Laird o’ Kirkaldy was a slow boat and an unlucky boat. One of her many mishaps, which I won’t bore you with, James, nearly drowned me. I almost welcomed it. However, one way and another, the Laird and I didn’t arrive in England until late in 1711. Like I always had when I’d taken a beating, I went straight to Mrs Defoe.
‘So thin, Martin,’ she said, ‘so brown. Sit and rest thy poor leg. I’ll heat up some white soup this minute.’
The children were all in bed, there was a kettle rattling gently on the fire and ironing airing from a string across the mantelpiece. She sat opposite me with her elbows on the table as I ate, not letting me talk until I’d finished two bowls of white soup and a loaf of home-made bread. I did my best with a syllabub but was defeated.
‘You eat that all up, Martin Millet. Good English food, that is, got nutmeg in it. You can’t thrive on foreign fare with all them spices. I was feared for you when I heard thy travels. A reg’lar Usselees, Dan’l says you been.’
‘Usselees had a Penelope like you,’ I said. ‘I’ve yet to find one.’
‘Bratchet not returned with thee, then?’
She’s no fool is Mrs Defoe.
‘She married somebody else. In Jamaica.’
Mrs Defoe squeezed my hand. ‘I’m that sorry, Martin. Funny little thing she was, but she had the makings of a rare woman.’
She brought me up to date with the essential news. The boys were growing up, young Daniel showing signs of a good business head – the first one in the family, I thought – young Norton was so clever at his reading and writing he might follow his father’s steps into journalism, Maria, Hannah, Henrietta and Sophia were all good girls and spoke their catechism very pretty.
‘But the poor queen, Martin. Failing they say and no wonder with assassins jumping out on us from every corner. What’ll come of it all, I don’t know. Civil war, they do say.’
Daniel himself was as gloomy when he came home. He wasn’t surprised to see me. A report of our doings had been sent from Jamaica by Lord Archibald to Robert Harley who was now Earl of Oxford and the queen’s first minister. ‘And I think I can trust you, Martin, to know that I am perhaps the earl’s greatest confidant.’
He didn’t seem the richer for it, or happier. When he took me into his study so that we could talk privately, he flew into a rage to find it strewn with washing and threw the clothes out into the passage and muttered something about a man called Swift not having to write in a laundry.
‘We can offer you but poor hospitality, Martin,’ he said, ‘but I beg you will stay here until you are settled. I wish to hear of your encounter with the pirates.’ His eyes gleamed at the prospect. He loved a good rogue, did Daniel.
I thanked him and told him truthfully that I never felt more at home than I did in that house in Newington.
‘But first to nos moutons, as the French say.’ He looked at me. ‘They do say that, do they?’
I said they did.
‘And did you really meet Louis face to face at Marly? Our reports from John Laws indicated the monster actually talked to you.’
When I started telling him, he held up a hand. ‘No, no. I must deny myself these pleasures until later. Harl… my Lord Oxford is in a fever to know of the quest for Anne Bonny.’
I told him most, not all, of what had happened in Jamaica.
He sat back. ‘Let me clarify. There is a record of Mary Read’s death but the gaoler at Spanish Town said the records were carelessly kept and believes both women did not survive imprisonment.’
‘I think one of ’em’s dead,’ I said, ‘I’m not sure which.’
‘Hmm.’ He got up and began striding about. His wig was still unfashionably long and he was wearing the same sage-green velvet coat and satin waistcoat in which he’d first come to Puddle Court. Mrs Defoe had done a good job in keeping them brushed and away from the bailiffs, but the lace cuffs were more frayed than ever.
‘I must tell you, Martin, that Lord Oxford tends to your opinion. He has become near fanatical in his belief that someone, a woman, has infiltrated the very court of our queen and is out for mischief.’ He brought me up to date with the Greg business. ‘But I should also tell you that he is not well. Those who witnessed the assassination attempt on him claim he remained the calmest person in the room, yet it has undoubtedly affected him. And his colleague Bolingbroke is worse than an enemy.’
Daniel leaned forward as if to impart a state secret. I suppose it was. ‘He looks too much on the wine when it is raging. While he kept his bed, I glimpsed empty port bottles beneath the counterpane.’
God help England, I thought. A drunk for a first minister and an invalid queen.
But I wasn’t disposed to discount Harley’s obession that there was a madwoman at court. Whoever had tried to rid the world of Bratchet had known virtually every move we made.
Daniel drew himself up. ‘I am empowered to co-opt you into the search for this woman, Martin. We propose to find you some position in the queen’s household.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m done, Daniel. It’s me for the quiet life. I’m going to buy myself a little farm and settle down on it. I’ve lost too much in the quest for Anne Bonny. If there’s a female Guy Fawkes at court, she can bloody well stay there for all I care.’
‘For your country, Martin.’
‘Sod my country.’
He was angry with me and became eloquent. Didn’t I realize we were on the edge of civil war? ‘The succession question is the plague come again. Men are glancing at each other for signs of infection. Is that a Stuart bubo bulging under an armpit; is that a Jacobite sneeze? Has this one breathed in so much tainted incense that he would tolerate a Catholic for a king? I tell you, Martin, the disease has spread to parlour, counting house, even kitchen. Only yesterday, in my own warehouse, I found my apprentices lined up on different sides of the floor, throwing High Church and Low Church at each other like battledore and shuttlecock.’
He shook me, I admit it. I’d no idea the split between supporters of Hanover and Stuart went so deep. In Jamaica they hardly cared who the monarch of England was as long as he took sugar.
‘We shall see civil war again,’ he kept saying. His lovely, prospering England, all his wonderful projects, to be swilled away in the blood of a butcher’s yard. ‘God knows I have no personal affection for George of Hanover, but I will take up arms again, as I did in the Monmouth rebellion, to protect my land from the Catholics.’
‘Come on, Daniel,’ I said, ‘there won’t be popery back.’
‘I have your assurance do I?’ he shouted, ‘The word of a man not in the country for years that the Pretender will be a good little king? We thought his father would be a good little king, until every Protestant in office began to be replaced by Papists.’
He banged the table. ‘It’s happening already. Bolingbroke is playing for the soul of the High Tories. He is to bring in a bill which will take the education of their children away from Dissenters and put it in the hands of teachers accredited only by the Church of England.’
Suddenly he was calm. And crafty. ‘This does not affect our weary Master Millet, does it? He will buy his farm and go to sleep and wake up to find someone else telling him where he may send his children to school. But…’ He leaned so close his nose practically touched mine. ‘…whose money will buy that farm for him?’
I sighed. ‘Aunt Effie’s.’
‘And do we know yet who killed Aunt Effie?’
‘But what’s the good of it?’ I pleaded, ‘Unless this woman wears a notice saying: “I intend to wreak havoc”, I’m not likely to recognize her.’
‘You’ve been sniffing the trail from Puddle Court to Jamaica,’ he pointed out, ‘You know her scent. There’ll be something, some word, a reference, a look.’
‘All right, Daniel,’ I said, ‘but I ain’t dressing up in livery and standing behind chairs with chalk in my hair.’
‘No,’ he said, looking me up and down, ‘I don’t see you as a footman. We’ll have to find something more… appropriate.’
I became a royal gardener.
I knew nothing of horticulture. At home we’d not possessed even a window-box. My father hadn’t liked flowers; he suspected their relationship with bees wasn’t all it should be. As for the army, if they catch you standing around sniffing petunias, they put you on a charge.
I explained this to Mr Henry Wise, the queen’s gardener, at our first meeting, but he said it didn’t matter as his instructions from the Earl of Oxford were that my post was to be nominal, no more than an excuse for my presence around the royal grounds.
A great man, Henry Wise. One of the few people who, when he gets to heaven, can look St Peter in the eye and say he left the world sweeter-smelling than he found it. He made the sunken garden from a chalk pit at Kensington, the rides at Windsor, the lime-bordered canals at Hampton Court and the Maestricht Garden near the Thames.
Queen Anne loved him. I’d see them together often, her very fat, him very thin, considering a flower bed like a couple of generals surveying the placement of troops. It’s said she discussed state secrets with him. If she did, he never passed them on.
Actually, my employment wasn’t as daft as it sounds. I saw a lot of the female royal household. The queen’s hunting days were over and she spent more and more time in her gardens, which meant that the maids of honour did too. Her other women were sent to gather flowers for the bedchamber and took their exercise around the grounds. Few of them lurked behind bushes, however, unless it was to meet a man, or in any way acted suspiciously as far as I could see.
As it turned out, I was useful to Mr Wise in organizing the transport of young plants – what he called ‘the greens’ – from his partner’s nursery at Brompton to the grounds of the various palaces. I built him a sort of covered wain which had double roof and sides, to insulate delicate trees like myrtles and oranges from both heat and cold. It was immensely heavy and needed a team of eight to pull it, but it worked.
There was a field which lay fallow at the back of the Brompton Nurseries and I persuaded George London, Wise’s partner, to let me use it for an experiment. It was an idea that’d come to me in France, seeing the way its wine-growers planted their vines in neat rows. Piracy and other things had put it out of my mind, but the sugar planters’ method of making lines of trenches for their cane cuttings to sprout in brought it back.
Why, I wondered, couldn’t this tidiness be applied to corn? Broadcasting seed by hand is wasteful; too many seeds here, too few there so that wheat and barley grow up in patches. I devised a drill – Christ, I was only too happy to occupy my mind with something – which would make channels in the soil, sow the seed and cover the rows, all in one operation.
It took me a long time; composing the seed box was a bugger and when I’d finished it looked a crazy contraption and wasn’t as efficient as it should have been – a man called Tull has since invented a better one – but it worked well enough for George London to praise the result to Mr Wise who, in turn, praised it to the queen, who came to see it in action.
The night after her inspection, Defoe hurried into my grace-and-favour cottage, one of a row in Kensington village.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘Well what?’
‘Dammit,’ he said, ‘the queen brought practically every woman in the household to see that blasted drill of yours. Are you no further?’
‘No. The red-headed one said what a dear little plough it was, a dark one asked why I didn’t paint it pink and the others wanted to play the “What?” game.’
He fell into a chair. ‘This is hopeless.’ Then he sat up. ‘You know which is the only way to solve this?’
‘How?’
‘Go to Jamaica and fetch the Bratchet back.’
‘No.’ He blinked and I realized I’d shouted. I sat down opposite him. ‘Leave her alone, Daniel. She’s safe out there.’
‘Very well, my dear boy. Don’t upset yourself. But Lord Oxford is becoming impatient. Time grows short. As you saw today, the queen’s not at all well.’ He added wistfully, ‘Anne Bonny would still prove the ideal solution to the crisis if we could find her. She would be the candidate on which both sides could compromise.’
‘They’re not compromising with Bratchet,’ I told him.
He produced a sheaf of papers from his pocket. ‘Now, then, my agency has been gathering information on the various women in the household.’
I took the papers from him and looked them over.
Daniel’s agents – better known to the London magistracy as rogues, pickpockets and tricksters – had been thorough. They’d uncovered quite a number of miniature skeletons rattling in the closets of the female household. What was surprising was the number of women whose childhoods couldn’t be accounted for. If the parents were dead, or if the woman herself came from a far-flung part of the country or colony, it was virtually impossible to confirm her as the person she claimed to be.
Her Majesty’s hairdresser, for example, was a supposed Huguenot refugee. But was she? And why was she enjoying a dubious relationship with a gambler who was suspected of Jacobite tendencies?
There was a bedchamber woman who’d been recommended by the late Earl of Nottingham but whose family had emigrated to Massachusetts, leaving nobody who could go bail for her background. A laundress’s cousin was in the Clink for debt. There’d been the unaccountable death of a housemaid’s brother.
Another bedchamber woman took mysterious trips to Highgate and had nightmares, a maid of honour was rumoured to have an illegitimate son, another maid of honour had been seen in a low tavern.
I handed him back the papers. ‘What did you do in the war, Uncle Daniel?’
‘Pried into the private lives of serving women, nephew. I know, I know. It seems shameful, but these are desperate times.’
He was looking desperate himself. He’d got too many eggs in Harley’s basket. If Harley fell he’d be friendless, not to say destitute. The Tories didn’t trust him because he had been too great a Whig; the Whigs were disgusted with him for taking too Tory a line in his news sheet.
He took off his wig and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. ‘Will we find a murderess or a queen, Martin? Put her on the throne or in the Tower? Or merely suppress all record of her existence in order to leave the way clear for the Hanovers?’ He looked up. ‘Or the Stuarts?’
‘You don’t even trust Harley, do you?’
Daniel let his hands drop. ‘I’m frightened, Martin. I asked him straight out the other day. “We are holding to the Protestant succession, are we not, my lord?” I said.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said, “We are holding to prudence, Master Defoe.” There are rumours that even he is flirting with the Pretender.’
They were like turkeys in a pen when a fox gets in; more of them trampling themselves through panic than the fox could kill. I saw them every day, Harley, Bolingbroke and the others rushing into Kensington Palace to hector the poor bloody queen into supporting this cause or the other. Why the hell couldn’t they leave the woman in peace? A good woman, too. It’d taken her time to understand what the Millet Drill was about, but once she did she’d asked intelligent questions. She reminded me of Mrs Defoe.
Daniel got up to go. He struck a tragic attitude. ‘Well, when the Pope and his minions rule England, one of the first cast on to the bonfire will be Daniel Defoe, Gentleman.’
The thought cheered him up. He made a brisk attempt to persuade me to invest any money I gained from the Millet Drill in a South Seas project he was peddling, then went.
I should have known that desperate men will do anything. The next week, when I took Mrs Defoe her usual bunch of flowers, she said Daniel had gone to Jamaica.
Harley had sent him to bring back the Bratchet.