‘I believe there is a J, sir. And an O.’
The King sighed and put the key back in his pocket. ‘Well done. Do you understand whom they signify?’
James and Olivia. Ever since I had known Lady Quincy, I had assumed that she had once been the King’s lover. But I had been wrong. James, Duke of York, had been her lover. The bond that now existed between her and the King was one of mutual interest: she had cooperated with His Majesty in the matter of his brother’s indiscretion, and made herself useful to him in other ways ever since.
‘Do you understand?’ the King repeated.
‘I believe so, sir.’ My voice shook a little, and not from cold. The King had known that his brother and Olivia Vauden, Lady Quincy as she now called herself, had been lovers in Bruges, and that Frances was their child; he had known that the Clarendons had sent their bastard daughter to live with the Warleys and he had authorized the payment of a pension for her support. But he hadn’t known of the continuing existence of this letter until Clarendon had found it missing, and had been forced to tell the King.
Had that tipped the scales against Clarendon? Was that the reason that he had finally lost the King’s backing?
The letter had been written in the Duke of York’s own hand in Bruges in 1657. It was addressed on the outside to Mistress Olivia Vauden. Inside, however, the Duke had made it abundantly clear that he was addressing his wife, in the eyes of God and of the law. He wrote of their marriage the previous day, and of the night they had spent together in each other’s arms. He referred by name to the priest who had married them according to the rites of the Church of England.
It was a letter that made the Duke of York a bigamist, by his later marriage to Lord Clarendon’s daughter, and therefore his children by her illegitimate. A good lawyer – Mr Turner, for example – might even argue that the letter effectively legitimized little Mistress Frances and made her next in the line of succession to the throne after her father the Duke. And, by concealing its existence, Lord Clarendon had committed a felony.
And of course that was why the King had ordered Frances to be brought to London, to keep her safely under his eye. The child’s scrofula had been a convenient excuse. But he hadn’t bargained for Lady Quincy’s switching her loyalty to Buckingham.
‘Open the lantern,’ the King commanded.
I obeyed. The flame flickered and almost went out. I turned the lantern to shelter it from the wind. The King folded the paper into a spill and fed it carefully and slowly to the insatiable flame. At the end he burned his fingers. He swore and shut the lantern.
I waited, as one usually does with a king. Thank God, I thought, it’s over at last. Clarendon had become a political liability – his unpopularity in the country and his habit of lecturing the King had already seen to that. Now he had also lost any lingering chance of regaining royal favour, and he was even more in danger of impeachment than he had been before. The winner was Buckingham. Without Clarendon, the King would have to rely increasingly on the support of the Duke and his allies in Parliament if he was to govern the country effectively. But at least the King had destroyed the letter, which meant that Buckingham had lost the biggest prize of all: the chance of using Frances to destabilize the Royal Succession and to weaken the position of the Duke of York, thereby increasing his own influence still further.
‘Marwood,’ the King said. ‘I understand that this child has scrofula.’
Taken unawares, I could only bow.
‘You had better take her to have the disease certified by the Surgeon General. If he confirms it’s scrofula, then you will bring her and my Lady Quincy to me, and I will touch the child in a private ceremony. Tell Chiffinch when you have the certificate, and he will make the arrangements.’
‘As you wish, sir. But …’
‘What?’ The King was already moving away.
‘There’s another child with scrofula in Lady Quincy’s house. An African she keeps as a footboy. Would you allow me to bring him to be touched as well?’
He stopped and looked back at me. ‘Why?’
I scarcely knew the answer myself. ‘It would be a kindness to him. And he was useful to us when Buckingham’s men tried to kidnap Mistress Frances in the Fens.’
‘Very well. As long as one of my surgeons certifies that he has the disease.’
‘Mr Knight has already done so, sir.’
The King gave a low laugh and clapped me on the back with as much familiarity as if I had been one of his intimate friends. ‘You’re a strange devil, Marwood.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, the last day in September, Lady Quincy and I paid a second visit to the Surgeon General, this time with Mistress Frances as well as Stephen. Lady Quincy did not wear a veil, and she was happy for the servant to announce her by her own name. If Mr Knight found anything curious in this, he was too well-bred to mention it.
He examined Frances. When he pronounced that the girl did indeed suffer from scrofula, the consequences took us all by surprise. Mistress Frances stamped her small feet and cried that she could not have the same disease as a nasty little blackamoor. She wailed loudly and tried to bite her mother’s hand. Meanwhile Stephen watched her with great eyes.
‘A good whipping and a diet of bread and water for a day or two,’ Mr Knight said above the racket as he was writing out the certificate. He looked up and smiled benevolently at Frances. ‘That’s the preliminary treatment I would recommend in this particular case. I think you’ll find it will answer. Would you like me to write you a ticket of admission for her as well?’
‘No, thank you,’ Lady Quincy said. ‘The King has agreed to a private ceremony for her.’
Mr Knight raised his eyebrows. ‘I see. How gracious of him.’ He glanced at Stephen. ‘And your footboy?’
‘The next public ceremony, I suppose. But we mustn’t keep you from your patients any longer, sir.’
It was clear Lady Quincy had no interest in Stephen. She had used him as a stalking horse to conceal the real reason for her interest in scrofula and its cure.
Somehow we got Frances into the coach while Mr Knight wrote out Stephen’s ticket. When I came back from settling his bill, the girl was relatively calm, though she keened continually as the coach rumbled slowly through the streets. Her mother seemed helpless in the face of her daughter’s tantrum.
‘I want to go back to Hitcham St Martin,’ Frances wailed suddenly. ‘I want to live with Mistress Warley.’
She buried her face in her hands and repeated the words over and over again like an incantation. Gradually, as the coach found its way back to Cradle Alley, the sounds subsided.
Lady Quincy touched my arm and smiled wearily at me. ‘My dear Marwood,’ she whispered, ‘whatever would we do without you?’
‘You’d do very well, madam, I’m sure.’
‘I want to ask your opinion about another matter. I believe I shall dismiss Stephen.’ She nestled a little closer. ‘Even if he’s cured, he’s too old to be a footboy – look, his features are coarsening already. Tell me, how does one get rid of a blackamoor, especially one with such blemishes? Does one sell them in the usual way? Pray, do advise me.’
The two children were sitting opposite but apart. They were both watching us, both listening. I turned my face towards Lady Quincy. It is one thing to desire a woman, I thought, another to love her, and yet a third to like her.
‘Would you let me have the lad, madam?’ I said.
‘You? Why do you want a slave boy?’
‘My servants need someone to fetch and carry for them.’
‘Of course you shall have him. I’ll give you his scrofula certificate, too, and his ticket of admission to a public ceremony.’
I had not yet told her that the King had agreed to touch Stephen privately as well as Frances. I said, ‘For whatever is the usual price for such a boy, of course. I’ll enquire.’
‘I think not.’ Lady Quincy tapped my cheek with a gloved finger. ‘Stephen will
be my present to you. A token of my friendship.’
At Whitehall, friendships and enmities are made and broken in the blink of an eye. Mr Chiffinch appeared to have forgotten his former dislike of me. On Tuesday he ordered me to call on him after dinner at his lodging. He gave me wine and congratulated me on serving the King so well and so discreetly.
‘His Majesty knows,’ he added, ‘that he can trust me to choose my subordinates with care, so I take some small share of the credit.’
I took advantage of this unexpected approval to ask how the King intended to deal with Buckingham and his hirelings, Veal and Roger.
Chiffinch smiled tolerantly at me. ‘You are still an innocent,’ he said. ‘The King shows the Duke every mark of favour imaginable – he enjoys his company – they are seen everywhere together – he listens to his advice in the Privy Council.’
‘But …’
‘But what? A King does not have friends and enemies as we mere subjects do. And a wise man makes a friend of a foe, because if one keeps an enemy close he has less room to cause harm. Besides, there’s no proof against Buckingham. When he talked to you, he was masked, wasn’t he, so you can’t swear it was him who talked to you, can you? As for this man Veal and his servant, they are remarkably popular in the City at present – did you know that? They rooted out a nest of sodomites. They have earned London’s gratitude.’
We sipped our wine.
‘Mind you,’ Chiffinch added, ‘if I were you, I would not expect any favours from the Duke of Buckingham. He does not forget.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
GEORGE MILCOTE WAS lodged by himself in Newgate. He was lucky in this, if in nothing else, for they would have done terrible things to a sodomite if he had been placed in the condemned hold among the worst men that London had to offer. I didn’t know who paid for this small mercy, and nor did he when I asked him. Perhaps Lord Clarendon or even the Duke of York, though neither man gave him a scrap of public support.
Much of the prison was still in ruins after the Fire last year, when the stones along the eastern wall had exploded in the heat. Milcote was housed in a part that had been hastily refurbished as a stopgap until the rebuilding could be completed. The walls of his cell were black from the flames, and the wood of the door was charred, though still sound. The air smelled damp. The barred window was less than a foot square. It was unglazed. The sounds and smells drifted up from the yard below.
Apart from the bed, there was nowhere to sit, so we stood and talked. The change in Milcote shocked me. He still wore his periwig, but its curls were tangled and matted. There was a bruise on his cheek. He was pale, unshaven and grubby. His clothes were creased and stained.
‘You’re my first visitor,’ he said. ‘Perhaps my only one. Why have you come? It must be to bring bad news.’
‘I came because I want to talk to you,’ I said. ‘How do you fare in here?’
‘I survive. They bring me food twice a day. I expect they spit in it. But they leave me alone most of the time, and that’s a great deal.’
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘did you kill Gorse as well as Alderley?’
‘I was desperate.’ He sounded uninterested, as if answering a question of no importance that related to someone else. ‘I was coming to call on you that evening to tell you that Buckingham’s pair of rogues were outside Clarendon House again. I’d almost reached your door when I realized someone was following me. So I laid an ambush. When I found it was Gorse, I …’
‘You killed him to shut his mouth,’ I said. ‘Once and for all.’
Milcote frowned at me. ‘What else could I do? I had to. He was the main witness against me. He wanted more money, or he swore he would write to my lord about me. So I stabbed him and took him down to the river. It was easy enough – I’d ridden over, so I put him on my horse. It was almost dark by then. If anyone had asked, I would have said my friend was drunk and I was taking him home. But I didn’t meet anyone.’
‘You ran a great risk when you put the body in the river. Anyone might have seen you.’
‘I didn’t take him to the Savoy stairs – I went to the Somerset Yard wharf next door. At that time there was no one about. The tide was high, and it was on the ebb.’
‘Still, you were fortunate.’
‘Fortunate?’ He gestured around him. ‘You call this fortunate? No, I was desperate, and I did the only thing I could. All this happened because of Gorse. Everything. He saw me one night in Love Lane and he realized what I was about. He sold the information to his old master, Alderley. He was hand-in-glove with him from the start. That’s how he came to work at Clarendon House.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘So they made you recommend him. I wondered about that. Once you said Lady Clarendon had recommended Gorse. But later you forgot – you contradicted yourself and said it had been you.’
‘I’m not sorry Gorse and Alderley are dead,’ he said. ‘They were evil. They made me …’
Milcote ran out of words and turned to face the wall.
Blackmail, I thought – was not that a worse crime than sodomy? I said, ‘What did they make you do?’
‘Alderley wanted that silver box from my lord’s closet – I never found out why. Both of them wanted money, too.’ He screwed up his face. ‘More and more. I even had to steal from my lord …’ He turned back to me. ‘Alderley said that once he had the box, that would be the end of it. He swore it, on his honour. But he had no honour. The devil lied.’
‘Because he’d seen Mistress Hakesby working at the pavilion,’ I said. ‘And he realized that there was something else you could do for him.’
‘It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.’ Milcote put his head in his hands. ‘Alderley wanted his revenge on her. He told me to lure her to the pavilion on the Saturday after the workmen had left. I was to make some excuse about needing to talk about the work and her master’s health – whether Hakesby was well enough for it. And he said I should make sure the well wasn’t covered and the pavilion door was left unlocked, and the wicket gate in the garden, too. That’s … when I realized what I had become.’
Silence settled over the room. The sounds rose up from the yard below, the shouts, the screams and the laughter.
‘I couldn’t let him do that to Mistress Hakesby.’ Milcote looked up. ‘I wanted no part of it, sir. So I pretended to agree. But I said nothing to her and I laid in wait for him myself. But the devil guessed what I was about and came at me with his sword. And I threw him down the well, and good riddance to him. I left him there and let Gorse find him on Monday morning. Afterwards I feared that my guilt would be obvious to everyone. I panicked and wrote that cowardly letter to Chiffinch, accusing Mistress Hakesby of killing him. I cannot forgive myself for that.’
The effort of telling me this had exhausted him. He sat down abruptly on the bed, a narrow straw mattress on a stone shelf that ran the length of one wall.
‘That letter was a mistake,’ I said. ‘Because you sent it to Chiffinch. Not many people knew his role in this.’
Milcote groaned and slumped against the wall of his cell. I could not understand him. He was a mass of contradictions. He was the same man as before, who had earned the respect of all who knew him – the soldier, the loyal servant, the gentleman. Yet his strange desires ran through him like knots in a plank of wood, as much part of him as his courage and his courtesy. Fear of exposure had driven him to act as he had, not those desires in themselves.
I remembered when we had supped at the Goat on the day that Gorse ran off. Milcote had drunk himself within sight of oblivion. Now I knew why: because Gorse knew his secret. That evening, before he had lost consciousness, he had seized my arm and asked me when this nightmare would end. We had both learned the answer to that question, almost to the day, and we knew how it would end, too. For him, at least, it would end on the scaffold.
He sat up straight, making an obvious effort to compose himself. ‘Is Mistress Hakesby back in the Drawing Office?’ he asked.
‘Yes. She marries her master soon.’
‘That old man.’ Milcote grimaced. ‘It’s unseemly.’
Though I felt sick in my stomach at the thought of the marriage, I forced myself to speak levelly, as if the subject barely interested me: ‘I understand that it’s a contract between them, not a love match. Both parties gain by it.’
‘Will you give her a present for me? As a wedding gift. Or perhaps a token of apology.’
‘What?’
‘That sword.’
‘Alderley’s Clemens Horn?’ I said. ‘I thought—’
‘I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. I know I should have done but … I had his crest ground away from the blade, and I intended to get a new sheath because the old one was ruined by the water …’ He shrugged. ‘It seems so trivial now. They have it here. I will write a note saying you can take it. It is the only thing of value I have left. Anyway, if she’s Alderley’s cousin, it’s hers by right.’
He scribbled a note in pencil on a flyleaf he tore from his Bible. Afterwards, we lapsed into another uneasy silence.
‘Do you know when?’ I asked at last.
‘When I will be hanged? No. No one tells me anything. I don’t mind dying, Marwood, but I wish this was over. It’s the waiting that’s the worst of it.’
The day after I saw Milcote at Newgate, I called at Lady Quincy’s house during the afternoon. I was shown up to the drawing room on the first floor, where she was sitting by one of the windows and sewing a piece of lace on to a shift; she made a pretty picture of femininity, as perhaps she intended. There was no sign of Mistress Frances.
‘You are punctual, sir,’ she said as I bowed to her. ‘I like a man who knows the value of time. Stephen is ready for you, but perhaps you will talk to me for a while first.’ She laid aside the sewing and smiled. ‘In fact, why not stay and sup with me? I am quite alone today.’
It was an invitation that said one thing and suggested others. I replied that I was pressed for time and could not stay; like hers, my words said one thing and suggested others. Her smile vanished. It was then, I think, that she grasped that it was over. Each of us had served our turn for the other, and there was nothing left between us.
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