. In the wet, flower-studded meadow it had burgeoned a momentary cornucopia. Reject him, it told her, and we wither into fruitlessness. An old maid. Who else has offered? Where is your Edinburgh Romeo who promised to return?

  Cecily came from a breed that, tormented by indecision, tossed for it. Her ancestors had gained and lost fortunes on the turn of a guinea. Let the gods decide.

  Back at the Belle, she hurried up to her room and took down her copy of Henry the Sixth, Part Two that she’d found in Hertford market. Jack Cade had led the rebellion; for certain it was Jack Cade determined to kill the lawyers.

  She leafed through the fourth act and found the place.

  Bugger.

  She became Mrs Archibald Cameron two weeks later at the door of Datchworth church with Eleanor and the Packer children throwing rose petals. If she’d had her way, it would have been a quiet wedding, her demeanour making it clear that it was not of her choosing, but Lady Mary Wortley Montagu – recently home from abroad – and half Hertfordshire celebrated a match which, Marjorie Packer told her, had been expected.

  ‘I didn’t expect it,’ Cecily said, coldly.

  ‘Best thing could happen,’ said Marjorie.

  Bucolic custom required the wedding party to carry bride and groom to their bed. Cecily could barely see it for the ribbons, love-knots, straw fertility symbols and flowers that hung about it. Cameron was flung in beside her.

  When the final indecency had been pronounced, they were left alone. ‘Let the piper play,’ Cameron hummed, lighting a candle. ‘A bride to wash ma feet before my age slips away.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ she said, sharply. The jokes of the Packers and Squire Leggatt, which even Lady Mary had joined in, had caused her to panic. At least Lemuel’d had the decency to attack her in darkness. And at once, so that the business could be over quickly.

  He’d declined to wear a nightcap. He looked younger without his wig; his hair was the same colour. Beneath his robe, his skin was a freckled milk-white. ‘Aye, well,’ he said, ‘we’d better get down to it.’

  She drew the sheet closely round her neck. But he got out of bed and went to the door that joined their room to Eleanor’s and looked in. ‘In the arms of Morpheus, bless her.’ He padded over to the aumbry in the wall and opened it. ‘It’s a thing I’ve noticed,’ he said, ‘that the only people who’re denied the feast at these affairs are the bride and groom. So I asked Quick to set us a wee collation.’

  He came back with a basket and knelt on the bed with it, raising the cloth. ‘Oh, ho, his green chicken sallet, lamb patties. Taffety tart? There’s joy. But first…’ He broke the lead seal of one of the basket’s two bottles. ‘Margaux ’seventeen. I brought it from my own cellar.’ He poured the wine into long-stemmed glasses and made her take one. ‘Your health, Lady Cecily.’

  It was difficult to be churlish. ‘Your health, sir.’

  He popped chicken and lettuce into her mouth. ‘Ye’re a gey comely woman, but ye need fattening. Could you no emulate Mistress Bygrave more?’ Betty Bygrave had the build of a turnpike cottage.

  He made her eat – she was hungry – and drink. When the basket was empty he wiped her mouth with his fingers and kissed it.

  ‘Put out the candle,’ she begged him.

  ‘I’ll not.’

  Their bodies crumbled an overlooked piece of Quick’s soft white bread and rolled a glass containing the last of the Margaux to the bottom of the bed and crushed the grasses of the fertility tokens, so that the daytime element of his wooing in the meadow remained, as if they were drunken gypsies copulating over a stolen meal in a haystack.

  In the morning she was ashamed at herself. At the time she was too astonished by his passion and her own, by her first climax which came before his and at the second clamping and gaping ride down a waterfall that forced a deep huff of abandonment out of her throat.

  Lust, she decided, most deadly of the seven deadly sins. A thing for peasants and prostitutes. Guillaume, Guillaume, with you would have been enchantment and romance. Not an earthy, sweating, uncontrolled thing.

  She wouldn’t look at her husband. Anyway, he went fishing. That night when he stretched his arms in a wide yawn and said it was time for bed, it seemed to her that everybody in the taproom looked at her face and saw the flush that suffused and mortified her.

  But behind the curtains of the bed, she swam in the common stream again and was sent down the rush of its fall.

  Oh, God, she thought as she went over, I’m a screamer. Like Dolly.

  Chapter Eleven

  London roared with noise and stink. Accustomed to country air, Lady Cecily Cameron’s nose flinched from the stench of concentrated sewage mingling with that coming from the establishments of butchers, tallow chandlers, pewterers, braziers, apothecaries, tanners and soap-makers.

  Pedestrians too frail or polite to shoulder their way through shouting, running footmen, pie-men, carriages and drays were felled like infantry under a cavalry charge. Everything had intensified: more and poorer beggars, gaudier shops and customers.

  ‘Was it always like this?’ she asked her husband, as they drove to their new home.

  ‘Like what?’

  He’d bought a house in Arundel Street, one of a stately block running down to the Thames, close to the Middle Temple where he now had extensive chambers. A respectable enough area, but not fashionable. The beau monde had moved west to build its houses around Grosvenor Square and Cecily didn’t blame it: the further away from the river the better. Sluggish with muck, already a neighbour to be reckoned with, she dreaded what it would be like in summer.

  She wasn’t any more pleased with the house’s interior. Cameron had hired an architect of the Palladian school to design it. She’d approved the idea; she was, after all, a modern woman. Fashion talked of Andrea Palladio’s symmetry, simplicity and restraint, the relation of elevation to interior, classical canons from the harmony of nature. Cecily looked forward to a slim and elegant contrast to the multi-levelled, shambling Belle.

  She was disappointed. The rules of Palladianism hadn’t been employed: the rooms were too high for their length, the windows too few, an over-large staircase dominated too small a hallway. The choice of pastel colours picked out in white might have suited Italy but a London winter would make the walls look as if they’d caught cold.

  Typically Whiggish, Cecily decided, an undermining of warm old Tory homes by dour regularity. The architect, it appeared, was a friend, had come cheap and fulfilled Cameron’s only other requirement: that his house be ‘tidy’.

  However, if No. 10, Arundel Street did not conform to Fashion’s strictures, it seemed that – judging from the calling cards and invitations piling the mantelshelf – her husband did.

  ‘Princess Caroline? Good gracious.’

  ‘Aye, ye’re reinstated.’ He looked smug.

  The Prince and Princess of Wales now lived in Leicester Fields, a quarrel with the king having forced them out of the Palace. Although there had recently been a public, somewhat frosty, reconciliation, Cecily noticed that Caroline’s invitation was for a garden party in June – the month when George was due to make a visit to Hanover. The Princess of Wales obviously wasn’t risking another quarrel with her father-in-law by a reunion with an offending former maid of honour while he was still in the country.

  Not completely reinstated, then. Still, it would be nice to see Caroline again.

  She picked up another invitation. ‘I shall no
t attend this one.’

  ‘There’s no need. I’ve already made our excuses to Sir Robert.’

  So in this marriage she wouldn’t be required to hobnob with the enemy. I suppose if I were a good spy, I would: the Jacobites would want me to. But to dine with the man who’d hanged Dolly without clawing at his eyes was beyond her capability.

  As a quid pro quo she turned down an invitation from Bolingbroke. If her husband could be generous, so could she. Again, the Jacobites would be displeased: the viscount’s manor in Dalton, now headquarters for every anti-Whig malcontent in England, provided an easy meeting place which, since he was her godfather, Cecily had a legitimate excuse to attend.

  The request for their society that Mr Archibald and Lady Cecily Cameron disagreed on came from Alexander Pope. ‘Your absence made a long winter,’ he wrote. ‘If your charity would take up a small bird that is half dead of the frost and set it a-chirping for half an hour, I will jump into my cage and put myself into your hands tomorrow at any hour you send.’

  ‘No,’ said Cecily.

  ‘The man’s a grand poet,’ her husband protested, ‘and there’s a pathos in his wish to be friends again.’

  ‘He can be as pathetic as he likes,’ Cecily said, ‘but mine was a colder bloody winter than his, and where was he?’

  Her loyalty was for those like Mary Astell and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who’d made a point of visiting the Belle, Mrs Astell despite the return of her cancer.

  ‘Very well. But I’d point out ye’re back in Society now, not Billingsgate.’ He hated her swearing.

  ‘In any case, we can’t be friends with Lady Mary and Pope.’ The two had quarrelled, dividing Society as bitterly as the Capulets and other Montagues had Verona’s, and were involved in literary warfare.

  ‘I laughed at him,’ Lady Mary said, when applied to for the cause of the rift between her and what had been a faithful admirer. ‘Too horrid of me, I know. But my dear, he suddenly launched himself at me declaring a passion. So unexpected. So ludicrous. Like a frog jumping on an ostrich.’