I went to Highgate yesterday, as I have done every month since arriving in England, but this time someone followed me.
It wasn’t her. She was behind me every step, of course; she always is, ranting and frenzied, but I took no notice. I control her better since the Bratchet was disposed of. I maintain long periods without answering her, though she tries different forms to frighten me; sometimes she’s a tree lumbering at me from a hedgerow on fat-ankled legs, sometimes a milestone bids me good-day and it is her.
I suppose I should be grateful; unless I had kept glancing back, I would not have noticed the man who followed. As it was, I did not see him until Parliament Hill Fields. A little man with a squashed nose, poorly dressed, apparently idling along reading a newspaper. Life at sea has made my eyes keen over long distances and I saw that the newspaper was the Review and that it was upside down.
It was early, with few people about, so that at first I thought him a foist after my purse and bent down to retie my bootlaces in order to take my knife from its strap round my leg.
I did some idling of my own. It was a fine summer’s day. After buying a squirt of milk from the woman who grazes her cow on the Fields, I retraced my steps a little, picking cowslips, weaving in and out of the trees, until I had regained the track. I turned, as if to consider the view of London below me, thinking I had thrown him off but caught sight of his heels as he dodged behind a bush.
I considered seizing him and carving his throat until he told me who sent him. But it is not usual for a bedchamber woman to carry a knife; he would have thought it odd. I could have stuck him, of course, but his death would arouse even more suspicion in whoever sent him. ‘Very well, Captain Queernabs,’ I thought, ‘let us see where the wind blows us.’
It blew me to the east side of the hill, through alleyways between the cottages there, past Dick Whittington’s Stone, and upwards at spanker pace.
It’s a pig of a hill and the breeze brought me sounds of his puffing breath; nevertheless he was a determined little barnacle and he stuck to me.
Who sent him? What do they know? I have been careful. It could be the Whigs, of course. They are so desperate to regain power over the queen that they may be trying to find something to my discredit so that they can force me to spy on her. They happily stoop to blackmail. Sarah, for instance, is threatening to publish the letters Queen Ant wrote to her in their early days if Anne doesn’t do what she wants.
What scandal then! I have no doubt the letters display passion that the world considers improper for one woman to feel for another. But for once the queen is holding her course, scandal or no. While the Whigs were at the helm they treated her with such contempt she has turned to fight. She is amazing in her sternness towards them. Sunderland sent packing. Godolphin dismissed, who had been with her all her reign, in a curt note delivered by a lackey. No thanks, no kindness, no mention of friendship or guidance. Just go.
She has even faced down the great Duke of Marlborough by refusing to appoint an experienced officer as chief of Essex’s regiment of Dragoons and instead has given the post to Abigail’s brother, Honest Jack Hill, who is about as fitted to lead Dragoons as an embroidery lesson.
This confirms the Whigs’ belief that Abigail rides Her Majesty and they are after her in full cry. In fact, did they but know it, Abigail’s on the wane. You can surfeit on Abigail’s cloying, insinuating sweetness and the queen is beginning to sicken. It is in me that she confides now, over glasses of cold tea, but she keeps me secret, fearing that I will be taken up by one faction or another.
Fear not, Your Majesty, I am my own faction. Oh yes.
However, I confess to fright as I climbed Highgate Hill. Did they suspect what it was I hid at the top?
There was a haywain going up, its driver leading his horses. I feigned fatigue and begged for a ride. He was impudent, demanding a kiss, which I gave him, before clambering on to the back board where I watched Queernabs showing interest in a hedge.
As I had guessed, the hay bales proved too high to pass under the archway toll and, as is usual, the wain was taken round through a yard at the rear of the Gate House tavern where I jumped off and ran into its taproom before Queernabs could see where I went.
The tavern’s drudge was sweeping out. I put my finger to my lips. The creature, of course, was shrieking to try and attract his attention, but no human woman will tell on another who is pursued by a man. As I emerged from the Gate’s front entrance, I heard the drudge say no, nobody had gone through to her certain knowledge. I was free.
Highgate is a strange place. Seen from London, its windmill sails give it the appearance of a typical English hill village but perhaps because the hill is virtually impassable to traffic for five months of the year, it has become the home of many foreigners on moderate incomes, especially the Mediterranean immigrants, Portuguese, Italians, Huguenots from southern France, Jews, men who are prepared to walk the six or seven miles to their work as stockbrokers’ clerks, translators and the like.
And while the well-to-do English prefer to live in London in the winter, they farm out their children to wet-nurses in the village because of its healthy air; although the Great Plague struck nearly everywhere else in England, there was not a single death from it in Highgate.
So the gardens of the thatched cottages grow alien vegetables and dark-skinned women with white babies at their breast chatter to each other over the hedges and bright, foreign flowers sprout in the window pots and the taprooms of the Gate and the Black Dog resound at nights with the tongues of Babel.
Yes, my darling, my dearest love, our secret is safe there.
Although Captain Queernabs managed to catch up with me again on my journey back, it was not until Kentish Town that he did so. He had not seen where I went.
Nevertheless, it was unsettling and I was much relieved to discover, after some cunning questioning in the buttery that night, that nearly all the women close to the queen, from maid of honour to chamber-pot scourer, are under invigilation.
Both Danvers and Abrahall say they have been followed too; the others are too stupid to know if they have or not, though, they said, they have found things shifted in their rooms, as if they had been searched. (Thank God my papers are well hidden.)
‘And I heard Carrots complain to the queen that her letters are being opened,’ said Danvers, ‘What can it mean?’
Sarah. Everybody blamed Sarah and I pretended to accede.
It is true that the duchess has no love for any of us. She will not recognize that her day is over; she still grips the title of Keeper of the Stole and rushes around like a Dutchman stopping holes in his dyke. She threw a fine tantrum when Danvers, who is the daughter of a former bedchamber woman, was given her mother’s post on the queen’s decision alone. Sarah, of course, had her own nominee. Then again Elizabeth Abrahall holds my old job as laundress and has been unwell, so the queen – also without consulting Sarah – granted her the right to a bottle of wine a day. Another to-do.
As for the Duchess of Somerset’s letters – Abrahall believes it may be Sarah again, trying to prove that Carrots murdered her first husband, Thomas Thynne. ‘There were rumours,’ she said.
‘He deserved it,’ said Danvers, who has all the old gossip from her mother, ‘but I doubt she did. She couldn’t kill pussy.’
‘She’ll be Mistress and Keeper if Sarah is dismissed,’ said Abrahall, ‘so Sarah has but to throw enough shit. Some of it will stick.’
They do not understand Sarah’s spirit as I do. She should have commanded a man o’ war instead of expending her energy pecking herself and others in this hen coop. She’d have swept Louis’s navy from the seas. If she could keelhaul Abigail she would, but she wouldn’t stoop to harassing underlings who merely do their duty.
No, someone else is in command of these drawer-openings and spyings. And not to uncover poor wenches’ peccadilloes. To find me. I have slipped up. It must be the letter to Francesca’s maid, the second that I sent to her through Greg. Or her reply. I had hoped its code would fool them, but Harley is quicker than I thought.
Of course, it is Harley. Who else? He is prime minister now. Like all of the rest, he makes his plans for when Queen Ant departs this vale of tears and Anne Bonny would fit into them nicely if he could find her.
Dear man, you have to find her first. I am here. I long to shout it. I whisper it instead. Here, Harley. Do the aspirates float along the corridors and disturb your sleep? They should. Was it you sent two innocent women to live in hell because they were inconvenient? Does the memory haunt you? It should, for we are back, our innocence gone, our little nails toughened into claws. Do you feel them griping at your liver? You will. If it was you, I shall tear it out and gnaw it.
We must address him as My Lord Oxford, now. Queen Ant was so pleased to have him back in Godolphin’s place she could hardly wait to grant him an earldom. But he is the same arch-intriguer hiding that convoluted brain behind a face like a pie and still he consorts with riff-raff.
One of his creatures is a common scribbler, Daniel Defoe, a tarnished cockalorum like most of his kind, whom he uses to wage a wordy war against the Whigs. Indeed, Defoe has now proved so successful in Harley’s games, the Brotherhood informs me, he has set up an agency of spies and employs several of their ex-pirates in his work.
I wonder if it is he who has been set on to find me. It would be ironic if the Captain Queernabs who followed me to Highgate were one of my former profession. I shall find out. Two can play at Harley’s table. I have another informant now, and a better one than Greg; nobler, handsomer, cleverer, and a thousand times more unscrupulous. As for ambition, he would steal the crown if he could and set it on his own handsome head. He might yet.
Henry St John, Secretary of State, whose ancestors on his mother’s side landed with William the Conqueror to be resisted at Hastings by ancestors on his father’s side. They have fought ever since. An unstable family. If I have not mentioned St John to you before, my love, it is because I did not consider him important. He kept himself back, called Harley ‘Dear Master’ and, anyway, could not find a seat in the old Parliament. Now, with the return of the Tories, he has vaulted on to the stage like an acrobat. He is the idol of the October Club, that pack of young Tory parliamentarians who would lop the head off every Whig, transport all Dissenters and bring back James Stuart.
I credit him with no conviction other than to gain personal power; he goes around crying, ‘The church is in danger. I shall defend her.’ Which is like Old Nick putting himself in charge of the angels. Where Harley drinks but does not whore or gamble, St John does all three and still has energy to do the work of four men. He is the Calico Jack of politics. Harley is already jealous of him. The queen distrusts him, despite his every sorcery to win her, because he is unfaithful to his wife.
He would use me; his intuition has divined that I am the coming power there, though he does not scorn to court Abigail as well. Yet it is not only for my influence that he woos me. I intrigue him. Deep calls to deep, pirate to pirate. He has penetrated my primness to what lies beneath and names me Circe, which is strange since Greg used the same appellation in his excited moments. ‘Come to bed, my Circe,’ he says, ‘let us wallow like swine.’
‘La, my lord, how you do run on,’ I say, or words to that effect.
But he knows. I think he is even aware of the creature as she prances behind me. ‘You have haunted eyes, my little bedchamber,’ he said once, ‘Let me exorcize your demon with my prick.’
‘I am sure it is a very pretty prick, sir,’ I tell him, ‘but it is not for me,’ which intrigues him the more. But I haven’t killed and plotted and manoeuvred to get this far only to throw the plan away on the honourable member for Cockshire.
I have begun. This very morning I took the first step in the plan’s last and most difficult stage.
Queen Ant was unwell; tormented by gout, eyes sore and weeping, puffiness increasing, she is exhausted by the work put on her. Daily conferences with ministers; cabinet meetings once, sometimes twice a week; petitions and foreign news to be read. Warrants, orders, demand her signature, audiences with foreign envoys, attendance on debates in the House of Lords, badgered by Harley, Abigail, or St John to grant this or prefer that. She laments: ‘I am so taken up with business, I have no time to say my prayers.’
I was on duty and she had sent Carrots on an errand so that she might have a glass or two of cold tea; she doesn’t like others to know how much she is drinking. Occasionally now, for the pain, she asks me to float some toast sprinkled with laudanum in it.
These are the times she reflects on death. She longs for its peace but fears it; she is in terror of her father’s reproaches. The huge, darkened bedchamber is full of demons; mine and hers. I believe James II stands at the end of her bed, his accusing finger pointed at her heart, condemning her desertion of him in the Great Revolution.
But what else could she have done, poor soul? She is and was a loyal daughter of the Church of England, sworn to uphold Protestantism. Her father a practising Roman. And, after all, her desertion was not for her gain; she helped to hand over the throne not only to William of Orange but to her own sister, Mary.
Yet fathers are not easily deserted and the price is being paid now. His ghost demands restitution for her half-brother. She will not, cannot, say she wishes young Pretender James rather than the Hanoverians to succeed her, but her soul would rest calmer with the knowledge that he would. She is not fond of the Hanovers and refused to countenance a visit to England by George or Sophia when the Whigs suggested it. ‘Not in my lifetime.’
So today, to keep the demons at bay, she sipped her cold tea and talked of the Stuarts generally and in doing so mentioned her father’s first cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
It was the opportunity I had prayed for. ‘Such a pity, Your Majesty,’ I said lightly, ‘that you should not have been able to meet his granddaughter, Anne Bard.’
‘Anne Bard?’ She was truly mystified. She, at least, is absolved of the crime.
I fell on my knees by the bed in pretended panic. ‘I should not have said. It escaped me. I beg Your Majesty’s forgiveness. Say nothing, dear madam. Don’t let them know. Let it be.’
Of course, she couldn’t let it be. But I pleaded on until at last I had her promise that if I would tell they should never know from her that I did. Well enough. She keeps her promises. So I spoke what is, in one sense, the truth; I had known Anne Bard when she came to London some seven, eight years before. ‘She claimed to be Dudley Bard’s legitimate daughter. She said she had papers to prove it. I know that she tried to see you for she hired a coach to ride to the palace in, but on her return said she had been turned away.’
It made her angry; royalty have a terror that their ministers will act behind their back. ‘Was it Godolphin?’
I shrugged. We discussed it and discussed; she loves minutiae. What did the girl look like? Tell me every word. Who was her mother? Whence came she? On and on until, at last: ‘What happened to her?’
‘I do not know, madam. She disappeared of a sudden.’
Carrots came back then, leaving me no time to plant the seed that her poor cousin had been spirited, but I could see the royal appetite chewing on what it had learned. She seems better. The mystery has pulled her from her depression. As I curtseyed before going off duty, I put my finger to my lips and she did the same. We share a secret. It is begun.
St John waited for me outside to escort me to my chambers – Her Majesty has been pleased to grant me a suite of rooms, not as large as Abigail’s, who is obliging her Sam with a child every year, but above what is usual for a bedchamber woman. We walked through the gardens while I picked jonquils and tulips for the royal sick room.
St John asked after the queen’s health casually, but it is of great concern to him. If the queen dies and Sophia or her son succeeds, Whigs will come in and Tories will go out. St John, the highest High Tory of them all, will be deprived of office, perhaps for life.
‘She is better today, sir, I thank you. She has taken no medicine but spirit of millipedes and Lady Charlotte has visited her.’
I was telling him nothing he wouldn’t learn tomorrow. The arrival of the royal curse, for which Lady Charlotte is a euphemism, is as good as shouted by the town crier. Dr Hamilton tells her ministers and her ministers congratulate her on it. Actually, Lady Charlotte is becoming very weak and this may be her last visit, but that I did not say; the woman’s entitled to some privacy.
St John was surprised. ‘Good old Lady Charlotte. There’s hope for us all.’ Being young – he is yet in his early thirties – he thinks any woman of forty-five to be mummified.
‘None for you, sir. Not if Her Majesty hears of the latest debauchery. Brigadier Breton’s wife, I am told.’
He bowed. ‘I am indeed the sapper of that lady’s earthworks. But…’ he picked me a tulip, ‘…’twas only to while away the hours besieging you. You are the beat of my heart, the breath of my nostrils. Surrender.’
‘My citadel is inviolable, sir, I thank you. Though, indeed, there is a service you might perform for Her Majesty’s ladies.’
‘All of them?’ He started backwards. ‘Woman, you flatter me.’
Ignoring it, I told him of how Carrots’s letters were opened, how some – I did not specify myself – were being followed, of the searched rooms. ‘Who can be doing it, do you think?’
‘Harley,’ he said at once. ‘And him such a pure old gentleman if you keep the brandy from him and him from the brandy. He has taken to sniffing ladies’ unmentionables in his dotage.’
But I’d caught him, I could see. He will find out; he loves a secret – and he will tell me, for he cannot keep one. He is the most indiscreet person in the world; he boasts to me that he is already ousting Harley as the Tory hero ‘for the man has all the appearance of wisdom but none of its substance’. He would love nothing more than to catch Harley bending. The wonder is not that two such dissimilar Tories begin to quarrel but that they were ever friends in the first place.
I dismissed him before we reached my stairs; I permit his foolery in public because he performs so for every human creature below the age of thirty with a cleft between its legs. Everyone knows it. But I cannot afford a scandal. Not now. Not so close.
‘Then I shall be off to dinner at the Beefsteak,’ he said – it is one of his drinking and whoring clubs – ‘they are saving me a housemaid for the first course. But I would rather eat you.’
‘Goodnight, sir,’ I told him and went to my stairs with something like regret; not for his fucking but for his company, which would have kept the beast at bay for a while at least.
It is Harley. And it is me he looks for. Lord knows who St John bribed or twisted last night but he was full of it and could not wait to tell me, dragging me to the orangery the moment I came off duty.
‘Have you ever heard of an Anne Bard or an Anne Bonny?’
‘No, sir.’
‘By God, neither had I. She is the Dark Lady of the Stuarts, my child, and Harley is the dark horse who’s discovered her existence. A granddaughter of Rupert of the Rhine, no less, plumb in the line of succession, a plum for me. Harley has reason to believe she is incognito somewhere at court.’
He fell on his knees in the grass and raised clasped hands to the sky. ‘Zeus, let me find her first. I make obeisance, I will sacrifice. Take my wife – as a matter of fact I’d be glad if you would – take my ass, take all else that is mine, but let me find her first.’
‘Get up, sir, I beg you. The gardeners are looking.’ I tugged the clown to his feet. ‘Why do you want this person?’
‘To knit my stockings,’ he said, brushing them off and glancing at me from the corner of his eyes, which are long and curve round almost to his temples. ‘What do you think I want her for? Consider. A Stuart, an untainted Stuart from the stable of Rupert himself, warhorse of blessed memory. Young, pretty – by God, she’d better be pretty – so timid and modest she works as a servant in the house of her exalted cousin. I’ll have her on the throne so fast it’ll make her eyes squint.’
I frowned. ‘Why would she not make herself known?’
‘How the hell should I know? What does it matter? Swift shall make up some romantic legend for her, a promise to her mother, fear of the Whigs, something. Don’t you wrinkle your pretty brow at me, madam, get on and find her and I’ll make you Chancellor of the Exchequer. If Harley thinks she’s here, she’s here. He’s a blandiloquent old blowsabell but his information is ever good.’
‘But the Act of Settlement,’ I protested, trying to extract what I could while I could, ‘Can that be set aside so easily?’
‘My dear girl, do you think England wants George of Hanover? A bunion-faced pickelhaube who speaks no English, no French, but only a language fit for calling pigs home?’ He expired. ‘If James Francis would turn Protestant or merely pretend to turn Protestant, the people would have him back tomorrow – even the Whigs. But no. He calls it honour. I call it dementia.’
‘You’ve been negotiating with him, then?’
‘Everybody’s negotiating with him.’ He was amazed I should ask. ‘Harley, Marlborough, Godolphin, the second footman and the night-soil man, I shouldn’t wonder. Nobody wants the Hanovers.’
‘And you would put this other Anne, this Anne Bard, on the throne instead?’
‘It’ll still be warm from the queen’s arse,’ he promised me. ‘Anybody, anybody, but George. I’ve even flirted with the Duke of Savoy. He’s a relative.’
‘The Duke of Savoy?’ I become confused with all our allies. ‘Didn’t he order one of his subjects boiled in oil?’
‘He was probably hungry. Apart from that, Victor Amadeus of Savoy is as godfearing a fellow as you’ll find in a week of Sundays. But Anne Bard now… I must discover if she’s Protestant. She will be Protestant. I’ll baptize her myself.’ He became very earnest. ‘Find her for me, dearest one, and I promise, I swear, you shall have any title you wish and riches beyond your dreams. Sniff her out. Which among the palace women has the Stuart look? The strain runs strong in all of them. She will be dark, I think, like yourself, perhaps a foreign accent – she will have been born abroad…’
On and on it went until I promised to be his secret – secret, I ask you – and cunning agent. I’ll not trust him, of course. He is clever but cannot control his cleverness. Carries too much topsail, we used to say. Besides, the plan goes well. There was no opportunity to be alone with the queen yesterday; despite feeling unwell she insisted on going to Westminster Hall and touching. Carrots says it is a terrible spectacle. ‘My dear, all those swollen, scabby people, weeping and crawling round her skirts, the mothers holding up their scrofulous children, thousands of them. The smell, my dear.’
Myself, I incline to William of Orange who, when asked by a subject to touch him for the king’s evil, wished him better health and more sense. But the Stuarts believe in the magic of kingship. So do their people. Scrofulous Jacobites even cross the Channel secretly to be touched by James Francis, refusing to accept that Anne has the power.
Today she was exhausted and kept to her chamber but she was well enough to indicate that she wished to speak to me privately and asked Carrots to take some message to Dr Hamilton, who keeps one talking to the last trump, and sent Danvers to the kitchens.
‘I have been tormented, my dear, by what you told me of that young woman. Did she say nothing else to you?’
‘Your Majesty, she disappeared so suddenly I feared for her. She feared for herself and indeed, that was why she left the box in my keeping.’
‘What box is this?’
‘A little one, madam, brass-bound. It meant much to her and I was to guard it until she came for it, though she never did. Indeed, when my family and I were to sail for Jamaica I was in a taking what should be done with it, so I carried it with me and brought it back again. I have it yet.’
‘What is in it?’
I opened my eyes wide. ‘I do not know, madam. It is padlocked.’
‘And you have never broken the lock?’
‘Indeed not. I had no such permission.’
‘She did well to trust you, my child.’ She sat up higher in bed, suddenly a little girl, an enormous little girl. ‘Yet it has been so long… do you think she would wish…? Should we…? Could we…?’
‘I shall bring it with me tomorrow, madam,’ I said.
The creature is howling her displeasure at my progress today and I have had to stuff my ears with cotton so that I can concentrate on what I write. ‘It wasn’t your box,’ I tell her, ‘you stole it.’
We opened it this morning; rather, I broke the lock and let Queen Ant take out and read its contents. I was glad to stand back – my hands were shaking.
Out came the genuine record of the marriage between Dudley Bard and Euphame Cassilis of Lochiel signed and sealed in 1680 by some Habsburg priest. Out next a torn and faded account, also genuine, in French by an admiring comrade who had seen young Bard die as he led a forlorn hope on the walls of Buda.
Then a statement, also in French, also genuine, by a Countess d’Hona, of witnessing the birth of a girl to Euphame Cassilis of Lochiel in 1681.
Queen Ant read each one carefully, holding them close to her eyes. She has acquired a macaw, the gift of some foreign potentate, which wobbles back and forth on an Indian screen near the bed. She likes it; we all hate the thing and secretly call it ‘Sarah’. It gives unexpected and piercing shrieks, echoing the creature’s.
After that came the forgeries. They were made by a gentleman called Fist Frank, known throughout the Brotherhood for his ability to fake anybody’s hand to perfection.
The first is the record of a marriage between James Francis Edward Stuart and Anne Margaret Bard in 1704, attested on oath by a Fr Jacomo Ronchi that it was conducted by him in Paris, and witnessed by Francesca, Lady Bellamont.
Queen Ant put it down slowly, staring straight ahead. ‘Not possible,’ she said, ‘No, no. Modena would not have allowed it.’
‘What is it, Your Majesty? You are pale.’
She shook her head. ‘No. It cannot be credited. Better you should not know, child.’
I curtseyed, but waited. Sure enough, she could not keep it in and after much are-you-loyal-child? and can-I-trust-you-with-a-secret? she told me. ‘This says that your acquaintance, Prince Rupert’s granddaughter, was married to my half-brother, James, some six years since. It cannot be. He was a child then, a mere sixteen years old. His mother would not have allowed it.’
I gave a shake of the head. A sentimental smile. ‘Impetuous young love.’ I had not expected she would swallow the medicine in one gulp; that she was already referring to ‘Prince Rupert’s granddaughter’ was well to be going on with.
‘Impetuous, indeed,’ she said.
‘There is more, madam,’ I said, pointing to the last paper.
This is an excellent forgery, modelled closely on Francesca’s manner of speech, saying that she had promoted this secret marriage between her legitimate granddaughter and young James, knowing the passion that was between them and seeing no harm in an alliance between two true and noble descendants of James I of England, VI of Scotland. ‘…That one day it may bear fruit that will be of comfort to Her Most Excellent Christian Majesty, Queen Anne of England.’ (It was vital to plant the seed that the union might bring forth a child. The word ‘comfort’ was a nice touch, I thought.)
I saw her lips shape the words in a desperate question. ‘A child?’
It is a gamble whether she takes it well or ill. Will a woman who has borne so many dead children be jealous? Or will she takes pleasure in knowing that the Stuart line goes on.
With a ‘tcha’ of impatience and disbelief she packed the papers back in the box and said she would keep it a while. She will consider the matter; her brain is cautious and slow but it is thorough. I can see she is in a turmoil, not wanting to credit such evidence.
But she will. Who is pressing her to accept it? Not I. I shall not mention it again until she does, acting as if I am merely the serendipity through which she has uncovered it. Belief that it is genuine will come about through her own uneasy conscience, growing in the guilt she feels for her young half-brother’s dispossession, like a nettle in an untidy corner. Then she will raise the business with me again.
And then… and then…
Such to-dos there have been. Sarah has been dismissed. It is as if the roof had blown off the palace and left us amazed and windswept in the sudden air. The great beam of Knossos has fallen and the Minotaur has rushed roaring away.
What fools the Marlboroughs are! They had England between their two pairs of hands and they squeezed her too tight. The duke has been pressing the queen to make him Captain-General for life. He knew the Tories were out for his blood because he refuses to make easy terms with Louis so that the war may be ended quickly. He believes that only he can bring about a lasting and honourable peace. He may be right, though, as a soldier, he thinks only in military terms and St John says there are other ways.
Indeed, St John would give Louis such terms as would allow us to trade with France when the war is finished. St John’s enemies call him a Frog lover. He calls himself a European. And he has the Tory landowners behind him; they say they are being ruined to enrich army officers and keep Whigs in the City juggling their shares and reaping money where they have not sown.
Queen Ant was horrified by Marlborough’s demand. She has not, I think, forgiven him for Malplaquet and its loss of lives, ‘a Pyrrhic victory’, she called it, whatever that is, and refused to go to the public thanksgiving in St Paul’s, making her mourning her excuse, and attended her private chapel instead.
It is unlike the duke to miscalculate so disastrously. Though Sarah has no sense of the danger, he has always shown tact. Now he has alienated the queen, who thinks he wishes to make himself tyrant, and has refused him, saying she cannot make him Captain-General for life without Act of Parliament and, in any case, cannot bind her successor to such.
The Tory press, especially Swift, egged on by St John, sees its opportunity and is baying for the blood of the Marlboroughs, accusing him of using money which should have fed his soldiers for his own purposes, and his wife, ‘that insolent woman, that plague, that fury’, of purloining no less than 20,000 a year from the Privy Purse.
I do not believe it and neither does Queen Ant: ‘Everybody knows that cheating is not the Duchess of Marlborough’s crime.’ But she saw her opportunity. When Sarah again threatened to publish the queen’s more indiscreet letters from their youth, even hinting at dark sexual doings between Her Majesty and Abigail, the axe fell.
Marlborough came back from Europe, begging the queen to stay her hand, bringing a letter which Sarah had written saying she was sorry she had ever displeased Her Majesty and never would again – I can see her thrashing with fury in writing it, like a snake eating its own tail.
‘The key must be returned within three days,’ Queen Ant said. I have never heard her colder. The gold key is the symbol of Sarah’s office. The duke pleaded; at least wait until the peace was concluded when he and his wife could retire with dignity.
‘The key must be returned within three days,’ the queen said again. And so it was. In two.
The next day – we were at St James’s – Abigail came bleating. ‘Oh, Your Majesty, see what she is doing!’
We ran to Sarah’s lodgings. And there she was, bless her, directing workmen by a chisel held in her hand, and gutting the rooms of everything but the chimneypieces. If it could be unscrewed Sarah was unscrewing it, light fittings, fingerplates, the brass locks on the doors – and beautiful locks too, by the queen’s locksmith, Josiah Key, who is the most ingenious man in Europe.
Queen Ant looked, then went away. Sarah did not so much as blink but went on ordering the men to be careful, to put this in that packing case. If we’d stood there much longer, she’d have had us boxed as well. Revenge, pure and simple. With Blenheim Palace rising like a beautiful monster out there in Oxfordshire she hardly needs door knobs. It was being built by a grateful nation out of public money, though it won’t be finished by it. I heard Queen Ant say, ‘I shall build no more houses for her when she has pulled my own to pieces.’
It was Sarah’s last act. She is gone. Her posts are given to Carrots (Groom of the Stole) and Abigail (Keeper of the Privy Purse) which has disappointed them both since each expected them both. But Queen Ant has learned her lesson. She has also raised my salary.
And now Harley is stabbed nearly to death! I should like to have seen it, I should like to have done it. The would-be assassin is, or was, I should now say, a seedy French noble who had spied for England against his country and then, when Harley reduced his pay, spied for France against England. He was discovered, arrested and brought before a committee of the Privy Council at Whitehall for examination. Suddenly Guiscard produced a penknife and stabbed Harley in the breast.
‘The villain has killed Mr Harley,’ cried St John – at least, that is what he says he said – and ran his rapier through the Frenchie’s body a time or two.
The penknife was broken by a brocade flower on Harley’s waistcoat – it was the silver and blue with gold flowers that he’d had made for the queen’s birthday – but he was badly hurt nevertheless and keeps his bed. Guiscard was dragged off to Newgate, dying.
St John is incensed. The attack has made Harley the nation’s and queen’s martyr and darling, just as he, St John, was outdoing him in popularity.
‘The old fart probably paid Guiscard to do it,’ he grumbled to me, ‘and wore that dreadful waistcoat a-purpose. Besides, who could pierce his heart? They wouldn’t know where to find it.’ He is having it put about that he was the intended victim, not Harley, though with little effect.
However, he is making hay while the cat’s away and is courting Abigail strongly, pleasing her by putting that useless brother of hers, Jack Hill, in charge of an expedition to Canada. Behind her back he is urging me to redouble my efforts to find Anne Bard.
It is possible, he says – and so do many others – that Guiscard also threatened the queen’s life. True, she is poorly guarded so now the sentries have been doubled and the locks changed.
The danger and the attack on Harley brought on another bout of her illness. This causes such panic among those with an eye to their future that they are forming alliances, breaking them, blackmailing each other for treating with the Jacobites then treating with them themselves. I am being offered such bribes to persuade the queen this way or the other that I could be as rich as Abigail is making herself if I wanted. I don’t take them. Nevertheless, I feel the same panic.
To have come so close and be robbed of our revenge because the stupid woman insists on dying…
Grant me time, God.
What shall I do? The creature has a new trick. She bleeds. As I write, blood is gushing from the space that is her mouth so fast that it has begun to swill on the floor. I have drawn up my feet to keep them from being covered but still it comes, thick and bright with irregular gobbets in it, like Lady Charlotte in spate, like a haemorrhage. It is rising up the walls. Oh, God, oh, Devil, grant me time before she sends me mad.