A consultation of sorts was presumably what awaited Townshend at Spencer House. But it would be of the kind he was growing all too used to: one held after the event. Perhaps he should protest. ‘Remember, my dear,’ his darling Dolly had said to him more than once, ‘Robin owes such a lot to you.’ Townshend certainly remembered. But he was no longer sure his brother-in-law did.
Spencer House should have been a place of hushed mourning. Instead, it was a tumult of scurrying servants and bustling Treasury clerks. Several of the latter were loading tea-chests crammed with papers into a closed cart under the sheepish supervision of the Duke of Kingston, who cast Townshend a doleful look and shrugged his massive shoulders.
‘He’s been busy in Sunderland’s study since dawn,’ Kingston said, neither troubling nor needing to specify whom he meant. ‘I found it locked, you know. I had to force the door open. Every drawer as well.’ It was unlikely that Kingston had personally forced anything, but his point was made. ‘Damned unseemly, I call it.’
‘But necessary, no doubt,’ said Townshend.
‘Who’s to say? All this’ – he gestured at the tea-chests – ‘is bound for Chelsea.’ Walpole’s London residence, then, not the Treasury. It was an eloquent distinction.
‘How’s the Countess?’
‘In a torrent of tears, as you’d expect. And horror-struck to find a pack of inky-fingered clerks clumping about her home, as you’d also expect. She may have miscarried by now, for all I know.’
‘Where’s the, er …’
‘Corpse? Taken away, thank God.’ Kingston lowered his voice. ‘They’re talking of a post mortem.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do you think? The fellow was in rude good health when I last saw him.’
‘You’re surely not suggesting—’
‘I’m suggesting nothing. But others won’t be so circumspect, will they?’
‘I dare say not.’
‘Well, don’t let me keep you. He’s in no mood to greet late arrivals.’
‘I’m not late.’
‘No?’ Kingston’s voice sank to a whisper. ‘If you ask me, we’re all late when it comes to keeping up with him.’
There was unquestionably an air of pre-emptive industry in Sunderland’s plundered study. Walpole sat at his dead foe’s desk, a late breakfast mug of cider at his elbow and a drift of papers before him, his face flushed and beaming, like that of a farmer in their native Norfolk at the conclusion of a tiring but ample harvest.
‘Ah, there you are, Charles. Welcome, welcome. How’s the day?’
‘Well enough,’ Townshend conceded, though in truth he had only the faintest awareness of the weather.
‘Better than well, I reckon. This is a day I didn’t think we’d see.’
‘What have Sunderland’s papers revealed?’
‘Much. You might almost say all. But—’ He broke off and glared across at a pair of clerks filling boxes on the other side of the room. ‘You two! Get out!’
‘Yes, sir,’ they chorused. ‘At once, sir.’ And out they got.
‘Close the door behind you!’ It clicked respectfully shut. ‘I’ve had them under my feet all morning, damn their eyes.’
‘It looks as if you’ve needed them.’
‘For porterage, yes. It’s about all they’re good for. But sit down, Charles. Make yourself comfortable. You may as well.’
‘Comfortable? In a dead man’s study? I don’t know about that.’ Nevertheless, Townshend drew up a chair. As he did so, his eye was taken by a portrait above the fireplace of a good-looking young man in military costume of the Civil War era. ‘An ancestor?’
‘The first Earl. Killed at the battle of Newbury, a few months after he was given the title.’
‘Sunderland’s grandfather?’
‘Yes. Note that. The grandfather, not the father. The second Earl was the same brand of scheming trimmer as his son. Maybe Sunderland wanted someone more inspiring to look at over his mantelpiece.’
‘Have you found anything inspiring to look at?’ Townshend nodded at the slew of papers on the desk.
‘You could say so. Sunderland seems to have been mighty selective about passing on what the Secret Service brought him.’
‘Has he held back anything important?’
‘It’s only the important stuff he has held back. You and Carteret can pick out the bones when it’s all been collated. Carteret tells me, by the way, that he may have found someone who can give us more reliable information on the doings of the Pretender than the kilted drunkards we normally employ.’
‘Baron von Stosch.’
‘That’s his name. The genuine article, you reckon?’
‘About as genuine as a diamond necklace on a Haymarket whore. But he could be useful.’
‘He’ll need to be if I read these runes aright.’
‘What is it, Robin?’ Townshend sat forward, his curiosity aroused. ‘Jacobite rumblings?’
‘There are always rumblings. This is something more. What do you make of these?’ Walpole plucked a batch of papers from the pile before him and tossed it across the desk.
It was a list of names, running to several pages, arranged under county headings. The names were familiar to Townshend. Many of them were known Jacobites. Many more were not. ‘These surely don’t all belong in the same basket,’ he said. ‘You’re not suggesting …’
‘Look at Norfolk.’
Townshend leafed forward to their own county and read the names, with rising incredulity. ‘Bacon, l’Estrange, Heron, North, Wodehouse.’ He stopped. ‘Some of these are our bought men.’
‘But some men sell themselves twice over. Ever hear of a lawyer called Christopher Layer?’
‘I don’t think so. Hold on, though. Not Layer of Aylsham?’
‘You have him. Not a credit to his profession, as you know. That list seems to be his handiwork. And Secret Service reports say Layer visited Rome last summer.’
‘He’s gone over to the Pretender?’
‘To the extent of boasting he’ll be Lord Chancellor under King James, apparently.’
‘Then … how did Sunderland … come by his list?’
‘There’s the question, Charles. How indeed? Perhaps he was simply sent it. Perhaps he asked for it to be drawn up. Sudden death leaves no time for the disposal of incriminating documents. That’s the best of it. On the one hand the Secret Service is busy telling Sunderland that Layer’s an active Jacobite plotter known to be in regular communication with one James Johnson, an alias, they believe, of none other than George Kelly.’
‘Secretary to the Bishop of Rochester.’
‘Exactly. Our least loyal prelate. That, as I say, is on the one hand. On the other, Sunderland has Layer’s list in his pos session, bearing every appearance of a muster-roll of traitors and their camp-followers, including twenty-three peers and eighty-three Members of Parliament.’ Walpole grinned. ‘I counted.’
‘How long has he had the list?’
‘Who knows? Long enough to alert the King’s ministers to its contents, I’d have thought. But he didn’t, did he? And this may be the reason.’ Walpole slid a single sheet of paper across the desk to join the pages of Layer’s list.
Townshend picked up the sheet of paper. It was a letter, addressed to Sunderland. As he read it, his mouth fell open in surprise. Then he read it again, this time aloud. ‘“I am greatly obliged to your lordship for the service you have rendered my cause and wish to assure your lordship that such service will be well rewarded. Your privileged foreknowledge of the Electoral itinerary will be our sure and certain guide in determining when it would be most propitious to set our enterprise afoot. It will be an enterprise of honour and of right and to find that you have as keen a sense as did your grandfather of where honour and right abide is to me a distinct and pronounced pleasure.”’
‘You didn’t know the Pretender had such a florid style of expression, did you, Charles?’
‘“Jacobus Rex.”’ Townshend read the
signature in no more than a murmur. Then he looked at the date. ‘This was written less than a month ago.’
‘So it appears. In perfect confidence, so it also appears. But I could hardly ask Galfridus to rifle through Sunderland’s post-bag, could I? There are limits.’ Walpole sighed. ‘This is what comes of abiding by them.’
‘I can hardly believe it, Robin. Sunderland … and the Pretender.’
‘He’d have thrown in his lot with the Devil himself to get the better of me.’
The use of the singular pronoun registered somewhere in Townshend’s confused thoughts. Me, not us. It was telling, in its way. But not as telling as the letter in his hand. ‘What’s meant by the … “Electoral itinerary”, do you suppose?’
‘The date of the King’s departure for Hanover, I’d surmise. He’s set on going this year. As to precisely when, who’d know sooner than his Groom of the Stole?’
‘They plan to strike when the King’s out of the country?’
‘Or worse – to assassinate him on the road to Hanover.’
‘Surely Sunderland wouldn’t have put his name to that.’
‘He put his name to something. Of course, if he’d succeeded in packing the House with his creatures and ousting us from office, he could have exposed the plot and claimed the credit for saving the kingdom. No doubt he only meant to go through with it if the elections went against him. As our managers seem to reckon they generally have. A desperate man, our Sunderland. And now a dead one.’
‘What are we to do?’
‘Nothing, for the moment. I want the ringleaders, Charles. And I mean to have them.’ Walpole sat back in his chair. ‘So, let them think they’re safe for a little longer yet. Let them plot away their days while we gather the evidence to damn them.’
‘Where’s such evidence to be found? This letter condemns Sunderland, not his co-conspirators.’
‘We must draw them out.’ Walpole smiled. ‘And I think I may have found a way to do just that. Sir Theodore Janssen came to see me a few days ago.’
‘Is he still complaining about his treatment?’
‘With decreasing energy. No, no. He came to see me because of an undertaking I secured from him while he was in the Tower – an undertaking to keep me advised of any developments in the matter of the Green Book.’
‘How can there be any developments now?’
‘I expected none, certainly. But what Janssen said gives me—’ There was a sudden commotion outside. Kingston’s voice could be heard above that of another man. ‘Ah! That’ll be Lord Godolphin.’
‘Godolphin? What will he say when he finds us taking our ease in his brother-in-law’s study?’
‘Very little, when we show him that letter. I suggested he call, as a matter of fact.’
‘Why?’
‘So that one of Sunderland’s relatives could witness our destruction of the letter.’
‘You mean to destroy it?’
‘Certainly. As an act of compassion, to spare the noble Earl’s reputation and his family’s feelings. That should take the wind out of Madam Marlborough’s sails, don’t you reckon?’ Walpole winked. ‘It’s not the dead we need to snare, Charles. It’s the living.’
Chapter Thirty
The Wanderer Returns
‘HELLO, MA.’
Spandrel’s greeting was hardly equal to the momentousness of the occasion. His mother gaped at him in astonishment for fully half a minute, seemingly – and understandably – unable to believe that he was standing before her, alive and well, alive and uncommonly well, to judge by his healthy complexion and newish clothes. Fifteen months of unexplained absence, during which she had often been reduced to believing him dead, had ended on an April morning of fitful sunshine, with her opening the door in answer to a strangely familiar knock and finding her son standing before her, smiling a smile she knew so well.
‘Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?’
She did kiss him, of course, and hugged him too. Tears started to her eyes. She hugged him again, then stood back and frowned at him. ‘I thought you were dead, boy. You know that?’
‘Not dead, Ma. As you can see.’
‘Come inside and close the door before we have half the neighbourhood goggling at you.’
‘I bumped into Annie Welsh in the yard.’
‘What did she say to you?’
‘Something about a bad penny.’
‘She probably remembers what I said to her when you first went missing.’
‘What was that?’
‘That I hoped for your sake you had a good excuse for leaving me in the lurch.’
‘I don’t know about in the lurch.’ Spandrel looked around the room. The piles of washing and the rack-load drying before the fire indicated that his mother was still plying her trade as a washerwoman. ‘You probably found living was cheaper without me.’
‘Cheaper, maybe. But not easier.’ She grabbed his left ear lobe, as she often had when he misbehaved as a child. ‘What have you been up to?’
‘Ow!’ Spandrel’s exaggerated cry persuaded her to let him go. ‘Some breakfast would be nice.’
‘I’m surprised you don’t expect a fatted calf.’
‘Have a heart, Ma.’
‘Lucky for you I’ve a bigger heart than’s good for me. I’ll make breakfast. While you explain yourself.’
Explaining himself was something Spandrel had already given much thought to. The Green Book – and the secrets it contained – was a subject he had no intention of broaching to his mother. He doubted she would be able to comprehend what he himself now found difficult to believe. The year that had passed since his departure from Rome had cast the events that had led him there in the first place into a semi-fabulous compartment of his memory. And he was content for them to remain there. Accordingly, while admitting that Sir Theodore Janssen had sent him on a secret errand to Amsterdam, he claimed that he had no idea what the package he had been charged to carry might have contained. He had been robbed of it in a tavern in Amsterdam, so he related, and, ashamed of such foolishness, had remained abroad rather than return home empty-handed to face Sir Theodore’s wrath.
His account grafted itself at this point onto the truth. For the past year, he had worked as a surveyor’s assistant in the French city of Rennes. He had met the surveyor, a kindly but ailing fellow much in need of assistance, by the name of Jean-Luc Taillard, during a coach journey (from Brest, a detail he omitted). Taillard, having no family of his own, had appointed Spandrel his heir. And Taillard’s recent death had left Spandrel in possession of his life savings, amounting to 15,000 livres – about £1,000. This was a fraction of what Spandrel had dreamt the Green Book might bring him. But it was also far more than he had ever had to his name. And it meant he could return to England without fear of being imprisoned for debt.
‘All the debts are paid, Ma,’ he said, as he finished his breakfast. ‘And there’s plenty left over.’
‘To spend on what, may I ask?’
‘Somewhere better for you to live, to start with. You’ll be sending washing out, not taking it in. And I’ll be finishing the map.’
‘That old dream of your father’s?’
‘This is one dream that’s going to come true.’
‘You mean that?’
‘I certainly do.’
‘All our troubles are over?’
‘Yes. Thanks to Monsieur Taillard.’ He plucked a flagon of gin from his bag and pulled out the cork. ‘Let’s drink to happier times.’
‘You’ll be the ruin of me, boy,’ said his mother, unable to stifle a grin.
Viscount Townshend hurried into the Treasury that morning with an altogether lighter tread than he had felt capable of when entering Spencer House the previous day. This time, he had news for Walpole, not the other way about, and it was a rare enough experience for him to relish.
Walpole was standing by the window of his office, munching an apple and gazing out at a leash of deer in St James’s Park. He looked e
xactly what Townshend knew him not to be – a man without a care in the world. But Townshend also knew that the cares of state were what lent him such a genial aspect. They were what made him happy.
‘What do you have for me, Charles? Something, I’ll be bound. I’ve seen that twinkle in your eye too often to be wrong.’
‘A despatch from Sir Luke Schaub.’ (Schaub was the British Ambassador in Paris, second only to Rome as a centre of Jacobite plotting.) ‘Sent two days ago.’ (Sent, then, on the day of Sunderland’s death.)
‘What does Sir Luke have to say?’
‘Cardinal Dubois has alerted him to a request from the Pretender for the use of three thousand French troops.’
‘When?’
‘Within weeks.’
‘How fortunate we are that the French Foreign Minister is such a devious man.’ Walpole raised the window and tossed his half-eaten apple out through the gap, then turned to Townshend with a broad smile. ‘It seems we’d have known something was afoot even without the run of Sunderland’s study. But no doubt Sunderland would have persuaded the King there was nothing to worry about.’
‘We should inform His Majesty.’
‘I agree. We’ll see him this afternoon. You’d better bring Carteret with you. It’ll give the impression we’re all of one mind.’ Walpole chuckled. ‘But then we are, of course.’
Shopping for anything but the barest necessities was for Margaret Spandrel a half-forgotten indulgence. Shopping for a new home was something she had not expected to do this side of Heaven. But that afternoon, equipped with a copy of the London Journal and the addresses of several reputable house agents, she accompanied her son on a tour of properties which were considerably larger and more elegant than many of those where she had latterly called to collect washing and which – miracle of miracles – William assured her they could afford.
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