By the King's Design

by Christine Trent

“How terrible,” was all Belle could choke out in response. “Those poor families, losing wives, mothers, and children like that.”

  Wesley was, as usual, detached. He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s the price to be paid for reform. Besides, what does the government expect after four years of the Corn Law?”

  The Corn Law? What was he talking about? They’d already seen that the disaster of the Corn Laws had been further worsened by the dreadful harvest in 1816, a consequence of the eruption of Mount Tambora. The country had suffered inestimable loss, in people like Clive and Amelia, literally starving to death all across the country. Why would the people’s suffering result in the government exacting even harsher retribution on them?

  “How can you say that? These were innocent women and children standing alongside their menfolk. It says here that one woman was thrown into a cellar and sabred to death. And here’s another, a Mary Heys, who was ridden over by cavalry. She was pregnant, with six young ones at home. She gave premature birth and followed her infant into the grave. I can’t imagine.”

  “Ha! That’s because you can’t even imagine being married, much less having a child in apron strings.”

  “What’s that to do with anything, Wesley? You also have never partaken in the matrimonial state. And remember we promised not to bring that up with each other again. The point here is whether this tragedy could have been avoided.”

  Wesley shook his head. “It couldn’t. Soon this country will undergo a revolution like France did.”

  “That’s not possible. We have a duly elected Parliament and a crowned king. Revolutionaries are only effective in uncivilized countries.”

  “That’s not what Mr. Thistlewood says.”

  “And who is Mr. Thistlewood?”

  Wesley narrowed his eyes. “Just a friend. He knows much about such things. More than you or I ever could.”

  And with that, Wesley departed the dining table for the shop, without offering to walk there with Belle.

  Wesley jammed his hat on his head as he left their lodgings. Who was Mr. Thistlewood, indeed? Just the brilliant leader of the Spencean Philanthropists was all. In fact, if it were so early in the day he might consider skipping the shop today and instead heading over to the Horse and Groom. He stopped to check his pocket watch. No, it was entirely too early, even for a man of strength and purpose like Arthur Thistlewood.

  But surely this afternoon he’d find him there. And Darcey, too. Darcey thought Mr. Thistlewood would prove to be very influential in the country’s future, and that Wesley should join the Spenceans.

  They’d discussed it at length in a private room in the inn over a new brick of opium he’d purchased from Nathaniel Ashby. Afterwards, Darcey heightened his senses and pleasure in the way that only she knew how to do. Now Wesley was a little foggy as to exactly why she thought he should join the Spenceans.

  But as long as Darcey was willing to wrap herself around him long into the night and help him forget Alice, he was willing to follow her ideas just about anywhere.

  That afternoon, he slipped out of the shop while Belle was in the storage room. She’d be furious, but he would make sure to come home long after she was asleep, which would take the edge off her anger the next day.

  The walk to the Horse and Groom was a pleasant one, a few blocks north up Edgware Road to Cato Street. Entering the tavern’s taproom, he immediately saw Darcey at a game table, attempting to play a game of chess with an opponent Wesley didn’t recognize. She was concentrating intently, licking her lips as she decided her next move.

  So attuned to her was he that he nearly came undone at her subconsciously alluring move. He pulled her away from the game, leaving her opponent grumbling.

  He put his lips close to her ear. “Were you waiting for me?”

  She stopped. “Now why would I be waiting on the likes of you, Wesley Stirling? Have I not better things to do?”

  Her eyes were challenging, but her smile was seductive. His gaze traveled downward to the cut of her bodice, which was low but respectable, and which he planned to divest her of soon.

  She shook her arm free from his hand. “Besides, it’s about time you showed your mangy cur face in here. I saw Mr. Thistlewood earlier, and he’s planning a meeting of the Spenceans tonight. You should attend and ask if you can join his group.”

  “Tonight? What time? I’ve a powerful thirst that needs slaking first.”

  “Is that right, now?” She ran a fingernail lightly down his arm. “And just how do you propose to take care of it?”

  “Quickly and firmly and to the great satisfaction of all concerned. Come, woman.” He took Darcey by the arm once again and led her to their favorite private room upstairs.

  Afterwards, feeling sated and drowsy, he allowed her to drag him to the tavern’s ballroom, which had been set up with chairs in rows facing one end of the room. A gathering of men were already seated and waiting for their speaker. Wesley sat down with Darcey near the front. Her face was flushed and her hair untidy, but a bonnet covered most of the damage. She stared straight ahead, looking neither at him nor anyone else in the room.

  He refrained from looking down at her bodice again, fearful that he might drag her out of the meeting and back to their room again.

  But his attention was soon diverted for real, as Arthur Thistlewood entered, a mug of ale in his hand, which he downed and handed off to a serving boy before stepping onto the six-inch platform at the head of the room.

  “Ah, friends,” Thistlewood began. “Are we not well served by the proprietor of the Horse and Groom? He’s an honest man doing an honest day’s work, is he not, and deserves our praise.”

  Wesley couldn’t see the proprietor anywhere in the room, but it didn’t stop the group from breaking out into huzzahs for the provider of libations in the tavern.

  Thistlewood motioned for quiet. He was a man of intense, fiery passion. A man Wesley would not want to have Darcey become too well acquainted with. Thistlewood’s thick, expressive eyebrows were upstaged only by a shock of curly hair on top of his head that smoothed out and grew straight below his ears. He opened his mouth again, and Wesley noticed the man’s graying teeth, which in no way detracted from his magnetism.

  “Many of you here tonight already know me. But I see new friends, and I hope you are thinking men, rational men, men who care for the safety and welfare of your fellow tradesmen. For those of you who have never joined us before, let me introduce myself. I am Arthur Thistlewood, the son of a farmer and the husband of a butcher’s daughter. I am one of you.

  “Yet, would you believe, the authorities have declared me a dangerous character? Someone who advocates revolution and sedition?”

  He bent over to address the audience in hushed tones. “I fear they may be right.”

  People leaned forward to hear more.

  “For the government has imposed unprecedented suffering upon us of a magnitude not seen since our civil war. And I have personally been the victim of their inhumane and brutal aggression. You know about the riots of Spa Fields from three years ago, do you not?”

  Heads nodded.

  “You know that the Prince Regent refused a hearing of our grievances—our reasonable request for parliamentary reforms. And you know that a group of evil-minded constables attacked us, determined to run us to ground.

  “But what you may not know is that, I, Arthur Thistlewood, was humiliated by arrest right before the eyes of my wife and infant child, followed by a prison stay. Of course, they had no case against me, and I was quickly released.

  “Then, two years ago, I was greatly insulted by Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, who also refused to hear my complaints against him. When Lord Sidmouth wouldn’t grant me an audience, I did the only thing that any man of honor and courage could do: I challenged him to a duel. Coward that he is, he wouldn’t face me, but instead had me arrested with threatening a breach of the peace.”

  Thistlewood shook his head dolefully. “For shame, Lord Sidmouth. You bring dis
grace upon the country.”

  Murmurs of “for shame” and “coward” floated through the room. All eyes were riveted on Thistlewood.

  “And so I was proclaimed guilty and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment in Horsham Jail. Further indignity found me there, for I was forced to share one bed with three men, in a cell measuring a mere seven by nine feet! A dog should not be subjected to such conditions.

  “But my constitution is such that I endured with as much poise as I could muster, and I earned the admiration of the men in my cell for my composure and self-confidence. But by this point I was a man of experience in oppression, wasn’t I?”

  More nods.

  “And we all here have heard about the recent tragedy, now known as Peterloo in comparison to Waterloo, where the military was sent in to overwhelming victory against its enemy. Only in this instance, the cavalry galloped in to trample upon and murder more than five hundred innocent men, women, and children peaceably assembled at St. Peter’s Field to demonstrate for suffrage and reform.”

  The audience was visibly agitated at this. News was just flowing into London about Peterloo, and it looked as though not everyone knew the details about the altercation. Wesley sensed that Mr. Thistlewood was not overly concerned about the slaughter of innocents in St. Peter’s Field, for it advanced his important movement.

  And on that point Wesley could agree, although recalling Belle’s horrified expression about it did give him a moment’s pause.

  But what was Belle’s opinion as compared to Darcey’s rapturous expression and Thistlewood’s inflamed oratory? She was a mere draper.

  “And so, my friends, I ask you: What is the only way such indiscriminate violence against us can be addressed? Is it by hiding behind our womenfolk’s skirts? No! For they will hack our women to bits. Is it by pleading and begging for redress of our grievances? Again, I say, no! For they will ignore us and throw us into prison.”

  Once again, Thistlewood dropped his voice for effect. And effective it was. Even Wesley was holding his breath.

  “Friends, we will only accomplish our aims of freedom and equality for all men by the shedding of blood.” He raised his fist and his voice together. “The blood of our oppressors, our tyrannical leaders, yes, even of our neighbors who stand in the way of our noble goals.”

  Flecks of foam appeared at the corner of Thistlewood’s mouth. The orator seemed overcome by his own speechmaking, mopping his forehead with a kerchief. “I submit to all of you that we are all coming to a momentous decision. That decision is whether we will stand or fall, be brave or cowards, preserve or lose our very lives. And so the question is: Will you join us? Will you join those of us who will conquer the unbearable, inhumane forces that persecute us?”

  The room exploded in elation.

  “We’ll join you!”

  “Eliminate the oppressors!”

  “Death to Parliament!”

  Thistlewood extended his arms as though to embrace everyone in the room. “It pleases me to have so many generous supporters who understand my vision. You are joining a great movement by uniting with the Spenceans. I will lead you to victory. My genius is so great just now, I don’t think there is any man alive who has so great a genius as mine at the moment.”

  He paused dramatically, looking upward as though in deep cogitation with the divine. “If it is the will of the Author of the World, should He exist, that I should perish in the cause of freedom, His will, and not mine, be done! It would be quite a triumph to me!”

  Thistlewood threw his arms up in the air, and the audience cheered. Wesley glanced at Darcey. Her eyes were shining and her cheeks were wet with tears as she clapped wildly in support.

  And so Wesley knew that he would happily join the Spencean Philanthropists to please the very enthralling Darcey White.

  9

  Awake! Arise! Arm yourselves with truth, justice, reason. Lay siege to corruption. Claim as your inalienable right, universal suffrage and annual Parliaments. And whenever you have the gratification to choose a representative, let him be from among the lower orders of men, and he will know how to sympathize with you.

  —Thomas Spence, founder of the Spencean Philanthropists, 1793

  August 1819

  London

  Why did I have to choose this moment to go out? Belle asked herself as she retreated back inside her shop.

  Having left an unusually happy Wesley to manage alone one afternoon, she went shopping. She planned to buy a packet of paper while she was out, but also wanted to browse windows. She started with the C. Laurent Fashion Dolls shop next door, which she’d only visited once since arriving in London.

  The proprietress, Lady Greycliffe, was an older French beauty, tall and willowy. Her blond hair was shot through with silver bands, revealing her to be at least in her fifties, even though she looked younger. She possessed beautiful manners and a delightful accent, although she told Belle she’d been in England for more than thirty years. Born Claudette Laurent in Paris, she’d been orphaned at a young age and fled to England, scratching her way up to finally opening this fashionable shop on Oxford Street, even having met and married a minor lord along the way. Although she now had a fine estate in Kent and a London townhome, Lady Greycliffe could never give up her passion for dollmaking, and still spent considerable time in her Oxford Street location.

  Belle lauded the dollmaker’s tenacity and courage.

  The shop had dolls of extraordinary proportions, from the tiniest creatures to fit little baby houses up to life-sized creations set on iron frames with translucent wax heads and hands.

  The shop’s specialty was fashion dolls made to resemble real people. Belle was so intrigued by them that she gave the proprietress a list of Amelia’s features, to have a keepsake made of her friend. Lady Greycliffe promised to have it in three weeks’ time.

  From there, Belle browsed nearly every shop window on her side of Oxford Street. She hadn’t realized the number of various businesses in this shopping district. Confectioners, jewelers, dressmakers, bootmakers, milliners, penmakers, and stationers all displayed wares in their windows. She wandered in and out of the shops, splurging only to buy herself a steel-nibbed pen and some India ink, in addition to a small sheaf of paper for writing up the shop’s sales.

  She came out of the stationer’s shop, intending to return back to her own, when she looked across the busy road, full of pedestrians, carriages, horses, and their droppings, and saw something that made her heart sink.

  Put Boyce sat at a table outside a coffee shop with that attractive woman she’d seen him with before. This was certainly far afield from his cabinetmaker shop for him to be.

  He said he liked walking everywhere, didn’t he? And this is the most fashionable shopping district in London. Why shouldn’t he be here with his lady love?

  Put was dressed again in his uncomfortable dark tailcoat over a striped waistcoat with buckskin breeches. Except he didn’t look ill at ease at all. No, in fact, he appeared quite jovial. He and the lady, with her fashionable bonnet tied with a dark green sash—silk if Belle wasn’t mistaken—were laughing at some terribly funny joke.

  Put leaned in to speak to her, and the woman leaned toward him as well, offering him the side of her face.

  He was close enough to kiss her cheek.

  Surely he wouldn’t commit such an act in public, would he?

  At that moment there was a long gap in horse traffic in the street. Put looked across Oxford Street and saw Belle standing there. She knew she must look a complete idiot, but she was rooted to the spot.

  She half hoped he would look embarrassed, but he didn’t. He held up a hand in greeting, then stood and directed a bow her way. The lady with him saw that Put was looking at Belle, and raised a gloved hand to her, as well.

  And that was too much. To have the woman waving to her energized Belle into motion and she fled back to her own shop, once again the rabbit acting on instinct.

  The shop was empty except for Wesle
y, thank goodness. She hung the “Closed” sign in the window and locked the door.

  “I think we’re done for the day,” she said.

  Wesley looked up from where he was writing in a journal. “What’s wrong, Sister?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. How were things in my absence?”

  “Mostly lookers, only one sale of some palm-and-bird-of-paradise damask to Mrs. Jennings. Oh, and Lady Logan sent along a note that she wants to meet with you. Something about seat cushions and her new Italian greyhound.”

  Oh dear.

  “Anything else?”

  “No. Except that I’ve been having an interesting time lately.”

  “Have you?” She looked around, and noticed that the floor was littered with threads, broken buttons, and scraps. She retrieved a broom and began sweeping the floor.

  “Yes. I’ve been to some meetings led by my friend, Arthur Thistlewood. He makes some valid points about the Peterloo Massacre.”

  “Thistlewood? Isn’t he the one you said knows more about anything than we could possibly hope to?”

  “Well, er, I may have spoken harshly, but he really is very clever. He heads an organization called the Spencean Philanthropists, dedicated to destroying the oppressive power of the government. I’ve joined them and have already impressed Mr. Thistlewood with my quick grasp of politics.”

  Belle shook her head. There was a pile of scraps at one end of the cutting table. It must be days’ worth. Why did Wesley have time to scribble in a book but no time to clean up scraps?

  “Did you hear me, Belle?”

  She snapped back to attention. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I asked what you thought about my joining the Spenceans.”

  “If they’re radicals, I don’t approve.”

  Wesley slammed his journal shut. “No, of course not. You’d never stand firm for principle or ideals.”

  “What do you mean? I merely said I don’t support extreme movements.”