He’d chosen the worst possible moment. In any case, she always bridled at his lectures – a rebuff from him could discountenance her for the rest of the day. That his reproof appeared to be parroting an order from Walpole struck memories of Lemuel’s sycophancy. And then there was the waistcoat and the nausea and the heat and the continually crowing cock…
‘You lick-spittle,’ she said. ‘You pompous, grovelling, bum-kissing little spaniel. You come running from that scabby-necked tyrant to tell me, me, who to talk to and who not? In a waistcoat like that?’
‘Cecily.’ He was taken aback by the savagery of her anger. He blinked. ‘What’s wrong with the waistcoat?’
‘I like Spender Dick, do you hear me? He’s the finest man here. And if he offends that fat prick-pig I like him the more. He doesn’t peddle scandal or nose up Walpole’s arse. Yes, Sir Robert, no, Sir Robert, I’ll go and tell her, Sir Robert. And he didn’t sit around scratching his ballocks while Sir Robert killed Dolly.’
‘So that’s it,’ he said quietly.
‘Yes, that’s it. And that’s it…’ she pointed at the appalling waistcoat ‘…and that’s it.’ Her hand stretched out to a table on which rested a little brass sphinx, symbol of a society that reflected its own delicate brutality, grabbed the ornament and threw it, shattering the glass bowl of a lamp.
When footmen came running, Cameron said that his wife had been overcome by the heat, and took her home.
* * *
The next day came the news that King George had collapsed in Holland. Insisting that the journey to Hanover be continued – ‘To Osnabrück, to Osnabrück’ – he was jolted in his carriage for a night and a day before he reached it and died.
His son received the news without grief. His first act as George II was to have two portraits of his mother hung in the royal apartments. His second was to destroy his father’s will. His third dismissed Sir Robert Walpole and appointed in his stead an amiable old man, Sir Spencer Compton, who was immediately out of his depth.
Everybody noted how well Walpole took it. Courteously, he waited on Sir Spencer Compton in more ways than one, obeying his orders, helping him take on the responsibilities, watching him flounder. To his worried friends he merely said: ‘I have the right sow by the ear.’
The sow, now Queen of England, was equally circumspect. Without letting her husband think she was persuading him, Sir Spencer’s incompetence was shown up and the advantages of keeping the former prime minister made obvious. Only a master of the parliamentary system could, as Walpole promised to do, increase the new king and queen’s private income beyond any previously enjoyed by an English sovereign and his consort.
Within weeks George II’s opinion of the man he’d called a rogue underwent a sea change.
* * *
On the day Walpole resumed power, Cecily miscarried. It was her husband who wept. Once she’d recovered, she said: ‘Eleanor and I will go back to the Belle now. There’s no need for you to come.’
Chapter Twelve
The Belle had maintained its general standard under Cole and Marjorie Packer, despite one or two plebeian habits having crept in.
Cecily reinstated lavender bags in every bed and the regular polishing of the silver, had the yard manure-heap removed from under the bedroom windows to the field and stopped the custom of free ale to the taproom which marked the arrival of any new Packer into the world. That apart, she commended her staff.
They showed their pleasure at having her back by truculence and, after a glance, forbore to ask when Master Archie would be arriving.
Eleanor said: ‘I didn’t like London, Marjorie. Quick, I didn’t like London. Didn’t like London, Cole.’ Which pleased them even more.
There had been other hangings under the Black Acts. A simpleton, a distant cousin of Marjorie’s, had experimentally fired a cock of wheat. A Codicote man had trapped two illegal rabbits while wearing a handkerchief across the bottom half of his face – thereby qualifying for capital punishment under the Black Acts for going disguised. And young Hawkins at Bramfield had broken down a gate put up by Lord Letty’s men across a path to his cottage – he’d buttoned the collar of his great coat across his chin, that too constituting a disguise.
In London Cecily hadn’t heard a word raised against the Black Acts; even her friends had shown surprise at her agitation. Were the laws not framed against Jacobites? When Cecily pointed out that they were being used against people who had no more involvement with Jacobitism than with metaphysics, there were shrugs: Walpole kept uncovering Jacobite plots, did he not? You couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, etc.
Under this indifference other legislation was creeping in without any pretence of being aimed at revolutionaries, making Walpole’s government the most bloodthirsty in Europe. You could now be hanged for wilfully breaking any tools used in the manufacture of wool or, if you were a bankrupt, for failing to present yourself for examination within forty-two days, or for opposing customs officers in the execution of their duty – which even the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Hardwicke, thought went too far.
The Tyburn tree had to be extended to take as many as twenty hangings at a time. Frequently, not one of the executed was a murderer.
In the forest the new Lord Letty showed equal impatience with the traditions of its kindling-gatherers, sawyers and hurdlers, spoke-choppers and faggoters, lath-renders and ladder-makers, men and women who rarely handled money but killed their own meat, and who were now denied use-rights which had been theirs for centuries. He made open land into paddocks, built deer pens, sold timber wholesale to the navy, granted turf to his rich neighbours and set man-traps.
But the foresters knew every covert, every hollow oak. They avoided the man-traps and continued occupations by night that had previously been done by day. Theirs was no venture for the luxury of putting an extra pheasant in the pot, it was for survival; encounters between the two sides were pitiless.
Stabber, once the handsomest of the Packers, had lost the tip of his nose to a keeper’s bullet, giving him the appearance of a time-worn gargoyle. The loss of his looks and the subsequent teasing made him bad-tempered. He refused to talk to Cecily.
She was upset that he should be involved in the forest battles at all. ‘I pay him enough,’ she complained to Cole. ‘He doesn’t need to steal.’
‘First place ut wadden stealing,’ Cole said. ‘Second place you don’t pay our old gran. Her cow grazed Stapleford Lea ’s long ’s I remember till Letty enclosed un. Her teeth’s gone, see. Her do need the milk. Stabber were tearing down the bugger’s fences.’
‘Well, I didn’t put them up.’
Cole shuffled. ‘Seemingly you been mingling with un at them grand balls and such. Us thought you’d maybe forgotten ’twas Letty got Miss Dolly hanged.’
Cecily shook her head. ‘I never saw him.’ But she’d mingled with Walpole, who cradled Letty and others like him, giving himself and them legal power to rob and kill. She’d known the claws that rested under that jovial breast and countenanced them. As for her husband… ‘He keeps us out of war,’ Cameron had said.
But what virtue lay in a peace that maimed and ravaged? Stability could have its own terror.
She appealed to Tyler, who had moved into the Belle during her absence: ‘Can’t you stop my people risking their necks?’ When he didn’t answer, she realized. ‘God damn it, you’re with them.’
‘Letty’s men burned my place down,’ he told her. ‘Reprisal.’
‘Reprisal for what?’
‘For us burning down one o’ theirs.’
I am a non-combatant in the middle of the lines, she thought. And then she thought: No, I’m a combatant. She had chosen her side in the gilded, sphinx-riddled drawing room at Richmond.
Cecily’s contact with the Cause was now through Mr Phineas, a traveller in buttons and a man of such underpowered character it was a wonder he sold any, leaving the nation’s coats to be done up by string.
‘Mole,’ he’d s
aid, on first stepping into the Belle.
‘Welcome, Mr Mole. If you would follow the other guests…’
‘No. Mole. It’s the password.’
‘Oh.’ She gave him dinner in the private room and fell asleep over the capon. But the opposition literature he passed to her to be put in Wallie’s postbag was enlivening. There were songs from Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in which Walpole was pilloried as Peachum, an organizer of cutpurses who augmented his profits by betraying his people for reward, while the hero, Macheath, was a highwayman and by implication, a country gentleman ruined by Walpole’s ‘Robinocracy’.
Among overtly Jacobite publications like Fog’s Weekly Journal, whose publishers risked arrest by unceasingly warning the country that it was ‘being enervated with Luxury, involved in an excessive national Debt and in Danger of being enslaved by Corruption if it does not restore Virtue’, i.e. James Stuart, there was the wittier and more vituperative The Craftsman, in which Cecily detected the fine hand of her godfather. It had fun describing Walpole as ‘the monster now on exhibition at Westminster’. The body of this creature covered at least an acre of ground… seemed to be swelled and bloated as though full of corruption.
Squibs, ballads, cartoons, all attacked Walpole’s government, all making the point that there was nothing to choose between its ministers and common criminals… ‘according to the Definition of those Gentlemen – Keep what you get, and get what you can.’
Sending these to Scotland for copying was more to Cecily’s taste than invasion, but she had to ration them so that Wallie’s postbag did not seem heavier than it had before he set it down at the Belle.
Some were on public sale anyway and the taproom Tories chuckled over them and sang with Macheath:
‘Since laws were made for ev’ry degree,
To curb vice in others, as well as me,
I wonder we han’t better company,
Upon Tyburn tree!’
They needed cheering up: the recent election had gone badly, the Whigs having managed to bribe more voters than they had.
Nothing, however, managed to invigorate Colonel Grandison, bereft of his magistracy.
Ironically, his stock had risen in his old division as it now compared him with Sir Samuel Pink, who’d earned the sobriquet ‘Inquisition Pink’ by proving himself a tireless upholder of the law’s every tenet; who’d sent Harriet Bygrave to the house of correction for refusing to name the father of her illegitimate child; who’d had an eleven-year-old vagrant whipped; and had convicted Tewin’s blacksmith, a former trooper, ‘for profane cursing and swearing’, and fined him a shilling an oath.
‘Us diddun know when we was well off,’ the taproom said, lovingly, shaking its head at the sad little figure sitting unkempt by the fire, refusing to respond even to Marjorie’s sympathetic flirtation, as if loss of consequence on the bench had taken away all joy in life.
Cecily treated him gently until a flash storm carried away the culvert that directed the hill stream from Datchworth under the Great North Road to replenish the Belle’s pond and into the fields behind. The resultant flood invaded the dining room. Then she lost her temper.
‘I want that culvert mended, Colonel. Look at my damned floor.’ The culvert was just within Datchworth’s boundary and all parishes were responsible for the maintenance of the section of roads that passed through them. Colonel Grandison, for these purposes, was Datchworth.
It failed to rouse him. ‘Those who profit from the road should mend it,’ he said listlessly.
Cecily could have taken Datchworth and its squire to court for its neglect but she didn’t want to kick Grandison when he was down. Few parishes did their duty by their roads; it would be unfair to prosecute Datchworth when Knebworth a little further north was equally culpable for the dilapidation of its section.
She had the culvert mended at her own expense: if her stretch of road collapsed to the extent that traffic was forced to bypass it, the Belle was finished. Nevertheless, for all that she could do, the road was deteriorating as not only her trade but the country’s increased…
‘A turnpike,’ she said. ‘We must have a turnpike. They’ve got one up at Stony Stratford.’
‘They got it because of the brick trade,’ said Colonel Grandison. ‘No brick trade here.’
‘But the bloody brick wagons tear up my bloody road to get to London,’ she pointed out. ‘Why can’t they pay to have it repaired?’
‘Need an Act of Parliament to put up a tollgate. And we’d need to set up a trust.’ All at once it was ‘we’. For the first time since Cecily had returned to the Belle, Grandison showed interest: road tolls were the coming, profitable thing.
‘Then we’ll get one.’
There was no lack of parties willing to join a trust and no lack of opposition either. Totty Stokes was against it because Cecily was for it. Farmers to the north of the proposed site of the turnpike objected to the prospect of paying a toll when they sent their corn to London, among them Squire Leggatt, though he was eventually persuaded that a shilling toll was cheaper than losing his corn through a wagon overturning in the ruts – as had happened the previous year.
Unexpected and ferocious opposition came from Dr Baines at Knebworth who, it appeared, had gained a deal of business from broken bones caused by spills on the carriageway.
What was needed was someone who could persuade everybody that Woolmer Green turnpike would be a Good Thing, someone to guide the Act for it through Parliament.
‘We need Archibald Cameron,’ Colonel Grandison said. ‘When does your husband come back?’
It was Cecily’s turn to show listlessness. ‘He’s devising a scheme to provide a hospital for foundlings.’ I don’t want him back.
She told herself Cameron was to be blamed for, tainted by, the revulsion she had experienced in London society: he was part of it, had tried to re-establish her in it.
She left the turnpike meeting, which had been at Datchworth Manor, to ride home alone through a summer evening scented with grass and the acid sweetness of limes.
Shepherd’s rose and honeysuckle were in the hedges, sheep nibbled the common, rooks scattered around the elms against a clear, textureless sky.
It was the first time since her return to Hertfordshire that she’d had time for reflection; she was reluctant to begin it, to face the misery that had followed her from London and which, no matter how she occupied herself, gnawed her – a knowledge that on the most basic and primeval of levels she had failed.
With perception, Cameron had said: ‘There’ll be other babies, my dearie. Women often miscarry. There’s no shame in it.’
Had he known it, he’d magnified the shame by refusing to leave her when the pain began, by insisting on taking the mess in the sheet from the maid and carrying it himself, with great gentleness, to its disposal. What sort of man did that?
The sort of man who seemed to have been present at every humiliation of her life and had then stood witness to this ultimate abasement – that Lady Cecily Cameron had failed where the most feckless hedge-trollop could succeed.
She began to sob. Afraid somebody would see her crying, she turned off the lane at Mardleybury pond, dismounting so that the horse could drink. She sat, hidden in a clump of foxgloves on the pond edge, and gave herself up to mourning her dead baby.
It was as if she’d unknowingly carried grief for it around with her until now, here, fittingly, in the fecundity of a country summer, it forced her acknowledgement. It would have been such a nice baby. She rocked back and forth, apologizing to it. My fault, my fault, my grievous fault.
The straits she’d been in when she offered her soul to the Devil seemed less terrible now and her declaration a capricious thing. But she’d stood among the ruins of the Belle and made it. I shall follow you all my days, if you will help me prosper so that I can take revenge on him who has brought me to this.
How ridiculous and how fatal. Dolly had known. ‘You don’t cheat the Devil,’ she’d said. She’d said he�
�d collect his dues. And he had.
And that man, that good man, her husband, had been present to watch the dues collected.
Damn him. Him and his woman in Kent.
Cecily sniffed and wiped her nose. Through the bars of the foxgloves, the sky had darkened and acquired a fingernail of a moon. Across the fields, between the trees, she could see the lights of the Belle.
I’ll stay here. I’m in control here. It’s the one bloody place I am in control.
She mounted her horse and went home.
* * *
It was a summer of storms that bent crops, made coaches late and delayed the mail so that Cecily’s work for the Cause frequently had to be done in the early hours of the morning, making her as bad-tempered as the weather – and as careless.
Her husband caught her, ink-handed, copying a letter from the Lord Steward, Lord Chesterfield, to a fellow peer in Scotland giving details of the proposed secret treaty with Austria. With rain like a waterfall washing the windows, she didn’t hear his arrival until he flung open the unlocked bedroom door. The chest in which she kept the Jacobite literature was open and on the floor were journals to infiltrate into the postbag that night.
He was wet and jubilant, a battered bunch of roses in his hand. ‘Ha til mi tulidh. Let the piper play. I thought ye’d be asleep. I planned to leap on ye like a leopard. I’ve missed ye.’ As she stared, frozen, he said: ‘It’s your husband, woman, here for his marital rights.’
And then he saw the letters, Chesterfield’s monogrammed, side by side with her copy. ‘What’s this?’ She watched the stages: bewilderment, realization, refusal of belief, appalled acceptance.
Now you know, she thought. And, illogically: Serve you right.
His hand passed over the embossed insignia of the postbag lying open on the floor; one by one he picked up the rolled copies of squibs, Craftsman, leaflets, running his fingers across the invective as if touch confirmed what his eyes failed to believe. ‘Ye’s a Jack,’ he said to himself and turned on her: ‘Ye’re a damned Jacobite.’
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