There was a view like the frontier of the world to feast on: to landward an entire county laid out, to seaward the Wash looking like pink champagne in the windy sunset.
I can eat the candles. There was no other use for them. It was why she’d come: to keep them unlit.
As if the men could see her, she kept her eyes away from the secondary beacon on the other side of the Windle’s mouth which, together with the Lantern, made the transit for incoming boats. Uplanders that the two men were, they might think it just a pile of peat and firewood awaiting collection.
It was hot here, like a greenhouse. She moved to one of the eastern windows, unbolted it and pushed it on its horizontal cantilever and had to hold it from slamming back. What had been a breeze was freshening into a lively wind. She shut the window and walked round to open one facing the house. The graveyard where Sophie’s baby lay was a neat, still square among bending bushes. Somebody had mown its grass. Hempens’ roofs and chimneys blocked a view of the jetty but, in any case, the mere was empty of anything but darkening reed and waterfowl settling for the night.
Nobody will come. Why should they? Her fen people would keep clear as she’d instructed: there was no reason for them to believe her endangered. And well for them: Maskelyne had already killed one man and tried to shoot another.
She sat herself down to wait. They’d try persuasion first.
A shepherd’s warning of a sunset, one of the reddest she could remember, streaked the west. A shower slanted in from the east in a block of speckles out of lowering purple that promised worse to come.
The alarm call of a thrush nesting in the kitchen-garden hedge alerted her to the portly shape coming from the house. One of Sir Spender’s hands held his hat from blowing off, the other swung awkwardly away from his pocket flap, a flag of truce: he was showing her he had no weapon.
‘Dear lady.’ He had to shout against the wind. From her angle and in the twilight his upturned face was a small pale moon. ‘It’s time, dear lady. Dies irae, dies ilia. Your king approaches. Light him in. To you the honour.’
Dear, dear, she thought, does he think I’m sulking? This is my house: I’ll light the lamp?
‘The Cause, Lady Cecily. Think of the Cause.’
To keep silent seemed a breach of etiquette and she had to fight the atavistic desire of a hostess to explain why she disappointed him. Nothing personal, Sir Spender. Do take advantage of my cellar. But the longer she kept them in suspense, the later it would be before they began the assault.
His voice came up to her, wet with dear ladies and madams through the raindrops: he was crying.
Cecily watched his hunched figure walk back to the house and was sorry. Despite his threat to give her away if he was captured, she didn’t dislike him. After all, it might be true that no man could stand questioning by Walpole’s men without revealing everything.
Harnessed to Maskelyne as he was, it had been impossible for her to plumb the man’s depths over the years. Undoubtedly he had some. His loyalty to James Stuart had a different quality from his friend’s: the travelling, the acquaintance with Princess Caroline, all the risks he’d taken with apparent nonchalance, when, she suspected, he had more to lose, argued a devotion to the Cause inspired by conviction for it rather than, as with Maskelyne, a hatred against everything else. What that conviction was – religion, belief in the inalienability of kingship, personal loyalty to the House of Stuart, hope of reward – she still didn’t know and now, probably, never would.
Raindrops began to hit the windows with a patter like thrown gravel. He was coming back. Towing Maskelyne. Wind, rain and shouting up a hundred-foot drop hampered his usual prolixity but he tried: ‘Lady Cecily. If any misunderstanding. Desperate times. Masky here. Rough diamond. But stout heart. Wish to apologize.’
Good God, they did think she was sulking.
Maskelyne was nudged forward. A white triangle looked up at her, teeth bared. ‘Apologies, Lady Cecily. All friends now, eh?’
What appalling token had she represented to him, she wondered, that he had never been able to hide his hatred of her or any woman? Had his mother not smacked him enough? Or too much? Had she found him doing naughty things in bed? Or vice versa? Perhaps he was one of those to whom any infliction by person or country caused irredeemable spite. A spoiler, she decided. If it were a Stuart on the throne at this minute, he’d be supporting Hanover.
It was a subject with insufficient interest to pursue. She must make herself comfortable for the night – she retired from the window to divest herself of her hoops. The Octagon was cooling down. She investigated the cupboards, found a tarpaulin and arranged it on the window-seat for a bed.
When she returned, the men were going back to the house, Sir Spender chasing his hat.
There was no moon yet, an almost total darkness outside. A glimmer showed suddenly in one of the attics of her house. The men were using their highest vantage point to keep a watch on the sea while they wondered what to do.
Cecily began a circular walk, keeping her own watch on the full round. The windows rattled against the iron tracery that held them.
Maskelyne was running in her direction, pushing a handcart, while Sir Spender loped beside him with a torch in his hand, its flame flattening out behind them. The cart was used for carrying logs from the woodpile. A battering ram? Christ, they’re going to burn me out.
She threw open the trapdoor, ran to the window-seat and lifted out the bucket of sand, lowered it through the trap, climbed through herself and lugged the bucket down the steps, lopsided with its weight, one hand clutching the staircase rail. At the bottom, she poured a draught-excluder of piled sand along the lower edge of the door and hammered the keyhole guard closely into place. The upper edge and sides she stuffed with silk torn from her poor skirt, stopping any crack that would suck in flame.
Up the stairs to fetch the water bucket. Down again. She stood it by her feet, ready; she needed her hands to clutch the area below her left breast where her heart was breaking loose.
She listened to a bonfire being built against the door. Far above, rain hammered on glass. It won’t light in this. Don’t let it light in this.
Smoke was coming through the sides of the keyhole. She pressed her hand flat against the guard.
After a long period of smokelessness, she realized the wind was wrong for them. It blew towards them, not her. And it would take ferocious concentration of flame to burn down a door as seasoned as the Lantern’s. She risked going upstairs and, cautiously, peered over the sill of the open, landward window. One head, Sir Spender’s, was just in view and turned towards the door hidden from her by the overhang. His flare hissed in the rain; from his demeanour and fitful billows of smoke she gathered that the fire wasn’t catching.
It took a while for Maskelyne to give up. He came into view, snatched the torch from Sir Spender and hurled it upwards. In the arc of light she saw his face – and ducked. There was a tinkle of glass and a neat hole radiating cracks in the window by which she’d been standing.
Shooting? I’ll give him shooting. Crouching, Cecily crossed to the candles and tugged one out of its holder, went down on her knees, crawled back with it and rolled it through the gap between the cantilevered window and the sill. Teach you, you bastard. A forty-pound object falling one hundred feet carried respect.
The noise of the rain covered any impact but, when she next dared to look, there was no sound and no light below. They’d gone.
Anger ebbed out of her as the last warmth left the Octagon. She pulled up one of her petticoats for a wrap, feeling cold, frightened and unfitted. I’m the wrong age for this. A maiden withstanding this crazy siege might be the stuff of storybooks but a mature innkeeper dropping candles on the heads of her besiegers touched on the ludicrous.
In any case, hers was the negative of romance. Minstrels could only sing of the woman lighting a hero home; one who kept the house dark against him would have them stamping on their lutes.
In any case, Cam
eron would never hear of it. Nor rescue her. Unromantic Scot… First thing we do, let’s kill all the… In any case…
Discomfort woke her up. She jog-trotted round the light to get her blood flowing and see what was to be seen. At the house, figures moved against the light in the attic. The moon was up, wind blowing ragged cloud across it so strongly she wondered it stayed in place. Pity poor Pretenders on a night like this.
At first she barely registered the speck of light that flickered to seaward. She leaned her head against the glass and screwed up her eyes to focus through the residue of raindrops. Again. A ship. Signalling. Not signalling – rolling. A blinking, tiny star from here; out there in the black sea a ship’s lantern rearing to the sky and then dropping as if the Pegasus it rode had folded his wings in mid-air.
Dear Christ, he’s come. Until that moment she might have been enacting a melodrama composed by amateurs, a reluctant player in a private performance that had just now acquired an audience. Out there, probably vomiting his heart out, was Britain’s real king, the most admirable scion of a most ancient house. Wanting, beseeching, to enter his kingdom.
You can’t come in. Oh, my dear lord, I can’t let you in.
Raindrops rolled down the outside of the window; inside Cecily’s tears rolled with them.
She ordered the thinking that had brought them both to this, trying to project it to him in airborne apology.
It isn’t only the people who’ll be killed, the women with no men, children with no fathers, the transported of either side. It’s that you don’t matter any more. Even your usurper doesn’t matter.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
She’d thought as he did: put another king on the throne and all would be well. But the battle had moved on – to a frowsty, overcrowded chamber in Westminster, to men who, corrupt as they were, still pretended to democracy and, because they pretended, occasionally had to bow to it.
Betterment couldn’t come from above any more; perhaps it never had. Its hope was in small, decent voices joining other small and decent voices so that, gradually, very gradually, they raised a shout that even Walpoles had to listen to.
Would James understand? He wouldn’t. He would tell her, as he’d once told her: ‘I have promised liberty of conscience, Lady Cecily.’ As if that were the be-all and end-all and he could deliver it, like Jehovah showering manna.
Liberty of conscience. A battle cry. Britain couldn’t afford the battle; it was out of date; it would delay the welfare that could only be gained by ordinary people nibbling away at rottenness.
She was flooded with a loving anguish. I’m married to one of those nibblers, sire. I watched him wake a jury’s conscience. A little case, concerning thirty pounds and a man’s freedom, but he made twelve other men think, Yes, this is unfair. Eventually, he and his kind will bring the entire country to say, Yes, this is unfair, that’s unfair, we shan’t put up with it.
Whether a Stuart was king, or a Hanover, made no difference. So, you see, we might as well keep the one we have and save commotion. The battle’s moved elsewhere. It’s the people’s fight now against a different authority. All you will do is get in their way.
If only she’d told him this face to face. But she hadn’t known it then. She saw again her parlour fire glow on the sallow face and hands of the icon seated in its chair, sniffed the scented rosemary logs and the mystery of kingship. And rejected it.
She said aloud: ‘I’m sorry, my lord, but you must go home. Kings have become irrelevant.’
The sight of the small light jumping up and down was unbearable and therefore annoying. She scolded it. You shouldn’t have left your arrangements to the likes of Sir Spender and Maskelyne.
But what else could he have done? Planning an invasion by remote control had always entailed leaving its organization to others – who had invariably shown themselves incompetent. At his first attempt, in 1708, he and his expedition had bobbed up and down off the Scottish coast waiting for an arranged signal, which had not been given. He’d had to go back to France without landing then.
And you must do it again.
But the little light was still pitiful to see and she walked away from the window to notice, almost without interest, that the men in the house had caught sight of it. They were running across the grass. Sir Spender tripped and stayed on his knees, arms stretched out to her in prayer.
Maskelyne came on, his limbs jerking in an ape’s dance. The tight cord that had always vibrated in the man had given way: unreasoning malice was loose – this time with reason. She saw the glint of teeth as he mouthed at her. His pistol must have refused to fire because he threw it at the glass, then stooped to send clods of earth after it. She heard the thump as they hit the tower below her.
All at once he stood still, summoning energy for something. It came in a shout loud enough to pierce the wind: ‘Light the Lantern.’
The moon was between clouds and clear behind her. She could see her own shadow elongated, at the man’s feet. She shook her head.
‘Then I’ll light one.’ It was sober, even as a shout.
And she knew. As he turned away, she knew.
I beg you.
Sound came from her mouth. Yes, yes, I’ll light the bloody candles. She thought later that she’d yelled the words but if she did he ignored them. Rock against the pain. He won’t. He wouldn’t.
A new and fiercer light sprang up in the attic.
She turned away so as not to see her house burn.
It isn’t mine. Behind her, a thousand ghosts put up soundless protest at the intruder with the match. Theirs, mine, history’s. Not just a house, a chain that linked her back in time. Shambling, rose-bricked, multi-roofed, twisted-chimneyed, ivy-covered, willow-clustered, the date over its door read 1497. Alain Fitzhenry had built it on the site of the keep raised in the reign of Richard Lionheart by Geoffrey Fitzhenry who had uncovered the sword of Hereward in its footings.
In its interior of mazed corridors and creaking, elm-floored rooms, Cecily, Anne and Sophie had played hide-and-seek like thirteen generations of children before them. With the diamond ring given to her by Queen Anne on her tenth birthday, Cecily had cut their initials into one of the leaded panes of her bedroom window. Anne Boleyn, in 1534, had done the same with her own and Henry VIll’s to a pane in the oriel of the hall.
Tiny yellow columns writhed and twisted in the mirror which night made out of the glass in front of her. Flames were licking up the curtains of her house and running along the floorboards.
He’s opened every door. The wind will make it a stove.
She stood with her back to it, watching miniaturized orange tongues waggle from every aperture of the house behind her. Te morturis, said her ancestors. We who are about to die salute you.
She couldn’t face them. They had heaped a bounty of estates upon her, the last of their line. She had lost every acre. Now this, their navel, their bolt-hole, the first and last of their refuges, she had delivered to destruction. Their valediction hissed at her through the useless rain.
No good to shut her eyes; no shutting a memory where fire chased through every passage, curling paint on her parents’ portraits, rendering the tester of the bed on which she’d been born a canopy of flame, the staircase a roaring chimney.
There was a whoomph that changed the house-shaped image in the mirror into a head whose Gorgon hair streamed back across the mere. Lost somewhere in it was the bobbing light at sea.
And still he can’t come. Even this oriflamme wouldn’t draw him. Without the plebeian beacon across the river, Maskelyne’s bonfire of her lineage was useless. The Pretender’s captain, with an onshore wind behind him, dare not attempt to come nearer. Nor, with an English fleet on patrol in daylight, could he stay where he was much longer.
In that sense, she had won. England had won. She found little joy in it; she couldn’t even say, as Pyrrhus had said: ‘One more such victory and I am undone.’ She was undone.
Cecily stood at the window until ra
in extinguished the glowing heap behind her and her eyes were too tired to see whether a ship’s light replaced it in the glass or not. Exhausted, she sank down and went to sleep because staying awake was intolerable and she couldn’t do it any more.
Seagulls’ yelping woke her up as a squadron of them flew inland with the dawn. The seaward windows above her were letting in pink-tinged light. No mirrors now. No house either. I don’t want to see it.
On the other hand, there was a pressing reason for not staying where she was. Flinching from stiffness and cold, Cecily made a coward’s crawl to the trapdoor and went downstairs to avail herself of the empty sand bucket. She washed in the water pail, listening. There seemed no human activity outside, only the call of a cuckoo and the kleep of oystercatchers coming through the keyhole on fresh, slightly seaweeded air as if it were any spring morning in the tidal fens.
It hadn’t happened. Her brain had been disordered and was now right again. God had restored her and her house. Warily, she lifted the keyhole guard and blinked through it. She shut it again, gently. Ah, well.
Upstairs once more, she kept her head determinedly to the north and opened the seaward window, letting in the slight breeze that kept away from the Lantern the stink of ash from the pile of checkered grey spars that lay behind it.
She hadn’t slept long. The moon was still up, a wafer in a laundered sky that turned primrose-yellow to the east. The tide had filled all the inlets and was now going out, leaving a pearl’s sheen of silt on which dunlin were already feeding. It was going to be a beautiful day.
She breathed it in and felt mended – heavily patched and darned, but mended. She’d lost a house, not her life. Nobody had died or, with luck, was going to. Houses could be rebuilt.
She was at once bereft and weightless, as if an ancestral responsibility had been lifted; sad, yet not without a curious exhilaration. The ghosts had burned with the house and were no more. While Hempens existed, even in the hands of a Peterborough builder, the golden chain of the Fitzhenrys had hung round her neck. With its removal, she stood unadorned; only her individuality as a resource. Not a bad resource, either. Lady Cecily Fitzhenry might have died with her home but the creature that replaced her was Belle Savage, a woman to be reckoned with on her own account, whose business acumen had created a renowned inn and whose heart had adopted a splendid daughter.
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