‘They accept me, they can accept her.’
He is so odd, Cecily thought. From the first he’d been besotted by the child, yet he hadn’t been involved in that strange, Christmas birth which had marked out her nativity to the Packers and to herself. He would have scoffed at her own secret conviction that the baby was Sophie’s reborn. He just seemed to equate himself with the child, feeling them both to be outsiders.
On the other hand, he liked to think of himself as a ‘canny’ man and had shown shrewdness in climbing the establishment’s ladder. Could he not see it was the reverse of canniness to inflict on society a most unsuitable child?
She wondered if, for all his orderliness, he had a weakness for the outré. Perhaps that’s why he married me. But I am re-established. Eleanor must always be an outsider.
* * *
Milkmaids garlanded their pails, there were lapwings’ eggs at the poulterers, bluebells under the trees of the parks, scarlet beans on the sticks of the kitchen gardens.
Eleanor suited the sun; in her best white muslin, a miniature of Cecily’s own, her skin glowed fittingly where other children were shaded with hats or went pink. She danced in the May procession to Westminster until the Hon. Carthew, who was five, pushed her so she fell. None of the watching adults picked her up.
Dogs were sheared and their hair used in the replastering of tenement ceilings. Children were taken to the afternoon parks to watch acrobats or the novel sight of lords taking off their coats to play cricket with artisans.
Cecily stopped taking Eleanor after the Countess of Crakanthorpe offered her a blacker child in exchange: ‘You’ve been away, my dear, and forgotten. The whole point of a pet slave is the contrast with the whiteness of one’s own complexion. Your mite is still coffee. Now I know they get darker as they get older, but then you don’t want them too close. I have just the thing, a truly inky little darling. No trouble, I assure you.’
‘And she meant it kindly,’ Cecily told her husband that night.
‘I’ll kill the hag. Should we not persist?’
‘You can. I won’t. I found the child rubbing her face with pumice. She said it was because she was dirty.’
Cameron sank back in his chair. ‘I’ll adopt her legally.’
‘It won’t make any difference.’
The parlour’s grandmother clock ticked away Eleanor’s innocence of black footmen who might marry her, the bourgeois who wouldn’t, the aristocrats who’d take her to bed, the women of all classes who’d despise her – black and white with different perspectives but the same conclusion: she didn’t know her place.
Nor do I know what it is, thought Cecily, I betray her every day.
Some of the three-year-old joy had gone for ever, replaced by puzzled caution. Anyone was free to lecture her. ‘Don’t call this lady “mamma”,’ Lady Manley said sharply and, turning to Cecily: ‘I know they like to when they’re little, but it sets an unfortunate precedent.’
And Cecily had said nothing. She was confused by her repulsion for both attackers and the attacked. There were times when, the hounds in full cry, she could barely look at the child, only to be overcome by a panic to rush to the foxcub and gather it up.
‘She must return to the Belle,’ she said to Cameron.
‘Ach, not yet, not yet,’ he said. ‘When the term’s over we’ll all go. Together.’
They didn’t take Eleanor to Princess Caroline’s garden party at Richmond where aristocratic children paraded in petite imitation of their pastel-clad parents. Violent scarlets, oranges and greens were reserved for the livery of black servants who, to Cecily’s attuned eye, seemed everywhere, bobbing their powdered heads as they handed their owners from carriages, playing trumpet in the bands, grinning, strutting to the music, sun winking on their silver collars, apparently as happy as the birds singing in latticed cages hanging from the trees.
Damn them, Cecily thought.
There was an effervescence not due solely to champagne: the king’s departure for Hanover two days before had lifted restrictions on the Prince and Princess of Wales. Furthermore, the death of the prince’s mother in November had revived the prophecy that his father would die within a year of it and was causing happy speculation among the Wales’s set that they would soon be the courtiers of George II.
There had been no official announcement, no mourning for the woman who might have been Queen of England but instead lived out the last thirty-three years of her life in confinement for her adultery, kept from contact with her children.
‘Poor lady,’ Cameron said. ‘And poor king too. If the prophecy proves true, nobody present here this day will mourn.’
‘Except Walpole,’ said Cecily, pleasantly. ‘He’ll be out.’
‘I’d not wager on it. Who else is there? Princess Caroline’ll push for him and she’ll not be wrong to do so. For all his faults our mannie keeps us out of war.’
‘Huh.’ She was displeased with Cameron: he who usually dressed soberly had today, nervously conscious that he would be in fancy company, put on an unwise waistcoat of nouveau riche beaded brocade which, she thought, lessened his dignity and reminded her of Lemuel’s sartorial excesses. It irked her. She had punished him for his weakness by letting it pass unremarked when she saw it.
The shadow of ‘our mannie’, twenty stone of him, blocked their path. ‘May I present my son?’ boomed Sir Robert. ‘Horace, that clever fellow Mr Archibald Cameron and his beautiful wife, Lady Cecily. What do you think of them, eh?’
Cameron’s hand clamped on his wife’s but Cecily stood like a stone. An old pair of eyes in a sickly triangle of a face regarded her from the level of Walpole’s thigh. ‘She is much prettier than the king’s mistresses, Papa.’
‘Good God, boy, so am I.’ Stamping with amusement, Walpole put his arm round Cameron’s shoulders and led him off to talk business. The boy followed, looking back.
‘Mark the child,’ said Lord Hervey’s voice behind her.
‘I shall not. Nothing of Walpole’s interests me.’
They proceeded together, four foot apart to make room for Lord Hervey’s grandiloquent cane and Cecily’s hoops. The sun was unkind to Hervey, showing up the powder and paint on his face; the once beautiful young man had aged and become skeletal on the latest fad, the vegetarian Dr Cheyne’s diet of seeds, green stuff and milk.
‘Our prime minister is more good-natured than you credit him, dear Cecily. As I said, mark the child.’ Hervey bent like a hairpin to put his mouth to Cecily’s ear, overwhelming her with scent. ‘Note the resemblance between the boy and my poor dear brother Carr. Recall the amitié that once existed between Carr and Lady Walpole and draw your own conclusion.’
Cecily glanced towards little Horace Walpole, who still looked back at her. There was no doubt… a Hervey in every line of his frail body. ‘Indeed.’
Lord Hervey nodded. ‘Sir Robert is too astute to have missed the likeness yet he loves the boy as his own and has requested an audience with the king for him. Such tolerance, such a big man. I beg you, forget how he harmed you as he has forgotten. Harden not your heart. He would be friends, he has told me so.’ Hervey’s ringed eyes were soulful, he seemed sincere – or as sincere as Hervey ever was.
Cecily was unsure whether he wanted to gain her sympathy for Walpole or inform her that his brother had slept with Walpole’s wife. If the first, he wasted his time: the day she befriended that monster would be when pigs flew. If the second – and this surprised her – somewhere along the years she’d lost her taste for gossip.
The fountain of it spouted as they strolled… The Prince and Princess of Wales just loathed their eldest son, Frederick, who was being raised in Hanover… The prince was so parsimonious he would not only not support his mistress, Mrs Howard, now she’d gone deaf, but, so that he might save on firing and candles, he never invited anybody to stay at Leicester House.
‘Only dear, clever Caroline could persuade him to give a party of these proportions. What this country owes to that
extraordinary woman. When the king dies she and dear Sir Robert will rule it between them.’
‘Indeed?’ Cecily was alarmed. ‘I thought Walpole would be out if the king died.’
‘Of course, the prince does not like him – Walpole has refused to let him be regent in his father’s absence – but dear, clever Caroline… Ah, there she is.’
A large woman stood under the trees surrounded by pretty young men and women, a bedecked carthorse amid colts.
Cecily hung back. Hervey regarded her, eyes glittering with divination. ‘Is this…? Surely not. Is it? Have you not encountered her since, er, since you left her service all those years ago?’
‘No.’
He was thrilled, ushering her forward. ‘Rest easy, my dear. She discounts politics where her friendships are concerned. Has she not engaged Dr Freind as physician for her children? And was he not most deeply involved in the recent Jacobite plot? She will be kind.’
He was right. The carthorse saw her and came forward, walking awkwardly, as if in pain. Gold ornaments chinked on the bronze silk of her gown. She was smiling. ‘Zezily.’
As Caroline raised her from her curtsy and hugged her, Cecily thought what a nice woman she was. The princess’s continuous pregnancies had made her almost as fat as Queen Anne and, as with Anne, were beginning to affect her health. But she shared the late queen’s kindness and the engraved patience that came from enduring interminable male capriciousness in order to get her own way.
She was the Jacobites’ greatest enemy in the sense that, without her, the Hanoverians might already have been ousted for the virtuous James III. The natural goodness she emanated made her the only one of the royal family the English respected and liked. All this, while showing a tolerance for Jacobites that drove her friend, Walpole, to distraction.
Cecily found she was crying. Caroline cried with her: ‘It vass your heart, liebchen. Always so much heart. It vass pardonable. We speak no more of it.’ She dried her eyes. ‘Now, I vant your advice.’
She reached across her hoops and took Cecily’s hand as they walked. ‘Lady Mary presses me to inoculate the kinder. She says you haf had it done on one you love. Is it varrantable?’
‘It has certainly done her no harm, Your Royal Highness.’
‘Mais une petite nègre,’ said Caroline doubtfully. Experimenting on a little black girl was one thing: on royal children another.
Cecily found herself saying: ‘I swear to Your Royal Highness I shall have it done to the child I’m carrying.’
‘Zo-o.’ That was better. Cecily’s belly was patted and listened to, she was introduced to Princesses Amelia and Caroline, all the time wondering whether she’d heard a cock crow.
‘Ve vill have it done while the king is still avay. He vouldn’t approve.’ Caroline smiled. ‘I vonder what present he brings me back this time. Last it vas a vild boy captured in Hamelin running on all fours and scaling trees à l’écureuil. We have put him in fine suit vith red stockings but darkness still inhabit his head.’
She had a happy thought. ‘Bring your little négre to Leicester House and they shall play together.’
Cecily curtsied to the sound of a second cock crow.
Lord Hervey stayed with Caroline. Cecily, hot and queasy, sought shade in the pavilions. The smell of well-liquored wine cup and tables mounded with the confectioners’ art made her queasier still and she wandered towards the trees, halted here and there by a burst of gossip. Miss So-and-So was with child. The Hon. This had been caught in bed with a maid, Lady That on the knee of a flunkey.
A Falstaffian figure at length under one of the oaks waved a glass at her: ‘Well met by noonday, lady.’
‘Oh, my God.’
Sir Spender Dick got up, brushing twigs off his breeches. ‘Were you not aware, dear madam, that I am a regular visitor to Anspach? I bring greetings to Her Royal Highness from her old friend, the wife of the Margrave’s Geheimsekretär.’
‘Oh, God.’ Sir Spender might well be a visitor to Caroline’s birthplace but he visited Bolingbroke at Battersea a damn sight oftener.
‘Be not dismayed, dear madam, Walpole’s watchers may spy but what can they prove? Nothing.’
‘Oh, God.’ Cecily was poised for flight, away from a known Jacobite, a tipsy known Jacobite.
He moved with her. She led him away from the pavilions towards another, more remote tree.
‘Forgive me for not having called at Arundel Street yet,’ he said, ‘but, as I indicated, I’ve been a-travelling.’
‘Don’t you dare come to Arundel Street. What do you want? Where’s Maskelyne?’ She looked round. ‘He’s not here too, is he?’
‘Our good friend was not invited. Madam, we must have discourse.’
She’d chosen too small a tree: Sir Spender’s bulk rivalled Sir Robert’s and stuck out on either side of the rowan’s slim trunk like a pear behind a toothpick. Cecily, half attending, shifted from foot to foot, hoping passers-by would think her trapped by a bore. Her fright wasn’t decreased by the man’s refusal to lower his voice.
‘…this time we shall be ready, if you will instruct your servants at Hempens accordingly. What appellation did you give to His Majesty when he visited you?’
‘Mr Robinson. Hush, will you.’
‘What?’
‘Mr Robinson. I told them he was a Mr Robinson. Sir Spender, we must discuss this another time.’
‘Calm yourself, dear madam.’ Sir Spender was at ease. ‘What better place to plan the coming of the rightful king than in the bosom of the usurpers?’
Cecily could think of plenty. ‘What coming?’
‘The next one.’ Sir Spender’s eyes disappeared into folds of fat as he beamed at her, wagging his finger. ‘The next instant in which England shows ready to discard its German gaolers, its Hanoverian halter, its Georgian gyves, its—’
‘Oh, God, will you be quiet?’ She was in a panic. Princess Caroline was leading a procession of courtiers in their direction.
‘To you the glory of lighting the Lantern, dear lady. As Shakespeare says, “We shall that day light such a candle in England as shall never be put out.”’
‘Latimer,’ she said automatically. She curtsied and grinned weakly in Caroline’s direction. Sir Spender curlicued his hand in a deep bow to which the princess bent her head, smiling, in reply.
A maid of honour danced up to Sir Spender. ‘We’re going to play in Merlin’s Cave.’
‘Lead on, my Vivien, lead on.’ His plump hand smoothed Cecily’s sleeve as he went, leaving moisture on its silk. His look changed for a second and she saw he wasn’t as drunk as all that. ‘Be ready,’ he said.
The band had taken the princess’s departure as a respite, leaving the air to the singing of caged and free birds. There was no sign of Cameron or Walpole.
Cecily made for the house and found a large, empty reception room on the south side in which to sit down. Betasselled curtains had been drawn against the sun. She rested on a couch, incalculably tired; two perspiring, ill-intentioned fat men in one hot afternoon had been too many, the one inspiring intense dislike, the other foreboding. And the cock of betrayal crowed on.
Suddenly she longed for the health of life at the Belle, for lack of complication, for country kindness.
She tried to compose herself and recall exactly what it was that Spender Dick had been saying. Hempens to be used as a springboard for a Jacobite rising… Oh, God. I’m afraid. So afraid.
Yet she saw the logic. Poor communication between James and his supporters in Britain had resulted in him arriving late for the Fifteen, and not at all for the previous invasion attempt in 1708. At the time of the South Sea Bubble when, Jacobites liked to think, he could have walked to the throne unopposed, he had been in Italy and too far away to do more than pull on his boots before Walpole had calmed the country down.
But if he were kept in constant readiness on the opposite coast for the moment when British Jacobites next saw their chance, he could be at Hempens with the tide,
ready to travel to wherever-it-was that he decided to raise his standard.
She calmed herself down. It won’t ever happen. The Jacobites planned invasions like children played ‘when-I-grow-up’ games. In the torpor of heat and her own pregnancy, among these exquisite, self-satisfied aristocrats, it was impossible to believe there would ever be sufficient energy of disaffection in the country to warrant another invasion.
The attrition of time had accustomed England to Whig rule. The fact that she hadn’t clawed out Walpole’s eyes this afternoon showed that even her anger was becoming worn down.
She was cooler now. ‘What if the Pretender does come?’ she asked aloud.
He wouldn’t. ‘Yet what if it does?’
He will fail and you, my dear, will end up in exile or under the executioner’s axe. She had too much invested in property and people to play deadly Jacobite games.
But if he didn’t fail? She remembered the kingdoms of the earth that had spread before her at Hempens when the Pretender, that wholesome prince, had sat in its shabby parlour and she had seen the promise of health and harmony restored to her nation.
Around her, in the great, shaded room, William Kent had incorporated his favourite motif, the sphinx. It spread its wings along the tops of mirrors, looked down from cornices, perched in the gilded foliage of consoles, the collar heavy round its slender neck, young breasts resting on claws, cruel and placid eyes.
She thought: Through apathy I’ve allowed myself to become part of this, which sneers at those it oppresses, which sees a black child as interchangeable with another.
And why have I? Why am I here? Because of a marriage that now divided her life into two pieces. Because of a Whig among Whigs.
He came looking for her. ‘There y’are.’ He stood in front of her. ‘I’m glad to find ye alone. I saw ye talking with yon Spender Dick, him who’s stayed at the Belle a time or two. I’ve to warn ye, Cecily, he’s under suspicion for Jacobite activities. Walpole’s in a fury that Her Royal Highness invited the callant. It does us no good to appear friendly with such and, for your own sake, I’d be grateful for ye to shun the man in future.’
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