It was no good. Smuggling was a national institution: excise was foreign. Nor did the British believe that it would stop at wine and tobacco; the term ‘general excise’ would eventually mean what it said, a tax on food, clothes, everything.
At the beginning of January ’33, there was a muttering that, by the end of the month, had become a roar, egged on by an opposition which saw its chance. Pamphlets, ballad writers, cartoonists followed The Craftsman into battle and poured their response on to the streets. Excise was something France imposed on its people, the Catholic James II had used it, therefore it was allied to popery. There’d be an excise on boots next, and free Englishmen would have to start wearing clogs like downtrodden bloody Frogs.
Walpole could reason as much as he liked that excisemen would only search private premises with a magistrate’s warrant; what protection was that? Whig JPs would give warrants at the drop of a hat.
‘No Excise, No Slavery, No Wooden Shoes’ became the slogan of the streets as an image became established in the public mind of vicious, corrupt excisemen breaking into homes, tipping the baby on to the floor and ravishing its mother in the search for an illegal bottle and pipe.
When Walpole rose to lay his proposal before Parliament, magistrates, constables and Horse and Foot Guards had to control the crowd that hammered on its doors. He remained cool in the face of what he regarded as an organized demonstration by ‘sturdy beggars’, a phrase that did him no good because, for once, the ‘sturdy beggars’ included respectable City men.
Though Walpole wisely left the Commons by a back door, he was sure of his majority within it. He would bring the Bill in though the sky fell. The king was with him. He’d link the Bill to a shilling off the land tax, which would surely carry the country gentry onto his side.
At St James’s Palace, George II called his prime minister ‘a brave man’, and fingered the sword he’d worn at Oudenarde. But the sword was double-edged: support from a king likely to profit most from the excise didn’t raise Walpole’s stock with a people who still regarded that king as a foreigner.
The sky looked shaky. Even the army, fonder of its smoke than most, threatened mutiny. Nor was agitation confined to London: Lord Hervey warned Walpole, ‘The whole nation is in flames.’
At February’s meeting in Hertford, the Coach Inn Proprietors put up a banner showing a coach drawn by the dragon Excise farting a stream of gold into Walpole’s lap. They sang:
‘Grant the tax, and the glutton
Will roar out for mutton
Your beef, bread and bacon to boot.
Your goose, pig and pullet
He’ll thrust down his gullet,
Whilst the labourer munches a root.’
Cecily, happily singing with them, thought: This isn’t just reaction to the excise. That was only the last straw. They’ve been ashamed of their country too long. They’ve had enough.
Because even normally quiet Hertford was in riot, she had brought Tyler with her to drive her home but, in organizing an anti-excise petition and deciding on the delegation to take it to Westminster, the meeting went on so long that they spent what remained of the night in rooms at the Golden Lion, listening to shouts of ‘No Slavery, No Wooden Shoes’ and the sound of smashing shop fronts.
The next morning Tyler had to lead the carriage horse around broken glass and window frames. A scorched rag, all that remained of an effigy of Walpole, hung from a lamp in Fore Street. He shook his head at it: ‘Iffen the Stuart had walked in last night they’d a carried him to St James’s.’
Cecily wondered how much he knew or guessed of her Jacobite activities and whether she should tell him. That she hadn’t done so already had been to protect him. If the would-be use of Hempens as a landing place for the Pretender transpired and proved disastrous, at least her good friend would be free of involvement.
When they reached the track that led to Bramfield, she asked: ‘If the Pretender had marched in last night, would you have helped carry him to St James’s?’
Tyler was silent, thinking. The bare branches of trees, outlined with frost, arched over their heads, casting complex, geometric shadows in the low February sun.
‘If Walpole falls,’ Cecily went on, ‘the Hanoverians could go with him. I’ve never seen people as angry as this. Worse than the Bubble. Even Totty Stokes was damning King George. Would they have James Stuart back, do you think? Would you?’
The carriage lurched as the horse picked its way over the rock-hard ruts of the track. Tyler guided it so that the wheels fitted into the grooves made by wagons. A dead branch fell off a tree in the forest, scattering rooks into the sky. It mattered that he should say yes. Whatever he was in the eyes of the law, to her Tyler was the measure of the reasoning common man. He was England.
‘Don’t know, Duchess,’ he said. ‘I don’t know we want an outsider in this fight. I reckon we can manage it ourselves.’
Oh, God, she despaired, is that England’s verdict? But I’m committed. Stand by, they’d said. The country’s tumult would attract the Pretender like a lion scenting blood; even now he could be heading for Hempens and invasion. The country’s Jacobites would at last be lifting their sorry heads and scurrying.
All I wanted to do was bring Walpole down. Must I bring down Hanover too?
Panicking, she couldn’t bear to sit still and told Tyler to stop the carriage so that she could get out and guide the horse. Her boots broke through the crust of ice on puddles as she walked but the exercise calmed her.
Walpole was merely the apotheosis of a society that had lost its way under an uncaring monarchy. The entire system needed reform and a kindly king, a James Stuart, was the man to do it. Yes, yes, I was right. The Pretender’s the man. Tyler’s isn’t the only voice of England.
The sun sent out no warmth; if anything the frost was deepening. The track would be iced all the way home. ‘At this rate,’ she said, ‘we won’t get back in time to see the York coach off.’ She liked to be in her forecourt to say goodbye so that she could deal with the complaints and receive the praise.
‘Cole’ll do it,’ Tyler said.
‘No. He was going to Stevenage this morning to see about another billiard table.’ The Belle was becoming sportif: as well as billiards, it now offered a cockpit, a small golf course, a cricket pitch and a skittles alley.
They were so delayed by ice that, emerging into the Great North Road, they met Cole coming back from Stevenage. The York coach had long gone on its way to London.
All the Belle’s staff was milling in the yard. Wrong, all wrong. She began to shake. For an instant, she thought: They’re going to hang Dolly.
She sat still in the carriage while faces below her mouthed desperate things. There’d been a man, a man. On the York coach. Passed by the kitchen this morning, saw Quick. ‘He had a pistol. He said Quick was a runaway, his runaway. He took him. In the coach.’
‘I’ll get him back,’ Cecily said. ‘The York stops at Potters Bar. I’ll get him there.’
Her lips were stiff. There was something else. It was Marjorie who broke it to her. ‘My dearie,’ she said, rubbing Cecily’s hand against her cheek. ‘The man. He said Eleanor must be Quick’s littl’un and so his property. My poor lamb, he took her an’ all.’
Chapter Thirteen
In his Middle Temple chambers, Cameron took off his wife’s boots, levered open her mouth and spooned brandy into it, asking questions, listening to Tyler’s replies.
‘Could ye not find news of him at Potters Bar?’
The coach had stopped at the Bar for the night. Was probably still there, the coachman having pronounced the road too dangerous to proceed. ‘But the bastard hired two horses and came on. He’d got Nellie in front of him under his cloak.’ Tyler paused. ‘Seems he snatched her without a coat.’
Cameron nodded. ‘And Quick?’
‘In manacles. On a leading rein.’
Cecily began to stand up. Cameron put his hand on her head and forced her down. ‘Stay.’ She stayed
. He turned back to Tyler. ‘Did ye find out his name?’
‘The coach manifest’s got him as Christopher Da Silva.’
‘Unusual enough, thanks be to God. Mrs Tothill?’
‘Yes, Master Archie?’ The old woman had been wringing her hands by the door.
‘Be good enough to step round to Mr Blurt and fetch him back here, if he’d oblige me. Quick as ye can.’
Tyler said: ‘He’d talked to one of the passengers. Said he was from the West Indies over here on business for his masters, a couple of sugar-growers.’
‘The passengers didn’t try to prevent the abduction?’
‘He was forceful, like. An’ he had a pistol. Said Quick was his slave as had jumped off a coach last time he was over. Now he’d found him again he’d take him back to the Windies. Said he had the authority.’
‘And Eleanor?’
‘Said she was his property too. Said she must be Quick’s.’
‘A not unreasonable assumption.’
Why is he talking? Why are we sitting? She was in a glass bowl; figures moved outside it in blurred distortions, their words coming to her as if spoken through water. ‘Injunction.’ ‘Habeas Corpus.’ She was beating on the glass and they didn’t hear her.
Her husband’s face came close, grey and wavering. ‘We’ll find her, Cecily. We’ll find her.’
His went away and another, seedy, squinting, took its place by the bowl, speaking slow: ‘I’m Mr Blurt, Lady Cecily. I know ’em all. I know their places. And I know every ship.’
It turned away, still speaking: ‘A course it might be the ship’s at Bristol. Thought o’ that, Master Archie, have you?’
Ships? Ships. He was taking Eleanor across seas.
‘Now then, Lady Cecily,’ said the squint, ‘no need for that. You hold on to me. I’m Mr Blurt and I know.’
Her hands reached through the glass to clutch a coat. It smelt of mice. Her lips managed to move. ‘It’s important. She’ll be very cold.’
‘I know, I know. You stay here now and rest.’
Stay here now. Christ, they were going. Leaving her in the bowl. Her feet found her unlaced boots and she stumbled to the door.
Tyler’s voice. ‘Better take her with us. She won’t rest else.’
Out into a white garden, metallic with frost. Into streets. Slush. Faces wrapped around and blue-nosed with a cold she couldn’t feel. Blockades of wagons. Bonfires in the roads and people capering round them, toasted yellow on one side from the reflection. Shouting.
Good God, they’re still rioting. Can’t you see it’s not important? My child has been snatched from me.
The freedom to know what’s important. Mary Astell’s voice had chanted all the way down the Great North Road as time expanded and contracted like rubber. A horse had slipped and broken its leg. Tyler’d shot it and they’d continued a-pillion, the moon beaming on them like an idiot. The only importance: reach Cameron, find Eleanor.
The analgesia of panic and cold was wearing off, allowing her to become sensible of London’s vastness. What if he’d taken her to Bristol?
‘Blurt’s sending a man to Bristol,’ Cameron told her. ‘We’re using Habeas Corpus.’
‘Use crowbars,’ she said. ‘Kill him.’ He ran on all fours with Eleanor in his mouth.
A magistrate’s house, tall, narrow, with stone steps. Argument, explanation, time stretching out again until it twanged her bones. Habeas Corpus. Have her body. She’d be so cold. So frightened.
Blurt: ‘I’ll take the docks. You take the Negro quarters, Master Archie. They know you. And one of ’em’ll know Da Silva from somewhere – news runs round them neighbourhoods like the rats.’
At the end of the first day’s hunt Cecily collapsed and Tyler had to take her back to the chambers while Cameron stayed on in Mile End, a lantern and his life in his hand as he climbed staircases that wobbled to doors showering woodwormed dust as he hammered on them, shedding light on faces that turned away from it, asking questions of people to whom secrecy was survival.
As Tyler helped her upstairs and Mrs Tothill stoked the bedroom fire, Cecily said: ‘We’re not going to find her, Tyler.’
‘Get on with you, Duchess. Course we are.’ He didn’t believe they would either.
It wasn’t sleep, more a parade of images: Eleanor growing up and thinning down, her hair like a black teazle atop the skinny body. Eleanor and Billy Packer in trouble with Colonel Grandison for tying the tails of two of his heifers together and swinging on the resultant rope, Eleanor climbing too high up the horse-chestnut for conkers, Eleanor whacking young Martin Bygraves with the tric-trac board because he’d called her a dingy slut when he lost. Eleanor refusing to apologize for a pert answer to those who commented on her colour.
God help her keep that courage.
Herself, afraid for her, paddling the child’s backside with a slipper too often, too often, for transgressions arising from a refusal to be cowed, and Eleanor, tear-stained, subsequently coming into her bed for a cuddle, never holding a grudge but never admitting defeat either.
‘Mamma?’
‘Yes?’
‘I expect you’re sorry now.’
I always was. I am.
Somebody was knocking on the front door downstairs. Cecily rolled out of bed, her body obeying the summons almost before her brain had caught up with its urgency. News.
As she reached for her night-robe, she heard Tyler stumping along the hall to open the door. He met her on the staircase. ‘It’s them bloody Jacks.’
Over his shoulder she saw the bulk of Sir Spender Dick filling the doorway, Maskelyne behind him.
‘Have they heard anything?’ She squeezed past Tyler and rushed down to the hall and opened the parlour door, ushering them in. ‘Have you news for me?’
‘Indeed we have, madam. Shut the door, Masky.’
‘What? What?’ She watched Maskelyne shut the door in Tyler’s face and stand with his back to it. ‘Do you know where she is?’
‘Where’s who?’
Everything in her world had so narrowed to one point that she could not believe visitors who arrived at this hour of night had come about anything else. ‘My… the child. Eleanor. She’s been abducted.’
Sir Spender said: ‘Little Nellie? The one at the Belle?’ He was genuinely taken aback.
‘I thought…’ Weakness brought on by disappointment forced Cecily to sit down. Drearily, she asked what they wanted.
Sir Spender pulled a chair near hers so that he could take her hand. ‘I commiserate with your troubles, dear lady…’
‘We got our own,’ said Maskelyne from the door.
‘…but as our friend here rightly says, we ourselves are in difficulties. Walpole’s dogs have picked up our scent and we are hunted men…’
‘You can’t stay here.’ Cecily panicked. She could bear no complication, no diversion, that would delay the search for Eleanor. Two hunted Jacobites under her roof could mean her arrest and exposure, not important in themselves at that moment except as another barrier between her and the lost child.
‘We have no such intention,’ Spender said reluctantly – it had occurred to him. ‘Nor must you fear, madam. Things are ever darkest before the dawn and our Dawn is almost upon us, advenit ille dies, our day is about to break – your lamp shall but send forth its beam and our sun arises.’
‘What?’ snapped Cecily. Why was he burbling if it had nothing to do with Eleanor?
‘Did you send to Hempens like you were told?’ Maskelyne was as abrupt as she. ‘Did you tell them to be ready to light the bloody lamp?’
Lamp? Had she? With difficulty she forced her mind back to Princess Caroline’s garden party. ‘Yes. I think so. Yes, I did.’
‘Splendid.’ Sir Spender patted her hand. ‘Then all is ready with our Grand Design. We but await our King. In a month or so, perhaps less, you shall have the honour of guiding him through the darkness to his kingdom on the Stuart tide. Hark and you shall hear it flowing…’ He got up and
went to the window, raising its sash so that the sound of rioting in the Strand came into the room like the remote roar of the sea.
Sir Spender cupped his ear. ‘What music.’ He turned back. ‘Dear lady, like all hunted creatures, Masky and I have been forced to flee our coverts. We find ourselves somewhat financially embarrassed…’
She gave them all the cash she had and took them to the door. They peered up and down the street before they stepped out into it. As she shut the door after them, Tyler stepped into the hall, his face set as she’d never seen it before. ‘I knew you was playing with fire but I never thought even you’d go and set light to yesself.’
‘You were listening at the keyhole.’
‘Bloody right I was. I never liked them two. Your brain gone unfurnished or something? What’s all this about lamps and tides? Bringin’ in the king? We got a king. He ain’t much but it ain’t worth starting a war to unseat the bugger. I’m ashamed of you, Duchess.’
She stared at him. She thought, I’m ashamed of me and I don’t know why. There’d been good reason for aiding the Jacobites, very good reason; just at the moment she couldn’t find her way through the jumble in her mind to discover what it was. To anyone else she would have shown defiance, to Tyler she admitted helplessness: ‘It’s got away from me, Tyler.’
‘It bloody has.’ He hadn’t finished berating her. She’d never seen him so angry. ‘You’re starting a war, that’s what you’re doing. A war. You been in a war, Duchess? I have. And I ain’t prepared to fight another in me own backyard. I warn you, I’ll stop it.’
‘Then stop it,’ she screamed at him. ‘Stop it, stop it. Stop everything. I don’t mind what happens. I just want Eleanor back.’
He spat. Then he sighed. ‘All right, all right.’ He put an arm round her shoulders and guided her back into the parlour and sat her down. ‘Let’s be hearing it all, then. What you been and gone and done?’
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