Cecily ran up her Montagu colours next day by going shopping with Lady Mary to amend the provincialism of her wardrobe. Cousin’s for undergarments and stays. Jacquemin’s to drink chocolate while gowns were paraded before her. Percy’s for hats.
Her hair had been done that morning by Madame Racinet: ‘Ah, non, Lady Cecily, we do not dress close maintenant, a lock hang over ze shoulder, like zis. Wiz your curl, we do not need ze irons.’ Very fetching.
Rococo was holding its own: heads were still tiny, skirts enormous, but there had been one improvement. Hoops, though wider, had evolved into two articulated frames, like fireguards tied round the waist, which enabled one to fold them forward in order to get through a door. There were longer sleeves, tiny ruffs for the throat and what Jacquemin’s called the robe à la française and Lady Mary ‘the sack’. The high Louis heel at first tottered a landlady who’d worn only mules for nearly six years, but Cecily persisted. She was back – in Fashion.
By afternoon she was parading her finery in Hyde Park, nervousness raising her chin so high she could barely see whether its languid and beautiful fellow-strollers bowed to her or not.
Out of the side of her mouth she hissed: ‘Are they cutting me?’
‘Good day, Lady Mansfield. My dear, they daren’t. How de do, Sir James? You are too lovely and your husband too important. Who knows but they might need his services in time to come. He is the best lawyer in London. A fine day indeed, Mr Carteret. And so attractive…’
‘Is he?’
‘You must know he is. The timbre of his voice, that mouth… my dear Countess… like an amused tiger’s. He plays the plain North Briton but more than one judge swoons at his speeches. Small wonder he wins his cases.’
‘Does he?’
London life with Lemuel had so humiliated Cecily that she was quick to be embarrassed by her second Whig husband. Cameron’s ignorance of the arts – apart from music, to which he was addicted – went as deep as Dolly’s. His accent, his tendency to call her ‘my dearie’, his awful Scottish songs, his frugality, these things revived echoes of shame in public, while his uninhibited love-making abashed her in private – afterwards.
However profound her own fall from grace, she was of the ton as he could never be.
She was taken back by most of her old set with comparative ease. Her Edinburgh exploit seemed forgotten, though there were sly references to the Belle out of which Lady Mary – a good friend but an inveterate gossip – had made a fine story. ‘When is a badly run hostelry like a musical instrument?’ Lord Hervey teased her.
‘When it’s a vile-inn,’ she said wearily. ‘I’ve heard it before.’ Treachery, it appeared, was less culpable than stepping out of one’s class. Nevertheless, her peers were prepared to overlook her lapse as a form of eccentricity, perhaps because so many of the once-grand eccentrics were being subdued by time. Mary Lepel was worn down by child-bearing. Mrs Howard had lost the Prince of Wales’s attention through going deaf.
‘And Sophie?’ She’d heard no word since Hempens.
‘Worst of all, poor thing,’ said Lady Mary. ‘Married again and gone to Ireland.’
On the whole, though, it was nice to be back, and gratifying that the aristocracy found her new husband worthier of acceptance than it had Lemuel.
But it became apparent, as the social season progressed, that it now accepted anybody as long as he had money or influence. At her own and other people’s dinner tables the ton mingled on equal terms with wealthy shopkeepers, stock-jobbers and commission agents.
‘Wendover’s marrying his son to a button-moulder’s daughter,’ she complained to Lady Mary.
‘A successful button moulder,’ Lady Mary pointed out. ‘My dear, blood has always married trade if trade were rich enough.’
But in her exile Cecily had idealized the years before the Bubble and couldn’t be persuaded that Walpole Whiggery hadn’t vulgarized Eden. She despised these new sharp-eyed men and women whose only concern was to outdo their neighbour yet who looked askance at Lady Mary, whose unorthodox dress and uninhibited speech they equated with moral laxity.
The dirt Pope was flinging at Lady Mary was beginning to stick.
Furthermore, while in Constantinople she had made the discovery that the one disease Turks did not suffer from – ‘they have everything else’ – was smallpox. ‘They insert the disease into their child’s arm as we would graft a bud on to a tree and the child is ever after immune, having suffered the least, mildest attack.’ Bravely, in Cecily’s view, Lady Mary had successfully carried out the operation on her own son and daughter and was now urgently spreading the good news that there was a remedy for the greatest scourge of the age. Instead of receiving praise, she was being reviled by a medical profession that resented an amateur blithely stepping in where it had not trod – not to mention thereby depriving it of income. She was openly denounced as a woman who would risk the lives of her children, while the Church thundered from its pulpits that she was flying in the face of God.
Cecily, having declared herself Lady Mary’s friend, found herself called on time and again to defend her against a shocked bourgeoisie.
Travelling home with Cameron in their closed carriage from one particularly trying dinner, Cecily fumed: ‘That cotton-miller’s wife had the impudence to ask if I didn’t think Lady Montagu – Lady Montagu, I ask you, they’ve no idea of titles – was a scandal and an impiety.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said Lady Mary’s true friends knew her for a virtuous woman, and that if her smallpox plan were generally adopted there would be fewer deaths and fewer plain women – which was a hit against Mrs Cotton-Miller who’s as pocked as a prune. Lord, in this Walpolian age everyone must conform, people as well as architecture. Why Mary supports the Whigs I cannot understand.’
Her husband leaned across to kiss her. ‘Born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, the both of ye. I like Lady Mary. And so, I’d point out, does Walpole.’ He began to pay attention to the gilded strings of her bodice.
‘Stop it.’ Cecily was punishing all Whigs that night. ‘What would Mrs Cotton-Miller say to you wanting to do that in a carriage?’
‘I don’t doubt she’d deem it impossible. Can we do nothing against yon hoops?’
‘No.’ Resent it though she did, the darkness and his hands were loosening more than her bodice. When they arrived home, her hoops were discarded on the landing and they barely made it to the bed.
Afterwards, in post-coital repulsion at her own abandonment – Lady Cecily, Lady Cecily – she returned to her complaint. ‘And do you know what else the hag said? She said one shouldn’t encourage beggars by giving them the scraps of dinner. And that Reverend Thingy agreed with her. Too busy enriching himself, like the rest of the Church. I ask you. We always gave the poor what was left over when the servants had finished. Your friends leave it on the midden to be fought over.’
Almost more than anything, Cecily had been shocked by the unkindness of the self-made rich to what it regarded as the self-made poor. Uncharitableness had become enshrined in law. The recent Mortmain Act said that ‘charitable endowments are rather an act of injustice towards the heir-at-law than an act of charity in the donor’.
‘Nowadays St Martin wouldn’t be allowed to share his cloak with the beggar,’ she grumbled.
Cameron said: ‘Yet there’s little virtue in individual giving. We need a national system of hospitals, kinder employment and more of it. A beatitudinous country. Now, will ye please sleep.’
In his own way, Cecily discovered, he was trying to bring about a beatitudinous country – another unsuspected side of his character. A careful man, he threw no purses or cloaks but formed committees with like-minded people in order to lobby MPs to bring in bills on behalf of ill-used apprentices, for the better regulation of parish poor children, the protection of chimney-climbing boys, of foundlings, debtors, Negroes – the list of his concerns seemed endless.
Not one of the bills had been brough
t into the House of Commons, let alone made law, but not through lack of trying by Archibald Cameron.
Cecily could almost have wished his philanthropy less: it brought to Arundel Street people to whom she wouldn’t have given house room in former times: Enthusiasts, essayists, Grub Street scribblers, dissenters, Quakers, colonials and a truly appalling young man named Wesley, whom her husband told her was bringing method to Christianity.
‘I wasn’t aware Christianity needed method,’ she said.
‘Aye, everything needs method.’
Beggars she could have understood – and helped – but not conclaves of thick-booted men scuffing her carpets and drinking all her tea, not Wesleys preaching virtue to her in her own parlour.
She accused her husband of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. ‘You won that land case for Townsend, yet you want to change laws his ministry protects.’
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but if the hounds didn’t pay my fees the hares would have a harder time of it.’
There were the petitioners who inevitably came at bedtime, slamming the door-knocker and shouting for ‘Master Archie’ to come because ‘they’ve taken my Tommy/Alfred/Jane/Harry’.
‘At this time of night?’ she’d ask, as he pulled on his boots.
‘Ye see, my dearie, Harry’s a black runaway, a decent man. I’m reminded of Quick.’ Or: ‘Ye see, my dearie, Alfred’s a debtor. I’m reminded of Castell and poor Lemuel.’ And: ‘Ye see, my dearie, Jane’s a fallen woman through no fault of her own.’
‘And who does she remind you of?’
He grinned at her and was gone.
And don’t call me ‘my dearie’. What woman in Kent? She was too proud to ask.
Her own contribution to the betterment of things came through Lady Mary, though not without misgivings.
‘Cecily, I wish you to help me spread the word.’
‘What word?’
‘Inoculation. If I can but make Society see what a boon it is. But people incline to think me an oddity. The more friends who will have their children inoculated the better. Think of the advantage to them. Eyelashes, every one.’ Lady Mary fluttered her lashless lids.
That’s why the establishment won’t take you seriously, thought Cecily, you make a joke of it. Yet you’re in earnest. And attempting something more useful than any man who’s discovered why apples don’t fall upwards or similar rubbish.
She failed to see how she could help. She herself had no need of inoculation: she’d been born with pockmarks on her stomach that showed she’d contracted and survived while in the womb the smallpox that had killed her mother soon after her birth. Cameron, too, had taken the disease lightly as a youth.
‘What about Eleanor?’ asked Lady Mary.
Cecily stiffened. ‘It’s unlikely Society can be persuaded by an experiment on an infant it would regard as expendable.’
‘Bring her to London and let the world see how expendable she is to you.’ She tutted at Cecily’s affront. ‘My dear, you dote on the moppet, I saw as much at the wedding. Were it not for her colour, one might believe you and Cameron her parents so highly do you extol her every lisp.’
‘Nonsense.’
Cameron, when they discussed it that evening, reflected her own misgivings. Inoculation was sensible if it worked. Lady Mary was convinced or she wouldn’t have endangered her children. On the other hand, to introduce venom into a child’s veins… On the other hand, smallpox was scourging the East End at that moment.
The image of Eleanor’s face had been with them ever since they’d left it, shedding tears, at the Belle Sauvage. Alongside it, they summoned up the unrecognizable features of those who’d died from smallpox, nostrils and throat closed by its malodorous pustules.
‘I’ll have a word with Edward Wortley,’ Cameron said. ‘He’s a canny head on his shoulders. The physician who went with them on the embassy, Maitland, I’ll consult him too.’
It occurred to Cecily that Cameron was prepared to trust Lady Mary’s husband and physician, but not Lady Mary. Treacherously, she thought: And so am I.
‘It’d be grand to have the lass around the place,’ Cameron said. ‘I’ve missed her sorely.’
‘Indeed?’
Her husband shook his head. ‘Why d’ye not admit you love her?’
Cecily was taken aback. He was overstepping a boundary she thought they had both drawn and respected.
By day they met as good acquaintances, often bantering, occasionally arguing, but never intruding on each other’s reserves. By night they rarely talked at all, being too busy with energetic, physical exploration of each other’s bodies.
So strong was the demarcation between the two states that the marriage seemed to consist of four people, the raging couple by candlelight having nothing to do with the sober pair that presented themselves neatly dressed in the breakfast room next morning.
Cecily had almost come to believe that the vulpine creature she encountered in bed was not Cameron at all but something subject to lycanthropy, which infected her with a similar metamorphosis. Whatever it was, it was not to be talked about.
The situation suited her. She was not called upon to rationalize either experience and had come to depend on the daytime husband not to embarrass her by referring to any variety of the deeper emotions.
Viewing her years at the Belle from the drawing rooms of London had emphasized what a distorted life she’d led in it. Now that desperation had dissipated, she wondered at the ease with which she’d consorted with highwaymen, blacks and bucolics, promoting to importance episodes that were best forgotten. It had been both a shock and a relief to resume conversation with people to whom idleness was an art and emotion a vulgarity. One could not, of course, expect a person born in the back alleys of Glasgow to understand that.
Oh, he was going to harp. Cecily took up her needlework, composing herself. Her hands and nails, she was pleased to see as she smoothed the silks, were responding to the ministrations of her maid.
‘D’you see, Cecily, we were both loveless bairns, never mind your riches and my poverty. Orphans, the two of us, habituated to lovelessness. The difference is you’re afeared of love and I’m not.’
He’d begun striding the room, hands behind his back. Counsel for the prosecution of sentimentality. And more Scottish by the minute.
‘The peacock blue, do you think? Or the green?’
‘Aye, I know it’s a sore point but we must have it out. You told me once ye loved another. Aye, I ken well ye meant Fraser. I put it to you that love was mebbe disastrous, all the cruel happenings in your life deriving from it. I put it to you that ye blame yourself. That mebbe ye wouldn’t have participated in the Castle escape if passion for Fraser hadn’t overcome your better judgement. Yes or no?’
‘The green, I think.’
‘Let it go, Cecily, my dearie.’ He was on his knees beside her. ‘Fraser’s mebbe dead, Edinburgh forgotten. Ye’ve come through the rough water to calm. And bravely. Ye can afford to love again.’
‘Or perhaps the blue.’
‘Aye, the bairn’s black and I’m a commoner but better a dinner of herbs where love is… Admit it, woman.’
Carefully, she poked the needle through the canvas and pulled it out again. ‘Mr Cameron, I do not wish to discuss these matters.’
He pushed the sewing frame on to the floor. ‘Why? What sin to joy in loving? What’s that which happens in our bed? How in hell d’ye regard that? The coupling of brute beasts?’
‘Yes,’ she shouted at him. ‘If you must know, yes.’
‘Ye’re a fool, mistress.’
‘Indeed. Unfortunately, I’m a fool who’s carrying your child.’
She left him still kneeling by the overturned sewing frame.
The next day he was kind, congratulating her and himself on conception, but he’d retreated. Cecily found it less easy to forgive him for trying to probe into her soul. She felt dissected, the secret places of her dragons laid bare. The pregnancy also made he
r feel sick.
Ten days later, in the Arundel Street nursery, she held one of Eleanor’s arms, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu the other, while Cameron played the fool to distract the child’s attention from Mr Maitland and his lancet.
‘Mamma, Mamma.’
‘Be brave, Eleanor. Soon over.’
‘Look, Nellie.’ Cameron had taken off his wig and was holding its queue across his top lip. ‘Chinese.’
‘Be brave. Soon over.’ To Maitland she said: ‘Hurry, can’t you?’
‘It must be done with care, Lady Cecily.’
Did it need that much pus ladled into the cuts? She could feel the arm’s slight bones quiver. What are we doing to you, my dear, my dear? You were safe at the Belle.
Over the other side of the cot, Lady Mary’s face was bright and interested. Cecily wanted to spit at it.
Cameron’s wig was ridiculously on the top of his marmalade curls. ‘Look, Nellie. Hindu.’
‘There,’ Maitland said. ‘Very nice.’
‘Now, my lamb. Drink this nice physic.’
‘Fizz, Nellie,’ said Cameron.
‘Fill people?’
‘Aye, but ye’re not ill, my dearie. Ye’re a brave, brave lassie. Mamma will stay while you sleep.’ He staggered as he left the room and Maitland had to hold him up.
Hard-eyed, Cecily watched him go. That was the weakling to whom she was bearing a child. A man of breeding would have shown more self-control. She stayed by the cot until Eleanor’s mouth relaxed into a full cupid’s bow and air went back and forth easily in the wide, perfect little nostrils. You mustn’t call me Mamma. Not here, my dear. They won’t understand. God save you, I wish I did.
The resultant fever vindicated Lady Mary by being comparatively slight. Cameron wanted Eleanor to stay in London under his eye. ‘Other children live healthfully here. We’ll hire a Town nursemaid as well.’
Cecily was tempted but doubtful. ‘She’ll be lonely away from the Belle. Other people won’t want their children to play with her.’
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