by Deryn Lake
Recriminations and threats were obviously now of no avail. The time had come for the Earl of Bute to assume one of his many roles, the paterfamilias and benign confidant, the friend whose wisdom was almost divine.
“I have asked her to marry me,” said the King shortly, “and I intend to do so.”
His tutor sat dumbstruck, his jaw sagging, giving him a very slightly stupid air.
“You’ve done what?” he said.
Observing him, George knew a moment of pure rebellious delight. For year upon countless year, he had regarded the Earl as being sans reproche, god-like in his stature, a beloved guardian to be set on a pedestal and adored. Now for the first time the King saw that the idol had feet of clay, that Bute with his mouth open looked just as silly as anyone else. Somewhere, in one of the chill currents in the King’s mind, there was a drowning.
Bute, to his credit, recovered himself quickly. “I wish you every felicitation, Sir, and pray both for you and your country.”
George looked at him sharply. “You are implying that it needs prayer?”
“Sir, at the risk of covering old ground, I warned you eighteen months ago that a marriage with Lady Sarah is an impossibility. It places Henry Fox in an inviolable position. You must know this yourself. I am afraid that in this matter there is a straight choice between your happiness and that of the nation.”
There was a long silence and the Earl knew that his pupil was weighing his words carefully.
“Is there no way that the two cannot be combined? I love her so much, you see. She means more to me than life itself,” George said finally.
“Kings are born not for happiness but for duty,” the Earl intoned grandly. “They marry for alliance, for strengthening the position of the throne. Of course it is acceptable, Sir —” Bute coughed delicately. “— for ladies who delight them greatly to become royal favourites.”
“I could not ask that of Sarah,” His Majesty replied indignantly. “She is too fine a person, too noble a character.”
“Then, Sir, we are at impasse.”
There was another long silence, broken eventually by the King saying sadly, “Then what am I to do?”
The Earl paused, knowing that the end was in sight, that his pupil’s sense of duty to his subjects, so very lively and so easily aroused, was beginning to gain the upper hand.
“My very dear Sir,” Bute said finally, “you must allow the Princess Charlotte to become your bride with all due speed and put an end immediately to your liaison with Lady Sarah. Remember that you agreed to the Princess in May. I have a copy of your letter still.”
George did not sigh so much as give a terrible shudder, one which started at his feet and shook the whole of the rest of his body. Bute, in a rare moment of pity, thought he had never seen the young man at a lower ebb.
“But how can I do that to the woman I love?”
“You must tell her that though you love her above all other women, it is your sacred duty to put your country first.”
The King got to his feet blindly, heading for the door without looking round. The Earl, guessing that His Majesty was on the point of tears, did nothing to stop him going.
“This day my heart breaks,” George said chokingly. “Why was I not born to lesser station?”
And he stumbled out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him. Bute stared after him, wondering if victory was his or whether his pupil might yet change his mind, and thinking, as the shadows of that summer evening darkened, that if the King did indeed decide to cast off Lady Sarah he would be casting away with her his youth and joy.
The Earl shook his head and went off to report all that had happened to the Princess of Wales.
*
Sunday service was divine, thought Sarah, and smiled at her own small joke. Heaven alone knew how, but after the Drawing Room on the previous Thursday when the King had slipped a note into her glove, an act which nobody could possibly have seen, the gossip was all round London that His Majesty was about to announce his betrothal to Lady Sarah Lennox. As a consequence of this, the Chapel Royal at St James’s was packed to overflowing on the following Sunday. Spectacles flashed on noses, quizzing glasses were rife, several people who did not normally carry ear trumpets now appeared with them, and there was an air of barely controlled excitement.
As Sarah entered the Chapel accompanied by her sisters Lady Caroline and Lady Emily, the people divided into two lines so that she passed through them as if she were already a queen. Fox, bringing up the rear, grinned mightily, and twirled his new cane crowned with an ebony negro’s head.
“What a beauty! Young Georgie’s done very well for himself,” bellowed deaf old Lady Granby, and there was a roar of laughter and applause more suitable for the playhouse than a place of worship.
Sarah went in head high, the secret of the royal betrothal clutched tight to her heart, and took her place amongst the other ladies in the gallery, the peers and gentlemen sitting below. The royal pew, however, was situated across the west end of the Chapel on the same level as the gallery and as the King came in from his private staircase, his sister behind him, everyone stood and gazed almost as if they expected him to wink an eye at them. But though he did not do that, George most certainly did not disappoint the onlookers. Having taken his seat he looked round to see if Sarah was there and then, having located her, stared at her with such a look of pure devotion that the congregation seethed with speculation.
“Odds on Sarah as royal bride,” was being whispered from person to person. It was generally believed that an announcement would be made by the end of that week.
Very touchingly, the young couple, though they did not speak to one another, made their love apparent for all the world to see. The King quite literally did not take his eyes from Sarah’s beautiful face throughout the entire proceedings while she, though attempting not to look in his direction, frequently caught his glance and blushed. Not one soul followed the service and the sermon was delivered to a crowd of craning necks.
Yet there was a general feeling of disappointment when Lady Sarah Lennox did not attend the Drawing Room that afternoon and many people wondered why she had stayed at home. The truth was very simple. The girl was indisposed, or rather had such an extraordinary feeling that all was not well with her royal lover that she claimed to have a headache and begged to stay behind in her bedroom.
But the minute the carriage bearing her sisters and brother-in-law could be heard rattling down the drive, Sarah rose from her bed and went to the window where she stared pensively out on the beautiful summer parkland.
‘What can it be?’ she thought. ‘Why am I ill at ease?’
For certain, the King had looked at her with so much love, so much blatant adoration, that it made Sarah’s heart ache just to think about it. And yet there had been a shadow in those blue eyes, a look of wretchedness that could not be overlooked or explained. Yesterday they had plighted their troth, had given each other a promise to be faithful for ever. Today the King was noticeably saddened, at least to her perceptive gaze.
“The Princess and Bute again,” sighed Sarah aloud and went downstairs that she might think the better now the house was empty.
It was a glorious day, the sun as hot as ever, the weather just as fine as when she had surrendered her innocence to the King. Moodily, Sarah paced the Saloon, played two pieces by Handel on her harpsichord and then, tiring of being inside, left the house by the door in the east wing and made her way to the Green Walk that ran parallel with the drive on the other edge of the fields. Here it was fresh and pleasant, the row of trees planted on the eastern side throwing a cool shadow at this hour of the day. Thinking about the King, wishing she knew exactly what it was that bothered him, Sarah made her way towards the Great Road humming the tune played by the gypsy fiddler when the haymakers had stopped for their noontime break.
And then, to her utter astonishment, Sarah heard the same tune played on the harpsichord, floating towards her on the summer breeze. Puz
zled, she looked all around, then back over her shoulder, thinking the sound must have come from Holland House. But the mansion was no longer there, only a ruinous shell with part of the east wing still standing in its place. The elm drive, too, had vanished and the soft grass of the Green Walk had changed into a hard substance which was not pleasant to the feet.
Without warning, the light of that beautiful summer’s day suddenly started to fade and Sarah stood in the gloaming, frightened and confused, certain that she must be dreaming yet feeling terribly alert and awake. The sound of the music continued and looking to her left the girl saw that the long line of shady trees had gone, in their place a high brick wall in which, spaced at intervals, was a series of wooden doors. And it was from behind the door beside which Sarah now stood that the sound of the harpsichord was coming. In the darkness, for it had changed from dusk to night almost in a matter of seconds, she pushed the door open and went in.
She was in a small well-kept garden, a neat terrace with stone flower-filled pots at the far end. Above this terrace loomed a tall thin house, a house which Sarah knew perfectly well could not be there, for the land beyond the Green Walk belonged to Mr Seymour and had no buildings upon it. Yet, illusion though this must be, Sarah could still hear the sound of the harpsichord coming from yet another door, a door with a panel of glass in it, which led off the terrace and into the house. Terrified, trembling, she felt herself drawn irresistibly towards the music. Very slowly, Sarah walked through the garden, ascended the terrace and peered within.
She was looking into a music room of sorts, though furnished most oddly. A great many people, dressed outlandishly and in fashions she simply could not comprehend, lounged on low sofas, some even sitting on the floor, listening to the harpsichordist. Peering sideways to see the player more clearly, Sarah recognised the fall of autumnal hair, the wide smiling mouth, and knew that it was the woman who haunted her, the woman whom the King himself had glimpsed on two separate occasions, the woman who was neither ghost nor yet real, and whose presence in Sarah’s life was utterly inexplicable.
And then her attention was drawn to the harpsichord. It was so like her own that Sarah could hardly believe her eyes. Yet there, plain to see, was the mahogany and walnut case, the two manuals, the name board bearing the words, Thomas Blasser, London, 1745. Without thinking what she was doing, Sarah opened the door and stepped inside to examine it more closely.
Feeling that he was in a draught, Rod Rees looked up and saw that the garden door had blown open. Quietly, so as not to disturb Sidonie’s playing, he got to his feet thinking to close it, utterly entranced as he was with his client’s latest composition, a strange haunting air which she claimed was based on an eighteenth-century folk tune, though Rod could not say that he had ever heard the original.
As he approached the door the agent saw Sarah standing in the entrance and felt every particle of colour drain from his face. Involuntarily, he exclaimed, “My God,” though the last thing he had wanted was to make any kind of scene.
“What is it?” asked Sidonie, looking up.
Rod heard his own voice answer her and realised that it had become thin with fear.
“There,” he said, “in the doorway. There was something standing there, I could have sworn it.”
“It was only the moonlight,” Finnan put in reassuringly. “Just a patch of moonlight.”
“I thought it was a woman.”
“No,” answered the Irishman, “there really is nothing there.”
And Finnan looked straight at Sarah as if he could not see her. Yet though she could have sworn he smiled just for a moment as their eyes met Sarah, in total confusion, backed away into the darkness, leaving behind the bizarre concert into which she had so frighteningly stumbled.
Chapter Fourteen
“Honour is dead!” said Henry Fox dramatically. “My God, Caro, honour is dead.”
“And so will you be,” answered his wife tartly, “if you drink another drop tonight. You have consumed a great deal too much brandy, Henry, and are becoming maudlin. I must bid you stop.”
“But how could he do it, answer me that? And to someone as beautiful and fine as Sarah? Is this decency? Is this honesty? What manner of man do we have as King of this realm?” answered her husband, ignoring Caroline’s instruction and pouring another glassful down his throat in a single draught.
“We have a weak man and that’s the truth of it. He’s no monster, just clay in the hands of others. It’s as well Sarah did not marry him. He would have been on her nerves in no time at all.”
“Who knows, who knows?” Fox answered gloomily, and there was silence for a few minutes as the couple watched the sun setting over the parkland.
It was the 7th July, 1761, and the rumour was all over London that at the Council meeting to be held next day the King was to announce his marriage to Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg and that Sarah Lennox would be out in the cold. And yet Fox still found it hard to believe what the fashionable world was saying. For at the Drawing Room on 2nd July, though the King had been hounded by his sister Augusta, who had openly laughed in Sarah’s face, he had looked at the girl with what could only be described as a tender lovelight in his eye. And now it had most astonishingly come to this. The Paymaster felt that he was on nodding acquaintance with public humiliation.
Upstairs, in the privacy of her bedroom, the object of all the speculation sat writing to Susan, pouring out something of what she felt, telling some of the truth if not the whole of it. For Sarah was too deeply hurt to admit even to her best friend that her heart had been broken by the King’s wretched behaviour.
All in all, it had been a very strange few days. Looking back, Sarah could only think that the hallucination had been a presage of doom; the hallucination in which she imagined her own precious harpsichord was being played by the mysterious woman in a house that did not even exist. She had woken to find that she had fainted in the Green Walk, that it was late afternoon, that there were no houses in sight and that the dew of evening was just beginning to dampen her clothes. Shaking and nauseous, Sarah had stumbled home and gone straight to bed, comforted by a nervous Lucy. And from that moment on, or so it seemed to her now, things had started to go wrong.
Four days later she had gone to the Drawing Room to find her royal lover tense and nervous, while Sarah herself had been openly mocked by Princess Augusta and her lady attendants. And then had come the fatal rumour; George was to marry the German princess after all.
“But he is betrothed to me!” Sarah had exclaimed, though only to herself, and had gone into The Wilderness to sit on the stone seat and sob uncontrollably, her world in ruins, all her youthful hopes trampled under foot, utterly disillusioned that the man to whom she had surrendered her virtue could have cast her aside so callously. To make matters worse — or was it perhaps better — Ste and Charles James were both home; the elder boy, taller and thinner, from the Grand Tour, the younger back from Eton. And it was this middle son of Henry Fox and Caroline who came across his youthful aunt in great distress, sitting alone and looking so abject that the boy, now aged twelve, also burst into tears. Rushing to Sarah, Charles put his arms round her and they wept silently together. Eventually though, he asked the obvious question.
“Dearest Sarah, what has upset you? Please tell me.”
She looked at him red-eyed and white-faced with no trace of her great beauty at this moment. “I can’t. It is a secret never to be spoken.”
“Are you with child?” asked Charles practically.
Sarah looked slightly annoyed. “No, that is a naughty thing to say.”
“Then what is it? Is the King going to marry somebody else?”
“How do you know all this?”
“It is the talk of Eton. I have been taking wagers that my aunt will soon be Queen of England.”
Sarah’s chin quivered. “Then you’re going to lose them. His Majesty is to marry a German princess.”
“Then more fool him.” The acuteness tha
t was one day going to make Charles James Fox the rogue politician he was destined to become, gleamed momentarily on his face. “It is he who will lose, Sarah, mark my words. And for making you suffer I shall hound him, I promise you that.”
“But I don’t hate him. I love him still.”
The boy looked wise. “That will pass in time. But now, swear that you won’t show anyone else how much he has hurt you. Please.”
“But how can I explain my face, Charles? I am as blotchy as an old sow.”
“I saw a poor squirrel lying injured beneath a tree. Let us take it back home and say you weep for that.”
Sarah looked at her nephew in some amazement. “I do declare you’re as wily as your father. It’s not natural in a child so young, indeed it isn’t.”
“Blood will out,” Charles had answered, and had led his aunt home by the hand, holding the damaged squirrel carefully in the other, and swearing to all the people he met that day that Lady Sarah Lennox was more concerned for the creature’s health than ever she was for the latest whim of His Majesty.
But now Sarah sat at her writing desk, honour bound to tell sweet Susan something of what had transpired.
“I have been very often since I last wrote,” she put, “but tho’ nothing was said, he always took pains to shew me some preference by talking twice, and mighty kind speeches and looks; even last Thursday, the day after the orders were come out, the hipocrite had the face to come up and speak to me with all the good humour in the world, and seemed to want to speak to me but was afraid.”
And indeed how wretched her lover had looked, Sarah thought, and what a desperate situation it was for both of them. And then her natural anger exploded and she wrote, “He must have sent to this woman before you went out of town; then what business had he to begin again? In short, his behaviour is that of a man who has neither sense, good nature, nor honesty. I shall go Thursday sennight; I shall take care to shew that I am not mortified to anybody, but if it is true that one can vex anybody with a reserved, cold manner, he shall have it I promise him.”
