The Remarkable Life and Times of Eliza Rose

by Mary Hooper

  Until Eliza saw it, she hadn’t been able to imagine the size and scale of the triple tree at Tyburn, the mighty structure, which – as Ma Gwyn cheerfully reminded them – could hang fifteen persons at once. Now as she took her place on the viewing stand erected for the occasion, the three-armed edifice rose before her, large and terrifying. She glanced anxiously back towards the City, praying that she’d see a lone horseman galloping up the road with a document under his arm. Perhaps some high and mighty lawman would step in, perhaps it was not too late for someone to hand over a princely sum which would save Duval …

  The fellow who’d committed treason was, as Ma Gwyn had predicted, dead on arrival at the gallows, but the cart containing the other four prisoners circled the area one last time and then drew up in front of the triple tree amidst mingled shouts of abuse and cries of support. The young woman carrying the child kissed it, again and again, and then, with tears falling down her face, gave it to an older woman standing alongside. As Eliza watched, appalled, the hangman climbed into the cart with the prisoners and fitted the hanging nooses over their heads. He gave the order for the cart to move forward, its driver whipped up the horses and it went off at a smart pace, leaving the four prisoners swaying on the end of their ropes. Eliza screwed her eyes up tightly and turned away.

  When Claude Duval’s turn came a few moments later, the roar of the crowd rose to a crescendo and, as his cart was manoeuvred into position under the gallows, a woman ran forward and flung herself on to it, sobbing, and was hauled off by the hangman. Another left a nearby carriage and made as if to go towards him, but fell in a graceful faint before she’d taken as many as six steps. Many of the women in the crowd were crying and others were turned away as if they couldn’t face the scene.

  Eliza stared down the roadway once more, but there was no single traveller on a desperate mission of mercy. Claude spoke to the crowd, but his words were drowned out by sobs and cries. His speech would survive, however, for Eliza could see that what he was saying was being inscribed by two men beside the scaffold.

  A church minister spoke a few final words to him; Duval bowed low to the crowd – and, Eliza thought, seemed to see her and Nell in the crowd and wave to them. The hangman fitted the noose around his head. As the order came to move the horses forward a great moan came from the assembled crowd and Eliza gripped Nell’s hand and closed her eyes. When, some moments later, she was brave enough to open them again, Claude Duval’s body was swinging, lifeless, on the end of a rope.

  There had been no reprieve.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  That evening, Eliza stayed within her own room, keeping very quiet. She was immensely sad about Claude Duval, but also concerned about the unknown persons who’d gone to Ma Gwyn’s tavern enquiring for her. She’d seen many posters that day asking for information about Claude Duval’s collaborators, and feared that at any moment someone might hammer on the front door and march her off to Newgate Prison. Perhaps naturally, then, when Mrs Pearce came to say that there was a gentleman caller waiting in the drawing room, she thought that moment had come.

  ‘He can’t want me. Where’s Mistress Gwyn?’ Eliza asked.

  ‘Gone in the carriage to see Mistress Behn,’ said the housekeeper. ‘I told him that, and he said he’d like to see you instead.’

  ‘Is he … does he look like a sheriff or a constable?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Mrs Pearce. ‘He looks a fine young gentleman.’

  A fine young gentleman, Eliza thought, did not sound like someone who’d come to drag her away, and she went downstairs and, going into the drawing room, found Valentine Howard gazing admiringly at the half-naked Lely portrait of Nell which was now hanging over the fireplace.

  Eliza dropped a curtsy, going pink as she remembered their last conversation.

  ‘Forgive my intrusion,’ he said, giving a brief bow, ‘but I come with some urgency and would ask you to give your mistress a message.’

  Eliza nodded and wondered whether to risk a bien sûr but decided against it. ‘Of course,’ she said. She waited for him to say more, but he remained silent. ‘Would you like to sit down?’ she asked, for he seemed agitated and there were drops of sweat along his upper lip. He didn’t seem to hear these words, however, and she had to repeat them before he said abruptly that this wouldn’t be necessary.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he suddenly burst out, ‘I have had a wearying day and I’m trying to get my feelings in order so that I may sound as rational as possible.’ He swallowed hard. ‘I wished to see Nell to ask her to intercede with the king.’

  Eliza did not feel it was her place to enquire what she might be interceding about, so just nodded. After another long silence he went on, ‘It concerns my friend Henry Monteagle,’ and then turned away – but not before Eliza thought she’d seen tears in his eyes. ‘Today,’ he continued a moment later, rather hoarsely, ‘my friend took advantage of the whole of London being occupied with the hanging of Claude Duval to fight a duel.’

  ‘I knew he was about to,’ Eliza admitted.

  ‘I was his second, and saw him hit by the first bullet fired by his opponent.’

  A spasm crossed his face and Eliza said, startled, ‘Is he dead?’

  He gave a slight nod and Eliza drew in her breath, wondering what to say. She couldn’t feel any sorrow – or she could, she thought, but only for those he’d left behind.

  After a moment she said, ‘Then I’m very sorry for his family.’

  Valentine went to the window and, pressing his head against the window, looked out on to the darkened street. ‘Perhaps … perhaps you’d be kind enough to ask Nell whether she’d plead with the king. He’d banned Henry from court, you see, but the Monteagle family wish him to have a proper funeral with all due ceremony.’ He hesitated. ‘The king denies Nell very little, and if she were to appeal to him I’m sure he’d accede to her wishes.’

  ‘I’ll speak to her as soon as she returns,’ Eliza said, still stunned by the news. She thought hard to recall a redeeming feature of Monteagle’s that she might mention. ‘You’ll miss him very much, I’m sure,’ she added after a moment. ‘You were good friends.’

  ‘We were,’ Valentine said. He swallowed. ‘He had a difficult life – a hard childhood.’

  ‘Hard?’ Eliza couldn’t keep the disbelief out of her voice.

  ‘He didn’t want for material things,’ Valentine went on, ‘but his upbringing was brutal. From a very young age he was kept from the arms of his mother and the tenderness of his sisters and given entirely into his father’s care, who left no stone unturned to ensure that he grew up a man as arrogant and callous as himself.’

  Eliza didn’t reply to this. If she had done, she thought, she’d have said that this did not excuse Henry Monteagle his cruelty or his drunkenness or his violent ways. She couldn’t say this to Valentine – to his friend – though. Especially not now, when he looked so low. In sympathy she reached out to touch his arm, and somehow his hand grasped hers.

  ‘It must be very hard to lose someone you love,’ she said gently.

  Valentine managed to smile at her. ‘I thank you for your understanding,’ he said. They gazed at each other for a long moment – until Eliza, breathless, almost thought that he might kiss her, but when he spoke it was not of kisses. ‘There have been some … some misunderstandings between us two,’ he said, ‘and for my part, I’m sorry for them.’

  Eliza stood, spellbound, waiting for whatever was going to come next.

  ‘I would have us friends,’ he said, ‘but … for someone in my position that could be difficult.’

  ‘For someone in your position?’ Eliza asked haltingly, and then realised what he was actually saying. ‘Do you mean, rather, for someone in your position … with someone in my position?’ she asked.

  He nodded slightly.

  ‘I am too low for you,’ Eliza said, and it was a statement rather than a question.

  ‘It is just that,’ he said, and he sounded relieved that the ma
tter was in the open.

  Eliza looked at him sadly – although, of course, it was only what she’d known all along. For one moment she found herself tempted to tell him that Doctor Deane had said she was high-born. But why should he believe that when she didn’t even believe it herself?

  Valentine let her hand fall. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but there can be no respectable connection between us.’ And with that he bowed and withdrew.

  Eliza spent the next day or so not knowing whether to feel content that there had been some small link between Valentine Howard and herself – that he’d gone some way to admitting that he’d been attracted to her – or frustration at the strictures of society which forbade there should be such a link. She ought to despise him for believing her too low, but knowing this fact to be true, she was unable to. With her background: no family, no name, no dowry, any right-thinking man of high birth would feel the same.

  The day of the funeral of Lord Henry Monteagle – titled so for a month following the death of his father – dawned with a fierce and sharp frost, even though it was only the beginning of November. Nell’s intercession with the king had worked, and Charles, already regretting that he’d banned Monteagle, had ordered the court into full mourning. This had necessitated Nell’s ordering of some gowns and cloaks in black crêpe, together with a quantity of ebony mourning jewellery.

  ‘I hate myself in black,’ she’d said that morning, setting off in her carriage for the funeral at St Paul’s at Covent Garden. This was the same church, Eliza noted, which was to take the body of Claude Duval when it had finished its lying in state in the popular Tangier Tavern, from where it was drawing people from all parts of the country. Nell had gone to pay her respects there, but Eliza hadn’t, for she was convinced that spies would be watching the place and taking note of all those who attended.

  ‘Black makes you look very pallid,’ Eliza had agreed as she’d tied the bows of Nell’s wrap. ‘Are you sleeping well? Are you sure you don’t feel faint?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Nell protested. ‘I’m as strong as a horse.’

  A little later that morning, however, Eliza received a message from Nell asking that her sable muff and tippet be brought to the church, for she feared that it would be so cold standing at the graveside that she’d take a chill. Eliza hurriedly found these objects and left the house with them, picking up a bag of hot chestnuts from a streetseller in the Strand to warm the inside of the muff.

  A great array of black-ribboned carriages filled the square outside the church and, hurrying across to it, Eliza wondered to herself whether anyone else there, like her, was glad to see Henry Monteagle dead – for she realised now that she’d never had a single meeting with him that hadn’t been an unpleasant one.

  As she wasn’t wearing mourning dress she entered the church and hid herself at the back. She’d stand in the shadows and look for Nell, she decided, then try and attract her attention. She might get a glimpse of Valentine, too; although he’d be up at the front with the chief mourners – with Monteagle’s mother and sisters.

  Eliza craned her neck to see to the front of the church where, on a deep marble pedestal, lay the coffin containing Henry Monteagle covered by a black silk pall on which was embroidered his family’s coat of arms: an eagle on a mountain peak. Seeing three figures standing together in the front pew, Eliza imagined the tallest was Valentine, with a Monteagle sister on each side of him. Such pretty sisters, she couldn’t help but think again. One, perhaps, was a little too old for Valentine’s consideration, but the other was just right. And of the correct social class too, so with due regard for that and for their shared sympathy over the bereavement, it would be entirely natural for them to find comfort in each other’s arms …

  Eliza felt sudden tears sting her eyes and quickly blinked them away. She didn’t want anyone to think that she was weeping for the man in the coffin.

  The service finished and, as the church bells tolled, the congregation started to file out of the church, preceded by the draped coffin carried by several black-robed figures. On seeing that one of these was Monmouth, Eliza pressed herself further back into the shadows, anxious that he shouldn’t catch a glimpse of her in case it somehow reminded him of the day he’d been held up by Claude Duval. As Monmouth passed where she was standing, Eliza suddenly saw Nell and, darting forward, pressed the tippet and muff into her hands. Nell, deep in conversation with the Earl of Rochester, broke off to thank her, then Eliza sat down in the nearest pew to wait until everyone else had left the church.

  At that point someone approached her. A tall, handsome woman, pale, wearing full mourning dress: black gown with black fur-lined cape and a deep hood. She came over, alone, to where Eliza was sitting and stood before her, and such was her presence and innate nobility that, although she’d no idea who she was, Eliza immediately got to her feet and gave a deep curtsy.

  The woman surveyed her kindly. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  Eliza gave her name nervously, for to have such a woman notice, let alone speak to her, was quite unexpected and surprising.

  ‘Eliza Rose,’ the woman echoed, and her eyes seemed to catch a light from somewhere. ‘And do you come here to mourn the passing of my son?’

  ‘Your … son?’ Eliza stammered in surprise, wondering to herself how such a lady, seemingly both gracious and temperate, could have given birth to one like he.

  The woman nodded. ‘I am Henry Monteagle’s mother.’

  Eliza hung her head. ‘You must excuse my appearance, but I’m not a mourner,’ she said when she could trust herself to speak. ‘I’m maid to Mistress Gwyn and came here merely to bring her some warm clothes.’

  The woman looked away, then touched her eyes with a square of black silk. ‘I see,’ she said.

  Eliza curtsied again. ‘I’m immensely sorry for your loss,’ she whispered, and found herself, for some unaccountable reason, trembling all over.

  The woman nodded. ‘It is especially hard to be burying your son on his birthday.’ As she spoke these last words, Eliza felt that she looked at her in a strange and penetrating way. So disconcerted did Eliza feel by the woman’s presence, however, that she attached no particular significance to this, and it wasn’t until she was walking home and happened to look at a bill advertising a play that she realised what the date was that day.

  November the third. And her own birthday.

  Chapter Thirty

  Since coming to London, Eliza thought to herself, so many extraordinary things had happened that she no longer tried to make any sense of them. She’d arrived in London as someone’s daughter, but was no longer that daughter. Instead she’d been, in turn, a prisoner, a mermaid, an orange seller and a highwayman’s moll. And, if she believed the assertions of Doctor Deane the astrologer, then she could add the strangest fact of all to this list: the notion that she was high-born.

  November the third. Her birthday; and also Henry Monteagle’s birthday.

  It had to have been he whose chart Doctor Deane had cast and found to be the same as hers. But how could there be any link or similarity between the two of them? How could she, a humble maid (but perfectly pleasant, she countered), have any similarity to a lord of the realm, and a horrid, callous and drunken one at that? They were astrological twins, the astrologer had said – although he’d allowed that the circumstances of their upbringing would have wrought great changes in their fortunes.

  Lying in bed three days after Henry Monteagle’s funeral, Eliza tried hard to remember Doctor Deane’s exact words to her. He’d said, she thought, that something very interesting and remarkable had happened at her birth. One day, perhaps, she’d go to him again and ask what more he knew, for she yearned to be in possession of any tiny detail about her real family. It was a hard thing, she decided, to have no attachments in life. Some might enjoy this freedom, but she didn’t. She longed for connections: a home, a mother, a father, a sister or a brother. And failing any family, then a sweetheart who loved her would suit – and pref
erably one, she thought now, who was very much like Valentine Howard. In time, someone else might be allowed into her heart, but at that moment it fully belonged to him, be he too highborn or not.

  Two more people had been arrested for their connections with Claude Duval: a woman who’d concealed him from the constables and a footpad who’d sometimes worked with him. Eliza had heard this news with fear, especially as the day before the Lord Mayor had bills posted up over the City asking for anyone who’d ever spoken to Duval to come forward so that they might learn more about his habits and his collaborators and thus make the highways safer places to travel. In view of this continued interest, Eliza considered whether she should again change her appearance, but decided that this would be almost impossible whilst living with the famous Nell.

  She’d tried to speak to Nell about her worries, but her friend was preoccupied both with the coming child and also with trying to keep the king’s attention from straying towards Louise de Keroualle, with whom he seemed somewhat infatuated. Eliza prayed daily that the king would not become jaded with Nell, knowing that her own well-being depended on it. Not that he seemed to love his Nelly any the less, Eliza thought, for she had a new part in a musical play and the king had been in the audience for all three performances. This, however, would probably be the last part Nell played before the birth of her child, for she was becoming rounder and heavier and couldn’t dance a jig half as nimbly as she used to.

  Later that morning Eliza, visiting the Royal Exchange in order to buy exotic fruit to tempt Nell’s appetite, felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Valentine Howard, still in the unrelieved black of deep mourning.

  He bowed and wished her good day and Eliza said a polite good day also, wondering if he was ashamed to be seen speaking to her.

  ‘I’ve just been talking about you,’ he said. ‘In fact, I was making my way to Pall Mall where I hoped to find you at home.’

  Eliza’s first thought was that the constabulary were after her and that he’d come to warn her of it. ‘You hoped … to find me in,’ she stammered. ‘But why?’