‘Yes,’ she said. She was jubilant with defiance. Now I can hurt you.
‘Ye’re their agent. Walpole said the Jacks were using the mail.’
‘Yes.’
He shook his head. ‘How long?’
‘How long have I been an agent for His Majesty King James?’ she said deliberately. ‘Years. Since the Bubble.’
You don’t know me. It was like stabbing him, Walpole, shoving a knife into all Whigdom. She stood at the stake, Joan of Arc, Guy Fawkes; at this moment she wished she’d blown up Parliament. No doubts now. ‘Everything I’ve learned that would help my Cause and harm yours I have passed on.’
His eyes narrowed, peering at her. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘Ye’re a fool.’ His voice went high with a revelation more terrible than that she was a traitor. Through his eyes she saw herself sprout asses’ ears, like Bottom. ‘Ye’re a fool.’
She became angry. ‘Why? Because I oppose a system that has turned my country into a shop? Where cheats and sycophants prosper? Where only the vulgar and venal become rich? Where quality’s despised? Where power’s become cruelty?’
He kicked the mailbag so that it skidded across the room. ‘Where it can change, woman, don’t ye see that? There’d be no change under James Stuart, it’d be taken back a hundred year. Will ye no understand?’ Now he was pleading with her. ‘We alter from the inside, not by war and revolution. Ye’ll kill people.’
‘You kill people now, you bastard.’ She lurched at him and hammered at his chest. ‘You hanged Dolly.’
He caught her hands. ‘And this is your revenge?’
She screamed, ‘Why shouldn’t it be? I was sold. Stripped in the market-place and sold. Walpole called it marriage. I called it rape. Everything I was, everything I had. Sold.’
‘No.’ He forced her to sit on the bed and stood over her, still holding her hands. ‘They didn’t sell the soul of you. I never told ye, and I should have. You were the bravest thing I ever saw and I loved ye for it. And now…’ he pointed to the litter on the floor ‘…now I don’t know ye.’
‘No, you don’t.’ By Christ, did he think he could mop up everything with a compliment? ‘You never did.’
He let go of her hands. ‘So it seems.’ Tiredly he took off his wig and ran his fingers through his curls. ‘So it seems.’
He walked over to her table and tore up the copy of Chesterfield’s letter, refolding the original. ‘How d’ye reseal the thing?’ He put the fragments into her powder bowl, picked up the candle and set them on fire. A smell of burning paper and scorched, scented talcum filled the room. ‘Is this the extent of it?’
‘What?’
‘Is this all they use ye for? Tampering with the mail? Ye’re involved in no more of their plotting? I don’t ask who gives your instructions, but I must know ye’re free of other guilt. Is this all of it?’
He saw her as a tool. She had no credit for having chosen to support the Cause from conviction. The fact that she’d had her own doubts about its validity made her feel more foolish and therefore more defiant. At that moment the only man she could think of who’d treated her as a reasoning intelligence was James Stuart.
He repeated: ‘Is this all of it?’
She lied, ‘Yes.’
Neatly, infuriatingly, he began picking up the scattered rolls of paper. She watched the flames flicker tawny reflections on his hair. ‘What woman in Kent?’
‘Eh?’
She said: ‘I’m informed that you keep a woman in Kent.’
‘What’s that to do with anything?’ He turned to look at her. ‘Aye, there was a woman. A good woman and dead four year since.’ He cocked his head. ‘Did ye think I was celibate while I waited for ye?’
She shrugged. ‘It is of no concern. Except to demonstrate that we both had our secrets.’
‘I hardly think poor Lucy constitutes a secret of equal weight with treachery.’ He was dismissing it, a light matter. He said tiredly: ‘Cecily. You must know I cannot countenance this Jacobite foolery. It’s against everything I hold in faith. I want your word you’ll abandon it. Come back with me to London.’
‘To London? After the way it treated Eleanor? I’ll never set foot in London again.’ Society’s bunting lay in the gutter, tawdry and limp, and had done from the moment it offered to swap Eleanor for a child that would more nearly complement her complexion. ‘I’m surprised you tolerate it, you and your supposed philanthropy.’
‘Because there’s the battleground.’ He came forward to her, holding out his freckled hands. ‘Ah, Cecily. Come back with me and change it. I need your help.’ His lips twitched. ‘Thee and me together. Lord, with the two of us they’ll need a new form of governance.’
She dodged and stood up so that he didn’t touch her. ‘No.’
‘Ye’re breaking our contract,’ he said.
He was only a lawyer after all. She said: ‘Sue me.’
And the marriage was over.
* * *
She never found out how her husband did it without putting suspicion on her, but she received a neutral letter from the Postmaster General informing her that the Belle’s licence as a receiving house for the Royal Mail had been withdrawn.
If, in many ways, it was a relief, it was also a reproof from all-powerful male Whiggery which Archibald Cameron had come to represent in Cecily’s eyes almost as surely as Walpole – an injustice she did not try to analyse. He was male, he was Whig, he was righteous, he’d forced another marriage on her, he’d had another woman. It was enough.
Now he’d abandoned her, a high-minded desertion that resurrected the ache of Cecily’s childhood at the irreproachable abandonment of her parents in dying before she could know them. Everybody leaves me. I am alone.
When, half waking in the mornings, her body expectant, she found herself rolling towards Cameron’s side of the bed, she berated herself for carnality – his fault again – and weakness.
She’d invigorate herself from self-pity with two words: Poor Lucy. Always effective. Poor Lucy developed the persona of a rival; plump, adoring and unforgiven. Poor Lucy, who’d died these four years since and, it was to be hoped, painfully.
Cameron didn’t abandon Eleanor or the Belle. He wrote to tell Cecily on which day he was coming to see the child and, when she could, Cecily arranged to be absent. In return, she wrote for his advice on legal matters, seeing no reason to surrender his services as a lawyer.
He co-operated in the turnpike, persuading much of the opposition that it was a Good Thing, became a trustee and guided the Act for it through Parliament. Within two years a squat little keeper’s house with gates stretching across the road was built on the flat stretch between Knebworth and Woolmer Green along which Tyler and Cecily had once strewn stolen articles to tempt the passengers of a waylaid coach to the Belle Sauvage.
That section of the Great North Road, on its new foundation of broken flint and gravel, became straight, speedy and safe for the first time since the Roman legions marched along it. To Cecily it was an achievement; her contribution to the roading of Britain.
She built herself into the wider community, not only a member of the Trust but its committee for appointing and overseeing the turnpike’s toll collector. She became acting churchwarden at Datchworth and joined the local Society of Coaching Inn Proprietors at Hertford. As a woman, her position was irregular but accepted by the provincials of Datchworth and Woolmer Green who lacked the niceties of convention.
The Coaching Inn Proprietors, however, had put up opposition. True, they said, one or two local women ran inns but they had the sensitivity to be represented at meetings by their sons.
Cecily was past sensitivity: if she didn’t have a finger in the pie it wouldn’t be cooked to her taste. She pointed out her sonless state and that there was nothing in the rules to bar female members. The implacable Totty Stokes said that was only because the Society had never expected a woman to be so insolent as to want to join.
‘It didn’t expect bloody fools to join eith
er, Totty Stokes,’ Cecily said, ‘but it got you.’
This passed for wit among Coaching Inn Proprietors, gained her applause and membership. She understood now why women who ventured into the male world became outrageous: in order to succeed they must abandon the luxury of self-consciousness. Men, it seemed, would tolerate competition from a woman as long as she was eccentric. Oh, well, if that was what was needed…
So it was during this time that Cecily became a ‘character’, her passport out of the constraints of femininity. It was a matter of freeing an aspect of her personality that she possessed anyway and perhaps would have emerged in any case. Imperiousness became aggression with an acquired Hertfordshire accent, salted by the language of the Fleet.
She dressed for comfort and neatness rather than beauty – it didn’t do to look handsomer than the handsomest guest – her shoes were kind to her feet, even if she wouldn’t have been seen dead in them in the old days. A turban added another five to her years by hiding her curls. The monster of a reticule that accompanied her rather than a lady’s dainty pocket was rumoured to contain a disembowelling knife.
Whether the inn shaped her, or she shaped her inn, the two became synonymous. Obscure Mrs Henry who’d arrived at Woolmer Green was now ‘good old Belle’ to some, and ‘Mistress Savage’ to those who didn’t dare. Belle Savage became her signature on documents, the formidable name of a formidable woman.
There were times when she would have dropped the charade – Who is Belle Savage? Rescue me from her – but others forced it on her, giving her leeway as a harpy she would not have been allowed as a conforming woman.
Luckily, Tyler and the straight-talking Packers kept her from tyranny.
The small pool of her life contained its compensations: the control and interest of a squire in its fluctuations, Eleanor swimming, happily, in the shoal of its little fish.
And the answer to Eleanor’s future was here. I shall leave her the Belle. The girl would have the independence that was survival for a woman, black or white. In time, one of the better local boys – a Packer, perhaps, she might do worse – could offer for her and wouldn’t lose by it; Eleanor was accepted in her own community. As for strangers, in the impermanence of traffic where ordinary and oddity met then parted, on a great road with newness round every bend, she would be deemed no more unusual than any other passing feature. Look, the Yorkshire dales. Look, a black landlady.
Cecily left Hertfordshire only once in this period – to go to Mary Astell’s funeral. The Chelsea church was poorly attended; Cecily had hoped to see Sophie but she wasn’t there. Since Hempens there had been one letter from Ireland, where she’d remarried, giving details of her new children and making no mention of the one lost.
There were two men in a congregation of seventeen. Cecily decided that practically all England’s well-educated women were gathered in the church that day. Oh, Mary, what happened to your Utopia of free, reasoned women? In its lifetime the small voice that proposed feminine education had been either derided or ignored. Stilled, it had been forgotten. There was less agitation for female literacy now than at any time since the Restoration.
The preacher praised only Mrs Astell’s piety and meekness under suffering. ‘She embodied all the feminine virtues but those of marriage and motherhood, which were denied her.’
Cecily waited for the coffin lid to rise and Mary Astell’s head to pop out, shrieking: ‘I didn’t want ’em. Marriage is a trap.’ But the casket stayed still under its weight of flowers and platitudes.
As they went outside into the winter churchyard to watch the small coffin lowered into its hole, Cecily blamed the bones inside it. Look at us. What good did you do us? Why did you give us knowledge if it was only to help us despair more? The women gathered round the grave were middle-aged, dressed not for Fashion but, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in her eastern cloak and turban, for fancy, or for comfort, like Lady Catherine Jones and Cecily herself. All of us oddities, all of us swimmers against the tide. She looked around at the faces. All of us lonely.
Walking back from the graveside, she was made lonelier yet.
‘I’m going abroad,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said. ‘This time I shall not come back.’
‘No.’ It was involuntary. Abandonment again; without Lady Mary she would be consigned to provincialism for ever. Nor could she bear that such a spirit should admit defeat – and defeat was what it was. The clamour set on by Pope, whose slanders now included ‘whore’, had reached even the Belle, so that the woman’s name had become synonymous with feminine disgrace and, by extension, Edward Wortley’s with that of cuckold.
Out of decency, pretending she didn’t know, Cecily asked: ‘Why must you go?’
Lady Mary covered a yawn with her fan. ‘People are grown so stupid I can no longer support their company.’ When Cecily stopped and turned to look at her, she shrugged. ‘My children are a disappointment, my marriage no longer a marriage.’
They walked on. Pope’s name wasn’t mentioned. ‘I have done my best to be a good wife and mother, apparently without success. I was not cut out for it. However, the dearest concern I have in this world is to spare Edward. He has always spared me. If I go into exile, the calumnies on him will cease.’
‘Oh, my dear.’
Lady Mary smiled. ‘Nothing in life became her like the leaving of… her husband.’
At the lych gate, they turned to look at the grave of their friend. Two men with shovels lurked behind the yew tree, waiting to fill it in.
‘What was it she always wanted for us?’ asked Lady Mary. ‘The freedom to decide for ourselves what is important? Such a dangerous woman she was.’
* * *
Land tax was lowered in order to keep estate owners happy. A salt tax was raised instead. Walpole told the House that a tax on salt was more equable than one which hurt only the landed gentry – presumably because it could then hurt everybody.
Opposing speeches pointed out that the poor were already hurting. ‘I hope every man that hears me will allow his pity and compassion for the poor and the wretched.’ This was William Pulteney, once an ally of Walpole’s who’d been got rid of, as all potential dissidents to the Great Man’s policies were sooner or later; Walpole’s government now consisted of Walpole and yes-men.
The salt tax was carried by 225 votes to 187.
‘Nothing can stop him, can it?’ asked Cecily, as she and Colonel Grandison stood at the door of his manor and handed out packets of salt to a queue of Datchworthians. ‘He can do what he likes. Look at them, they don’t mind.’
As each packet was placed into each extended hand, its owner nodded slightly. There were no thanks – these were Hertfordshire men and women – but it seemed to Cecily that, had they been right-thinking, they should even now be tearing bricks out of the walls of a manor house which paid proportionally less tax than they did.
Colonel Grandison knew his people. ‘They mind,’ he said. ‘They just don’t mind enough. Yet.’
‘When’s yet going to be?’
It was glimmering, like an unrisen sun, over the horizon; a beam in the mind of a prime minister who believed he’d placated those who mattered and that the patience of the rest could be stretched indefinitely. An excise tax.
The first whisper reached the Belle in an article in The Craftsman which Mr Phineas, button traveller, still delivered to Cecily along with Jacobite literature, even though she was no longer its distributor.
She read the article. It accused Walpole of planning to bring in a ‘general excise’ which, it said, would be used to create a larger standing army which in turn would be used against its own people when they protested at the suppression of all liberty.
Mr Phineas was showing more animation than Cecily had ever seen in him. ‘Word is to stand by,’ he whispered. ‘This’ll do for Walpole and Hanover.’
She raised her eyebrows. Excise meant that goods shipped into British ports would be stored in bonded warehouses, untaxed until they emerged for sale. The
system did away with customs duty, which smugglers evaded, and instead put the onus of tax directly on the customer. But where was the cause of Phineas’s excitement? Would a people dormant under a salt tax wake up at this one? She couldn’t see them flocking to the Pretender’s banner merely because it read: ‘Down with the excise!’
Showing the article to Tyler, she got her first inkling that she was wrong.
‘Gawd,’ he said. ‘The old bugger’s gone too far this time.’
‘Why? Why has he? I don’t understand.’
‘He’s losing too much revenue through smuggling, Duchess. But he’ll do for hisself with this.’
‘Why will he?’ She could only think of it as it applied to her own smuggling: the tea and the brandy that came into her hidden cellar from the fens. ‘Surely we can avoid excise like we avoid customs.’
Tyler looked pityingly at her. ‘Ain’t met many excisemen, have you, Duchess? They got powers customs men only dream about. They’ll tear down the Belle in a search if they want to. An’ they want to. Bastards, the lot of ’em. An Englishman’s home’ll be the exciseman’s castle. People won’t stand for it.’
Frightened for her smuggled profit, Cecily wrote to Cameron to see if he knew what were Walpole’s exact intentions.
His reply was measured. Sir Robert’s proposed legislation was logical since smuggling was getting out of hand…
And Sir Robert should know, thought Cecily. He’s done enough of it.
…the excise was to be on wine and tobacco; ‘general’ only in the sense that it would be paid by everybody using those commodities. ‘He has been advised against it,’ Cameron wrote. ‘The British perceive excise as foreign to their nature. Yet he swears he will take the Bill to the House and in this I believe he misjudges the public mood.’
For once, it appeared that he had. The Great Man, beaming good will and common sense, explained the logic and benefits of the scheme. Excise would affect only wine and tobacco but it would give its officials new power to search out smugglers who were a disgrace to the nation and a drain on its income.
Blood Royal Page 28