by Angus Donald
‘Your Majesty,’ Buckingham continued, when he had regained his composure, ‘all is not lost. We have the jewels, we have Blood – and I believe I can persuade him to keep his mouth shut until he is tried and hanged. A week or two should see it done. But I may need to make some outlays in gold – and perhaps if you were to make some gesture towards me in recompense for the expenses I shall undoubtedly incur, that would encourage me to manage this matter as swiftly and quietly as possible.’
‘What do you want?’
‘There is a sweet little estate in County Kildare called Straffan that would complement my lands in that county most charmingly.’
The King looked at him. ‘I’ll think about it. But can you truly get Blood to stay quiet and accept his own death without a murmur? How?’
‘I have my own methods, sire, but I think it would be best if you were not party to them, don’t you?’
For the first time the King looked discomforted. ‘Yes, don’t tell me. You’re right. I don’t want to know. But you should know this, my Lord Buckingham. If your methods are as incompetently managed as the rest of this risible shambles, I will make you pay for it. And you will never get your hands on Straffan or any other “sweet little estates” that are within my gift, that I can tell you. If I am in the slightest part embarrassed by this, whatever it is, and if you do not swiftly clear up this enormous stinking shit-pile you have created – you will be finished at court. Do I make myself clear?’
Monday 15 May, 1671
Holcroft had returned directly to the Cockpit after a brief visit to the Blue Boar. Warburton had been hostile and had claimed that he had no message for Blood but, grudgingly, he had shown the boy the room where the men had stayed and the bloodstains on the floorboards of corridor where Parrot had met his end. He told him that the soldiers had taken Parrot’s body and the glittering mound of jewels with them when they departed. Tom, he said, had jumped from the window and escaped. It was clear from his manner that he could not wait for Holcroft to leave his inn. Finally, Warburton asked him to tell his father that the favour was now more than repaid and that he would be most obliged if Colonel Blood never darkened his door again.
There had been no point in returning to Tower to deliver this bad news so Holcroft had returned to the Cockpit from White Chapel Street, low-spirited, despondent and strangely exhausted by events. He went to bed.
The next morning after he had made his usual delivery and collection at the General Post Office in the City, there was another shock awaiting him when he returned to the clerks’ office in the Duke of Buckingham’s apartments. When he looked in the little cupboard beneath his desk that held his few personal possessions, he saw that the lock had been crudely broken open with a knife or a chisel and that his belongings, usually meticulously folded and placed just so, had been rummaged through and were tossed into confusion. Holcroft felt sick. The intrusion felt like an assault on his person. Worse than that, when he looked again through his belongings, he found that his pack of Parisian playing cards was gone.
The cards might have been limp, greasy and past their best, but the feeling in his heart was akin to a bereavement. The queen of diamonds, and all the others, had been taken from him. He could feel an actual physical pain in his heart. Yet he also recognized with part of his mind that they were only fifty-two painted rectangles of cardboard worth no more than a shilling or two, perhaps less.
When they returned from their dinner, he asked Mullins and the other two clerks if they knew anything about the breaking of the lock on his cupboard, and they evinced surprise and horror and vowed they knew nothing about it, but there was something about their manner, they looked away from Holcroft when they offered their condolences for his lost belongings, that made him feel uneasy. Not that he was any judge of the subtleties of human expression, but he was almost sure that they were lying to him.
Then Mullins handed him a small letter that had arrived that morning from Lancashire, and he read with a sense of dull inevitability that his mother was dead. Granny Maggie wrote that despite the solicitous care of the local physician – whose fee was only affordable through Holcroft’s generosity – his mother had been gathered unto God a week ago after a long, draining illness. She had been buried in the churchyard at Culcheth. Holcroft sat staring numbly at his desk and considered the twin losses of his Parisian playing cards and his mother. He wondered which he would rather have back in his life – then stopped himself from completing that thought.
When the little bell rang, summoning him to his master’s study, it was almost with a sense of relief that he gathered up his papers and left his silent, awkward colleagues and made his way through the corridors and into the Duke of Buckingham’s lair.
There was a palpable sense of gaiety in the duke’s study as if some triumph were being celebrated. Sir Thomas Osborne, Sir Thomas Littleton and the duke were drinking port wine and it was clear when Holcroft entered that Littleton had been telling an anecdote. Oddly, when the confidential clerk came into the room, Littleton stopped mid-sentence and all three men stared at him as if they’d never seen him before in their lives.
‘Should I come back later, Your Grace?’
‘No, no. Come in, Mister Blood – we were just discussing your illustrious family.’
Holcroft had no idea what to say to that so he said nothing.
‘Now, Holcroft – tell me, if you would be so kind, where have we got to on the matter of the Duke of Ormonde’s letter?’
Holcroft looked meaningfully at Osborne and Littleton, then back at the duke with raised eyebrows.
‘Oh do not worry about these two. You may speak freely in front of them; they have been fully appraised of the situation.’
‘I have the letter on my person,’ said Holcroft, touching the front of his coat and feeling the crackle of paper from the inside pocket. ‘And I am prepared to give it to you in exchange for your word of honour that you will pay over the agreed sum of five hundred pounds within the week. You two gentlemen shall witness the duke’s word, if you please.’ Holcroft looked at Littleton and Osborne who merely smiled archly, then glanced at each other.
‘Oh certainly,’ said the duke, ‘you have my word that I shall pay up like a lamb – if the letter is truly what it is purported to be.’
He held out his hand.
Holcroft reached into his inside coat pocket, pulled out the letter and passed it to him.
The duke opened the letter and took a long time in reading it. Holcroft looked out of the window. It was a cold, cloudy day, and though it was mid-May it had more of the chill of autumn about it.
‘It’s very good,’ said the duke finally. ‘Very good indeed.’
‘You are satisfied with it then, sir?’
‘I’m impressed. Who did Aphra use for this? Was it that playbill-writer Wilkinson? He’s the best in the business and this is fine work. It’s almost perfect: the signature is superb, if I didn’t know it was as fake as a wooden farthing, I might well believe it. Tell Mistress Behn I congratulate her.’
Holcroft’s belly felt as if it was filling with icy water.
‘Are you not going to protest? Will you not swear on your honour that it is the real document?’
Holcroft shrugged.
‘Will you not plead ignorance? Or say that you did not know that it was a fake? Weep bitter tears? Pretend that Aphra Behn hoodwinked you?’
Holcroft said nothing.
‘Oh you are a sad bore, Mister Blood, a great disappointment to me. I promised my friends some entertainment today. I planned to have Westbury and d’Erloncourt come in and confound you with the evidence of their eyes – they followed you all over town, you know, and saw you meeting the Behn woman to plot this shabby little deceit half a dozen times. You were hardly discreet. So – nothing to say to me then?’
‘If you do not want to buy the letter, may I have it back?’
Buckingham actually laughed. ‘You are a cool one. Why not? I am a man of my word and I am certainl
y not going to pay you for this nonsense. Here. Take it.’ He spun the letter from his fingers towards Holcroft. It reached about halfway between them and fluttered to the floor. Holcroft bent down and picked it up.
‘I suppose you plan to sell it to Lord Arlington. Is that your scheme? You failed to dupe me so why not try again. Is that it?’
Holcroft said nothing. He was thinking of his wasted five pounds.
‘I don’t mind in the slightest if you do, actually; anything that blackens Ormonde’s name is a joy to me. Make a fool of Arlington too, by all means. But do not dare to mention my name to him in connection with this.’
‘Is there any thing else that you require of me, Your Grace?’
For the first time, the duke showed a trace of anger: ‘Yes, God damn you. I require that you consider yourself dismissed from my service. I require that you take your miserable, conniving, ungrateful, cheating carcass out of my sight this minute. That is what I require of you, Mister Blood. And you should ensure that I do not lay eyes on you ever again. You are fortunate that I do not have you flogged through White Hall. I consider that I am being more than merciful in that I do not bring you before a magistrate and have you hanged. So go, consider yourself lucky, and do not trouble me again!’
Holcroft bowed, turned and headed for the door. Before he had got through it, he heard the duke say: ‘Oh, and you should know, boy, that your father will be dead before the month is up. The King will not see him. Take that happy thought with you, ingrate!’
It took Holcroft less than five minutes to gather up his belongings from the clerk’s hall, his papers and his clothes, and bundle them up in an old cloth fardel before heading out into the tulip garden. But during that short time, it seemed that word of his ignominious dismissal had spread like lightning throughout the entire staff of the duke’s establishment.
The pages were all there to watch him go: Robert Westbury, with a superior smirk on his aristocratic face; Henri d’Erloncourt, who blushed and glared and seemed furious that Holcroft should have tried to dupe his lover; and Albert St John, who just looked confused and a little frightened. Mullins and his three clerks kept their faces artfully blank. Matlock the steward gave him an evil grin and a little comical wave goodbye. But it was Arnold the porter who administered the coup de grâce. As Holcroft passed through his gate and set off down the narrow alley towards The Street with his bundle over his shoulder, Arnold lashed out with his long leg and gave Holcroft a humiliating and surprisingly painful boot directly to the seat of his breeches.
*
Later that afternoon, in a mood of celebration, Arnold Smith and Robert Westbury shared a large jug of the duke’s best burgundy in the cosy back room of the porter’s lodge. The porter and the senior page had engaged in carouses before – over several memorable nights, Arnold had introduced the boy to some of the murkier houses of ill-repute in London, the kind of places where you could do anything, absolutely anything, you liked to the girls, up to and including murder, if you had the money to pay for it – and Westbury, while otherwise forgotten by his father, still received a generous allowance.
‘I must say I was glad to see the back of that mad prig Blood,’ said Westbury, idly scratching a louse in his groin. ‘He’s been like a stone in my shoe these past few months but, thank God, we’ve seen the last of him.’
‘Trying to nip gold money out of our duke like that,’ agreed Arnold, taking a deep swig of his stolen burgundy, ‘he ought to be hanged at the very least. Old Bucky was too soft on him, in my humble opinion. Far too soft. Only encourages the other sharpers.’
‘I suspect he fancied him. Blood probably sucked his fat cock most nights. Makes even the greatest nobleman feel mighty kind and forgiving, having his balls drained on a regular basis.’
‘It’s not right, though. Not right at all. He should have had more ’n a fare-thee-well and a boot up the bum after what he did.’
‘I wouldn’t have minded giving him a few good licks from my belt,’ said Westbury, ‘maybe even a proper old-fashioned horse-whipping. But it’s too late now – the dim-lit bastard’s gone for good.’
‘It might not be too late, Bobbie,’ said Arnold, shooting a glance at his friend. ‘Might not be too late at all. Where do you suppose he might have fetched up?’
‘Where would he go? To a friend’s house, I suppose. His father is in the Tower, likely to be hanged any day. And I heard his mother was dead, too. So I suppose he would try to find lodging with a friend.’
‘Didn’t have too many friends, as I recall,’ said Arnold slyly.
Westbury and Arnold looked at each other.
‘He’ll go to the Behn woman,’ said Westbury.
‘He’s likely tucked up cosy with that little slut, sucking on her lovely titties as he cries his little eyes out at his great misfortune.’
‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of that myself,’ said Westbury, laughing.
‘How do you suppose our duke would feel,’ said the old porter, ‘if a pair of ruffians, knowing where Master Holcroft was roosting now, was to set upon him, say, in a darkened alley and give him a bit of a hiding – maybe that horse-whipping you spoke of. Maybe they might take a lash to that blonde bitch, too; maybe even give her a little something more besides.’
‘I should think the duke would be delighted.’
‘The ruffians would have to give it a few days, let the dust settle, so to speak. Make sure they knew where the bastard was staying. But then . . . Do you think a reward of some sort might be forthcoming from Old Bucky?’
‘It might well be, for service above and beyond the call of duty. Ten pounds. Twenty, if the old boy was feeling generous. At the very least the, ah, ruffians would have the gratitude of our good duke – and that might be worth something one day – and o’ course the satisfaction of delivering just retribution to those who most certainly deserve it.’
*
Holcroft heard the singing long before he saw the four men approaching. After six months in White Hall he was quite familiar with groups of drunken courtiers stumbling joyfully from one place of refreshment to another, but he had learned to avoid them since their rough horseplay and crude teasing could quickly turn to ugly violence – Albert St John had had his breeches pulled down by one such group of gallants not two weeks past and when he protested, the revellers, every man bearing some title of dignity, some even peers of the realm, had knocked him down and pissed all over him.
So, at the sounds of revelry, Holcroft got up from the stone seat before the sundial in the Privy Garden, where he had been sitting these past two hours, trying to quiet his frantic mind after his dismissal, and moved back thirty yards or so into the shadow of a yew hedge where in his dark coat he was reasonably inconspicuous. He recognized John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, an intimate of the King and a notorious drunkard and one of the other men, a bluff fellow called Henry Savile. The bawdy singing, something about the King and his mistresses, broke down into confused barks of laughter as the four men drew near to the sundial. He heard Wilmot declaim: ‘Restless he rolls from whore to whore; a merry monarch, scandalous and poor!’
His friends all honked like geese and clutched their hands to their stomachs with the agony of their glee.
Holcroft drew further back into the shade of the yew hedge.
Wilmot made a great show of peering at the enamel plaque that depicted the King holding his sceptre, which appeared to jut priapically from his lap, then he turned to his comrades, winked at them, looked back at the plaque and said: ‘What’s that, Your Majesty? Do you mean to fuck Time?’
His companions fell about, some laughing so hard they fell to the ground, praising his wit between gasps. Holcroft felt disgusted, even soiled, not just at the disrespect shown to the King’s image but also at that shown to the sundial, that divine instrument, the incarnation of universal rectitude.
With a flourish, Wilmot drew his sword, a slim steel blade about a yard in length. ‘I am afraid, Your Majesty,’ he said, ‘I cannot al
low that unnatural congress. Kings and Kingdoms shall tumble, and so shall you!’
With that the Earl of Rochester began slashing wildly at the sundial; the glass spheres popping like pricked bladders, the metal arms clanging discordantly against the steel blade, slicing off the filigree works, bending the arms, the extremities snapping clean off. Holcroft stood rooted to the spot, frozen in horror. Wilmot’s friends, hooting with joy, drew their own weapons and began to attack the sundial with a similar manic energy, hacking at its elegant limbs, cracking the enamel plaques, slashing at the central iron stem in a bizarre parody of the melee. When the others were puffing, red-faced, spent, Henry Savile hurled himself bodily at the ruined sundial, catching it with his beefy shoulder and knocking it down to crash against the gravel path on which it had stood. He picked himself up and looked at his companions: ‘The tyrant is dead, long live Mother Time!’
If he had been expecting cheers, he was to be disappointed. Not a man said anything. The mood had changed as swiftly as the wind. Wilmot was looking at the nicks in the edge of his sword, feeling them with his thumb. The other two men looked shamefaced. ‘This calls for a mighty drink!’ said Wilmot. ‘Come, my gang of merry revellers, let us celebrate our victory!’
‘Let us stroll in St James’s Park,’ said Savile. ‘There are wine-sellers a plenty to be found there – whores too, I’ll warrant.’
As they staggered away, Holcoft saw Johnny Wilmot lay an arm over Henry Savile’s broad shoulder and heard him say in a conversational tone: ‘Much wine had passed, with grave discourse, of who fucks who, and who does worse . . .’
When they had gone, Holcroft approached the mangled remains of the sundial as if he were walking up to a fresh and bloody corpse. He looked down at the scattered, severed arms, the shards of broken glass and enamel, chips of gold paint, the twisted metal limbs, the hacked-off dials, the whole once-beautiful edifice lying on the gravel of the path like a fallen warrior, dismembered in the dusk of a battlefield, and he felt the acid tears burn his eyelids that had not come when he had heard that his mother was dead. Nor had he wept when the Duke of Buckingham had expelled him from the Cockpit that afternoon, dashing his hopes of ever becoming a soldier, nor had there been tears at the news of his father’s imminent death.
