Blood Royal
Page 35
Neither inn nor daughter would appear on the Fitzhenry escutcheon. By God, they’ll be etched on Belle Savage’s – symbols of the new, common adventurers’ world to which she had succeeded by right of saving it.
For there was no ship. The horizon of the Wash stretched without interruption in a ruled line across her view. The Pretender had gone home.
About time too. Last night’s sympathy was over. Caused enough trouble. Coming here. Burning people’s houses down.
Spender Dick and Maskelyne were discounted; mere grotesque dei ex machina in the drama of which Cecily and James Stuart had been the protagonists.
But where the hell were they? Unless she was sure they’d gone, she dare not leave sanctuary – though she was getting damn sick of it.
Where the hell was anybody? Had the burning of the only mansion for miles escaped notice? Did she have to save England totally alone? She must face the view to the south and see what was to be seen: the moment couldn’t be put off any longer.
An object moved at the edge of her vision. She looked left and downwards to see the two Jacobites rowing Edgar’s boat down the Windle towards the estuary.
Going fishing, the bastards. Hadn’t spared time to eat before they burned down her kitchen. And not dei ex machina now, but dei ex navicula – or whatever the Latin was. Not gods either. Clowns.
The terrible Maskelyne had diminished into an indifferent oarsman. As she watched, he caught a crab and fell back with his head in his companion’s crotch and his legs in the air.
There was enough water to carry them over the sandbanks but, if they went much further, the tide, stronger than its opposing breeze, would take them out to…
By God, by God, by God. That’s where they’re going.
It was Belle Savage who shoved the window open further and whooped a triumphant goodbye. ‘Drown, you buggers.’
Quite probably they would. They could have no hope of overhauling the Pretender’s ship. Risk-takers ever, they had calculated a crossing of the North Sea as a better gamble than staying to be hunted through England. But in a rowing boat?
‘Personally,’ she admonished them, pleasantly, ‘I’d have gone along the coast and begged a passage on something more substantial.’
Yet they were undoubtedly heading out to sea as fast as they could, Sir Spender rowing like a man in a race…
She whirled round to see what it was the Jacobites were fleeing from. Beyond the skeletal heap that had been the house of Hempens, small boats were coming across the mere, lots of them, heading towards the island like a flotilla of determined ducks – one, with two figures aboard, ahead of all the rest.
Tyler, she thought. Edgar. And was down at the bottom of the tower on the instant, tugging back the bolts of the door. Which wouldn’t move. With all her weight on her arms and her head down, it wouldn’t shift. Maskelyne hadn’t spared the logs he’d piled against it.
God dammit, if she had to go up these bloody steps one more time… but if she didn’t, they’d start picking over the ruins in a search for her corpse.
Irritable, hungry and all at once nauseous with reaction, she stamped up the stairs, clambered into the Octagon and slammed open a southern window. ‘I’m here.’
One lone chimney still hid the jetty but the breeze carried the cry over it. Two men, hatless and running, appeared round the side of the ruins. One was Tyler. The other wasn’t Edgar.
A great peace settled over Cecily Cameron. She leaned over the window-seat on folded arms and waited to be rescued.
This, then, was the latter-day hero: of medium height, ginger-headed, neat, even while breathless and having lost his hat, a man of concern, not romance; one who, if she was any judge, felt himself considerably put out, yet one who, anticipating an army of invaders – Tyler would have told him – had brought no army of his own to face them. There’d been only fenmen in the boats behind him. Had he thought to save England and his wife by argument? Yes, he probably had. Well, but he suited her.
Tyler saw her, grinned back, and disappeared from view to tackle the blockage at the door.
Archibald Cameron saw her, took off his wig and wiped his sleeve across his forehead. He jerked his head towards the pile of rubble behind him. ‘Rot ye, woman, I thought you to be in yon ashes.’
‘No,’ she called down, brightly. ‘I was up here. Preventing another Rising.’
Running his fingers wearily through his hair, he nodded. ‘Tyler said ye’d try. It seems he knows ye better than I do.’
‘We share a criminal bent. But you came after me just the same.’
‘It’s over, then?’
‘This time.’
He glanced back to the ruins. ‘And that?’
‘The price.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He was suddenly full of his own grievance. He, too, was suffering reaction: ‘But could ye no’ have left word? There was Eleanor to be carried to the Belle and Cole not knowing where ye were off to with your Jacobite friend that Tyler, when applied to, said was planning invasion…’
‘Yet you came after me just the same,’ she reiterated. One had to be patient.
He looked up. ‘You want me to say it? I’ll say it. If the hosts of hell were swarming ashore, I’d still have plucked ye from the arms of the Devil himself.’
‘So I should hope.’
He sat down on the grass, leaned back and propped himself on his elbows. They rested their eyes on each other for a while in mutual assessment.
He was humming in the Gaelic, bless him, something about a wife before his age slipped away.
But he had to know. She could only be rescued on her own terms: ‘I shan’t come back to London. I’m an innkeeper. And there’s Eleanor. I’m finished with Society.’
‘Society’ll be relieved to hear it,’ he said, and got to his feet. ‘I’m not sure but what, following Quick’s verdict, Society hasnae finished wi’ me. There was a deal of havering in chambers after. But I’m needed in London and I’ll not leave it. Bad for business.’ He put on his wig and called querulously: ‘Can we no’ have this argument somewhere more private?’
Her fen people were standing in a discreet but interested semi-circle around the Lantern. Tyler was signalling that the door was free.
‘Do you think we can resolve it?’ she asked.
He smiled back at her.
So, for the last time she descended the steps of her tower and went through the open door into the sunlight, to try.
Author’s Notes
Despite his defeat over the excise in 1734 – a massive victory for the popular will – Sir Robert Walpole remained in power until 1742, dying in 1745, having held the office of prime minister for twenty-two years.
In order to fit them into the frame of the book I have telescoped somewhat the years from 1716 to 1733, but have kept their events in the order in which they occurred.
To sort out fact from fiction…
Mary Astell was a real person and has been described as the first English feminist. While I think that title more properly belongs in the previous century, with Aphra Behn, there’s no doubt Mrs Astell was an amazingly free thinker for her time.
The escapes described at the end of Chapter Two, by Old Borlum and the Earls of Wintoun and Nithsdale, as well as the transportees, actually took place.
The architect, John Castell, died in Corbett’s sponging house after pleading not to be sent to it. His friend James Oglethorpe told his story to the House of Commons, which agreed to appoint a Commission of Inquiry into debtors’ prisons. It learned that Bambridge, Warden of the Fleet, was making a regular annual income of five thousand pounds a year from bribes and torturing prisoners who wouldn’t pay them. Hogarth painted a scene showing a prisoner on his knees demonstrating Bambridge’s method of fastening a man’s hands and neck. Bambridge was acquitted of Castell’s murder and all other charges. He lived a free man for another twenty years before slitting his throat. Little change was made in the laws of insolvency until 1808, when an Act of Parlia
ment improved the debtors’ lot by allowing anyone who had been in prison for a year for a debt of less than twenty pounds to be freed as having suffered enough.
Lest anyone think I made it up in Chapter Three, the account of Dolly’s loss of bladder control in the House of Commons is based on a real incident.
I have set the Belle Sauvage into a section of what is now the B197 between Welwyn and Knebworth, but there was no such inn there. The village of Datchworth had no responsibility for the road and the men and women I’ve peopled it with never existed as far as I know, though they are based on real eighteenth-century characters.
James Stuart, whom we meet in Chapter Eight, was, of course, the Old Pretender, a much nicer man than his more famous son, Bonnie Prince Charlie. He made more than one attempt to invade England. However, the account of his landing at Hempens comes from my imagination.
Perhaps because she was an amateur and, worse, a woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s battle to introduce inoculation against smallpox into Britain was castigated by many doctors and churchmen and has been treated frivolously by more than one of her biographers. Princess Caroline was wiser and allowed the royal children to be inoculated by her. She deserves the inscription on the monument in Lichfield Cathedral: ‘Sacred to the Memory of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who happily introduced from Turkey into this country the salutary art of inoculating the Small-pox…’
The court case depicted in Chapter Fourteen is, of course, fictional but could have taken place. The conflicting judgments in what were mainly property suits involving black men and women, as the question of their legal position increasingly cropped up, had begun as far back as 1569 and were sometimes in their favour, sometimes not. In essence, the situation could only be resolved by an Act of Parliament, which didn’t transpire until 1807, with final emancipation coming in 1833.
First published in the United Kingdom in 1998 by Michael Joseph
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by
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Copyright © Diana Norman, 1998
The moral right of Diana Norman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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ISBN 9781788635080
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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