Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 9.5

-xii-

                    News from the continent is not good. Bonaparte has a vast army encamped at Boulogne overlooking the Channel, within sight, on a clear day, of England. But the King merely sends peremptory messages to his allies in Vienna and Berlin. The Hanoverian Count Bennigsen is now a leading member of the conspiracy in St. Petersburg to assassinate Czar Paul, the Russian emperor, so Grand Duke Alexander will soon ascend the throne there; and he’s on our side — or we think he is. As the damp, grey English winter drags London through the first weeks of 1799, Edward’s rheumatism, aggravated by injuries from his fall, begins to cause him acute suffering. Every doctor his mother sends him prescribes bleeding, and a spell at the waters of Bath. He chooses the waters. As Julie’s maids begin to pack and prepare for their trip to Somerset, he decides to honour his pledge and visit Caroline, the Princess of Wales, out at Blackheath.

                         He reaches the Montague estate after a two-hour ride with aching joints, pleasantly surprised to find the house and grounds ample enough and exceedingly well-tended. Caroline’s maid shows him into a spacious, if curiously furnished drawing room, saying her mistress will be down shortly, and offering him tea. Seated on a richly embroidered sofa, opposite French doors looking out on a snow-blanketed garden, with trellis-work arbours and arches, he looks around at the room and its many decorations. There are erotic paintings, some of a Sapphic nature, hung on walls of a deep Chinese-red with gold edging. All manner of objects and small bronze sculptures jockey for his attention. There is a Turkish water pipe, recently smoked and containing a brownish residue. There are several phallic shaped rods, each about a foot in height and fashioned from wood, metal, ivory or marble. Oriental rugs sprawl across the floorboards, overlapping one another untidily. When his tea arrives, on a brass tray the size of a door, he sips at it, reaching for a crudely printed, unbound book on the side table. The text is in French, and its title translates as The 120 Days of Sodom. The author is a certain Louis Sade. Edward assumes it’s some sort of theological tract:  the story of Lot and his family. Was that as long a narrative as 120 days? In the Bible it seems more like a very long weekend. Opening a page at random and reading idly, he comes across a passage of such fantastically vile obscenity that he can scarcely believe his eyes. There are also several engravings of activities he barely even understands. The shock of this book brings on a bilious attack of such severity he can no longer drink his tea, gulping down some milk from a small jug instead. He puts the book back on its table, wishing he could now wash his hands, wash his eyes and mind. How could anyone possess such an abomination? 

                       It is at this point that Princess Caroline enters the room in a cloud of patchouli, a stocky figure wearing a long red silk gown with applique dragons. Her hair hangs in blonde ringlets. Despite Wales’ aspersions, she’s far from ugly.

                   “Are you sick?” she asks, eschewing any formalities. “You are looking not very well.” She has traces of a German accent that are more evident in her battered grammar and tessalated ssyntax than in her constricted pronunciation.

                       He rises to bow and kiss her hand, saying, “I’ve had an accidental fall, Highness; it’s nothing.”

                     “I am not being ‘Highness’ here to you,” she announces grandly. “I am ‘Caroline’ for you, and a sister. You must kiss me, especial as they say you are the one who is not like Gorge. Is it so?”

                          Gorge? It suits Wales, he thinks. He’s confused, but he kisses her hot cheeks in the French manner, and then he is lost for words. She smells of musk and lavender water, not fish. Her face is rounded, with full lips, a distinctively noble nose and wide blue eyes, which have dark smudges beneath them, yet still contain much sparkling life. He immediately feels she’s being wronged.

                   “Madame,” he says, in German, “I have come to introduce myself and pay my respects.”

                       She prefers to speak English, however, saying, “Because you is the kind one, as all say. Please sit and have finished with you tea. It is pleasant for me to have a kind one here.”

                        She sits where he’d been on the sofa, patting the nearby cushion for him to join her there. He complains of the biliousness that makes tea hard on his stomach.

                      “Ach, your father is having the biliousness in him also,” she tells him. “He is a poor, sweet man. Like you, not like Gorge. But saucy for his years.”

                     “Saucy?” He thinks he must have misheard her.

                     A smile. Her nipples are pushing against the fabric of her gown, thick and hard. “Yes, very saucy,” she explains, but in a tone that suggests this sauciness is just a harmless foible. “He come here once all lone, by his horse’s back; and he tell me that from now onward his whole family – excepting the one person we know – will be treating me nicely for the future.” She then sighs theatrically. “But that Ernst brother – I do not like him. He has wicked eyes. He arrive chasing the King. But your father order the Ernst to stay out of this room, so I am lone with him here. He say how much he love me, and also my mother, who be his sister. We are sit us there,” she says, pointing to a green velvet daybed, “and this naughty King he fall himself on me, with the hand on my bosom’ – she pats one full breast, which undulates beneath her fingers ‘– saying many time how he want to have at me.’ She slides her pink tongue along plump lips. ‘I was a tiny bit shock for the moment; but then I slip me off the far side and run to my table, knowing not what must be said.” Her eyes are wide, but somehow, she doesn’t make a very convincing victim.

                      “How was the King taking this?” he asks her, embarrassed both by and for his father. He is aware of the heat coming from her body. 

                      “He is laughing, with the face now red. He think I am play the game with him. So, he is comie to my table, saying I am the little fox who will soon be in his trap…”

                       He thinks of the kindly old fellow with his pouch of winking coins, saying, “What did you do?” He sees that trap, but feels that he’s in it himself, and she’s bearing down on him with her dangerously equivocal smile.

                     “As you see,’ she says, ‘the table is of a round shaping, so he cannot catch with me because I am alway move opposite to him. But I am laugh too now, because his face be so red and saucy.” Her cheeks are now flushed, red and distinctly saucy.

                      “He thought you were not offended?” he says, feeling dizzy, drowning in the jungle pool of her her warmth and perfume.

                     She thumps his thigh with her fist, moving closer. “I was not offend, Edvard. I was maybe even eine kleine flattery. My husband do not want me in his bed, but his father want me on the furnishing… or it may be on anywhere. It is nice to be want by someone, and I also feel good to put such spirit into an alder man.” She leans her head on his shoulder, the spiced breath whispering through her lips.

                      A breast sprawls over his elbow, big and taut. He’s not sure he wants to hear the end of her story, but he asks for it anyway.

                     “Oh,” she replies, as if his inquisitiveness were unexpected, the word’s deep chord rippling over her insistent breast, “he is soon tire by the table chasing, and he sit, telling me what a dear girl I is, and how he will alway be looking after me.” She grips his wrist with a thick warm hand, even her proximate aura steamy and intoxicating.

                        “No more attacks?” he asks, sympathising with his father’s lust, but wondering who was the real predator that day here.

                  She sits upright, her warmth vanishing. “Never, not ever,’ she says firmly. ‘And he come to me many time, giving a gift alway. Did you know I am now a Ranger of Green-Witch Park?” Her eyelids open so wide that the orbs seem in danger of rolling out and smashing on the floor.

              “Greenwich?’ he says, now missing the sultry heat. ‘No, I did not know that.”

                     “Yes, it is truth; and there is a good income from it to help with my expenditure. He want to give me the Green-Witch Park also, but I say, No. Because I am know this park is a belonging of your mother.”

                       Well, that’s laudable, he thinks, but he wonders what royal gifts she has not refused. Instead of this, he asks her why she thinks the King is now acting in such a kindly and generous fashion. Edward assumes it’s just guilt over the attack; but he still can’t believe the old king capable of such spry licentiousness. He’s heard the stories, though, and her account gives them creedence – not that creedence was required for acts witnessed by so many.

                     She dips a forefinger into the milk and licks it. “He try to make apology for his Prince of Veils,’ she says, ‘who, if he get his self more fat, will soon be a Prince of Whales.” She pronounces this last word ‘Wa-hales’, lest he miss her pun.

                        She is easy to seduce, he thinks, because she is the seducer. He forces himself to remember his mission here. “You have been treated very badly, have you not?” he says.  

                    “Your Gorge brother,” she tells him, leaning close again and all but whispering, “give my pearl bracelets to his Lady Jersey — did you know of that?” Her face is angled, and her big blue eyes search his, looking for what? Her whisper is now like the purring of a momentarily content cat.

                    “No,” he confesses. “I did not. Why are you whispering?”

                     “Because she is here,” Caroline hisses. “She is alway somewheres here, listening, spying, making the report back for Gorge. I have to take my dinner with that woman almuch every night – and I hate her so great I want to cut my knife with her throat…”

                    “You want to cut her throat?” he suggests.

                   “No, worse,’ she says, leaping to her feet. ‘I like to jump her head on my knife until the knife break up!’ She hops up and down, stamping, her heavy breasts rolling around behind the red silk. She crashes back on the sofa sighing. ‘Alway she wear my pearl bracelets to miliate me,’ she says. ‘He take way all my jewel and give them to little Charlotte, who she cannot wear them, natural, so they are looked after for her until she grow big. It is all for hurt me. He wish me a death, but he know all the peoples they will blame him for that. He want to be love, but he do not make his self able to be love. Often, I feel a pity for him, since he can be the nice man; yet also he be a nasty vindicate man, and blame me for all his hurt…”

                       She is an unusual person, he thinks, not easy to read. “But what started all this hostility and cruelty?” he says. This is what he really wants to know. “George is not exactly a model human being, but I have never found him to be a wicked or inhumane one. Something must have happened between you to create such an intense animosity? I will, of course, understand if it’s too intimate or personal a matter that you cannot speak of it…”

                    “I trusting you,” she tells him, still whispering, “but you must promise me not to be repeat what I will say for the lifetime of me and my dear Charlotte…” Her expression of unannealed frankness  is a little too theatrical.

                     He assures her he never breaks a promise.

                    “On the night of us wedding,” she says, her bright eyes now distinctly sad, tears ready to well up and slide, ‘he is so drunken that he fall down and sleep. I leave him there, not wanting this special night to be spoil. But, after a two or three hour, he wake up, and he come to me quite tender, with kissings and all natural affections. Then he put himself inside, and he stop in there, saying to me, ‘You are not maiden, are you, Madame?’ Her eyebrows have risen to the hairline. ‘He is angry, but now very rough; he finish with his self all the sames. As he lay backs, with hard breath, he demand of me why I am not the wirgin I am suppose proper to be for him. I understand his anger; so, I decide I will tell truth of it. I say to him that in Brunsvick I was have two ladies who is my special friend, and we sometime be play games in the bed, with one lady pretending herself a husband, and me acting a role of wife.’ She presses her chubby palms together and begins plunging a forefinger between the first two fingers of her other hand, in and out, in and out. ‘In this game,’ she goes on, ‘we use what you call ‘didoe’ for the husband, and so this is how I losing my head maiden.’ Her eyes have taken on a greenish hue, and something wild glints inside them. ‘I am young then, I tell to him,’ she says, ‘and not with knowledges of such matter. The Gorge he listen to me quiet; then he ask if I enjoy these game with girls.’ She smiles, her lips somehow fuller, wet and shiny. ‘I wish to be honest for him,’ she says, ‘so I admit to him I very much enjoys it.’ She leans over to look directly into his eyes, panting softly before continuing. ‘This is when he goes into a crazy, a complete 

verrückt, punching my belly, calling me terrible name, hitting my head, and telling me he never will touch me ever again. I am scare he might kill me – as we hear the English king does with wifes – but he start drinking of the brandy again, walking up and down room, calling me disgusted thing, and telling the marriage it is over. He drink perhap two pint of brandy, and look as if he will light into flame. Then he suddenly lie on sofa and is a sleep immediate, snoring so loud I must put cloth in my ear. This is what happen on the night.’ She straightens up, elbows out. ‘What you hear about this is thing I make to prevent shame for both him and me. Do you understanding better now?” she asks him, looking as if a burden has fallen from her hunched shoulders, fallen into his strong arms.

                     He feels dazed from the surfeit of truth. “I do indeed,” he says. “And I deeply appreciate your honesty, as well as your trust. But what of little Charlotte? Where is she in all this unpleasantness?”

                      “That is how he hurt me most, Edvard,’ she says woefully. ‘The King he adore her, and she now is under his care official; but she is live herselve at Carlton House, with Lady Elgin for the governess – a good person, this lady. I am give permit to see her one time a week, for only the hour; and often this is not possible be for me, because Gorge is send her off to the different place. He want my heart to break into a small piece; but I will not let this breaking happen to me. I am remain myselve strong, and also happy. One day Charlotte will be make her own mind on who she will see; and she is know I love her, and want to be more with her if it is allow to me. She also know her father can see her much time as he wish, but he see her for less than I am do. She feel she is have no parent; and this is not be right. It is not be very right at all, no…” Caroline begins to weep, and he puts an arm on her shoulders, offering consoling words that sound to him as empty as the air. 

                      “The King ardently wishes for reconciliation,” he says at length. “Is there no way of effecting this, if only for the family and for little Charlotte’s sake?” She suddenly feels so small under his huge arm, so small and so soft.

                      “Ask to your brother this question, not to me,” she replies testily. “He is the one who throw the obstacle across my roads.”

                      “But he invited you to spend Christmas at Carlton House. Why did you decline his offer?” he says, inhaling briefly the scent of ginger on her breath.

                     She snorts indignantly. “I am be to go there and get miliated by his wa-hore and drinker friend?” she snaps, shaking back her yellow ringlets over his forearm.

                     “He could have been genuinely attempting to build a bridge,’ he says, watching her chest ebb and flow, disturbed by his own thoughts. ‘You ought to have given him a chance – and you know how sensitive he is to slights or insults…”

                    She twists free of his arms, her body pivoting. “And you do not knowing how he be unsensitive to him wife and child.’ She spits this out. ‘He cannot build any thing, let lone the bridge. He drink; he wa-hore; he fatten; he gomble; he sleep – these are be his talent; these are be his work.’ She claps her hands and then turns back to him, mellow now. ‘It is not like you,’ she says, the voice still breathy, ‘who lead armies and rule over the umpires…”

                     He’s flattered that reports of him have given her so high an opinion of his very modest accomplishments. Who was circulating such encomia? Not a relative to be sure. He wants to point out that Wales does possess other talents, yet he’s sensible that such qualities hardly mitigate the vindictive cruelties she’s endured at her husband’s hands. He glances at the foul book on her side table. Why would she have such a thing? He doesn’t dare ask. He wonders how truthful she’s being. There are always two versions of any tale about relationships, aren’t there? “The Prince of Wales’ position is very different from my own,” he decides to say. “He is heir to the throne and cannot be placed in life-threatening situations. His task is to watch and learn, waiting for the time when he will hold the reins of power.” That’s the official version, he thinks.

                     “He cannot even hold the rein of him horse,” she says scornfully. “He fall off in his drinked state. I hope he never is wearing the crown here, because your country will suffer with him. The peoples will kill him like King Louis –chop!’ She chops his thigh so hard he cries out. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Me they will spare, the peoples, because they is know I too suffer off him.”

                      He assures her he’ll continue to labour on her behalf with Wales, and will visit her as often as possible, making sure she’s provided with everything she needs.

                    “And to help the lone me?” she says, asking then if he wants to see how she spends her time out here at Blackheath. 

                  ‘Delighted,’ he says.

                   Then she leads him from the room down creaking corridors, past potted plants and framed landscapes, to another room far away in the east wing. It’s an artist’s studio, with large windows on three walls, and a skylight in the ceiling. On three easels sit paintings in various stages of completion. They’re mainly landscapes, but with small sketchy figures in the foreground. The work is competent, yet decidedly not good. Upon small revolving podia are foot-high shapes shrouded in damp brown rags. Caroline removes these covers, revealing heads sculpted in clay, also far from complete, with little russet blobs like carbuncles in many areas. The work on these heads, however, strikes him as quite accomplished. Two are of women; one is a man closely resembling his father. The eyes, nose, and lips are exceedingly life-like – almost uncannily so — and balefully reminiscent of a death mask. He asks Caroline if this is indeed the King.

                     “So, he is recognize to you?” she says, clearly delighted the likeness is good.

                   “Did he sit for the sculpting?” he inquires, trying to picture such a scene.

                    “A little he does,” she replies, “but most is from the memories.”

                     Not all the memories, I hope, he thinks. ‘I’m impressed,’ he says, aware she needs praise like a starving man needs food. ‘You have a great talent here, Caroline…’ 

                   ‘Also,’ she tells him, already drunk on his manna, ‘I am become musician, also writer, and farmer also…’

                   ‘Farmer!’ he says in surprise. She explains that she tends a vegetable garden, invisible now due to the snow, whose produce she sells at a local market for good money. He finds this rather difficult to believe, since her grounds are not extensive enough to provide sufficient space for crops serving much more than her own kitchens. But he praises her industry, remarking that she makes excellent use of her time, which must weigh heavy on her isolated existence. She repays this with a hot wet kiss on his lips, which she can only reach by standing on a chair. It is the kind of kiss that lingers, that smoulders, that wakes you deep in the night with unbearable yearning. It is an experienced kiss.

                       ‘As I was taking my horse from the groom,’ he tells Julie back in Knightsbridge, ‘I saw Lady Jersey peering down from an upstairs window. I smiled in acknowledgement; but   the moment I did she dodged away. Odd, no?’

                    ‘Bizarre, I’d say,’ Julie says. ‘What a dreadful existence that poor Caroline leads…’

                    ‘Indeed. But it isn’t anything like as tragic as that of her sister,’ he says. ‘She was locked away in a remote Danish castle by her husband, and then found dead in the dungeon… under very suspicious circumstances…’

                    ‘Surely,’ says Julie superciliously, ‘they’re the only circumstances that leave one dead in a dungeon?’ 

                     ‘True,’ he says. ‘But you’re right: Caroline’s life here is still unnecessarily awful. I’m going to do whatever I can for her…’

                    ‘I see,’ says Julie, regarding him forensically. ‘And does that mean spending more time alone with her out there at Blackheath?’

                     ‘Madame de St. Laurent!’ he declaims. ‘Are you jealous?’

                    ‘It may be that I am, Major-General…It may well be I am…’

-xiii-

                    Mr. Pitt has now introduced an income tax of two shillings on the pound to help pay for the war. It is very far from popular and only applies to the wealthy. Taxing the poorer classes Is too complicated. We’re sending Admiral Sir Sydney Smith and the Royal Navy to assist the Ottoman Turks at Acre, in Haifa Bay on the eastern Mediterranean coast. Evidently on his way to Constantinople — and planning to march from there to take India — Bonaparte, having lost his fleet to Admiral Nelson, has now laid siege to the Acre fortress with 20,000 men. We’re going to trap him in the east – if the plague hasn’t already claimed him. He’s been out of touch with Paris for a year now, and the Directoire – a governing body largely comprising greedy plutocrats and war profiteers — fearing his popularity and power, hopes he’ll stay out of touch permanently. After his father’s murder, Grand Duke Alexander is now Czar, and the Russian alliance with Prussia and Austria has once more resumed. This allows us to rest easier, with the continental powers waging the war against France on our behalf. We’ll contribute some gold, but our armies can stay out in those parts of the Empire where they’re needed – which is where they can profit us rather than drain the exchequer. 

                    The Duke of Kent’s journey with Julie to the River Avon Valley in Somerset, accompanied by Lieutenant-General Weatherall and a small escort of the Windsor Guard, is uneventful enough, though arduously long, a hundred miles over ruinous roads, and in unusually atrocious weather even for England. The city of Bath comes as something of a surprise. It was laid out earlier in the century by John Wood the Elder in a series of elegant crescents and broad squares built of creamy Bath limestone. The effect is regal indeed, a miniature of Nash’s new London. In spite the endless rain, the streets swarm with as many denizens as you’d see on the pavements of Mayfair. Edward’s party is lodged in a house owned by the fabulously wealthy Duke of Devonshire, overlooking the park on Royal Crescent. That same evening, before they’ve even settled in, a doctor named Poole arrives to explain the details of Edward’s regimen at the spa. It is rigorous, even hectic. Yet besides drinking the waters and taking various kinds of bath at various times of day, it also includes a packed schedule of social events, balls, dinners, concerts, drawing rooms, all of which he finds utterly superfluous to any curative process. He tells Poole he’ll adhere to his advice regarding the remedial waters but can promise no more. When the doctor has just left, a liveried servant appears bearing a teetering stack of some hundred invitations to this and that event, from this and that person. Except for three old friends, these persons are all strangers to him; thus, he feels no compunction to respond to their solicitations in any way at all. He looks forward to a rest and a cure, not a busy social life. He has no real liking for society, as we’ve seen, and no talent at the social graces. Whether the one is cause of the other is something the reader must decide, for the duke is silent on these matters.

                   ‘I want to see the Roman baths and temple ruins,’ he says. ‘And that will be that. I shall read in peace. My ambitions go no further…’ If only this were true, he thinks.

                    ‘What about us?’ says Julie, standing beside Weatherall and looking forlorn, her mouth theatrically downturned.

                      It has not yet occurred to him that Julie and Weatherall are very social people, enjoying the company of others that he prefers to shun. We all tend to assume that everyone’s tastes are just like our own. ‘I shall enjoy your company,’ he tells them, ‘…from my chaise right here…’ His massive brow nods at furniture in question and he smiles serenely.

                      Bath has been a spa town since the Roman occupation, and its hot springs have been enjoyed back into prehistory. After a fallow period, its popularity revived under George I, and it is now the main adjunct to London society. You’d think you were in Piccadilly: everybody’s here. It is very far from the restful retreat promoted by its owners and even by its patrons, most of who may claim to seek rest and recuperation when all they want is the same London society in a different setting with a change of air. 

                      ‘You can start on this,’ says Julie, throwing him a book. “It mentions Bath and might make the place more… amusing for you.” She means more of something else but he can’t decide what.

                     He opens the cover. It is The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollett. He’d read it as a child and had then hated the fact that it was no story at all, but rather a disparate collection of letters. Yet his returns to Swift and Defoe have proved to him that books can richly repay a second visit from the land of experience; so he resolves to give Captain Smollett another chance, as many have done to their profit. 

                      His first appointment the following morning is at what is called the ‘Pump Room’. Here he drinks the waters – turbid and sulphurous –which have an almost instant emetic effect. Then he is escorted to the baths. There are three separate ones: Royalty, Quality and Others. He’s been told Quality is the best, but his station forces him to bathe in Royalty. He’s not impressed. It is a vat of turgid tepid-hot brown water, with the crumbling remains of a temple to Jupiter surrounding it in untidy piles. But on this day, there is one strikingly unusual and unavoidably noticeable feature. Among his fellow bathers is the self-proclaimed Louis XVIII, Comte de Provence, the exiled rightful King of France since the young dauphin is now believed dead. He’s on a visit to England for the purpose of soliciting King George’s permission to allow him to reside here, since Bonaparte is making exile anywhere on the continent rather irksome. You’d have to live on the Baltic coast to be fairly certain republicanism wouldn’t roust you from bed at night. A bloated walrus-like figure sprawled across a stone slab in the bath, Louis is with his brother, the formerly dashing Comte d’Artois, now a scrawny armature of sagging flesh. The pair are courteous to Edward, but neither man is very talkative, except when the opportunity presents itself to curse Bonaparte, ‘that Corsican usurper’, and to maunder over their lost throne. Looking at Louis’ inflated marble flesh, Edward finds uncharitable thoughts flashing through his mind. Little about these brothers is regal now. Little is even dignified. He imagines the supreme pleasure that helping ruined Bourbons must be giving his father. There is a biblical apothegm about charity trumping revenge, but he cannot recall it. The hellish fetor of these waters seems to have a narcotic effect. To make you forget, he thinks, forget you ever parboiled yourself in this vat of sewage with remnants of the French monarchy.

                     Somewhat refreshed by his bath, however, dressed and outside the Stygian bathhouse, he is approached by a young lad of tidy appearance, holding a sheaf of pamphlets.

                  “Read all about the inefficacy of the waters!” the boy cries, proferring a pamphlet. “Only tuppence, good sir.”

                    He buys one, thanking the lad. The quarto is indeed titled On the Inefficacies of the Bath Waters; and the author is one Tobias Smollett, sailor and novelist. Julie will enjoy the coincidence, he tells himself complacently.

                      “How typical of you to find the only thing here designed to ruin our little holiday,” she says, tossing the pamphlet onto a table.

                 “Nonsense,” he tells her, clapping his big paws and trying to sound effervescent with good cheer. “We shall soon go to dinner, and then to a concert, possibly even a ball. I’m aglow with new health and all the pleasures that await us in life…” The forced professional smile on his face makes him feel like a crafty old crocodile, eye sockets just above the sludge.

                    ‘Really?’ She looks at him quizzically, saying, “Your sentence seems to require a ‘but’, does it not. But what?”

                   “Well,” he confesses, “it would continue something like, ‘But I’m not sure the baths of Bath will be amongst those pleasures.’ The waters, on the other hand, seem somewhat worth pursuing.” He recounts his experiences of Pump Room and bath, finding her growing more sympathetic to his dislike of the latter. “You’ll never guess who I met in that cesspit though,” he says. 

                    “Tobias Smollett?” she speculates.

                    “No, close, but not close enough. It was Louis XVIII.”

                      She shakes her head and utters a modest little laugh. “It’s only fitting you found him wallowing in filth,” she says, a tad bitterly, “since he’s spent most of his life doing nothing else, that fat pig…”

                       Edward is surprised by her sour tone. “Your king? Well, he’s convinced he’ll be back on the throne in Paris within months,” he says. “Did you know Bonaparte has returned safe and sound in France, and to a hero’s welcome?” D’Artois had told him this in the bath as a preliminary, or perhaps a caveat to bewailing a cruel and capricious fate.

                     A look of curious relief washes over Julie’s face. “How would I know that?” she asks peevishly.

                     “You hear things…” 

                    “What is that supposed to mean?”

                   “Nothing. Why so irritable?’

                   ‘My time maybe?’ she suggests. ‘If Bonaparte is back the Bourbons won’t be, will they?’ It seems an odd thing to look relieved about.

                  Weatherall comes bounding in before Edward can pursue the issue with her.

                   “This place is busier than Mayfair,” says the lieutenant-general. “In a half-hour’s stroll I met five old acquaintances! My dance-card is already full…”

                    “Try the waters, Fred, and it will soon empty out…”

                    “Does this mean you’ll not be joining us for dinner?” Julie asks him, her tone as ambiguous as her mood.

                   “I’m afraid I shall hardly be joining you for anything, my lady,” replies Weatherall. “These are friends I haven’t seen in fifteen years – I can hardly refuse their invitations, can I?”

                      “Of course not.”

                        Edward agrees with her and, over the following week, they end up spending, as they always do when it’s possible, a delightful time a deux. He continues his patronage of the Pump Room, finding, as promised, that the waters gradually become more tolerable and their restorative virtues become more evident. The baths he eschews entirely. ‘My mother is always recommending them,’ he says, ‘but I sincerely doubt if she would ever lower herself into one of those cesspits…’

                      ‘Well,’ says Julie, ‘whatever she’s doing works. She looks marvellous for her age…’

                         ‘It’s the drinking human blood,’ he says. ‘And a broth made from the bones…’

‘I see,’ she says. ‘So that’s what happened to your two missing brothers, was it?’

‘And the Arran islanders…’

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 9.4

-ix-

                    If the season is all but ignored by their monarch, his loftier subjects celebrate with gusto. Obliged to accompany their Majesties to various events, balls, dinners, entertainments and drawing-rooms, Edward is not able to visit Julie until December 30th. To his great surprise, he finds her entertaining  in her rooms Lady Wentworth and Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert. Both women wear unusual dresses, gathered under the bosom and then flowing loose. It looks as if they’re both pregnant. After exchanging pleasantries, Mrs. Fitzherbert, a most graceful, attractive and courteous woman, departs with Lady Frances, a less graceful, but still attractive and courteous body, if also a marvellously cunning one.

                    “What in heaven’s name was Mrs. Fitzherbert doing here?” he demands, somewhat truculently.

                     ‘Maria?’ says Julie, her blue eyes widening. ‘Frances introduced me to her… We’ve become rather great friends in fact… it was almost instant. Well, Edward, we have so much in common, don’t we?” She smiles, picking a thread from her gown. “We’re nearly the same age; she speaks fluent French; and we are both Catholics in morganatic marriages to brothers who are both royal princes. I’d say that was a lot in common…”

                   “You told me that before you met her!” he shouts, banging his fist down on a chair arm, eliciting from it a puff of fine dust. “Our marriage is supposed to be a secret! What were you thinking, woman?”

                   “Calmly,” she tells him. “I impressed upon her the need for secrecy – which she, of all people, understands perfectly. She will not tell a soul, not even Frances. It means so much to me to have someone I can confide in, someone who knows what I’m going through. Besides, we have all the same tastes, in opera, books, the theatre and fashion…”

                     ‘She’s a cultured woman,’ he admits. ‘More than I can say of Lady Frances…except for those teeth! What are they made from?’

                     ‘Maria’s teeth? Poor thing. They’re made of wood. Her own all rotted out…’

                     He thinks: Women who are so similar rarely like one another though, do they? It’s in the same way they hate encountering someone in the same dress they have on themselves. “What on earth were those two wearing?’ he asks, thinking now about dresses. ‘They looked as if they were both with child.”

                   “That’s the latest style,” he learns. “I’m so out of touch with things here. Hooped skirts and high wigs are out now. I’ve had to order myself a whole new wardrobe – everything. And I’ve found the best hairdresser, who’ll make sure I have the right natural look. Don’t worry, my love, I will not embarrass you tomorrow night by appearing like the ghost of Madame de Pompadour. Had it not been for Maria, I’d have been a rollicking joke at Carlton House.”

                  “Ah. The Phantom Pompadour… Then I suppose my sisters are all jokes, are they? Since none of them is wearing such a… a smock?”

                    “Maria says the Court is considered hopelessly old-fashioned. But the Prince of Wales is always au courant, setting the style for all good society, and very disapproving of those around him who fall short of his standards.”

                  “His standards? Then I shall have to gain five stone, and start drinking several demi-johns of port a day, shan’t I?”

                   “It’s only for the women, silly,” she says, pinching his cheek. “The men still wear their evening clothes, or their dress uniforms – although the Prince is evidently more flamboyant; and this is catching on.”

                 “Flamboyant is a word for it, I suppose. But that’s because he’s only a colonel, and he isn’t going to wear a uniform making him the lowest ranking officer in any room, is he? No, not when he’s Emperor of the World…” The thought of Wales suddenly infuriates him.

                     “I’m looking forward so enormously to tomorrow.” Julie now leans close and whispers, “In the morning I’m to have an audience with the Queen, accompanied by Maria and Frances. I’m so excited…”

                    He stands abruptly, looking down at her. “I thought I told you that was a bad idea,” he says loudly, the volume forcing her back in alarm. “And it is indeed a very bad idea. Ah. And I forbid it!”

                   “You can’t forbid it,” she tells him defiantly. “It’s already arranged…” 

                 “Then it shall be unarranged.” 

                    “You are ashamed of me, aren’t you? Maria says the whole court knows of my existence; so why should they not see that I’m no scheming little actress? I’m a baronne, and every bit as good as they – if not better…” 

                   “It’s true,” he admits. “Even my father told me he knew about you…

                        ‘And?’

                        ‘And he didn’t mind the idea of a mistress. But you can’t mention the marriage to my mother, Julie. It would ruin all my prospects here. Promise me you won’t mention it. If you do, it will mean the end of us… The utter end.”

                   “I promise. I promise. I will just be your French lady…”

                     ‘Don’t mention France either…’

                   ‘All right…’ 

                  “Then go to Windsor,” he says diffidently, “but don’t expect much. You won’t get much. And make sure you’re introduced to my sister Sophia. She knows all about you and will try to make your time there less irksome. I shall call for you at seven for the trip to Carlton House. Please don’t tell me Lady Wentworth has managed to get herself invited…”

                   “Of course; she attends all the best society parties. But Maria is not invited – isn’t that sad?”

                 “If George invited all his women there’d be no room for the other guests… By the way, did Weatherall show you the house yet?’

                    “He’s arranged for everything here to be moved on January 2nd,” she replies. “But he told me you’d prefer to show me the place yourself…”

                    “Ah. Well, I didn’t tell him that; but he’s right. Like you, he’s always right. Let’s go there now.”

                    “It will have to be quick,” she says. “I have an appointment at the dressmaker’s shop in less than an hour – and if I’m late I shall have nothing appropriate to wear tomorrow.”

                    “The Queen won’t care if you’re wearing grain sacks with a bird’s nest on your head…” The thought of this audience still vexes him horribly.

                   “Not for her, silly. For the evening.”  

                    ‘Ah. When’s Lady Wentworth going back to Canada?’

                    ‘’I have no idea. She doesn’t mention it. I think she’s having too good a time here…’

                   ‘No doubt. And you know who she’s having it with?’

                   ‘Who?’

                    ‘Clarence. My brother Bill – how d’you think she got an audience with the Queen?’

                    ‘But isn’t he…?’

                   ‘As good as married to Mrs. Jordan, with their ten children? Yes, he is… I hope your moral fortitude will survive London…’

                    ‘So do I.’ She is not shocked, although she seems to be. She’s unshockable now. After ten years with Edward her skin, still fine and translucent, has grown far thicker. She will need such skin in London.

-x-

                   “Well?” he says, ignoring her sculpted and darker, more natural-looking tresses, as he arrives at seven to collect her. He also ignores the scarlet silk dress, embroidered with small white roses, which, though gathered at the chest, falls in undulating folds that do not make her look pregnant.

                     “Well what?” she says, turning in a small circle to show off other delicacies of her dress.

                   “The Queen!” he cries, almost mad with foreboding. “How did it go with my mother?”

                    “Oh,” replies Julie nonchalantly, “she is the sweetest thing. We got along so well that she made me stay a half-hour longer. She even knew some of my relatives in her youth and was grieved to hear they’d gone under the blade. She was utterly delightful; and she told me I should visit her any time I wished…”

                    “You’re sure this is Queen Charlotte we’re talking about?”

                    “Of course! Very formal at first. Pinched face; grey hair. Very German.”

                     “Did she mention me?”

                     “Only to say she was glad you’d found such a charming ‘friend’. Afterwards, Sophia showed me around the castle. What a grim place! But she was simply lovely, so affectionate. She adores you…”

                   ‘Yes, yes…’ He’s so relieved he can’t find words.

                    “You’re too hard on her, Edward. We had a perfect time together, and I’m in no doubt she approves of me…”

                    “As a ‘friend’. Why is it that she dotes on all the mistresses – or some of them – and cannot abide the wives… or the wife? I don’t understand her. I don’t even know if she likes me. She’s never said so in thirty years. Yet, in ten minutes, she says how fond she is of you! I cannot comprehend it.”

                    “Because you’re a man. Women are different together when men are not present – but you will never know that, will you?”

                   “I could hide behind an arras…”

                   “You’d be shocked…and run through with a rapier…” She picks at the folds of her dress, flushed with delight. “How do I look for my entrance into society here?”

                    He fairly oozes compliments, fastening a necklace of emeralds around her milky throat. She admires the soft cashmere of his dress uniform, with its major-general’s braid and all the other golden or jewelled honours. ‘I feared today was going to be a descent into hell,’ he says.

                    ‘The day isn’t over yet, my love…’

-xi-

                    Carlton House is ablaze with light, within and without. Poor Londoners, shivering in their threadbare capes and squat hessian caps, with no new year worth celebrating, stand bunched together in the slush just across Pall Mall, there to gawk at this vision of another world. Some have only sackcloth or paper wrapped around their stamping feet; all are hungry. Our war is beginning to hit the state coffers. Exports are down; imports are difficult. Prices are rising, and the harvest had not been good. Yet these people all still admire the conspicuous consumption and its grandeur – or some of them do. A small throng of malcontents mutters obscenities about the Prince of Wales. They like the idea of Princess Caroline as their queen one day. They like the idea of little Charlotte as the heir. They do not like the rumours of Wales’ mistreatment of his wife and daughter. They don’t like him at all anymore. They remember Perdita Robinson and the other early scandals, which makes them realise they never liked him. A line of closed coaches, waiting to deliver their impatient passengers, extends far down Piccadilly, leading up to the towering Palladian columns that mark the entrance to Wales’ house. But when Edward’s carriage, flying its royal standard, is sighted, the driver is led by a groom out of the line, taken down to a small side road, and then in through a private entrance to the courtyard. 

                    God, look at him! Wales himself comes bouncing out to greet them, wearing a cadmium yellow cutaway tailcoat, over a scarlet brocade vest, embroidered with stars in greens and blues. His pantaloons are sky-blue satin, a shade darker than his silk stockings. His shoes have large, yet purely ornamental gold buckles; and his characteristic high white cravat is of a bone-lace so fine that the work on it is only visible from close range, the fabric so thick it conceals his wobbling chins almost entirely. Nothing can hide his advancing belly, however. And nothing can disabuse you of the idea that you’re seeing some sort of monstrous ambulatory confection. Even his wig, teased up into a high puffy nimbus, resembles a spun-sugar topping. Seeing Julie, he stops in his tracks, bowing low – or as low as his equator will permit — and kissing her hand with unusual fastidiousness. 

                 “My goodness, Edward!” says Wales, in the voice he usually reserves for appraising objets d’art, “you have acquired yourself a goddess! Madame,” he then tells Julie, “you honour my humble abode with your divine presence. Come, let us get some beverages…”

                    “This is the least humble abode that ever did exist,” Julie whispers to him, to Edward, as they enter Carlton House by a door opening into a palatial salon, with silk-lined walls as orange as a tropical sunset.

                    Wales had hired Henry Holland, leading architect of that year, and put an army of cabinet-makers to work. The house is utterly unrecognizable from Edward’s previous visit, so vastly enlarged that it has become indeed a veritable palace, embellished all over with gilded Rococo plasterwork, and intricately carved wooden gewgaws. Like every other room they will visit tonight, this one is hung with very fine paintings: portraits by Gainsborough, Rembrandt, and Reynolds; landscapes galore, some by Renaissance masters – a Da Vinci, a Veronese, a Giotto — others from the French school of Poussin, Fragonard and the like; along with interiors and still-lifes from Vermeer and the Flemish schools. (One day these paintings will help found the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square – which of course does not exist yet either. Although he has good advisers, Wales knows painting as well as any man alive. He can discuss brushstrokes, pigments and composition as knowledgeably as the artists themselves. An insatiable collector – it’s a family trait — he also loves the works he collects. Art gives him a visceral pleasure, one that can at times seem almost erotic in nature. 

                   The tasteful effect of these masterpieces is, however, diluted by an excess of inlaid red lacquer furniture in the Chinese style (yet made in Paris before the Revolution), and by the surfeit of ostentatious clutter: boxes, urns, sculptural maquettes, busts, knick-knacks. Everything shimmers in the light from a thousand candles. You almost gag on the surfeit, on the excess. 

                   Presenting each with a golden goblet of smuggled rare French claret, Wales, floating on little feet like a huge balloon, leads them down corridors writhing with glinting Rococo foliage. Eventually, they’re led into a cavernous gothic ballroom, as full of life-sized marble statuary as it is of flesh-and-blood people. 

                    “We don’t have deathly boring reception-lines here,” Wales confides to his ear, as if’s a state secret. Then he yells out, “Friends, this is my dear brother, Prince Edward, now Duke of Kent, just returned from fourteen years’ service overseas, during which time he won many great victories, many crowns of laurel, and military honours too numerous to mention. Although he’s lost his hair, he will never lose our respect, love and highest esteem.” This initiates an enthusiastic round of applause, with cries of Bravo! Then Wales continues, “With him is his most lovely and distinguished companion, the Baronne de St. Laurent, who must have made many a lady present here already wish she’d stayed home and paid more attention to her plumage. Please welcome Madame as you do my brother and offer them both your sincerest affection and good wishes. As midnight approaches, bringing with it the last year of our glorious century, I shall signal toasts, and then the dancing will commence, continuing on into the dawn of 1799. And be it a happy new year for you all!”

                       With this, Wales slips away to welcome guests still arriving. Three hundred are invited to the dinner, with another two hundred invited solely for the ball. It’s a way of putting some people in their real place as friends to royalty. After receiving congratulations and pleasantries from innumerable strangers – or, at least, persons he doesn’t recognize — Julie and Edward are spirited away by an aide to the Prince of Wales. They are taken to a dining room as large as a cathedral, where a ninety-foot-long table, laid with gold, silver, crystal, and embroidered Belgian linen, sits high on a dais. Like its sixty mahogany chairs, the piece had been made by the master Sheraton himself. On the floor level are several long leaf-tables, again laid lavishly, and provided with distinctive Chippendale chairs, the work of Sheraton’s rival. The walls of this opulent space are of marble, inlaid with geometric and floral designs in semi-precious stones — lapis lazuli, jade, turquoise, and malachite. The ceiling is formed from beaten silver squares with gilded edges; thus, every surface reflects the light from countless candles, many of which stand in a tiered, green and red Venetian glass chandelier, twenty feet in diameter. You are perhaps dining in the celestial lair of the Great Moghul himself. For Wales is the Sultan of Piccadilly; and he now sits at the head of their table, inviting Edward to be seated on his right, and Julie to his left. A royal prince or duke is seated at the head of each of the lower tables. The Duke of York grimaces over at one point. But the youthful, dour-looking Prince of Orange, William, with his grey, fleece-like wig, is seated at the far end of their table, distant enough to make any conversation with him impossible. Bonaparte has turned the Netherlands into a Batavian Republic, so William, the last stadtholder, is without a domain at present, yet another exile in a world of transients. In fact, he’s now living at Kew (from whence he writes to the other Dutch stadtholders, urging them to make over their colonies to us. Most don’t, but the request confuses and demoralises them. We take the colonies anyway – although we give them back after the war. Most of them. We keep South Africa and Ceylon: too good to return).

                   “He’s a drab fellow, tragically boring,” Wales comments. “We shall be fortunate not to endure his maundering thoughts. We don’t mind his old colonies, though…”

                   “Sometimes dull things just need a little polishing to make them gleam,” Julie tells Wales, much to his surprise. “What gleams can always be enjoyed, can it not?”

                   “The only orange I can enjoy is in segments on a plate,” says Wales, now in his most charming persona. “The rest is rust, and rust never shines.”

                  “An orange can also be peeled, Your Highness…”

                      “Peel that Orange and I’ll wager you’ll find its fruit dry as an old maid, Madame.”

                     “I must assume Your Highness knows how dry that is, for I am entirely ignorant of it.”

                   “Because you are not made to be old, less still dry. But this is a thesis only provable by peeling your own fruit and tasting the result, Madame; thus, your appearance has the advantage over me.” Wales enjoys his own wit so much that he never bothers to see if his guests also enjoy it.

                    “I should have imagined such a fine connoisseur of art as Your Hghness would believe firmly in the fact of appearance constituting reality…”

                  “In reality, my lady, reality constitutes appearance – and, alas, I cannot collect, frame, hang, and mount reality.”

                   “One hears you try, Highness, and that your collection is sizeable, mounted, too, if not all hung and framed.” 

                    Julie exchanges much surprisingly saucy banter with Wales for most of the nine courses this feast entails. Too many for Edward’s delicate stomach, which sizzles with bile. He’s reminded fondly of his jousts with Lady Simcoe. But never before has he seen Julie fence like this, never seen her hold her own. But, he thinks, I’ve never seen her in the company of equals before, have I?

                    To his right sits Charles James Fox, the celebrated, though visibly dissolute Whig politician. Despised as a republican by the King and other Tories, Fox has even written pamphlets praising the French Revolution. Beside him is Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright and polemicist, author of the annoying  School for Scandal. Initially, Edward engages them both in a discussion of Gulliver’s Travels, while hoping he can eventually ask Sheridan about the character of his ‘Joseph Surface’. Drunk as he is, Fox still masterfully controls his fabled silver tongue.

                    “When in Ludnag,” he now says, as if addressing the House, “Gulliver is asked what he would do if granted immortality, as some of the inhabitants of that curious land have been. What does he say? He says, first of all, that he would study the causes of corruption, and then root them out. After this, he claims he would devote himself to amassing wealth, in order that he can then spend his time without disturbance in learning and then furthering the sciences, eventually sharing his vast fund of accumulated knowledge and experience with the young. Now,” Fox goes on, his own words energizing him, “I suggest to you that Gulliver’s error here is in denying the equation between corruption and wealth. Show me a great fortune and I shall show you a great crime.” He laughs throatily before continuing. “Gulliver imagines he can acquire wealth honestly; but he’s wrong. For one man’s gain is another man’s loss. Wealth is not infinite, not limitless. If it accrues in one place, it diminishes in another – ask the maharajas of India; ask our own northern labourers. But, after all of his altruistic schemes with which to employ his own immortality, what does Gulliver find is happening to the genuine immortals of Ludnag, eh?’ Fox looks from side to side mischievously, eyes twinkling. ‘He finds they are ignored, scorned, deprived of basic rights; they’re also miserable, and revoltingly ugly. No one cares about their rich funds of life-experience, because it is all considered out of date and useless. Some may be a thousand years old, or more, yet no one is even bothered to find out. The ancient records have long since decayed and rotted away. These immortals, if anything at all, are now merely questioned about which famous historical figures they personally remember. And, worst of all, their only desire is to die!’ His eyes again glint in the candlelight. ‘Just like the Sibyl,’ he says triumphantly.

                     “What do you take from this, Mr. Fox?” Edward asks.

                   “None of us wants to die; we fear and dread it. Yet those who cannot die want only death; immortality proves to be a curse, more fearsome and dreaded than death itself. Secondly, Gulliver’s thinking is flawed,” says Fox, pouring more claret into his chalice, “and Swift is holding us up a mirror, in which we see ourselves: overly concerned with making money, and marvellously unconcerned by the corruption this inevitably entails…’ He stares at a candle’s wobbling flame. A pause.  ‘Because,’ he continues, ‘what we intend to do with the money, once we have it, is to be selfless and pure. Except that we usually die before the financial goal is reached, if it ever can be reached; and those of us who do not perform the social courtesy of dying soon enough – like me — are faced merely with a younger generation intent on its own greed, and not the least bit interested in our knowledge and experience, nor in the moral life to which all of this vast learning, and any real thought invariably points.’ He sniffs mightily and then sips his wine reflectively. ‘Remember, sir,’ he says, ‘that Gulliver is considered mad for thinking, as Socrates did before him, that philosophers ought to be kings, or kings ought to be philosophers — whichever. The fact that Gulliver’s philosophers turn out to be horses is neither here nor there. Nay, or neigh,’ he whinnies throatily, ‘it simply illustrates that we would not recognize a true philosopher even if we found one. We are the Yahoos, after all. For despite Gulliver’s tailoring and hairless skin, the equine philosophers still see the bestial Yahoo in him. Look around you here, sir: is there a single horse at table? No, sir, no: Yahoos all beneath the finery and jewels. Yahoooo! ” Fox hoots and drains his eighth glass, a spark of perverse triumph in his rheumy old eyes, as Edward takes the opportunity to ask Sheridan if he agrees with the politician’s analysis.

                  “Mr. Fox goes deep,” says Sheridan, in a self-deprecating manner, his old duelling scars still visible in pallid welts on flushed cheeks. “For meself, I look for the shallow and amusing.’ At this Fox rolls his eyes and shakes his head in mock scorn. ‘I liked Gulliver pissing on the Lilliputian palace fire to extinguish it, for example; and then finding himself charged with treason for his heroic action. I loved the geometrical shapes of food on the flying island. I adored the way in which he kept abandoning his pregnant wife and children, whilst professing to miss and love them abjectly. But his charge of insanity, merely for telling the truth, is the best of all, summing up our own era most succinctly. Like me, Swift was Irish, and we Irish tend to see things more clearly, and state them more poetically, avoiding any potential repercussions with allegory or metaphor. Your English poets hit their readers over the noggin with banal truths; they have no subtlety, no finesse. Except for the immortal Shakespeare, that is – and he is believed to be of Irish descent. As for your pious prig, Milton, born to yawn – burn him! And your spiteful little imp, Mr. Pope – string him up by the neck with his rhyming couplets, a dunce’s cap rammed upon his deformed bonce! If it’s not Irish, I say, it’s shite not writing! But, then, I’m no critic, as you can tell from me play of that name…”

                   “What of Joseph Surface in your play? Is he really worse than his brother, Charles?” It seems a foolish question now he hears himself utter it.

                   “You have me there,” says Sheridan. “I’ll be damned if I remember what I was about with that. I wrote it in one night when I was as drunk as a priest. Every time I see the thing, I ask meself the same question: Charles is a degenerate; Joseph is not. He merely makes one mistake, and then is ungenerous — but perhaps this is to conserve his uncle’s money?”

                     “Does Charles see through the ruse?’ asks Edward. ‘Is that why he won’t sell the uncle’s portrait, knowing the man well enough to realize his Achilles’ heel is vanity, a chronic susceptibility to flattery?”

                   Sheridan’s moist lips open wide. “Now, that could well be, I admit. Yet, as I say, I was so very monstrous drunk when I scribbled it down that it came as a shock to find it there on me desk in the morning. Well, it was in the afternoon in fact, and on someone else’s desk, and in a stranger’s house, too! As I say, that night is a fog thicker than this soup we’re served. Audiences are amused by me play, though, and that’s me only purpose. I aspire to no lofty heights and warrant no close perusal – as you’ve just learned for yourself, sir.”

                 “His stuff is shallow and mindless,” agrees Fox, his eyes crossed, his face webbed with red veins of claret. “He can rock the House with his oratory, but I always sleep through the plays. If your brother wasn’t so fond of him, he’d be a ha’penny scrivener in some Wapping warehouse. He isn’t even Irish, or he wasn’t until tonight, as I recall. He’s been here since he was seven – forty-odd years makes you an Englishman, I’d say, no? But he can drink like a desert, and that’s a talent I won’t deny him.”

                     Sheridan laughs gaily at this. In fact he’s a thoughtful man, a great opponent of the American war. The two men are obviously friends and have been for years – if only in the interests of the Whig cause, which relies heavily on Wales’ own apparent interest in it. Fox had tried to coerce Parliament into passing a regency bill back in 1788, making the Prince of Wales de facto king; but the move had failed, partly because King George III recovered his wits sufficiently to appear in public, and partly because rumours of Wales’ marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert were leaking out steadily enough to drown his floundering popularity. Fox had asked him directly if the rumour was true and had never forgiven him for the lie of denying it. But, of course, he had to conceal his indignation and create a circle of Whig friends around Wales, friends who, like Sheridan, could amuse and indulge him sufficiently to retain his support for the party. Even those who knew Fox well, and liked him, sometimes said, as most Tories maintained, that if he ever managed to form a powerful enough government, he would abolish the monarchy entirely, forming a republic along French lines. He wielded power as it was, but not enough power to win a Parliament of his own. He never would, either, although his stirring oratory enlivened Westminster and assisted many worthy causes in achieving their goals of liberal reform.  

                      Julie is now charming Wales so utterly that the two of them might well be alone there. Edward is bothered by this, and he tries ways of making her desist, but she’s bound upon a wheel of wit, determined to plant her marker on the summit of London society, over which the sun of Wales’ shining presence rises every day, to gleam on through every long late night. Viewing such society for the first time in a decade, and now as an adult, Edward wonders if this effort of hers is worth the trouble. Then he notices at their table, seated opposite Sheridan, a sour-faced Lady Jersey, Wales’ latest mistress, who’s trying not to notice Julie’s merriment and banter. Yet she can’t restrain herself, always turning back to her plate with eyes ablaze, her fury barely suppressed. In between her and Julie is Sir William Pitt, the Prime Minister, and a Tory. Edward moves his chair to engage Pitt, who, with his thinning grey hair and worn countenance, seems very old, blurred and downcast indeed – but he’s not yet forty. 

                    ‘What news do you hear from Russia, Sir William?’ he says, trying to sound knowledgeable, trying not to sound like someone exiled half a lifetime from current events and current friends.

                  ‘Russia?’ says Pitt diffidently. ‘Czar Paul has bats in his belfry – that’s what we all hear. He’s declared war on his allies in Vienna and Berlin; and now he’s aligned with Bonaparte. They’re planning to invade us. What else do you need to hear?’

                   ‘Lord,’ says Edward. ‘What are the chances of an invasion?’

                   ‘Chances?’ says Pitt, picking at his venison like a finnicky surgeon. ‘You jump in a hundred ships; you sail a few hundred thousand men over the Channel; and you land them at Folkestone, or somewhere. Those are the chances…’

                  ‘Ah. Well, are we prepared?’

                 ‘Why don’t you ask your brother, the Duke of York? He’s commander-in-chief, not me. His Majesty thinks the Prussians, Austrians and Spanish will take care of it. Supposedly Ireland is our greatest threat…’

                     ‘I see…’

                     ‘I’m monstrous glad someone does,’ says Pitt. ‘Because I don’t…’ With this he leaves the table, not to return.

                    Edward finds himself looking into Lady Jersey’s furious eyes. He smiles incompetently. She scowls, and then hisses, ‘Why don’t you drag your whore off my prinny, so we can all share a bit of this evening.’ It isn’t a question. With this, she too rises and leaves. He is shocked at the incivility. No one left his father’s table until the King himself rose.  

                    Seated beyond where Lady Jersey was is the Duke of Dorset, who’s also annoyed about something. He starts telling Edward about the Prince of Wales’ wedding. “I attended that wedding,” he says, barely able to conceal disgust at the thought, “and it was the most appalling farrago I have ever in my life witnessed. Ever! The Prince was so drunk that Lord Moira had to help him into the chapel. He looked like death and kept gazing around as if he had no idea where he was. When the Archbishop of Canterbury reached that part where it says, you know, ‘if anyone present knows of any lawful impediment to the marriage of this couple…’ and so on, Canterbury stopped, he paused, and he looked hard at George, then over to Caroline. The place went so silent you could hear dust falling. George was literally shaking in his boots. White as my wig, he was. It must have been only a few seconds, but it felt like an hour. It was so damned obvious that the Archbishop knew Wales was already married – and he wanted to let him know he knew, before proceeding on with the farce. At one point, George even began to creep on his hands and knees away from the altar! The King had to get up and drag him back to his bride. As they left the chapel, I was right behind them, and I heard not a single word spoken by either. Just married and they say nothing? It felt more like a funeral than a wedding — and I’m not exaggerating.”

                    “What happened after the ceremony?” Edward asks him, in a whisper that will not carry to the head of table. He’s not sure whether to feel sorrow or pity.

                 “There was a drawing room at St. James’,” says Dorset. “I went for your father’s sake but, I tell you, it was an Homeric epic of embarrassment. George got himself reeling and gibbering drunk again, staggering about like a sailor on leave, completely ignoring his new wife, who, bless her poor soul, tried to put on a good face, smiling and chatting, as if nothing were amiss. All the Prince ever said to her was a cruel thing: ‘What are you looking so bloody cheerful about, you ugly bitch?’ Everyone heard it. The King sat cheerful enough, his usual civil self, greeting guests and acknowledging congratulations. But His Majesty’s difficult to read; he’s so used to acting the part on formal occasions that you never know what he’s really feeling or thinking.”

                   “I am well aware of that,” says Edward. “I still can’t read him.”

                   “But your mother’s different,” Dorset continues. “Queen Charlotte sat in that room with an expression like she’d been sucking on alum. It was so off-putting that no one, except for the princesses, went anywhere near her. I spent the time conversing with Lord Malmesbury, who had been assigned to fetch Caroline over from Brunswick. He told me she was not the easiest body to deal with – very opinionated and stubborn. He also said she rarely washed or changed her linen and smelt rather fishy, as a consequence. He’d attempted to educate her in the ways of our court, but she was a poor study, so he feared for the Prince’s delicate sensibilities. The first thing George said to him, very angrily, was why he didn’t inform him she was so ugly. Malmesbury told him he’d travelled under the King’s orders, which were simply to escort the princess to England, not to voice his opinion of her looks. George cursed him vilely.”

                     “How did this dreadful drawing room end then?” Edward is not sure he even wants to know this.

                   “Wales abruptly left, supported by his cronies. By all accounts, they retired to a club and carried on drinking. According to my wife, who got it from one of the bedchamber ladies, the wedding night was a galloping disaster. Addled by drink, George collapsed under a chimneypiece, where Caroline left him. After that, he refused to sleep in the same room with her any more. It was, apparently, the biggest surprise of her life to find she was with child. She told anyone who’d listen that she thought the Prince was incapable of doing his duty. Obviously, he wasn’t incapable. But whatever happened on that night, it so revolted George that he never touched her again. I can’t help thinking that Lady Jersey had a hand in it all. She’s a conniving little bitch — and how she got to be Lady of the Bedchamber baffles me.”

                  “I too was baffled, sir,’ says Edward, baffled by his baffling brother as he says it.

                   “She constantly reports back to George on every little faux pas or lapse Caroline makes, every inappropriate remark… even any tasteless jest. She poisons his mind because she wants him to herself. God knows how her husband deals with this! One of the maids told my wife that our dear Lady Jersey told Caroline how fond of long hair George was; and that, as a result, she unpinned her locks on the wedding night, appalling Wales so badly he vomited on the spot. But I will admit that the Princess of Wales does behave badly herself at times. She cannot shut up; she says the first thing that comes into her head without considering its effect in advance. I was at a dinner where Wales complained about the shoes she wore. What does she do? She takes them off, throws them behind her chair, and says to George, ‘There! Now if you can make me a better pair of shoes, go off and make them now!’ This sort of thing might count as humour over there in Brunswick, but at the prince’s table it went down like a ripe stool off the balcony. Now, I hear, she bombards him with intemperate letters from Blackheath, complaining about everything under the sun. He’s afraid to reply freely, since when he once did, she had his letter published in the damned press, which made him still more unpopular with the public — who all hate him enough as it is. The marriage was a diabolical mistake; but what’s done is done. Neither of them is blameless, but it’s the child my heart goes out to. She’s torn in half by them in their endless squabble. I know His Majesty wants reconciliation, but there has to be compromise.”

                    “And a good start would be the exit of Lady Jersey,”  suggests Edward.

                  “Quite right, quite right. Can you imagine having to dine nightly with your husband’s mistress out there at Blackheath, knowing she’s also his spy? It’s all so unconscionable.”

                   “And sad,” Edward says, telling Dorset he plans to visit Caroline and see what, if anything, can be done.

                  “Excellent idea,” Dorset says, as if no one else could have thought of such a thing. “If I can be of any assistance, I’m always at your service.”

                    “Start by murdering Lady Jersey, perhaps?” 

                      ‘I imagine it’s rough, your coming back after so long into all of this…’

                   ‘I wish I could imagine it,’ he says.

                      As they all toast in 1799 with smuggled champagne, the orchestra strikes up, and the dancing begins. He performs his usual duty dances with every willing woman – of who there are fewer than he’s accustomed to having in North America — but Wales, rather impolitely, keeps Julie mostly to himself, presumably aware that he’s the sole shining partner every female guest craves for a dance and its ray of reflected lustre. A new dance has come from Vienna, the waltz, in which you put an arm around your partner’s waist. No one has experienced such forwardness before. During his one waltz with Julie, he says, feeling the heat through her dress, ‘You’re causing a little too much gossip here…’.

                   “He can be quite charming,” she replies, “yet I’m also sensible that he’s capable of being most un-charming. You’ll notice he was scarcely drinking at all until now, and he’s started inhaling liquor like air. I’m beginning to feel less safe with him the drunker he becomes. I think I have made my mark on London society, and you’ve had your official return as a hero and duke, so I suggest we quietly leave as soon as we can, to avoid any embarrassing scenes. What a difference from all those pretentious little gatherings at Quebec and Halifax though, don’t you find?”

                   Peevishly, he says, “You clearly prefer your pretentiousness to be gargantuan?” But he’s pleased she wants to leave; he’s had more than enough, and Wales is beginning to behave badly, falling down, crawling about on the ballroom floor, and grabbing at skirts to haul himself upright. ‘If this is good society,’ he says, ‘then I don’t think I’m fitted for it… Fox was right: Yahoos all…’

                  ‘Yahoos?’ she says.

                   ‘All…’

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 9.3

-vii-

                  An unseen tide laps at his feet. The air seems to bristle. A thousand threads bind him tight to the damp ground. They’re tied in his hair, around his limbs, and even to all the shining buttons on his uniform. He can’t move. They are trying to loop threads around his teeth now. An inch tall, these malicious little people walk smugly over his chest, speaking in shrill, haughty voices. ‘Just because they’re big, they think they’re better than us. But look at him now! We’ve reeled him in, haven’t we?’ One self-important fellow hauls up a tiny ladder to climb onto his chin. It is the Bishop of Osnaburg, with his orb, his robes and his mitre. ‘Edvard Golliber,’ he says, ‘you’re not such a big man here, are you, eh, eh?’ The little pest prods his crook into the cave of a nostril, and he, the Duke of Kent, wakes up with a start into the dank, misty chill of Christmas morning. Ah, if only the Book of Life were thus straightforward! If only our lives had a coherent narrative to cloak the nagging mysteries hidden beneath or behind them. If only there were a truth to discover – the truth of why we’re here, the truth of why life goes on… And where is the Book of Love these days? The air tastes like a freezing woodland brook. His small fire is just ashes now, ashes in an ashtray. He yanks at his bell cord for a servant, realizing at length that none is coming. So badly run and served is the castle that there may well be no bell anyway at the cord’s end. The fires are laid by one group of servants, yet they’re only lit by men or women under someone else’s command. Similar traditional absurdities rule most other domestic tasks, their concomitant inefficacy never questioned. It’s traditional. Why change it? A boy was found sleeping in a cupboard under the stairs; he would go out nightly to gorge himself in the kitchens. He’d been there for a month before he was found. Nothing is ever repaired in a timely fashion. Sometimes it isn’t repaired at all. Instead of raging against this time-honoured nonsense, Edward stays beneath his covers with Lemuel Gulliver’s tale, determined to remain there until he’s better served and much better warmed. 

                   “I don’t know about Swift,” says Wales, when Edward questions him about the accuracy of this satire, during a remarkably unfestive luncheon. “You should ask Sheridan about books – he reads ‘em. He’ll be at the New Year’s dinner, so you’ll get your chance. But as for corruption in our Parliament, you don’t need a Gulliver to tell you about that. You think Papa would trust his will to a crew of pompous, self-interested windbags? No, sir! Any significant vote in the House is bought and paid for with hard cash.”

                 “It is?’ he says, shocked. ‘What about the Constitution?” 

                  “His Majesty wipes his arse with the fucking Constitution,” says Wales, gulping down a tankard of port. “Half the members in Parliament are on a secret payroll, and others are bought off ad hoc, when the need for their support arises. I’ve been at dinners where thousand-pound bills are handed around like toast with anchovy paste. That’s how the King gets his business done: make no mistake, Eddie. Yet he despises the men he can buy off. The only men he trusts are the ones he can’t buy – like Billy Pitt. He needs to court favour with Pitt, because he needs, values and trusts his advice. He’d be lost without him. That’s why he will end up supporting Pitt’s great friend, Wilberforce, and the bill to abolish slavery. He likes Wilberforce too, because he’s cultivated, independently wealthy, educated and committed – exactly the kind of man our father wishes he had as a son. Just because he can be mad, Eddie, don’t think the King isn’t shrewd. Lord Chancellor Thurlow opposes the slavery bill, yet, although His Majesty relies on Thurlow, he also knows the man is heavily involved with vested interests in the sugar trade; thus his advice on this particular issue is always tainted. Pitt and Wilberforce argue slavery is antithetical to British concepts of freedom; the Quakers, and other Dissenters, say slavery is against Christian teachings – and you know how fond our father is of Quakers. Or maybe you don’t. Did you ever hear of Hannah Lightfoot?”

                “Ah, no,’ he says. ‘I fear not.” He has heard a little, but he always wants to hear more.

                “She was a Quaker girl the King supposedly had a fling with before his marriage. His soft spot for the Society of Friends presumably derives from memories of her soft spots, y’see?” Wales chortles like a bad child.

                   “So, he’s sympathetic towards Abolition?’ says Edward. ‘Are you aware of Lord Simcoe’s intention to abolish slavery in Upper Canada?”

                  “Yes, yes, yes;’ snaps Wales, ‘but no one cares what happens in Canada – as long as it remains ours, that is.”

                   “But why is it so hard to declare abolition across the Empire?” Edward asks, authentically puzzled. ‘It is an obnoxious, inhumane trade after all…’

                 “Thurlow and his cronies contend that abolition will just hand over the sugar trade to France,” Wales explains, “leaving the black man no better off. Who d’you think will win this debate?”

                “I have no idea,’ he admits. 

                   “It will be whomsoever the King wants to win it, that’s who it’ll be – and we pray he’s in his right mind when the time comes, don’t we? D’you see what I’m facing here, Ed?” Wales says, a great weariness now in his voice. “God, I’m capable of doing so much more than I’m allowed to do, which is nothing, nothing at all! I’m merely Colonel of the Dragoons, and I get to review their fucking parades. That is it – a task any antic from Bedlam could do!”

                    “I sympathize, George,” he says, recounting his own plight.

                  “But you’re nowhere near the Throne, are you?’ Wales snarls, growing choleric from drink, as is his custom. “I am so very close. I can smell it; I can taste it. It’s within my grasp, yet I still can’t touch it. My allegiance with the Whigs infuriates him, because he knows we have men beyond his control. Yet soon he will be beyond his own control, won’t he? And what then? I don’t really care for much of the Whig platform, but I support it just to thwart that foul old man.”

                   ‘Are they republicans at heart, the Whigs?’ he asks, growing chary of his brother now.

                   ‘Nah – maybe a few are. Fox is. But most are scarcely any different from the Tories. All politicians lie about everything all the time, and generally just to feather or further their own ends, in one way or another. They’re more concerned with winning elections than governing. It’s a show put on to mollify the masses. Power remains where it’s always been…’

                   ‘Where’s that, George?’ he says.

                   ‘Where the money is…’

                     ‘Isn’t that changing now – I mean who has the money is changing.’

                    ‘Maybe a bit. But it will never change much. You can always put the people who really rule a country into one small room…’ 

                     He thinks: A great reckoning in a small room… “How is the war affecting all this?” he asks, wondering why the subject has not yet arisen.

                     “He cares nothing about the French,” says Wales, demanding another bottle of port. “Robespierre and the Terror even pleased him; he thought the French were destroying themselves, saving him the trouble of doing it himself. The execution of Louis made him nervous, admittedly, but he concluded that it must make our allies still more nervous, and they’d thus take care of it, saving him the trouble. The Russians bother him; their Czar is as mad as he is, and, they say, allying with Bonaparte against us. That’s bad for trade. We don’t have an ambassador there anymore; but we have agents. There’s a movement aligning behind mad Paul’s son, some Grand Duke – Alexander, I think. He’s Swiss educated, y’see? We can work with him. The Czar’s days are numbered – mark my words, Ed. For the King, our war is all at sea. It’s a naval conflict, understand? He puts his faith in Nelson, Keith, Smith, Jervis and the rest. He won’t believe an invasion is possible, and he relies on Austria, Spain, Prussia, and the fucking Dutch to deal with Bonaparte. There is even talk, if Alexander becomes czar, of a Russo-Turkish alliance to handle Bonaparte’s eastern ambitions. But His Majesty is only concerned with domestic issues: the Irish question, and the temporal authority of the Papacy. Piddling stuff! Pitt wants Irish soldiers to be accorded a right to reach the rank of colonel, yet the King opposes it, no matter that we need more Irish to fight in this war… and in all the other wars too. If he loses Pitt over this issue – which could happen – where will His Majesty be? He keeps restating his damn Coronation Oath, to protect the Reformed Protestant Church, blah-blah; but that didn’t bother him with your Quebec and Canada Acts, did it?  You’ve let the papists loose over there. Almost everyone is for greater religious freedom here; but, no, he won’t listen. The bees in his bonnet buzz all day and night…” Wales gulps down more port and belches, sounding like a colossal bee himself.

                      For all his dissolute behaviour, thinks Edward, Wales has a firm grip on politics – or he seems to. “Having the clergy eternally grateful works out well in Lower Canada,” Edward says knowledgeably, “because there it is really Gallican Catholicism, not Roman…”

                      “What’s the fucking difference?”

                    Now he can really show off. “The old French Church,’ he says, ‘the Second Estate, owned some thirty percent of the land, wielding immense political power from that, and from a five-yearly grant of money to the state treasury. The grant was voluntary, its amount not fixed, thus reflecting the Church’s pleasure or displeasure with the King. The Quebec clergy still operate on this model, there having been no revolution to disrupt it… unless you count our invasion. It’s only the Church and its control over the common people which prevents an uprising provoked by American agents. The priests make it clear how much Americans hate Catholicism, be it strictly true or not. Yet this power is also going to prove dangerous, I think.”

                     “Why’s that, Eddie? Hey, how come you know so much – you’re not a kid anymore, are you?’

                    No, he thinks, I’m not, am I? “Because the Church,’ he says, ‘ever seeking to bend its obsequious knee to Britain these days, is beginning to dictate what the French Canadians can and cannot do for a living, reserving for the English alone a right to engage in the more lucrative and socially elevated occupations. The people resent it, yet they blame us rather than their Church for imposing it. The clergy are very slippery to deal with, very two-faced, and their attitude towards the Indians is likely to damage our relationship with the tribes, which may prove vital in a war. The clerics see only conversion where we see co-existence, land treaties and laissez-faire… Ah, George, you can’t imagine what I’ve learned in Canada…”  

                   “And I probably don’t want to,’ Wales snaps. ‘To hell with your Gallican Church then,” he spits venomously. “Here we would not have such problems. But Catholics need emancipation, for both our practical reasons, and our moral or ethical ones. The King’s infuriating obduracy on the issue is merely yet another feature of his insanity; it’s not any serious commitment to our own Church, which is in no need of protection from Rome anyway. He gets more upset by Fred’s failures in France and Holland than he does about Bonaparte’s successes in Italy and Austria…” He bangs out his final phrases with a knife: “You can’t deal with a madman in power! If you succeed in understanding his reasoning, it means you’re as mad as he is…”

                     This last outburst draws the attention of everyone at table, seeing which, Wales throws down his napkin, rises unsteadily, and announces he’s returning to London. ‘So, stare your fill, fuckwits, ‘cos the view is leaving…’

                     “Don’t judge him harshly,” Fred, the Duke of York, says in a kindly voice, when Wales has gone. These are the first words he’s uttered to Edward in nearly a decade. “We’re all in a difficult situation here,’ he adds, the mild tone almost creepy. 

                   “So I understand,” says Edward.

                    “No, you don’t understand,” retorts York, in a more hostile and hence a more normal manner. “You breeze in after ten years away, and you think you understand, yet you don’t in the least understand! You have no idea what we’ve gone through, and now you’re pontificating on what we ought to do…”

                    “I was not pontificating, Fred, I was listening…” 

                    “Then listen to this, Joseph Surface,” York now shouts. “We don’t want you interfering in our affairs. Why don’t you just go back to the wilderness, where you belong?” He too rises abruptly, spilling his glass of port, and stamping out the room on absurdly spindly legs, legs which look too frail to support his bovine torso.

                      “Yes, the good old family Christmas,” says Bill, the Duke of Clarence. “There is nothing like it, is there?”

                     “I see,” Edward tells no one in particular, “that I have missed much whilst away, and yet also nothing at all. Is it my fault I have been stationed on the edges of empire? No one ever writes to me…Someone ought to write…’ He holds back what is welling up inside.

                     “We come here for the pain,” Ernest, the new Duke of Cumberland, says in a frivolous but somewhat sinister tone. “We go to Carlton House for the pleasure…”

                    “Then why don’t we get invited there too?” Sophia complains, gesturing around at her sisters.

                      “Because our Papa doesn’t want you spoiled,” Bill tells her sardonically. “He wants you fresh, and all to himself… and the footmen…”

                    “Beast!” yells Sophia, throwing a napkin at Bill, who catches it deftly in one hand.

                     “Enough!” Edward calls out. “Enough of this!” For he has truly had enough.

‘Oh, you’ll get used to it,’ Ernest tells him. ‘Even madness gets to seem normal after a while…’

-viii-

                     The day following Christmas, Boxing Day, is traditionally when King George likes to travel around the local villages, handing out small “boxes” of money to his tenant farmers and the poor. While Edward is still in his bed reading, an equerry announces that the King has requested him to join His Majesty on this goodwill mission. He washes and dresses rapidly, dashing down to the forecourt, where he fully expects to find an escort of the Windsor Guard waiting. Instead, he sees his father alone, clad in a old woolen cloak, feeding oats and carrots to his horse in the drifting post-dawn mist. The King talks tenderly to his aged grey mare, and Edward stands unnoticed for some minutes, watching this touching scene. He cannot hear his father’s words, but they’re surely tender, since he allows the animal to nuzzle his rubicund face and ears. “There you are, finally, what-what!” the King says. “I was about to give up on you and go alone. The groom has your horse over there, hey-hey…” He indicates a nearby stable block. “We have to go early to catch these farmers at home, or else they’ll be out cutting wood and hunting, even today. They’re hard workers, unlike some people, what-what… I often wonder what was in the ‘box’ on that first Boxing Day, don’t you? Of course, I don’t give out any boxes. Hard enough to carry a big pouch of coins, hey-hey…”

                      As they ride off, Edward tells him that in Canada he’s always up by four, to drill and inspect his troops. ‘So, for me this isn’t early…’ He hopes this isn’t as obsequiously toadying as it sounds after he’s said it.

                     “A fine job you’ve done with those men, or so I hear tell, what-what,” says the King, clucking to urge his mount on into the vapours that crawl like bloated serpents across frosted mud and grass. 

                      He can scarcely believe he’s out riding with his father and exchanging pleasantries too. He does clutch at his saddle with a hand at times, though. Not once in thirty-one years had he experienced such intimacy with the man. He hardly knows how to behave, or what to say. Is this kindly old fellow the mad king who must be tied down and locked up? When you’re seeing one side of a person, it’s difficult to imagine there is another. But there usually is. We all have public selves, private selves, and often secret selves, don’t we? It’s when the secret selves go public that there’s trouble iIn paradise.

                    The field mist is low, yet so dense the horses’ feet vanish into it, as if they’re trotting over clouds in heaven. Where are the angels? Edward tells him about life in Canada, and of how the Indians revere His Majesty, but are being robbed and mistreated by Americans.

                     “They must be protected, hey-hey,” the King says forcefully. “It is a terrible thing to lose your land. I know, boy, I know what it’s like. But we cannot fight the rebel colonies again. Too difficult to supply troops over such a distance. I’ve been discussing trade with Mr. Jay, their new envoy here – able fellow, hey-hey. They seem to realize trade with us is better than war; and that chaos in Europe makes us the only viable market for their cotton and tobacco, hey-hey. The Duke of Portland and Chancellor Thurlow assure me we can make them so reliant on trade with us that we should soon be in a good position to dictate their policies from London, what-what. Looking forward to that day, we are…”

                      ‘Yes,’ says Edward, ‘but I found opinions in Boston to be very divided. Although the wealth seems to be in southern states, the political and military power is in the north, where a policy of expansion further west is most prevalent. The southerners have enough land, you see, Papa? Immigrants seem to favour the north, so more land will be needed to attract them there…’

                 “They’ll have the Spanish to deal with in the south too, what-what,” says the King, fully acquainted with the situation, just as Wales had indicated he was, or at least could be. “They ought to have us to deal with in the north though, hey-hey. The colonies must not expand beyond the Ohio River. That’ll be part of your new task…”

                     ‘There aren’t enough troops to support a war over Ohio, Papa. I need a hundred thousand more men even to contemplate any such action. I urge you to establish land treaties with the Indians, who will surely repay us with loyalty, and an invaluable fighting force…’

                   “I don’t have enough soldiers for meself,” his father says, sighing. “We’re fighting for control of southern India, up against this Tipu Sultan chappie, who gets advice from that sly old fox, Benjamin Franklin – we intercept their mail, what-what. The princelings of northern India have been easy to deal with – they all hate one another, what-what – but the south is different, more united. We’ve already signed a pact with the Nizam of Hyderabad, but I doubt if he has much influence over this Tipu — who, I must admit, is an exceeding skilled general, what-what. Even my own officers there tell me it’s a privilege to surrender to him. One does not often hear that kind of praise from officers, does one, hey-hey? While our men were raping and pillaging, so I’m told, Tipu shot an old dear friend for mistreating a prisoner –man of high principle, y’see? But you soldiers have your own code, is it not so? Like chess: you respect the greater strategist; you don’t hate him. That’s the South India problem in a nutshell: we’re up against a military genius, a man who knows the terrain and commands thousands of well-trained men. But we need to win it, hey-hey, or India will be endless trouble…’

                     ‘You have another military genius to deal with over the Channel, Papa, don’t you?’ says Edward.

                   ‘Ach, Bonaparte, what-what: he’s a savage. Our allies will deal with the French. But I have the damned Irish issue to contend with… No, I cannot spare any more men for Canada. Wish I could, but I cannot, what-what. The French are stirring things up over there in Ireland – Catholic alliance, y’see? Hmm, I hear you have a French Catholic alliance yourself, what-what?” He says this unexpectedly but very casually. 

                    Edward clutches at his pommel. “It’s hard to be alone,” he says, trembling with anxiety.

                    “Oh, yes,” says the King dolefully. “I know all about being alone, what-what. Nothing wrong with a mistress. Wish I had one meself. Lady Pembroke would have done monstrous well, but she turned me down, hey-hey — just turned me down flat…”

                    “My lady is more than a mistress,” he ventures to say. “We’ve been together for ten years now. I… I love her…”

                    “Oh, love!” the King exclaims. “That’s for poets and fools. You ought to find yourself one of those little German princesses. Have a proper marriage. Settle down, what-what. Have children, and then a bit of fun on the side. But present a decent front for the public. They need that. They respect that. Your brothers are bringing nothing but disgrace upon us, what-what. It’s making me ill…” He clasps at his advancing belly, perhaps experiencing a spasm there, or the memory of one.

                       This is not as tortuous as Edward has imagined it would be. ‘I hear some sad things about Princess Caroline and the child,’ he says.

                     “She’s out at Blackheath, on the Montague estate,’ says the King. ‘I visit her now and then, what-what; and I play with little Charlotte at Carlton House. She lives with Wales – but he’s no father to her. She’s an angel too, so bright, and so sweet, hey-hey. You ought to meet her, Edward. George has been abominable to her, and to Caroline – his own cousin, too, what-what. The people hate him for it; he daren’t go out in an open carriage – he’d be stoned to death. Yes, go to Blackheath, m’boy. See if you can’t bring about reconciliation. I’d be so grateful if you could do that, what-what.” He dabs at his eyes with a kerchief.

                   ‘Why,’ asks Edward, ‘can you not devise some sort of Constitutional Act for the Irish, safeguarding their faith and traditions, and allowing greater freedom of religion all over the British Isles… and the Empire? If it works in Canada, why not here?’

                   “You don’t understand my position, what-what,” is all the King says to this.

                      He tries another tack. ‘What think you of Lord Simcoe’s idea to form an Indian buffer state between Canada and America, Papa?’

                     “Good man, that Simcoe, what-what,” his father says. “Given him free rein over there. He must do what he feels appropriate, hey-hey. One needs to be on the spot to realize what’s required over there, hey-hey – as you must know. I cannot be everywhere, can I? Sometimes I have enough trouble just being here, what-what…”

                     Not wishing to agitate him, Edward changes the subject to clocks, saying he’s now acquired his own passion for them, but suddenly remembering with horror the clock at Kew.

                     “Used to be an intemperate passion, as I recall,’ says the King, smiling wanly, remembering well that fateful day a quarter-century earlier. ‘Lovely stuff, clockwork. But with my eyes going I’m not able to appreciate the delicacies much anymore. Although,” he says, more brightly now, “I’ve seen machines that would make your hair – or what’s left of it – stand on end in wonder, what-what. There are engines powered somehow by water, by steam, able to pull a carriage without horses – it’s a strange sight to behold, hey-hey. There are huge looms, driven by steam-powered pedals, so I believe. With flying shuttles too, capable of weaving cloth a hundred times faster than the old way, what-what. I’ve even seen a device which can cut and bale hay faster than two dozen men, what-what. Every day, it seems, someone invents a new machine to do something or other better and speedier than any number of men, hey-hey.”

                     “But won’t this mean labourers will be out of work?” he asks. 

                 “Nonsense, what-what. They’ll have more time for leisure; besides, they can find even more work in the mills and factories springing up all over the place. You should see the northern shires, m’boy: transformed, what-what. They won’t have to toil in their own hovels anymore, hey-hey. I tell you, boy, a great change is coming, and we shall all benefit from it, what-what…”

                      Edward tries broaching the subject of education for the poor, though to little avail.

                “What do they need education for?” asks the King, astounded. “It’ll just enable them to read the claptrap in newspapers or fill their heads with the seditious gibberish printed by pamphleteers, hey-hey. Education is for the upper classes, who know how to use it properly. You don’t give a carpenter books when what he needs is wood and tools, what-what. To give a peasant books is like giving a fish a wheelbarrow, hey-hey…”

                     Edward is surprised to find that his father’s views so closely echo those of the Baron de Vincy. Perhaps they’re both right? But he, the Duke of Kent, doesn’t believe they are.

                        The King reins in his old mare beside a small stone cottage, flanked by partially collapsed wooden outbuildings. They dismount to stand on frost-sheathed weeds as crisp as glass. The ground crackles beneath them. The King, more agile for his age than you would have imagined possible, knocks at a low door with his riding crop.

                “Whozat?” yells a woman’s voice from within. 

                   “It is Farmer George, ma’am,” says his father, almost gleefully, “come to wish thee greetings of the season.”

                    The door is instantly flung open by a woman in her thirties, with untidy grey hair and several missing teeth. She curtsies quite delicately, inviting them inside, where they find one single smoky room. Five children sit before a smoldering hearth, playing with crudely-carved wooden toys. On a straw pallet to one side lies a very old man with sunken cheeks and a thatch of dirty white hair. He snores sonorously. The woman goes to wake this old man, but the King tells her to let him sleep on. ‘He looks too tranquil to wake, ma’am, This here be my son, Edward. And where be the master of thy house?” 

                    “John ‘e died of the ague this October last,” replies the woman sorrowfully, “an’ we’s ‘avin’ trouble wivout ‘im ‘ere…”

                      “I’m profoundly sorry to hear that, good lady, what-what,” says the King. “I shall send thee a man to help with the wood, the seed time and harvest. In the meantime, this should assist you through the winter, hey-hey…” He counts out ten winking gold guineas and places them on a ruinous table. The woman pulls her apron over her face, weeping. The King pats her on the back gently, urging her to contact him at the castle if she should ever find herself in need. She thanks him profusely, in between heaving sobs of relief, which now start some of the children crying in alarm. “Tend to thy little ones,” says King George. “I only wish it could have been a happier Christmas for thee all, what-what.”

                      With this they take their leave, proceeding on through an icy northern wind, which now churns up the mist below them into frothy wavelets as they ride through England. 

                   Looking back, the King says, “One wishes one could do more, what-what…”

                   ‘Education,’ says Edward. ‘Access to modern physick…’ 

                   “No, no, boy. It is simply their lot. And they know it, what-what. Ours is to help them whenever we can, hey-hey. Our heavenly Father has a plan, you know. Ah, yes indeed He does, hey-hey…”

                     A plan to bring so many into this world only to suffer? Edward doesn’t like the heavenly father’s plan at this moment, any more than he likes his earthly father’s approval of that plan. Does the right to rule flow down from heaven, or up from the people? A difficulty there:  can anything be said to flow up? 

                   They visit several more of these little homes, none in such desperate circumstances as the first, yet none exactly thriving in any sense of the word. Dirt, mildew and clutter are ubiquitous. Ignorance of hygiene and a lack of adequate nourishment are prime causes of the sicknesses afflicting a great many people they encounter, people whose hacking coughs and streaming colds seem to be regarded by them as normal, the unavoidable companions of winter. His father leaves no more than a guinea in these other homes, where no person appears especially surprised to find their monarch knocking at the door. The King is unfailingly courteous to everyone, always inquiring knowledgeably about absent family members, soil conditions, size of harvests, abundance of local game, and whether they have enough flour and root vegetables for the cold months, when want is always most keenly experienced. These visits give him as much pleasure as they do his tenants. Indeed, Edward has never seen his father so buoyant at any official function, or even at any domestic event. But then he hasn’t seen many of these at all, has he? A winter sun, pale as an old coin, now hangs between bare twisted branches, its cold light throwing faint sparkles over the frosted grass and dead bush. 

                  “I’ve missed my home so much and for so long,” Edward says, aware that he may not have the King’s ear again for…for who know’s how long? If ever…

                   “Missed it, what-waht? You’ve been fortunate in that, for you’ve also missed the many terrible happenings in it, hey-hey. Your brothers’ disgusting behaviour, for instance. I’m gratified to see that hasn’t yet rubbed off on you, hey-hey. They say I’m mad, you know?” He says it nonchalantly.

                     “Ah, well.’ He’s taken aback by this. ‘You seem, ah…fine to me.”

                    “Ay, lad, ay. But there are times when I fear I might be mad. I pray Our Lord to spare me that – let me not be mad… My eyes grow dimmer by the day, and the hearing in one ear has gone, hey-hey. My stomach throws up bile like pond slime. I cannot seem to sleep. But let me not go mad…” He coughs violently, and once more dabs his sad old eyes.

                    “I will not let you go mad,” Edward tells him, feeling a catch in his throat, feeling a well beneath it.

                    “You?” the King retorts, almost scornfully. “What can you do? They sent me a Doctor Willis, what-what, a clergyman who now ministers physick to lunatics. I asked him why he didn’t keep to his former trade. Know what he replies? He says, ‘Our Saviour went about healing the sick’. I tell the rascal, ‘But He didn’t get seven hundred pound a year for it, did He?’ Edward laughs, but the King has not finished. “They tormented me, those so-called doctors. They abused me, hey-hey. They had my own footmen sitting on me while they tried to get me into this strait-waistcoat thingy, what-what. They shaved my head and blistered it. They drove me barmy with opium. They purged me night and day. They kept me tied in a terrible chair, hey-hey. They slapped me if I spoke, what-what. They starved me. They turned my wife against me. Then they gave me warm baths… which I liked. Yes. They soothed my poor burning head, hey-hey. But they did nothing for my talking, what-what. Did you hear of that? I could not stop myself; I talked for days on end about anything and everything, hey-hey. I couldn’t stop it; even when I was all alone I talked and talked and talked, what-what. I was like Mr. Burke: able to talk forever about a single trifle. So do not say I am fine, boy, what-what! For I am not fine – which is why I stay out of politics as much as possible. It’s politics which have made me mad, hey-hey. They agitate my brain, which begins to smoulder, then to burn…A fire blazes in my skull, and none can douse it. None!” His expression is odd, a woeful kind of pride.

                       ‘I am so sorry to hear of all this, Papa. But…but you’ve done good deeds today…You must console yourself with the truth of this: a madman would not be capable of performing good deeds, would he?’ He sniffs back tears, a lake of them welling down there.

                   “Don’t cry, boy,” says the King softly. “I’ve cried sufficient meself to supply an ocean. If you add more tears, we shall all be drowned, what-what…”

                    They ride back in silence, the grey robes of morning flapping over their heads, as Christmas 1798 changes its costume.

                   ‘Papa?’ he says at length. ‘I’ve often wanted to ask you why you say “what-what” and “hey-hey” all the time. Is it…’

                    ‘I don’t understand what it is you mean,’ says his father irritably. ‘I say no such things…’

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 9.2

-v-

                  A dark morning. You can hear the clouds rumble above. “And,” he says, as they ride through a galaxy of drifting snowflakes, after conveying his own momentous news, “under the powers vested in me, as well as by way of a New Year’s gift, I hereby accord you the rank of Lieutenant-General. Well-deserved. Congratulations, Fred!”

                “Highness,” says Weatherall, “I mean, Your Grace, I’m overwhelmed…”

                  “And you’ll be unseated if you ever call me that in private. Besides, I’m still a ‘Highness’, not a ‘Grace’…”

                        ‘Duke of Kent, eh? Why Kent?’

                      ‘Tradition for the fourth son? I must admit I don’t really know – and I certainly won’t ask. It could be Bollockhaven for all I care – as long as it’s a dukedom…’

                  It is not the same city he saw in 1790. There is far more of it. Mr. Nash, Mr. Wyatt and others have left their graceful imprints and creamy uniformity everywhere. Elegant crescents of townhouses have sprung up where there were open fields before. In the suburbs, and on the river’s south bank, there are factories, with plumes of thick black smoke waving over brick chimneys a hundred feet tall. It is Christmas Eve, and the slushy pavements throng with shoppers carrying sacks and parcels. Errand boys dash past, two of them carrying a hog’s carcass on a yoke. The barrow boys yell out wares and prices, breathing grey funnels of steam. The streets are unusually crowded with clattering hackney cabs as well as many private equipages, with occupants wrapped in Canadian furs and worsted capes. Merchants’ carts are laden with chests and crates for delivery, their horses stout and blinkered, irritably nosing their way past plodding pdestrians. Vendors roast chestnuts on open braziers, announcing their trade in sing-song rhymes: Get ‘em while they’s hot, an’ I won’t charge alot – wait until they’s cold, an’ you’ll find me rather bold… From out of shops and taverns, all ablaze with lamplight and coal fires, come hordes of people, red in the face and boisterous with good cheer. Mr. Malthus has just written his Essay on Population, so we shall soon understand the relationship between crowds and commerce, crowds and civilization. A few soldiers stand guard on street corners in the more fashionable parts of town, but the military presence in general is minimal. You wouldn’t think a French invasion was anticipated, less still greatly feared. If the armies of General Bonaparte make it this far, the war would be over anyway. Beyond the symbolic, a defense of London serves no purpose. Our troops wait at the coast.

                    ‘Hard to imagine the tumbrils rolling down these streets,’ says Weatherall, as they canter across Knightsbridge and through the park.

                  ‘Well,’ says the duke, ‘it was hard to imagine America going to war with France, but it happened…’

                     ‘You can’t really call it a war,’ says Weatherall. ‘It’s a fit of pique…’

                  ‘Quasi-war,’ he says. ‘God, how this city has grown, Fred. Whichever way you look there are more buildings and people than in all of Canada…’

                  ‘Too many, I’d say. I’m finding it rather hectic…’

                “I expect you can amuse yourself for two hours, Lieutenant-General,’ he says, as they arrive in front of Julie’s hotel on Duke Street. ‘Shall we meet back here at three?”

                “Oh, I can amuse myself very adequately, Edward,” Weatherall assures him. “I have two friends not a bow-shot from here who will think they’re seeing a ghost.”

                “Let’s hope then it’s refreshments they lay on, Fred, and not an exorcism…”

                       He then bounds up the hotel stairs three at a time to his love, quite forgetting his ailments in the process, both the real and the affected.

                  Hearing his great news, Julie is overcome with relief, the prospect of a return to Canada being nothing like as irksome for her as it is to him. Her children are there, and that is everything any place needs to be delightful. She is also relieved he doesn’t have to mope and moan anymore about injustice and inequity. ‘You realize we’ll have to live in Halifax again?’ he says, uncertain she’s grasped this aspect.

                     ‘A small price to pay…’ 

                     ‘You’re invited to a dinner by Wales on New Year’s Eve too…’

                      ‘My God,’ she gasps, ‘it never rains but it pours…’

                    ‘Ah, yes. It does that here all the time – but no one is very pleased by it…’

                “You’ll never guess who accompanied me from Portsmouth in my carriage,” she says, “while my women travelled behind us in hers…”

                  “I suspect I will,” he says. “It was Lady Wentworth?”

                   “Yes. Such a kind and amiable woman…’

                    ‘Who is?’

                    ‘Frances, silly. She knows everyone in London, simply everyone. And she has promised to introduce me to all her friends, and even to gain me an audience with the Queen, whom she knows very well indeed!”

                An electric spasm in the bowels. “Ah. I think that is not a good idea,” he tells her, appalled at the very thought of such an encounter. “In fact, that is a very bad idea.”

                  “Why? One of Lady Frances’ particular friends is Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert, and your mother sees her regularly… and with great affection too, or so I’m told.” She doesn’t have hands on her hips, but it feels as if she does.

                    ‘I haven’t heard that,’ he says indignantly, ‘and I’m very reluctant to believe it’s true…’

                “Yet it is true. The Queen has even made Lady Wentworth an honorary Lady-in-Waiting. She can go out to Windsor, or visit Buckingham House here whenever she wishes…”

                ‘Christ! So that is also true, is it?’ he sighs. ‘Well, Mama’s highly susceptible to cajolery — especially from the middle-classes. I can see how Lady Frances, given her tenacity and cunning, found it easy work to seduce the Queen. But the idea of Mama entertaining Mrs. Fitzherbert strikes me as perverse. It must be a manifestation of her disapproval of Wales’ marriage to Princess Caroline. You know how those German principalities hold grudges against one another for centuries – or maybe you don’t know. Mecklenberg-Streilitz has probably despised Brunswick since the Peasants Revolt. The Duke of Brunswick farted in their chapel — or vice versa. Ah, well. It’s petty, but no one ever forgets, because there’s nothing else to do in those godforsaken little states. You should hear what’s been going on in London. God! My sister told me…’ He proceeds to tell her the saga of Caroline and Wales, glad she’s found at least one friend in the city – even if that friend would not have been exactly his choice in companions for her. 

                    ‘How frightful,’ Julie says. ‘That poor child…’

                    Then he says, ‘I’m going to find you a house near Kensington Palace, and I’ll spend as much time with you there as possible. As to being seen in public, I’ll consult with Wales over such matters, attempt to gauge the general opinion before making any decision…’ He makes this sound as sensible as he feels it is.

                    ‘But if the Queen accepts Mrs. Fitzherbert,’ she says, frowning, ‘then why should she not accept me?’

                     ‘You don’t understand, Julie. Mama is not accepting anyone. She’s making known her opinion of Caroline – and that’s all she’s doing…’

                  ‘You’re right: I don’t understand. Mrs. Fitzherbert is morganatically married to a blood prince, and so am I. She’s a Catholic widow too. What’s the difference?’

                     ‘Mama doesn’t voice her views in public to the King. Indeed, she doesn’t voice them at all. She reveals them through gestures and preferment. The company she keeps is her comment. That’s the difference…’ He can tell she dislikes this schoolmasterly tone, now disliking it himself.

                     ‘I think you’re ashamed of me,’ she says. ‘If you weren’t ashamed you’d let me meet the Queen. I can look after myself. You know I can. And I’m sure she’d like me if we got to know one another…’

                    He recoils from this proposition involuntarily, saying, ‘It’s unthinkable, my love. Don’t think it. You’ll be meeting everyone of quality at George’s dinner – isn’t that enough?’

                      ‘I didn’t realize there was a limit on what I can wish for…’

‘You want me to lose the dukedom? Papa is just looking for an excuse…’

                     His dilatory objections only serve to make her more indignant; but their brief time together is over before anything is settled – not that anything like this could ever be settled. He wonders if she fully realizes the hopelessness of their situation.

                  “I think I’ve found you the perfect house,” Weatherall says, sitting on his glossy horse in the sleet. “It was occupied by a Mr. Palmer, who no longer requires it; and we can view the place immediately, if you so wish.”

                He nods. “Ah, well. Where is this perfect house then?”

                  It’s a mansion in Knightsbridge, with balconies overlooking Hyde Park, to the north, and the Surrey hills to the south. Most importantly, it stands not a five-minute ride through the park from Kensington Palace. There’s a spacious, well-appointed dining room, in which he can picture Julie entertaining with her usual grace and flair. There are two drawing rooms, both possessed of fine chimneypieces decorated with marble statuary, and ideally suited for conversation, cards or musical entertainments. To serve on less formal occasions, there’s a morning room and a music room, both lavishly decorated in white and gold. All the rooms are furnished most handsomely, featuring pieces either in the Queen Anne style, or else the modern classical manner: broken-arch pediments, fluted columns, hautboys that curve like women with claw feet, tripod pedestals beneath the rich mahogany of leaf tables, and the hardware all in gleaming brass. Upstairs are large, airy bedchambers, with dressing rooms, and night-soil cabinets that have a disposal system deploying valves (Mr. Thomas Crapper’s valveless flushing invention will not arrive until much later in the next century). On fine days, he can imagine guests walking around the gravel paths of well laid-out gardens, both in the front and rear. For rainy days, there’s an exceedingly large glass conservatory, well stocked with exotic blooms and rare plants. It smells like Martinique. Three acres of grounds contain vegetable gardens and fruit trees to supply the kitchens with fresh produce. There’s also stabling for twelve horses, servants’ quarters, and all the offices necessary for the smooth running of such an establishment.

              He beams. “Oh, yes, rather,’ he says. ‘I shall take it. Will you make the arrangements, Fred? And then assist Julie with the process of moving in…’ He never asks the cost. He never even thinks about money where Julie’s happiness is concerned.

                  “But I thought it was to be your house, Edward?”

                  “And so it is,” he says. ‘Or it will be until my bachelor apartments at Ken Palace are ready… probably even after that too. But this is all entre nous, Fred. We must be perceived as having separate residences, you understand why? So: entre nous…”

        “Naturellement. Everything always is, unless otherwise stated. I assume it always will be, yes?”

                  ‘God, what a priceless right hand you are…’

                  Weatherall chuckles. ‘The left was injured at Fort Royal…I mean, Fort Edward…’

                         ‘Christ! How long ago that now seems…’ The arrow of time flies fast for him during these years.

                  On their return through an icy drizzle, some miles from the castle, in a densely-wooded section of the Windsor road, two men on horseback emerge from the trees with pistols pointed. Their faces are concealed up to the eyes by black kerchiefs. Edward and Weatherall rein in their horses, halting some two yards away from these men.

                  “Have you any idea of just who you have waylaid here, gentlemen?” demands Weatherall angrily, indicating Edward with his flushed head. “This is the Duke of Kent!”

                ‘Calmly, Fred…’

              “Goody-oh,” says one man in an unpleasantly coarse tone, “for it be your money we wants, not your fucking titles. Now, dismount and hand over, lest I blow your dukey brains out!”

                  They jump from their saddles, pulling out money pouches. It is standard advice for those waylaid by highwaymen.

              “I thinks we’ll relieve yous of those fine steeds too,” says the other masked man in a nasal voice. While reaching out for their pouches, he makes the mistake of lowering his flintlock slightly. Weatherall the warrior moves like a flash of lightning, drawing his sabre and, with one great blow, severing the highwayman’s hand, which falls, pistol and all, into the murky snow. Blood spurts in a pulsing torrent from his wrist, and he topples sideways onto his accomplice, screaming in pain and causing the other man to lose his own balance. Instantly, Edward is on this man, kicking the pistol from his grip as he hangs from the stirrups, and then discharging his own weapon a foot from the man’s face, which instantly explodes into a crimson mush that slides down over the edge of his soaking kerchief.

                  “Now what was it you wanted from us?” Weatherall asks the one man left alive, who’s now sedulously trying to staunch the flow of blood from his wrist by making a tourniquet from his filthy neckcloth.

                “Mercy, sires!” the man pleads, his face now visible, swarthy, scarred and white as frost. “Just mercy for a poor man who has nothing to provide this season for his starving family…”

                  Edward thinks of his soldiers. There but for fortune… “Then mercy it shall be,” he says, a pang in his heart. “After all, it is the eve of our Saviour’s birth…” He thinks: Does a man like you even have a Saviour to forgive him?

                    “By God, that was fun!” says Weatherall, as they ride away.

                “And, like a lot of fun, it nearly wasn’t,’ says the duke, his guilt a confounding presence. ‘Let’s hope we’ve salvaged someone else’s Christmas cheer with this bloodshed, eh?’

                  “Think he really had a starving family to provide for?” Weatherall is too pragmatic for any guilt.

                “You saw his face: the only family he’s ever known is probably in Newgate. They would have killed us without a doubt…’ Edward rummages through his conscience for justification.

                    ‘But?’

                    “I give you a choice of good or bad. Choose the good.”

                  “Who said that?” asks Weatherall.

          “Deuteronomy, I believe…”

            ‘It’s not really a choice, is it? It’s an alternative…’

                ‘But the choice is still yours…’ And, Edward thinks, I chose the bad, all for a pouch of gold that isn’t even mine.

                At Windsor, their adventure is greeted with horrified gasps from his sisters, and knowing nods from Bill and Ernest, the only brothers present.

                “It happens all too often these days,” says Ernest, who is to receive the dukedom of Cumberland when Edward gets his own title. “Something needs to be done about it…’

                   ‘Ah, but what?” Edward is of course thinking about free schooling for the masses. 

                  ‘The scaffold?’ Ernest’s face, disfigured by a sabre scar across one eye, has always struck Edward as unpleasant – and not for the disfigurement. He knows this younger brother only slightly, yet he has instinctively never felt any affection at all towards him. As it tends to do, time will reveal to him why this is. At present, though, he reproaches himself for what seems to be an unwarranted revulsion.

                  Managing to get some moments alone with Bill, the Duke of Clarence, in the library, where people go to whisper rather than read, he inquires what Bill thinks about their father’s current state of health. You need to be careful in this castle who hears you talking about what.

                    “You’ve never really seen him at his worst, have you?” says Bill, perhaps realizing this about his young brother for the first time, and thus intent on painting an especially dramatic canvas. “The trouble is you never know when he’s going to erupt like a keg of gunpowder. One time, at the end of an appalling bout, when he was thought to be sane enough to do it, he was permitted to inspect a new Navy schooner at Spithead. On deck there happened to be a girl, pretty little thing too, the captain’s niece, or some such, I think. His Majesty takes one look at her, and then he says out loud, ‘What a gorgeous arse!’ He slaps the girl’s bum, and tells everyone, ‘I’d like to fuck that!’ This is the sort of thing we’ve endured, Eddie.”

                    He thinks: Your behaviour in Canada wasn’t any better, was it, Bill? But he would never say such a thing. “Good Lord!” he declaims. “Our pious father behaving like that? I can’t believe it.” But, he tells himself, uncontrollable lust must run in the family, mustn’t it? Like everything else that runs in there. He will not pursue this for fear of finding some darkness in himself scampering about shoulder to shoulder with all the other vices.

                  “Oh, Mama’s heard worse,” Bill goes on. “And there’s the violence, too…”

              “Violence?” A shudder.

              “One night at dinner, Adolphus said something His Majesty took exception to. He rushed at the boy, dragged him from his chair by the throat and would have throttled him if we hadn’t managed to pull him off.’ Edward clutches at his seat, thinking of the time when he too was dragged from a dining table. ‘That’s when Mama got the doctors in. They tied him into a special jacket which fixed his arms behind him. Then they dosed him with opium, shaved his head and blistered his scalp – you know, to draw out the poisons from his brain. He was immersed in iced water baths too…’ Bill steps back to admire his canvas, assess its impact.

                 ‘Immersed, was he?’ Edward’s thinking of poor Charles-Louis de Forstisson at Dr. Gizl’s sanatarium – in another life, the life in which Fortisson was still alive.

                   ‘Yes,’ says Bill, ‘and then he was fed on emetics and broth for a month or more. Ugh! There was spew and shit all over his bed.  Some cure, eh? Fnally the old sod was declared well enough to go to Cheltenham for the waters. Christ knows who had that brilliant idea. No sooner was he there than he began chasing around after a horse, snorting and whinnying as if he were a horse himself. What a spectacle! Mr. Pitt, and others in the Parliament, not wanting any of the public to see their monarch in such a state, our poor Papa was immediately brought back here. Imagine Mama’s joy at that! Then he started the bloody talking business – you’ve heard of that?’ Edward shakes his numb head, in which these reconditely awful scenes tumble over one another like acrobats in a madhouse, as Bill daubs on: “He would talk incessantly, about trifles, about nonsense, about nothing at all.” He pauses, finding the response indufficient, and then offering his own explanation for it. “Surely you heard much of this back in ’90, after his first attack? Why let me rattle on if you’d heard it all before?”

              Dazed by this catalogue of nightmares, Edward now realizes his brother’s annoyed with him. “Yes, ’90. I was… well, I was preoccupied with my own troubles then, Bill, was I not? I remember little beyond finding it all hard to believe. I suppose you have to see it in order to accept fully that Papa can do such things?’ Why, he wonders, am I apologizing for missing horrors we should be mourning? 

                 Bill snorts derisively.  “Ha. You’re lucky to be spared it, more like. I was away at sea much of the time myself, yet not away enough. God, but the talking was truly hideous! Sometimes it went on for days. He couldn’t sleep. He wandered. He woke the staff. But he couldn’t shut up; just talk, talk, talk. It was driving everyone mad, a contagion of gibbering insanity. You never know whether it’s gone or if it’s returned – or maybe it’s always there. Now he argues with his ministers over everything; he thinks they’re conspiring to ruin him. He’s suspicious of everyone, all of us.” Bill shakes his head, the wig turning more slowly above it, as if the lid of his skull is twisting itself off. “Even the common people have begun to hate him; there have been assassination attempts, and rocks are thrown at his carriage…’

            ‘Assassination?’ says Edward, his mouth gaping open. ‘Rocks?’ Have I landed in some alternative England, he thinks, some parodic product of Mr. Swift’s pen?

                   ‘Oh, yes,’ Bill confirms. ‘Death threats, jeers, all manner of abuses. He takes it all calmly, though; but he doesn’t take it seriously –that’s the problem. And after what’s been happening in France, it is serious, Eddie. The Queen wouldn’t go near him back then; and she still won’t be left alone with him for a minute …’

                    ‘As before…’ Edward feels obliged now to prevent Bill telling him anything he already knows; yet this seems ludicrous in the face of what’s actually under discussion. Why aren’t they discussing what happens, or what ought to happen when a monarch has lost his mind? 

                    ‘Yes. As before,’ says Bill, preoccupied with problems rather than solutions. ‘He tries to enter her bedchamber, but she keeps German maids and our sisters around her, so he will be shamed and sure to leave. But he has no shame. He says he wants Mama in his bed, yet he still goes on about Lady Pembroke. Remember that sorry tale of humiliation?’ Edward nods, recalling how his father’s offer of marriage to the woman had been scornfully rejected. ‘Well,’ Bill goes on, ‘now he’s offered that bitch the moon to be his mistress; but she’s revolted by him. We’re all revolted. He tried the same thing with Lady Yarmouth, getting the same mortified result. How does he expect these noblewomen to respond when some scruffy old jelly-eyed babbler says he’d like to fuck them? No decent whorehouse would let someone in that state enter the premises less still handle the merchandize. Christ! Then he had the gall to tell Mama he intended to find a mistress elsewhere – can you believe it? He’d have to plod up to Yorkshire before finding some gin-soaked scrag-end willing to entertain his putrified prick in her festering quim even for a guinea…’

                    ‘Awful, Bill. This is so very awful.’ But Edward feels only pity for his sick father. He also wonders how Bill can scorn the King when he himself behaves more shamefully, and cannot blame his lubriciousness on madness. Or, he now wonders, can he? Can they all in this accursed family?

                    ‘He sleeps out at Frogmore now,’ adds Bill. It’s the large mansion in Windsor Park they insist for some reason on caling a cottage. ‘He says he won’t sleep in any building where he can’t share a bed with his wife. He’ll drag us all down with him, Eddie. No one knows what to do with him. Even the footmen are confused by it all. One moment they’re serving their king, and the next they’re ordered to hold him down while his doctors holler, punch and tie him up again. No one knows if it’s even legal to treat him like this. It surely must be treasonous to handle His Majesty in such a fashion, mustn’t it? But no one really cares anymore. We’ve all had enough. It’s breaking down around us, Eddie. Nothing’s solid anymore. There’s even a special chair for him, with built-in restraints, straps and such. You’d think he might rebel at the sight of this fearful thing. But no, he calls it his ‘throne’. It’s dreadful, dreadfull. Our Papa! But if he says anything untoward, let alone anything angry, he’s gagged and told to shut up. The King! It’s been horrible for everyone, just horrible! Worst of all, his long spells of sanity make it impossible to establish a regency – which is our only way out of this — and he hates Georgie virulently for attempting to do it. But what else can we do?’ A pause, as Bill searches for any other incidents to enhance his picture, soon finding a suitable tableau for the background. ‘One day, when Georgie, Fred, and me were at dinner with the Queen, he arrived totally dishevelled, wearing only his nightshirt; and he said to Fred, ‘Darling boy, I wish I were dead; for I fear I shall be mad’.” Bill feels the anecdote lacking and is obliged to tell what isn’t shown well enough. “It is so sad at times, so very sad. Perhaps, now you’re here, Eddie, with your more reasonable mind, you can come up with some sort of solution?”

                “Ah, well…’ He thinks: Christ, things must be bad if they imagine I’m the only one able to solve this problem. 

                     ‘His eyesight’s fading too,’ Bill adds to the pile. ‘Half the time he doesn’t appear to know who’s in any room. He has to listen to the voices – and he always gets it wrong…’

                ‘On top of everything, that too?’ Edward says, feeling his brother is for some reason going too far with this; and then he changes the subject: ‘Bill, did you arrange an audience between Lady Wentworth and Mama?’

                “Why not?” Bill replies, looking more than slightly offended. “She’s an awful lot of fun; she deserves a little reward for it. Why the hell not? I’m surprised you haven’t had some fun with her yourself – it’s well worth it, I can promise you of that with Lady Wellworth. And she’s right on your doorstep over there too. My God, go to it, man!”

                There is something very wearisome about this, so he says, ‘Why so many, Bill?’

                  ‘So many what?’

                ‘George, Fred, you – why so many women?’

                  ‘Oh,’ says Bill. ‘They always get to know you in the end, Eddie, don’t they? And that spoils it. You want one who doesn’t know you – one who you don’t know either. It’s all about the spice…’

                  “Spice is it? What about Mrs. Jordan?”

                  “What about her?” snaps Clarence, now annoyed by these inappropriate questions. “She’s given me ten children, Ed! That tends to sap the fun out of things. Just wait a while: you’ll see for yourself. Anyway, don’t Joseph-Surface me — you with your debts and your French tart…”

                  “If you knew the play better,” Edward says heatedly, “you’d know that Joseph Surface is a better man than his brother!”

                “Oh. So now you’re better than us, are you?” Bill snarls, shaking his head in disbelief.

                  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Edward says, putting his huge paws on Bill’s shoulders. “Come now; let’s not fight on Christmas Eve. God knows, there’s enough discord in this family without us adding to it. Let’s go down and join in the festivities, eh?”

                “Don’t expect much of the festive spirit here,’ says Bill. ‘I’d rather be with my sweetheart and my children, and I suspect you would too – wherever you’ve hidden her. Or them? But duty calls, so let’s go arm in arm, like brothers.”

                  “You’ll meet my French lady on New Year’s Eve,” says Edward, relieved the squabbling is over.

                  “My-my,” Bill remarks cheerfully, “maybe the surface is wearing thin on young Joseph at long last, is it?”

                ‘Maybe no veneer was ever there to begin with?’

                ‘Maybe so, maybe so – but only time will tell, won’t it?’

                     ‘Time?’ he says. ‘Time just burns down quietly and drowns in wax, Bill; it doesn’t say a word…’

-vi-

                  Bill is right about the festivities, or the lack thereof. There is no tree, although his sisters –  except Amelia, the King’s favourite, now fallen sick – have attempted to liven up windows and doorways with pine branches. It is nothing like his childhood memories of Christmas, which are very gay. Well, fairly gay at least. It was one of the few times when the whole family was ever together, which itself now seems an unlikely cause for gaiety. 

                   The Queen  watches on disapprovingly as her children drink punch, sitting like a plaster gargoyle in her capacious grey velvet armchair. She visibly flinches when the King enters on thin, uncooperative legs, to seat himself in an elbow chair by the fire, acknowledging no one, distracted by his own vexatious meditations. Edward attempts conversation with him, but His Majesty is indifferent and unresponsive, as if he barely knows his son now. Prince Edward, the new Duke of Kent, makes a point of not drinking in front of his father, well aware now, however, of why his brothers all drink to excess. It’s the only way to endure an intensely sepulchral atmosphere in what is supposed to be their home.

                Dinner is especially edgy, awkward and gloom-laden. Edward pities Lieutenant-General Weatherall for having to sit through this ordeal on the eve of Christmas. The King eats voraciously and excessively – something he never used to do – and he ignores Weatherall, the only extra-familial guest, someone he’d have once gone out of his way to engage and make comfortable. When the meal is over, Edward attempts to give the occasion a trifle more merriment by asking his friend to accompany him along with the royal sisters to show them those pretty Canadian ponies he has brought over from Nova Scotia as gifts. The ponies have been concealed in a distant stable block to make them a genuine surprise. Illuminated by the slanting yellow rays of lanterns, these inquisitive little horses enthrall the girls, who each immediately claim one, giving them fanciful names on the spot: ‘Chockylegs’, ‘Snortweed’, ‘Frostbelly’. When this small treat is over, and the ponies return to munching on hay, they all trudge back to the darkened castle, their briefly festive Christmas Eve at an end.

                     After attending midnight mass in the tenebrous chill of St. George’s Chapel, the Queen retires, taking her ladies with her; yet his father remains behind, with Bill and Ernest. The King, curiously roused of a sudden, insists that Princess Elizabeth return to play the harpsichord. She’s sent for, and now sits at the keys, while King George blows his flute. He plays exceedingly well indeed, as does Elizabeth. It is a welcome glimpse into old times. They render numerous carols quite affectingly together, with everyone singing the old familiar words, adding some small quantity of a dimly-remembered joy to the night that all children will recall fondly as adults without knowing why. Wales and York are supposed to return from from the city, but there is no sign of them by the time everyone goes up to their bedchambers. Augustus is elsewhere, and Adolphus, the youngest brother, is now stationed at Hanover. Whatever the reasons were for spawning so vast a brood, joyful togetherness does not seem to be among them.

                      He apologizes to Weatherall for the unseasonal gloom, and for his father’s incivility.

                “All families are ineffably difficult,” says the Lieutenant-General, “which is why I have no desire to start one of my own.”

                “You never discuss your parents or childhood, Fred…”

                “Correct, Edward. I never do and never will. I shall now bid you a good night.”

                Edward’s room, without curtains or carpets – according to his parents’ preferences – is penetratingly cold and damp, despite its sorry little coal fire, which glows over there like the stub of a cheroot and provides about as much heat. The bedsheets feel sodden, as chilled, he thinks, as the castle’s flags must be out there in the icy night, so he’s obliged to wear a chamber robe to create even the faintest semblance of warmth. On a side table are piled several books, which he’d ignored the previous night. Now he pulls from between volumes of collected sermons and prayer manuals a copy of Dr. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which he reads until the candle gutters, annoyed by the summations of each chapter that always precede it, yet finally engrossed by the lunacy of Lilliput’s eternal feud over which end of a boiled egg ought to be cracked open. The Big-Enders and the Little-Enders remind him acutely, as they’re intended to do, of our own political squabbles – something he’d not in the least observed when the novel had been read to him as a child. It’s the mark of a good book, he thinks: the story can captivate a child, yet it also swims darkly beneath a sparkling surface, waiting for someone able to hook its real purpose and delightedly reel it in.

-vii-

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 9.1

BOOK TWO

The Duke

CHAPTER NINE

Good Society

England: Christmas 1798-August 1799

-i-

                A landscape of steel-grey water; the wintry sun a pale coin flipped up on the black horizon. The thick rotundity of a glassy planet, a treacherous world of liquid crystal. It may allow you to float on its surface, or it may smash you down to drown fathoms deep. Stowaway gulls wail for their lost home; the west wind slaps violently at sails, filling their vast bellies, blowing this tiny wooden island tenuously across an immensity of brine.

                   After an uneventful voyage of 27 days on the H.M.S. Topaz, through high seas, but with fair winds, they land at Portsmouth a little before Christmas in the Year of Grace 1798. Weatherall and he have promised one another to finish reading School for Scandal independently, so they can discuss the curse of his nickname, ‘Joseph Surface’, later at their leisure, yet before he reaches his mettlesome family. But the opportunity to have this discussion never seems to arise. Their baggage had preceded them in three ships, containing, among many other items, two fine carriages, built in London, with twelve Canadian horses to pull them; and six white ponies, intended as gifts for his sisters. Colonel Fawcett of the Royal Nova Scotia Regiment was placed in charge of this cargo, and with organizing their landing in England.

                “By God, my heart is on fire,” Fred Weatherall breathes, swallowing back tears, as the pale English coast comes into view. “I do love this great little country…”

                “We ought to,” Prince Edward says, “we’re giving our lives to her – or she’s taking them. And she’s not so little anymore either…” The empire now sprawls ingenuously around the world.

                Home, they say, is where the heart is; but the hurt is there too. Now he’s finally back in his homeland, after what is, to him, half a lifetime, he starts to worry about all the vexations and impediments he might be about to face here. He worries even if these obstacles are alongside the joys and renewed acquaintanceships with people, many of them, who haven’t seen him  since he was sixteen. Will they even know the man he’s become? Will they recognize this big, burly, prematurely balding soldier, grown from the egg of that callow youth? That boy would still be the only Edward they’ll remember, wouldn’t he? Does any of that child remain in this giant of a man? And what about Julie? How great a secret will their relationship have to be here? Who could she have as friends in London? What possible society could she enjoy? Her English is poor, isn’t it? They always speak French, so he scarcely knows. Is this going to become a dreadful period of loneliness and isolation for her? Such questions had always been overridden by the uncertainty of ever returning to England; but now they’re here, now they’re finally in England, these issues loom large, casting monstrous shadows over the future. And then there’s the King. Papa. The thought of his father makes him clutch helplessly at the bench upon which he sits.

                An appropriately regal welcome awaits their ship on the quayside, with cannon-fire, regimental bands, and cheering crowds. People have  come out in droves despite the freezing drizzle. There are soggy banners everywhere, some proclaiming, in dripping coloured paints, WELCOME HOME, PRINCE EDWARD, HERO OF THE WEST INDIES; and others bearing more modest, yet still highly affecting sentiments.

                “This is where we must soon separate for a time, my dearest,” he tells Julie, as ropes are thrown to sailors waiting at the dock. “It will not be long, I promise. You’ll take one carriage to a hotel, with your ladies. I shall take the other to Windsor and meet you in London as soon as is humanly possible.”

                “I understand,” she replies calmly, with no trace of sorrow. “I’ve been expecting this and am sensible of your many commitments and duties here. Don’t worry for me. You know I’m patient, and I will be fine…” She looks down, her sapphire eyes a little dull under grey English skies.

                “It will just not be the way it has been,” he says, wondering at this need to state the obvious.

                “I know that, silly man,” she says, nudging him in the chest with her elbow. “And remember, you’re supposed to be sick – that’s why you’re here. Try looking sick, because you don’t right now. Limp, or something; groan a little; have Weatherall support you. The crowd will probably assume they are wounds from battle – and a wounded hero is even more beloved than one without a scratch. Wounds are proof of heroism, valour, courage, and all those things which the mob, and you little boys value so highly…and so foolishly.” She regards him reflectively, the splendid uniform, the imposing bulk and height. 

                      She has never mentioned the parting from little Jean de Mestre, for which he’s thankful, having nothing remotely consoling to say about such another wrenching separation. Robert Wood and his wife are undoubtedly the best possible parents for the child now.

               “You’re making parting such a bitter sorrow,” he tells her, laughing mawkishly.

                Looking over at the welcoming committee standing expectantly on a dais erected for this purpose near the docking site, he sees, to his horror, Lady Frances Wentworth, smiling madly beneath a parasol patterned in garish blue and orange blotches. This accoutrement may have shaded her from the sun — if England has seen one this year — yet it is no match for English rain, which drips freely through its fabric, carrying down blobs of colour from the pattern onto her white fox collar.

                “Do you see who’s waiting to greet us down there?” he asks Weatherall.

                  “What the hell is that woman doing here?’ says Weatherall. ‘And in the official party too! My God, the gall…”

                “Talking of which,” Edward says, “why is no member of my family here to greet me, yet Lady Wantworse can manage to get down to Portsmouth and insinuate herself into the official reception?”

                “I imagine that’s not all she’s managed to insinuate herself into,” Weatherall speculates. “After all, she’s been here a month already, and when she wants something she goes at it like a rat after cheese.”

                  “And if she wants someone it’s like a hound after hares…”

                “That hound would be a bitch, of course?”

                  ‘A witch, I think…’

                    “Shall we limp down the gangplank, perhaps adding a fearful slip, with the timely grip of a strong arm preventing you from a gravely watery landing? The crowd gasps in terror, and then sighs with relief, applauding the valiant captain and his timely arm. Let them have some theatre, eh? God knows we’ve had enough experience with that! You’ve missed your family for a decade; another day won’t make much difference.” 

                  “You’re right, Fred. Like Madame Julie, you’re always right. Don’t you get sick of all that rectitude?”

                  “Not really. No. Never.”

                    “That’s exactly what she said.”

                    “How can right be wrong? Come, let’s dazzle les Anglais. I can see Fawcett’s down there, with everything prepared – or it’d better be…”

                      His farewell to Julie is hard but brief. He thinks: Her life since meeting me has been nothing but loss. Her property; her homeland; her friends; her husband; her mother; her children — and now, yet again, me. What use is love where love itself is forbidden? But her strength in adversity amazes him. It inspires him too, and he realizes he knows more about what makes his clocks work than what makes her resolutely tick, tock and chime. She always chimes so beautifully.

                   “No words,” he says, kissing her eyes, her face and her trembling lips. “No words now.”

-ii-

                         Limping out across the groaning deck, he’s helped onto the damp companionway by Weatherall, who accompanies him down it. At one point, his cane slips on greasy wood and he nearly topples over into the turgid waters, rescued by Weatherall’s quick hand, as the waiting crowd gasps, then sighs with relief, as if witnessing some daring acrobatic act. 

                    “That was a little too convincing,” whispers Weatherall. “I nearly lost you.”

                    “That was no act,” he whispers back. “The damn cane slid on this slime.”

                    “No more of that, then. Just limp, wince, and hobble from henceforth, eh? We can’t lose the hero so soon…”

                    Applause clatters out at the sight of their poor wounded prince; wild cheering, with shouts of Bravo, and God Save Prince Edward! He’s wearing his finest uniform, naturally, with the diamond-studded Garter Star given him by grateful Haligonians. He has also decided to use the white wig again, not wanting to present England with a balding hero – at least not on his first appearance. ‘Pity our vessel couldn’t have towed my island here,’ he says.

                    ‘There wouldn’t be room in the Channel…’

                      ‘I hope not.’ He never did get to see his island.

                        Once he reaches the quay, Colonel Fawcett steps forward, saluting smartly and then signaling the band to strike up the prince’s, personal fanfare. His wobbling sea-legs make him genuinely unsteady here, so that Weatherall, unsure if he’s acting or not, takes his arm. Fawcett inquires if he needs additional assistance for the walk to his carriage.

                      “His Royal Highness prefers to walk unaided,” Weatherall says solemnly, removing his own arm from Edward’s elbow.

                      “I suppose I shall have to give a speech?” he says, in the voice of a weary, wounded man, a man broken by the sea. “And meet all those people?” He can see Lady Frances craning her neck, straining to catch his eye, an expression of terrifying eagerness on her painted face. Her parasol has virtually dissolved in the rain by now, and the colourful blotches from it, spattered over her wing-like white fur collar, make her resemble some sort of hideously human jungle flower.

                      “It is customary, Highness,” replies Fawcett, an exemplary officer, yet duller than mud. “But,” he adds, realizing he has to, “I can tell them you are too weak and ill to tax yourself further.”

                    “That would be my preference,” he says, “especially since I am too weak and ill to be further taxed. Captain Weatherall will speak for me; and, by the way,” he continues, in a lower voice, “keep that woman away from me at all costs. Use force if you have to.”

                  Weatherall is obliged to point Lady Frances out to Fawcett, who is looking despairingly over at a thousand female faces.                      

                    “Shall I ride after you by horse?” Weatherall asks.

                    “You won’t have to ride far. As soon as we’re clear of the town, I shall ask the driver – is it Lieutenant Versil? — to slow down until you catch us. It’s too wet for a long ride. I’d forgotten about the rain here. Odd how you forget the bad things, is it not?”

                  “Yes, it is Versil; and, yes, it is odd you don’t remember the rain, because it’s about all I remember well. Until later, then… Your Highness.” As Weatherall approaches the reception committee, the prince limps off to where his transport waits, seeing, in a peripheral fashion, a small commotion centred on Lady Frances. She’s attempting to clamber over the rope barrier separating people from prince, as two sentries are struggling to restrain her, doubtless upon Weatherall’s instructions. Once he’s certain she has no possibility of escaping her captors, he pauses to wave up at crowds of well-wishers, moved by their genuine affection. He decides to blow the people kisses, as he’d done when leaving Halifax. This action causes a tremendous response, rapturous cheering, with cries and yells of good wishes. There are even tears. Amazed to be received so affectionately, he waves and palms kisses for some minutes, thinking this is a far better way of responding to such outpourings of love and loyalty than the usual bowing and saluting. He then has his carriage pause along the narrow Portsmouth streets, which are all lined with locals, in order to exchange pleasantries and acknowledge greetings, asking some about their lives and hopes, asking them what they lack. There is little doubt in his mind that these acts have created a better impression than any formal speech and private luncheon could have done. These are the people who will one day be able to choose their rulers by ballot, and, if he wishes to help advance their rights to suffrage and education, he ought to get to know them more intimately than anyone from his class has ever done.

                  Weatherall catches up with him sooner than expected and, hitching his horse to the carriage, jumps in beside him. “What a reception you received!” he exclaims, shivering with cold and damp. “They clearly adore you here.”

                      “Well, they’re said to be fickle…But this is what must be infuriating my brothers,” he says, voicing his fears over what such popularity will be earning him in the way of fraternal hatred.

                    “They’ll get over it,” Weatherall assures him complacently. “After all, there’s a war and an invasion to worry about.”

                    He observes with amazement how populated the countryside here is when compared with Canada. Half his life has been lived away from England, and he now realizes that he’s  a stranger here, unfamiliar with almost everything he sees. Little cottages or farmhouses are almost everywhere along their route, and nearly all the land in view appears to be cultivated, divided neatly into fenced-off squares, all now painted white with snow or frost. The comforting smell of wood-smoke drifts in from fieldstone chimneys jutting from thatched rooftops, these homes nestled amongst copses of bare, frozen trees.

                    “You’ll never guess what that mad bitch, Lady Wantworse, told me,” says Weatherall, stretching out with his boots on the opposite bench as they rock, squeak and roll along their way.

                  “Nothing will surprise me about her,” he says, smiling at the impossible charm of  England.

                    “I’ll wager this will,’ says Weatherall. ‘She managed to get an audience with the Queen, and had herself nominated Lady-in-Waiting, with permission to live abroad, and five hundred pound a year. She also obtained some other perquisite for Sir John. Surprised?”

          “Flabbergasted, more like it, Fred. Is there no end to that woman’s tireless  machinations? The Queen? God…” Then a light dawns. “She must have taken up with the Duke of Clarence again. Only Bill could have arranged such an audience. I hope this doesn’t mean she’s going to be haunting Windsor whenever she feels so inclined?”

                  “The rat gets the cheese, and the bitch catches the hare…”

                “Tenacity isn’t the right word, is it?” he decides, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Did Madame Julie disembark safely?” 

                “She and her maids waited on board until the crowds had dispersed. Now she’s on her way.”

                “Can we put the spectre of Joseph Surface to rest before I reach Windsor?” he asks, wearied by the thought. “Did you finish the play?”

                  “I did.”

                  “And what are your conclusions?”

                   The plot, we must remind ourselves, revolves around two brothers, Charles and Joseph Surface. Charles has dissipated an income sent to him by Sir Oliver, a rich uncle overseas, borrowing heavily to finance his gambling, wenching, and drunken revels. Joseph is, by all accounts, upright, moral and bookish, having made good use of the monies also sent him by Sir Oliver. His one flaw is trying to seduce Lady Teasle, the amorous young wife of doddering old Sir Peter. The rich uncle, Sir Oliver, returns from India after a sixteen-year absence, and he resolves, by adopting a disguise, to discover which of the brothers is now the more worthy. 

                “I find that Joseph Surface’s hypocrisy is more in the accusations of some characters than it is in his actions,” opines Weatherall. “Indeed, at one point, it’s Sir Peter, I believe, who says a man of such obvious good character ought to be permitted a little dalliance.”

                  “True,” says the prince. “Go on.”

                  “But the main divergence from your own situation is that Joseph has been adequately supplied with funds, which he hasn’t squandered; and that Charles is an irredeemable reprobate, who only wins his uncle’s affection through playing upon his vanity.”

                    “How so?”

                  “Well,” continues Weatherall, “when willing to sell the disguised Sir Oliver all the family portraits, he refuses to part with one of them, one which by sheer coincidence proves to be the painting of his uncle. I thought this implied that he recognized Sir Oliver’s ruse, because the picture had no other special merits, as far as we know; and Charles has no real affection for his uncle. Indeed he mocks the man when he’s alone with his friends…”

                “Ah, yes. Interesting. Good stuff, Fred.”

                “Then Joseph is further damned for refusing to help a fictional distant relative in financial distress — a man who Charles has aided, yet only with ill-gotten money. The conclusion of all this chicaneryis that Charles is unfairly elevated over his brother, winning the woman Joseph wanted, but only, it would seem, for her wealth – if his nature has not changed, that is. And there’s no indication it has changed, is there? Both brothers are guilty of bad behaviour, yet Charles, whose behaviour has been patently far worse, wins the day, and Joseph is left, most unfairly, with nothing. I must say, Edward, it all resonates, this plot, with what you’ve told me about Wales and your father…”

                “Yes. That’s my reading of it, too, Fred,” he says. “So how should I proceed if the bloody name is used on me again?”

                “I should simply inquire who plays ‘Charles Surface’ in the current scenario — they’re both Surfaces, after all — and then point out the vast differences between your own condition and that of Joseph. Only a very superficial reading of the play could equate you with the character, whose treatment is in any case monstrous inequitable compared with that of the undeserving Charles.”

              “Yes, yes!’ he cries, delighted. ‘I’m so glad we agree on the main issues. And I’m certain, if the insult arises, no one will remember the play as thoroughly as we now do. At least I have some arrows in my quiver.”

                “Or barbs upon your line…”

                ‘Excellent, Fred. Let’s go fishing…’

-iii-

                  Tired from their voyage and all the excitement of being home once again after so long, even if as strangers in a strangish land, they fall silent, dozing fitfully to the creaking, crunching, bumping and rolling of the carriage, and the muffled clatter of horses’ hoofs on crisp white snow. In all the little hamlets through which they pass, chimneys puff out billowing blue gyres of smoke, oil lamps throw shuddering shapes on darkened walls framed by frost-rimed windows, yet not a soul stirs outside. It is a painting come to uncertain life, the kind of image folded as a print into some soldier’s kit, to be taken out and gazed on with bittersweet fondness proppsed against a searing dune or sheltering from the steamy monsoon air thousands of miles and hundreds of days away from such a beloved landscape. The prince feels deep affection for every hill and dale, every field and forest, every hut and every house, every inch of a tidy little land, the manicured acres of this England. Weatherall is experiencing the same sentiments. It is curious how familiar the unfamiliar seems. They gaze through the streaked glass windows in silence, occasionally looking back and smiling at one another, like men who’ve collaborated on some masterpiece and now see it is done, and it is good.

                  Passing through Henley, a day later, they see the River Thames for the first time, a rare ray of primrose sunlight flashing upon the slow, turbid waters, as if the country’s great artery were acknowledging their presence, their return. Soon there is Eton, with its renowned and ancient college; and then there is Windsor, where everything will change, for better or worse. He knows not which — he, Prince Edward.

-iv-

                  The castle is about three hours carriage ride from London; it looks even grimmer than he remembers, and it was grim enough in memory. Its cold greyish-brown stones and stark gothic crenellations remind him of his sister Sophia’s comment about her ‘little prison at Windsor’. Clawing at his groaning seat, the prince has a sudden impulse to order their carriage back onto the London road and avoid his own incarceration. But outriders with baggage have already proclaimed his arrival to the castle. There’s no escape now, no choice. He wonders what happens to free will at such times, times when you can only be exactly where you are; and your “free” will has nothing to say in it, no part to play at all. The moment his carriage is sighted coming up to the driveway guard-posts, cannon are fired, bells ring out from St. George’s Chapel, and the resident regimental band marches out playing his fanfare, followed by other martial tunes, many of them connected with the Grenadiers, those men he’d so successfully commanded in the West Indies. But of all the world’s great soldiers there’s none that can compare with the rum-tum-tum of the fife and drum of the British Grenadiers… You’d be forgiven for thinking he is welcome here; you’d almost be convinced of it. Locals, mostly children, tear around screaming with objectless delight, their parents tugging forelocks and squinting to see the new arrivals, the alternate race, those ferried from one palace to others, like jewelry in gilded boxes. These locals like gamboling in the castle grounds, where their monarch often engages them in conversation, and will sometimes pass out sweetmeats to the younger ones. The poor are always complaining about a disastrous lack of work, yet they’re invariably clad in and constitutionally prepared for 365 holidays each year. Regular work would severely curtail their traditional habits, he thinks, mainly to avoid thinking: O, Christ, commend my soul into the firm hands of a vast Unknowable. There are, he assures himself, times when you need a more personal god, a celestial General Grey, who commands the cosmos effortlessly, while noticing every mistake you make, seeing each mote as a huge unplanned cross-beam; but he also has your back when the shells and bullets fly and the ground has turned to bubbling pitch.

              Gathered in a huddle on the entrance steps are his sisters and his mother, Queen Charlotte, all of them wrapped in shawls and wearing bonnets against the cold damp wind and its stinging pellets of iced drizzle. None of his brothers or his father is there, however. Relief is rarely very relieving. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve though,  and, he reasons, the male Hanovers will all come down then from the city, down to a place where Christmas has been celebrated by English monarchs, on and off, for six hundred years. Sometimes it’s Greenwich or Whitehall, but in his experience it was mostly here, where the King has spent a fortune, a king’s ransom on renovations and new building. None of this has made the place look any the less forbidding, though. You’d think the rambling old pile had a darker purpose, yet it doesn’t, unless the imprisonment of young ladies counts? You’d think there were dungeons with miscreants and traitors hanging from the walls in chains, but there aren’t. Not yet there aren’t.

                    “Be pleased to see the ladies,” cautions wise Weatherall, “for they’ve missed you too. You must hide any disappointment about brothers for their sakes.”

                  “Right again, Fred,” he says, letting his friend help him from the carriage, and then limp painfully towards the steps. Ouch! A collective cry of dismayed sympathy goes up from the women, whose breath steams in ghostly clouds that half obscure their faces. Not the merriest wives of Windsor, he thinks; more like the Melacholy Maids. Escaping their churning phantoms, his sisters run to embrace him, although his mother remains where she is, implacable, not a feeling, sentiment or emotion visible on her pinched and exceedingly proper countenance, which sniffs the misted air with distaste. Or is this the air sniffing her? Then she calls out in her spiky German accent for everyone to return inside quickly. It is too cold even for her, Highness of Hyperborea.

            ‘Edvard, hurry, or you gatch your debt!’ 

             Has she deliberately made ‘death’ sound like ‘debt’? She usually says tod, to avoid summoning the Angel of Death, who speaks no German.

                  Cheered by the official welcome – at least something was planned for his return – he allows his sisters to help him up the steps, beckoning Weatherall to follow. Ouch! He can see that this sudden proximity to the ancient heart of our empire intimidates his friend. It intimidates everyone: it’s designed to do this, to intimidate. We’re all intimidated by the two faces of monarchy’s winking coin. Even the local peasants look on from a respectful distance. This may be their playground, but they’re still aware of the areas here that are private; just as they’re aware of the gaping difference between themselves and their betters. You can tell the classes apart at a glance: the clothes say it all; from rags to satin breeches. Is this the way God planned it?

                      Knowing Julie is now only a hard hour’s gallop away is what most intimidates the prince, however. He badly wants to be there with her. He suddenly doesn’t want to be here, with women who, for God’s sake, he scarcely even knows.

‘Zee,’ his mother says suspiciously, hearing the snort, ‘der coldt hass come eefen now. I varnink you, I varnink all off zer kinders of catchink der debt.. I know zeeze ting.;

                  Through bare, chilled stone corridors they go, with the wind biting in at their ears from open embrasures, up and down cold granite steps, across bailey and barbican, until they enter his mother’s warm drawing room, where dim figures rise from armchairs, and a great choir of voices erupts:

               “Dear Edward, welcome home!”  

                  It is a dream, surely? He sees his father coming towards him with open arms, a fleshy red face and bulging eyes beaming with unfeigned delight. “What-what?” says the King, embracing him, embracing the prince. “Good job you’re not still in Geneva, what-what. The accursed French have invaded the place, hey-hey. My darling boy, home at last; bless you, bless you!”

                        Bless me? Me? The King smells strongly of something medicinal, and of something ordure-like. Over his dusty shoulder, Edward can see his brothers, George, Fred, Bill, and Augustus all smiling joyfully and even applauding. All, that is, except Fred, the Duke of York, who bares his fangs and turns away. The prince introduces Weatherall, who is then discreetly shown out by a footman and taken to his rooms. Edward limps in exaggerated pain over to an armchair near the fire, apologizing that he needs to sit on account of his injuries. ‘Well, tell me your news,’ he says, both hands now resting on the pommel of his cane. 

                     The Prince of Wales has grown even plumper. God, look at him! He wants you to look. His face is a ruddy ball of gorged flesh under its powdered wig, his stomach so fulsome you’d think he’d stuffed a cushion under his golden waistcoat. ‘War?’ says Edward, when Wales informs him that the United States has gone to war with France.

                     ‘A little war,’ Wales adds. ‘Paris objects to their neutrality with us; but the French are already regretting it, dear boy. The American navy has had its first victory: U.S. Delaware took La Croyable as a prize… Incroyable, eh?’ Restrained laughter in the rich fug of this pampered room.

                     ‘Did you hear of the Irish Rebellion?’ says Bill, the Duke of Clarence.

                       Did you hear of Lady Frances Wentworth? he thinks, saying, ‘I hear of nothing over there…’ Except the wind, the rain and the ocean.

                      ‘Paris sent a thousand troops to assist them in Mayo, the bastards!’ Bill explains.

                  ‘That’s right,’ says Augustus, now a bright-eyed young man, not a reedy boy. ‘But we sorted that out, didn’t we? Knocked ‘em for six and took Wolfe Tone…’

                     ‘Where’s that?’

                     ‘You mean who. He was the leader – I say was: he died of his wounds…’

                  “Clever bugger, though,’ adds Wales. ‘The movement managed to unite Catholics and Protestants – never thought we’d see that over there. So,’ he says, clapping his bejewelled hands, ‘Joseph Surface returns!”

                  So, it does come up. “And Charles Surface is married,” says Edward, very glad of the retort, and wishing Weatherall could have witnessed it. “Where’s the lucky bride?”  He notices his sister, Princess Sophia, covertly shaking her head in warning.

                  “Don’t ever mention her in my presence,” growls Wales, turning away abruptly, and then turning back, his expression no longer so dark. “I shall be holding a banquet in your honour,” he says genially, “on New Year’s Eve. The Prince of Orange and all society shall be there to welcome you home. And,” he leans closer, whispering, “our parents will not be present, so you can bring your French lady, if you wish – and if you still have her. Otherwise I can arrange any number of hot little minxes for you…”

                The prince smiles, thanking Wales, and then asking him why the Duke of York seems so cold.

                  “Ignore him,” says Wales, still in hushed tones. “He’s jealous you have all the glory and he all the shame. He’s so accustomed to being Papa’s darling that he simply cannot tolerate the recent lack of doting. He fears you might usurp his place…” You can hear the buttons on his waistcoat straining as he leans down. 

                “You’re aware,” says Edward, “that those were the first kind words our father has said to me in fourteen years…”

                “He’s such a great bore these days,” whispers Wales. “The only words I want to hear from him are that he’ll pay my debts.”

                  Edward thinks: but he does pay them, George, saying, “He promises to pay mine, yet he never does.”

                “Dear boy, he never does anything he promises, and he promises anything he has no intention of doing. One simply ignores him now.”

                    As Prince of Wales, the future King, he can afford to bait and abuse their father, Edward tells himself; yet, no nearer the throne than he is to the sun, he can only afford to please the man – and please him greatly too.

                    His mother is now most solicitous about his health, insisting he see the best doctors as soon as possible — and she of course knows these men. His childhood rises like an unquiet shade, jittering around the walls, and he recalls the leeches, the cuppings, the bleedings and the astral dwarves. No thanks. He tells her the waters at Bath will do him much more good. 

                  “Viz der elt vun cannod be doo carevul,” she says, her accent even thicker than it had been a decade earlier. “Your vader iss a livink monumend to diss vact,” she adds. “Zick as old hund vor yearse – und vhy?”

                  He shakes his head in ignorance.

                    Her answer is diet, exercise and magical potions. “Ze debt off his dob,’ she adds.

                  “His ‘dob’?” inquires the prince, learning that this dob was brown and white, filthy, and used to sleep on His Majesty’s bed. Unhygeinic. An open invitation to the brigade of demons always waiting for an opportunity to invade your vitals and gnaw away. The King also goes riding in foul weather, he’s told, and this will wreck your resistance to inter-dimensional parasites. He wonders how the madness is faring these days, but he dares not ask. He might not be able to understand her answer anyway. He decides to continue the conversation in German, since it is making less and less sense in English; but the Queen simply looks offended, her cold black eyes roaming his face like beetles, her nose contracting as if detecting a foul smell, or perhaps an evil dwarf lurking in the aethers? Then she walks away with delicate, deer-like steps. Fred, the Duke of York, the Bishop of Osnaburg, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, soon makes his own excuses to leave, pleading urgent war business – a reason too plausible and of too general a concern for anyone to find it particularly suspect. Except Prince Edward, who alone, possibly, perceives the cold, icy shoulder. People only pay attention to their own experiences in this world; those of others are incomprehensible for the most part. With York’s absence, the mood of this cozy room, with its snapping orange fires burning in two grates, with its family portraits looking on benignly, this familiar room grows lighter and more intimate. The prince is truly overwhelmed by the warmth of a reception he’d been dreading for weeks. They question one another on the past and the future. The past is deep and long indeed, yet his sisters have little to report on it – at least, not in public – but they’re eager to hear about Canada, America and the West Indies, the big world they’ll never see, here in their little world, their permanent prison for a life sentence. He’s glad to relate much that makes them marvel — although almost anything does that. The King, most unlike his old self, sits quietly listening. He seems unwell, hollowed out, his once blue eyes now a cloudy grey, webbed with red veins, and his breathing often laboured, whistling. At one point, however, he breaks up a conversation Edward is having to announce the most stunning news. “You have conducted yourself admirably abroad, Edward, what-what,” he says, his voice twanging and hoarse yet still powerfully enthused. “And I trust you will continue in that upright behavior here, hey-hey. Therefore, in recognition of your services, I intend to make you Duke of Kent and Strathern, with all estates and annuities, what-what. You shall be Earl of Dublin too, hey-hey…”

                  No one is ever sure if his ‘what-whats’ and ‘hey-heys’ are questions, exclamations, or simply punctuations with no other meaning at all. No one ever asks him about them though: too embarrassing. All we know is that they vanish when the madness comes upon him; so, we regard them as a barometer of sickness and are thus glad to hear them, irritating as they are.

                    He, the new duke, stammers out a genuinely humble gratitude; yet the King has not finished. “Furthermore,” he goes on, wheezing a little, “since Governor-General Prescott is too old to carry both positions, you may well be appointed Commander-in-Chief of British Forces in North America, hey-hey — but still based in Halifax, where your arms are more needed in these perilous  times, what-what. Parliament must decide on this appointment, however – and they never listen to me, of course, of course. First, though, we need to get you well again, hey-hey! And I know all about that.” He rolls his red eyes and of a sudden looks excitable, ablaze now with his own regal largesse. The transition from Farmer George to Emperor may well be effortless for him, but the world finds it unnerving.

                  As deflating as news of his return to dreary Nova Scotia is for Edward, the honours conferred upon him more than make up for it. Even here the province is mocked as ‘Nova Scarcity’. No one has any illusions about it. Before he can thank his father further and more graciously, the King is gone, saying he has work to do – what-what. Ministers have come up from London. We’re at war, hey-hey! The casual shabbiness of his dress – the loose coat of coarse homespun, the stained breeches, and the old waistcoat with buttons missing, the farmer’s outfit – perplexes him, the new duke. He realizes how the King might enjoy being ‘Farmer George’. He is not ashamed of his prize hogs and huge turnips – why should he be? But the same day he can be in the Presence Chamber at St. James, telling the Persian Ambassador how his country’s forces ought to be aligned against the French. Or he can be in his office at Whitehall authorizing new duties or tariffs on rum or nutmeg. The farmer needs to be an emperor too; but in which role is he play-acting? Both? Neither? One or the other? He now asks his mother how the King’s mental health has been, but she simply rolls her glassy beetle eyes, saying that King George is worse whenever it suits him. Everyone else looks embarrassed by this reply, yet no one comments further, preferring to continue the reunion. Windsor is a place where much is ignored, where much is swept away with the crumbs, peelings and mouse droppings. It’s a place replete with open secrets, with things both unsaid and unsayable, yet spoken in private all the time.

                  In just such a private moment, Wales mutters in his ear, “The King is simply not fit to rule, and that’s the truth of the matter; yet none dare say so. Billy Pitt knows the government would fall if the King were declared non compos mentis, so he insists on favourable medical reports. It’s all a rather dull farce.” He hisses out a sigh of what is intended to sound like frustration.

                  “I heard he had recovered,” Edward whispers back.

                “No,” says Wales emphatically, “he never really did. You simply cannot tell when the madness will return – or when he’ll turn it off. Our mama is even frightened to be in the same house as him now, and she hasn’t shared his bed in years. She surrounds herself with maids and our sisters at night, in case he tries to enter her chamber. He promises he’ll stay away; yet, like all his promises, he breaks it weekly.”

                  ‘Will he keep his promise to me,’ he asks anxiously. ‘The dukedom?’

                     ‘Oh, he can’t get out of that now,’ says Wales. ‘Everyone here heard him, so he can’t renege. I’ll personally ensure that promise is kept, don’t worry about it, dear boy. High time you were treated fairly too…’

                    This cheers Edward considerably, although he still fears the King will find some excuse to deny him the titles and the money. He worries that Julie’s presence will provide this excuse; he worries that a bad report from Canada will provide it. He still wonders why his elevation has lagged so far behind that of his brothers, though. But then he recalls Julie’s imprecations about his tendency immediately to seek out the bad when something good arrives; thus, he tries to repel these thoughts, achieving a partial success. Perhaps the promises will be kept?   

                  When he’s finally alone with Sophia in the library, she tells him the Queen had never approved of their brother George’s marriage to Princess Caroline of Brunswick – some ancient Teutonic feud? — and is privately happy about the rift that’s opened up between them.

                    ‘Happy?’ he says. ‘I can’t picture that…’

                    ‘She far prefers Lady Jersey – who’s an adulteress,’ says Sophia, running an index finger over the corrugated spines on a shelf of books. The Queen even invites Wales’ mistress to her drawing rooms: extraordinary, what! “Caroline was so badly behaved, though,” Sophia continues, shaking her head at the thought. “Georgie even invited her to spend this Christmas season at Carlton House – an olive branch, if ever there was one – yet she refused it, probably burning that bridge forever. She can’t expect much in the way of consideration now, can she? You know how Georgie is – so very easily offended. But it is the child, little Charlotte, who I pity most…’

                     ‘There’s a child!’ he cries, he who never hears news from home.

                    ‘Yes, she’s nearly three now – didn’t you know? Georgie doesn’t see her much; yet he issues weekly instructions about precisely how she’s to be handled and educated. Caroline is only allowed to see her own child once a week, and for just a few minutes at that. But she does nothing to improve the situation, behaving outrageously in public, and carrying on shamelessly with one beau after another. There are even rumours about Lord Byron, who’s frequently seen at Caroline’s dinner parties. And you know what he’s like…’

                    ‘No. What is he like?’

                   ‘Anything in skirts – and if it’s not in skirts he’ll wrap your curtains around it just to tear them off again… Well, Caroline tells anyone who’ll listen that Georgie was so drunk on their wedding night he fell into the fireplace, where she left him to sleep it off. Fortunately, it was summer then and no fire had been set. On the other hand, he tells everyone she hasn’t washed her private parts in years, and the smell of her sickens him. I think he does try, however – if only for our father’s sake. You know how much value papa places in the family and all its virtues…’

                     ‘All?’ he says. ‘What are all its virtues, Soph?’

                     ‘You know the King’s only daughter-in-law is also his niece, don’t you?’

                     ‘Our family tree is like the banyan that grows in India; branches creep down to form new trunks, and one tree becomes its own forest…’

                     ‘Its own jungle… Well, imagine how Papa feels that his niecely daughter-in-law is throwing parties out at Blackheath, parties which, I might add, young ladies are afraid to attend, lest their virtue be impugned…’

                   ‘Why would it be?’

                   ‘Everyone’s drunk; there are drugs too; and books of obscene pictures are passed around for all to see. Passions are inflamed. This goes on all night – and worse. Far worse, no doubt. Use your imagination, Edward. Someone I know attended one of these gatherings, and she said she found Caroline in the garden at dawn, with her dress hoisted up to reveal a petticoat covered in blue stars. She had silver wings on her back and was seated in a tree drinking a tankard of porter! You know how sensitive Georgie is about slights…’

                        ‘How is that a slight?’

                        ‘His wife? Please! Yet despite her conduct, the public is on her side – you know how contrary they can be — and Georgie has made himself very unpopular by what’s perceived as his harsh treatment of her. The press takes her side. The mob has no interest in the truth; and they always champion an underdog, don’t they?’

                       ‘It’s understandable,’ he says. ‘They’re all underdogs…’

                      ‘Maybe; but people stone Georgie’s carriage; and they throw mud at Lady Jersey’s. She’s the wicked witch in all this – and that further endears her to Mama…’

                     ‘Where’s Caroline living now?’ he asks.

                      ‘She’s at Montague House, on a property – symbolically, you assume – just beyond the royal estates at Blackheath. There’s more symbolism too. Lady Jersey lives with her husband right next door to Georgie’s house on Pall Mall. Earl Jersey is even in charge of Georgie’s horses, to justify this proximity…’

                       ‘The cuckold’s perquisites, eh?’

                  ‘Personally,’ says Sophia, ‘I think our family has been so scared by the Revolution in France that they’ve cut themselves off from a public they fear will be chopping off our heads next year. Caroline, on the other hand, promotes her democratic values to the mob. She garners as much attention as possible – driving out through the parks with her daughter, for example; or regularly appearing at the opera, where she receives more applause than the performers. She openly aligns herself with Whig politicians; whereas poor Georgie is afraid some of them will be erecting a guillotine next to the Serpentine when our republic comes…’

                      ‘I thought he was a major Whig supporter? He was eight years ago…’

                     ‘Was, yes. Now he’s afraid they’ll be our Jacobins – or a few of them will. God, he’s afraid to go out these days… And I’m afraid poor little Charlotte has become the weapon with which Georgie and Caroline wage their horrid feud, both in private and in public… ”

                     ‘Christ,’ he says, ‘I wish someone would write to me about all this…’

                      ‘But I did, Edward…’

                    ‘Ah. True. But not in much detail. Why doesn’t Wales ever write?’

                    ‘Ask him, not me. But I imagine the whole sordid business embarrasses him…’

                     ‘It’s embarrassing me,’ he tells her. ‘I’m going to visit Caroline and verify the truth for myself. I’m so sick of rumours and innuendo, of second-hand information…’

                    ‘That’s the only kind we ever get here…’

              “But what of you, Soph?” he then asks. ‘I only hear rumours about you too…’

                “They’re probably true, though,” she confesses. “I had an affair with a footman – a handsome fellow…’

                    ‘I heard it was an equerry…’

                   ‘Ah, I wish,’ she says. ‘There was a child…’

                   ‘A child!’

                      ‘Yes. The footman is gone now, of course, and the child is gone too – c’est la vie, n’est-ce pas? Do I regret it? No. Would I do it again? No. But is being shut up here with Mama supposed to be my life? Surely I deserve a tiny morsel of happiness?”

                    ‘Ah. Yes. Of course, you do. What about marriage?’

                ‘I’m soiled goods now, Edward, aren’t I? None of the German nobles would touch me. And Papa won’t countenance a match with one of his subjects. So, I’ll remain here forever…’ She looks around at the walls and shelves.

                      He sees the castle growing up around her; he sees the dust piling up like black snow; he sees the big world shrink until, half a century hence, it is a ball of dirt in her buckled arthritic hands, as she lies down in the dark to breathe her last among the mice and cobwebs in her huge, dank prison cell. ‘I wish there were something I could do,’ he says.

                  ‘So do I, Edward, so do I…’

                  ‘But it will be different when Wales is king…’

                  ‘No, it won’t,’ she says snappily. ‘He isn’t what you think…’

                  ‘And what do I think he is?’

                  ‘Different from Papa,’ she says. ‘But he’s not. He is on the outside; but inside he’s similar. Conscious of the impressions he makes; sensitive to his authority being challenged. It’s all a species of vanity. His rule will be dominated by it – you’ll see I’m right. They’re divided in the soul, the both of them. It’s why they antagonize one another so horribly…’

                He takes her pale little hand in his great paw. ‘I wish we’d had this conversation years ago, Soph,’ he says.

                  ‘We’re having it now, aren’t we?’ 

                     He sits beside Wales at dinner that night, but the issue of Caroline never comes up; and, as usual, the Prince of Wales is soon too drunk to converse intelligibly upon anything at all. The King eats in his own rooms, wherever they are, and he, the new duke, doesn’t see his father for the rest of that day. It’s his mother who informs him bachelor apartments are being prepared for his use in Kensington Palace; yet until they’re ready he will have to rent himself a London house. ‘Do nod led zem svundle you, Edvard. Offer zem haff vot zey askink…’

                  It is with the excuse of this errand that he announces he’ll ride into the city on the following day, accompanied by Captain Weatherall. It will be so good to breathe fresh air, the air Julie breathes, not the exhalations of his family.

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 8.8

 

-xxvi-

                     ‘Have you seen this, sire?’ says a corporal walking up from the harbour. He hands the prince a folded London paper. ‘Keep it, sire.’

                   ‘Thank you, Corporal.’ He stands where he is, on a newish stretch of cobblestones currently collapsing into a culvert. In crawling black and white is the latest news about Bonaparte. It is nothing anyone predicted; it is nothing anyone could have anticipated. The general has taken a large fleet across the Mediterranean, first recapturing Malta, and then proceeding on to Alexandria, where, after the city fell, he has marched up the Delta to Cairo, defeating Turkish and Arab forces in a battle near the pyramids. He is now master of Egypt.

                “Why on earth would he do that?” Governor Wentworth asks him later, the spaniel’s ears of his fluffy wig flapping in perplexity. “It makes no sense at all.”

                  “Oh, it makes sense all right,” he says. “And brilliant sense too. He’s effectively cut off our trade routes to India and the Orient. Everything will have to go around the Horn. This will bankrupt England. There will be no cotton for the northern mills, to name but one vital commodity lost. Thousands will be out of work, and the civil unrest caused will, as it’s presumably planned to do, smooth a path for Bonaparte’s republican invasion. There will not even be enough money to pay and supply an army; and I imagine many of the lower ranks will join the French anyway – they’d have more to gain. We may yet see a guillotine in Piccadilly…”

                “Good God!” is all Sir John can say in response to this. He looks as if the sky has fallen in on him – the dripping grey sky.

                ‘I need to inform my officers,’ says Prince Edward, and he does.

                  A week later, however, better news arrives. Admiral Nelson has sunk nearly the entire French fleet at Abukir Bay, in the Nile’s mouth, effectively stranding Bonaparte’s army of 40,000 in Egypt. Another feather in the cap of Quebec’s Mr. Alexander Davidson, the man who salvaged Nelson’s career. There are also rumours that plague has begun to decimate French forces, and that the cost of this foolhardy expedition is proving ruinous to the French exchequer. The oligarchs and Directoire ardently hope they have finally seen the last of Bonaparte, whose reach seems to have exceeded his grasp for the first time. But he’s been out of communication for months. No one even knows if he’s still alive.

                As Weatherall gloats over this, the prince cautions him not to underestimate a man of such obvious capabilities. “He has an uncanny knack of turning disaster into glory,” he says. “The Lord alone knows how he’ll do it this time, though — but he might find a way. I imagine the Directoire is hoping he’ll vanish beneath the desert sands forever…”

                “And old King Louis in his lair of exile – wherever it is — must be dancing a jig,” says Weatherall.

                “With his age, flab and gout,” he says, “the jig will be dancing him…”

                  ‘How do you know what he looks like?’

                ‘How do I know anything these days, Fred? French gossip…’

-xxvii-

                    While Europe holds its collective breath, the east wind around Bedford Basin does nothing but exhale noisily, spraying the landscape with brine. In a world moving faster and faster, speed seems to be your only weapon. He rides over the acres as if trying to punish them. It is a few days later that his galloping horse steps through a rotting bridge plank, breaking a fetlock and throwing him violently to the ground. He lies there breathless, certain that bones have been broken. The pain all down his spine feels as if an avalanche has fallen on him; and, to avoid causing further damage, he calls for a makeshift stretcher to carry him back to the house. But first he makes sure the horse is put out of its whinnying pain by a clean shot to the head. Poor boy.

                Back at home, he’s put to bed, and lies waiting for Dr. North, a physician he trusts, to examine his injuries. Naturally, Julie is distraught, fluffing his pillows, straightening his covers, ferrying trays in and out, and fussing over him in numberless other ways. 

                “Nothing seems to be broken, sire,” the doctor informs him, after a careful examination. “But some muscles have been severely wrenched, along with a lot of bad bruising. A few days of bed-rest ought to clear that up; but I shall give you some laudanum for the pain.”

                  ‘Thank you,’ he says dully; but, incongruously, he feels distinctly disappointed by this diagnosis. Serious injuries might justify a return to England; so, the prospect of being recovered fully in a few days is not as pleasing for him as it would be for someone else. He becomes resolutely determined not to recover swiftly at all, groaning with pain whenever anyone enters the bedchamber. He keeps calling for laudanum, citing agonies beyond description — and he soon far exceeds the prescribed dosage. 

                  The tincture puts him into a strange state of mind, initially with a sense of floating, utterly free of cares, pains, even of his body itself, and desiring nothing, nothing at all. Suddenly, after an exceedingly odd dream in which he was staring into the bluest pool of water, he’s back in his bed looking up at Julie’s sky-blue eyes. 

                  “How are you feeling, my love,” she asks, in a voice that comes from miles away. “You were dreaming, I think, and groaning. Is the pain bad?”

              “Terrible,” he tells her, grimacing, but feeling no pain at all. “Fetch Dr. North again. I feel my muscles have been ripped from the bones.”

                  North duly appears, examines, and repeats his former diagnosis. Nothing seems to be wrong. The prince moans and sighs with his hellish torments, suggesting he might need to recuperate in a better climate, perhaps even take the waters at Bath or Cheltenham. These would also aid his rheumatism which, he says, now plagues him in concert with greater demons. He has already asked Robert Wood to write on his behalf to the King, describing the accident, and the dreadful state of his health; and then beseeching King George to allow him to return home, in the hope that a better clime, and restorative waters, might help him recover. Might. He had asked Wood to emphasize the awful weather in Nova Scotia too, and its infamous reputation for causing sickness, premature aging, agues and even death. Indeed, often death. He’d signed this letter in a spidery sick man’s hand, whose final stroke trailed off down the page, as if in a swoon.

              “I see no reason for travel,” opines Dr. North, annoyingly certain of this. “Rest here will do you far more good than agitation elsewhere.”

                Julie, with her ceaseless tide of broths and herbal infusions, is catching on to his ploy now. But, bless her soul, she plays along with it, summoning the doctor every other day, and assuring him that Edward seems no better, is still suffering awful pains and sleepless nights. Eventually, North catches on himself, suggesting that he himself write to King George, urging him to grant permission for the prince to take the waters at Bath – this is his best advice for any hope of Edward’s recovery. In a pitifully feeble voice, Edward suggests North also mention the deleterious effects on health of winters here.

              Looking with reprovingly dubious eyes, North agrees to pen his recommendation forthwith, and get it to the mail packet before sunset. “I should imagine you will not be requiring my services much more from here on,” he adds, looking from Julie to Edward with arched eyebrows, before closing his medical case and leaving the room.

                “Now you’ve achieved one goal,” Julie says, in her matronly tone, “do we have to keep up this pretense until you hear from the King?”

              “Or don’t hear,” he says. “But I imagine I shall be able to hobble about the house, even over to my office. But I’m far too poorly and feeble for venturing further. Weatherall can take care of garrison business, and Robert Wood will bring out anything from the mail packet the moment it arrives…”

                “What about the moment it does not arrive?” asks Julie, tapping a forefinger on her chin in a gesture of uncertain intent. “Have you fixed a date for that moment? Because you cannot be ‘sick’ forever now, can you?” 

                “Don’t you ever tire of being right all the time,” he asks her.

                  “Not really, no.” She smiles a secret, self-satisfied smile, and then glides from the room, as if bourn by a zephyr.

                  To his utter astonishment, he doesn’t have to languish as the sick man very long before receiving, two months later, a letter from his father, and in the King’s own whimsical hand too. He reads it with trepidation, scarcely able to believe the paragraph granting him permission to recuperate in England, making use of the remedial waters at Bath. This concession, writes King George, is due to Edward’s laudable work on the Halifax fortifications, which are widely believed to have made the harbour impregnably secure. The King even says he will await the prince’s arrival eagerly, for their last meeting had been so long ago, and he’s heard many commendations of Edward’s character and achievements in the meantime. He reads and he rereads the document, his heart aglow. Is this the same father? Is this the King who called him a pelican son, who wanted him shot? His very soul seems suddenly at ease, after its decade of epic dis-ease.

                  A frenzy of activity follows, with Julie packing away valuables, and instructing the Woods on details of the care for baby Jean. 

                 Theirs is not the only busy household in these environs, however. Lady Frances Wentworth, hearing of his intended visit to England, no doubt, has decided she also needs to travel there, using the excuse that she must have her youngest son, Charles Mary Wentworth, properly installed in a good English school. Where he’ll probably be very miserable with that for a middle name, he thinks. The truth of this visit, he assumes, is that Lady Frances realizes he’ll be meeting the King after so long an absence; and that many benefits and perquisites are bound to flow from such an encounter. She has no intention of missing out on anything that might accrue to her from such proximity to His Britannic Majesty. If she considers herself cunning and subtle, she is wrong, though: he can read her like a broadsheet. As it happens, however, her ship sails some weeks before Prince Edward’s. Sir John is not going; he can’t leave his post – and, in any case, he doesn’t want to leave it.

                   Hearing of this, Julie says, ‘The poor man will be lonely, here on his own…’

                 ‘I think not,’ he says. ‘He won’t be lonely at all.’

      ‘Please don’t tell me why,’ she says, wrinkling the button of her nose.

-xxviii-

                  This time his mind is not at his destination before the rest of him gets there. The destination is no longer so sharply defined. He can’t imagine it. It’s been eight years since he was last in England, and even back then it was only for a couple of painful weeks. The pain is sharply defined, but nothing else is. He hasn’t really lived there since he was sixteen. What awaits him? He hardly dares entertain any speculations. Hurtling like a crossbow bolt, as it has been doing, time now feels like that bolt sluggishly probing its way down through a mire. Each day lasts for a month; each hour is a week. He has to appear sickly, injured, or far more so than he really is; so, he’s confined to Bedford Basin, where the trees drip their way towards winter, and the wind slithers along your nerves like an eel.  

                  ‘Is luncheon ready?’ he asks Julie, hobbling over from his gothic office out in the cold damp garden.

                   ‘You breakfasted an hour ago, Edward,’ she tells him. ‘You should be supervising what goes into our travelling chests…’

                  ‘Christ!’ he sighs. ‘An hour ago? Surely it’s past noon?’

                 ‘With all these cursed clocks,’ she says, ‘I should know what the time is, shouldn’t I? And it’s several minutes after nine…’

                   But mid-November does arrive eventually. Julie and he meet Captain Weatherall on the quayside, as the Fusiliers’ band plays some of the prince’s favourite tunes, and cannon fire from embrasures in the many redoubts and towers he’s built to defend Halifax. Governor Wentworth is there to bid him farewell, looking unusually dapper in a frockcoat of gold brocade, a rather extravagant hat upon his head, its long ostrich plume sadly sagging and soggy in the drizzle.

                    ‘What an extraordinary hat, Sir John,’ he says, bowing formally.

                      ‘Yes. Lucy chose it for me,’ Wentworth tells him.

                    ‘Lucy?’

                      ‘Yes. My…er…my nurse…’

                      ‘Ah. Yes. Well, she has fine taste. It’s an exceptional hat.’

                     ‘Shall I have her commission one for you, sire?’

                    ‘When I return.’ If I return, he thinks. ‘Madame Julie was worried you might be lonely?’

                        ‘Oh, no,’ says Sir John, with a smile. ‘No, I won’t be lonely…’

                    ‘Yes. I told her you wouldn’t be… lonely, I mean.’

                     ‘I hope you didn’t say why?’

                      ‘She wouldn’t let me,’ he says, walking away. 

                “I can hardly believe we’re off to England after all these years,” says Weatherall, as they lean over the rail looking down on busy wet quays. ‘It’s been fifteen for me – fifteen years! I hardly dare imagine the changes…’

                  “Neither do I, Fred. Neither do I.” He waves fondly to the crowds of well-wishers, eschewing his usual formal bow and even blowing a kiss with his hand to the little city with the formidably big fortresses all around it. He bids a silent farewell to his safe, serene island, which is out there somewhere in the yawning brown bay. Up anchors. An uncouth wet wind fills the billowing white sails. The ocean parts reluctantly to let them slide through green furrows flecked with silver foam.

                From out at sea, those fortifications are all any hostile vessel will be able to make out of its intended target. That target will now not appear inviting. No hostile force will ever land there again. Within the hour, no land at all is visible, just the forbidding Atlantic Ocean, for hundreds and hundreds of miles, churning froth and granite water, with dear old England waiting on the other side.

                   ‘If the French haven’t invaded,’ he says.

                ‘There’s that,’ agrees Weatherall, ‘and we’d end up under the blade at Piccadilly, wouldn’t we?’

                  ‘No, Fred. I think they’d put the guillotine in Whitehall…’ 

                    ‘No. That’ll never be. What does it feel like for you?’

                ‘The guillotine?’

                ‘No. Going home…’

                ‘Home? Ah,’ he says, ‘it feels as if the first stage of my life is over, and the next one is waiting for me. Oddly, that’s what it feels like,’ he says, he, the prince.

                          It is what we think too, ready to rejoin the man in middle age a little later on in his journey, ready to unpack and delve through his complexities and their perplexities, to follow his baffling course, and to watch at closer range his strange, dark and distressingly dysfunctional family. A cocoon never looks prepossessing, though, nothing like what emerges from it. Beauty, as we’re told, is truth; and his truth is one of goodness and kindness. You wonder why such beauty makes some men’s hearts glow, and others mad with jealousy and spite. Perhaps this too will be discovered, as all things are, in time, as the candle burns down.

                

           

End of Book One

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 8.7

-xxi-

                  Without Lady Dorchester and Lady Simcoe’s critical gaze on her, Julie is able in Nova Scotia to make a considerable number of friends, and to accompany him freely to dinners and balls, as well as to plays at the overly optimistic Grand Theatre. It is better named the Modest Theatre. Some of these plays are once again staged by his own officers, now they don’t have Lord Simcoe to appease. Prince Edward had gradually relaxed the strict formality of his own events, seeing that the general behaviour of society here has improved greatly; he also eases up with his demands on other public or private functions. Besides racing around the province, these diversions provide one of his few tools to ward off boredom. Julie’s sense of style and fashion soon sets the standard for Haligonian ladies of quality, and dispenses with the plainer, looser designs that everyone hears are increasingly prevalent in London. Such dull styles are not for Madame de St. Laurent. Gorgeously full hoop dresses, high wigs, bejewelled or plumed, and beauty patches are still de rigeur for her. It is not Madame de Pompadour, but it is still very much the old Versailles, the Versailles now lost, sunk forever underneath a lake of blood. Similarly, Julie’s insistence on serving elaborate French cuisine delights local epicures; and her dinners are always alive with gallant banter and intelligent wit. Another singularity, which especially pleases female guests, is her insistence that the time allowed men alone with their port and cigars after dinner must be limited to fifteen minutes only. She is indeed the model, the cynosure, the grande chatelaine all other hostesses in Halifax aspire to emulate. He is proud of her. At dinners or other affairs, she displayss an ideal balance between familiarity and propriety. No one ever takes liberties with her informality, always sensible of the detached formality it cloaks. He can’t afford to allow any public lapse in his own formality, or in the conduct of others towards him. He represents the Crown here, as always. Supposedly. But in private he has learned to sit back and be more casual with other guests. They appreciate this too. It seems that all men who have not met him, or who’ve only seen him in public, dislike him; but when they meet him privately, only some do. 

                      Julie’s time passes far more pleasantly than his own, which, when not working, he now squanders upon preposterous whims. There is very little genuine work to do these days. He’s done it all. Energy is a dreadful quality for a man with little to expend it on.

                    Having become acquainted with the masterly old Swiss clockmaker out at Shelburne, he began commissioning all manner of timepieces from him; and he also started ordering other devices from London. He has any number of music boxes, jewelled birds which sing and flap their wings at the flick of a lever, and tiny porcelain figures that spin about on a lid, or little acrobats that tumble inside their glass cage. Before long, every room at Bedford Basin is littered with mechanical marvels. He’s literally incapable of not acquiring any new example of this novel merger between the jeweler’s and the watchmaker’s art. The more a clock chimes, and the more it releases some version of a flying or whirling wonder — hooting geese, violent jack-in-the-boxes shooting out, cackling crones hubble-bubbling by their cauldron — the more he revels in it. He’s charged a footman on the estate with the task of keeping every clock wound, presenting this man with a huge jangling set of carefully numbered keys for this specific purpose. If a clock fails to chime on time, or sounds too early, he can always pick out the culprit, and he has his man set it right immediately.

                  “Why do you keep buying so many clocks?” Julie asks him innocently, one rainy day… at a minute past noon. “It’s like living in a belfry. Does not all this chiming, tinkling, whirring, squawking, buzzing, and twittering bother you?”

                  “No. On the contrary,” he says, “it delights me.” 

                    “But why so many?”

                      “I’m not sure, I must confess,’ he says. ‘I just have this urge to own them. The mechanical ingenuity and the intricate craftsmanship fascinate me… indeed they enthrall me.”

                  “Are you certain it has nothing to do with your father’s clock?”

                  “Ah. No,” he admits. “I’m not certain of that. All I know is that my collection gives me boundless pleasure.”

                    “And all I know is that these wretched things give me a boundless gnashing headache.”

                  He offers to restrict his more boisterous timepieces to distant rooms, but she shrugs off the suggestion, instead telling him to, ‘Examine closely the compulsion behind their purchase, my love…’

                  He appreciates what he deduces to be her maternal concern – he has no experience of this to be so sure of it –and indeed it often gives him a warm feeling inside. But he doesn’t like her prying too closely into his affairs, such as those times when she stands over him as he writes to Louis de Salaberry, or the Baron de Vincy, suggesting her own terms of endearment to Souris and the children, or Geneva and the emigres. If he fails to include her messages, she often insists that he add them in a postscript. It makes him feel like a child learning penmanship – and this induces the old Kew feelings of loneliness and isolation. And that, as such things will, causes arguments. 

                    Their relationship with the Salaberrys is vital if news of their other son, Eduard, is to keep flowing. There hasn’t been much yet; but then he’s barely four years old. Edward has cautioned Julie about writing too pointedly herself. Eduard should only be referred to obliquely, in case letters fall into the wrong hands one day, or even into Eduard’s hands — and he learns who his real parents are amid possible confusion or perhaps scandal. Although she follows Eduard’s progress avidly, Julie is careful, asking Souris vague and general questions about ‘the children’, and receiving replies about a ‘he’. 

                       ‘But you always end by saying you hope you can repay his kindness one day,’ she says, pointing at his closing phrase with a long pale finger. ‘You helped him win the election – isn’t that enough?’

                       ‘No. Not with Louis,’ he tells her, seizing the finger and squeezing. ‘Besides,’ he says, ‘a few weeks of speechmaking doesn’t really repay a lifetime of parenting, does it?’

                       ‘I wouldn’t know, would I?’ she tells him sharply.

                For all her social success at Halifax, Julie is secretly bored to the point of screaming by the women flocking to her home. There is no culture here, no educated intelligence, no inspiring discussions. It is not the world she was raised to believe she would inhabit all her life. It is not Paris or London. It is not even Quebec.

-xxii-

                      An opportunity to make partial payment on the  debt to Salaberry does, however, arise sooner than he expects. 

                ‘His eldest son, Charles,’ says the prince, reading Salaberry’s latest epistle, ‘who joined the British army a couple of years ago, remember? 

                    ‘Charles. Yes,’ she replies, picking out stitches with a pin. ‘What about him?’

                      ‘He’s nearly nineteen now, isn’t he?’

                      ‘Probably. Is that all the letter’s about, his age? They should know that…’

                     ‘No. Louis says Charles will be arriving here in command of a contingent sent up from the West Indies…’

                      ‘And?’

                      ‘That’s it,’ says Edward, folding the letter. ‘Obviously we have to take care of him…’

                        Young Charles de Salaberry had in fact been dispatched to fight with General Grey’s forces in the West Indies, and he was there at the same time as Edward; although, since he was under General Dundas’ command, the prince saw little or nothing of him. He was, however, able to do the boy some small service. Charles had fought a duel with a German mercenary who’d insulted the French race — and he killed the man. The punishment for such an infraction is generally death; yet Edward’s influence, along with Charles’ extreme youth, got him let off with a reprimand, a lucky reprieve for which he was effusively grateful – as was his father, Louis.

                       ‘He must stay with us,’ decides Julie. ‘He’s Eduard’s brother…’

                      ‘Don’t ever say that!’ he snaps at her. ‘Guard your tongue…’

                      ‘Well, he is…’

                      ‘No,’ he tells her, ‘Jean de Mestre is his brother…’

                       ‘Listen to Mr. Armstrong, pater familias…’

                    “You’ve grown into a man since last we met, Lieutenant,” he tells Charles de Salaberry, at the drizzling quayside, where soldiers returning from years down in the islands are weeping with joy upon seeing the rain, the pallid faces and all the comforts to be found under a big Union Jack. “There’s nothing like the military for making boys into men, is there?” he adds awkwardly. Nothing like war, you mean, he thinks.

                Charles bears a striking resemblance to Louis, his father, but his face is a good deal less fleshy, with yellowed skin which, combined with his height, gives him a more sinewy, fox-like appearance. His carriage is dignified, his character and manners impeccable. The prince is immensely pleased by all of this. Delightful children can so often turn out to be disappointing as adults, can’t they?

                  “The fighting and that appalling climate played a large role, too,” Charles now says, his voice slightly hoarse.

                  “This one isn’t very enthralling either. Were you sick down there?” he inquires, concerned now by the colour of Charles’ skin.

                    “I had a fever and the jaundice, sire,” he replies. “Yet it didn’t keep me down for long, and I’m in superb health now… Superb!”

                    “I had a letter from Governor Hamilton at Domenica concerning you,” the prince tells him. “He had nothing but praise for your conduct and courage. High praise too. I shall be forwarding it to your father.”

                  “Thank you, sire.”

                  “Charles,” he says, leaning in closer to him, “when we’re in private I’m ‘Uncle Edward’, or just ‘Edward’, never ‘sire’ or ‘Highness’. Your father is my dear friend, and royal titles are not for friends.”

                  ‘All right, si… Uncle Edward…’

                  He makes sure that Charles is at his side as often as possible over the coming year, witnessing drills, tours of inspection, and all the minutiae of a commander’s duties, so the lad will be fully prepared to rise rapidly through the ranks – something the prince vows to make sure he will do. ‘I’ve come to look upon him as a son, another son,’ he tells Julie, as they stroll the grounds of Bedford Basin through a choking brown fog.

                     ‘You’re not even old enough to be his father,’ she says, laughing.

                   ‘Ah. Well…’ 

                    ‘I know what you mean, though…’

                     ‘Ugh! This climate… What’s in this fog?’ he says.

                   ‘Treacle?’

-xxiii-

                      A general anxiety builds, as if it’s rolling in from Europe on the ocean’s pewter shoulders, a mental distemper to poison the mind and spirit. Packets from England are coming more and more frequently during these tense weeks, their arrival signaled by a flag on the Citadel. Besides the usual cargo of goods, which have ladies crowding the quays in search of the latest bonnets, trimmings, patterns, fabrics and such, these vessels also carry news of the war. A General Buonaparte, an Italian in the French army, has defeated the Austrians in several battles, driving them out of Italy entirely, and founding independent republics there, at Venice, Liguria and elsewhere. He then took Rome, along with the Papal States and, in a series of lightning strikes, inflicted more shattering defeats on the Austrian armies, finally entering Vienna itself. It is said, in some quarters, that this Buonaparte has now been made commander of a massive force preparing to invade England, where a widespread mutiny at Spithead has evidently severely demoralized both the public and the military. This is shattering news; the maps are being redrawn, and republicanism creeps across the continent like bad water. The only piece of good news is of a victory at Cape St. Vincent by Admiral Jervis – who the prince had fought with in the West Indies — and Admiral Nelson, who could, as we’ve heard, just as easily be living in domestic bliss in the Lower Town at Quebec, were it not for the kindly wisdom and strong rope of a certain Mr. Davidson. Perhaps, he thinks, that fickle goddess, Fortune, was involved too?

                    “It’s just as we feared,” Weatherall tells him morosely, as they discuss this latest intelligence over an indifferent luncheon at the barracks. “The French are using their armies to spread that creed across the whole of Europe.”

                  “Yes. Who is this Buonaparte?” he asks, banging his knife on the table. “An Italian? Pah. I doubt if he’s at all interested in spreading republicanism…’

                      ‘Some pretty impressive victories, though, you must admit…’

                       ‘Yes. No problem with inaction in his army, I’ll warrant. Where did he suddenly spring from, eh? Who the hell is he?”

                  “One of the packet captains told me he’s actually from Corsica,” says Weatherall, “which makes him French – if, that is, he’s under 27…’

                       ‘What?’

                        ‘Well, France seized the island in 1769…’

                      ‘I missed that, Fred. I was two…’

                      ‘I was only twelve – I read about it on the Rock…’

                     ‘Good to know someone was reading there… What else did the captain say?’

                     ‘Not much. Just that the French adore Buonaparte for renovating their tattered reputation… Oh, and he claims to be a liberator, not a conqueror – says he’s bringing new ideas and freedom, not the shackles of invasion…’

              “Poppycock! Let’s see how long that lasts! But an invasion of England! This is a truly awful prospect… and we’re stuck out here!” His knife clatters down again and he groans.

                  “An invasion is impossible, I’d say. We rule the waves, remember?”

                  “Well, Fred, as Pierre Bedard and the vile old comtesse have recently reminded us, they’ve done it before, haven’t they?’

                  “Before we had a navy… and a real army – that was before.” 

                  A sigh. “Our job is here,” he reminds Weatherall, wishing it were over there. “I suppose we ought to redouble drills, and stage practices for an attack…”

                  “I’d say the chances of that are unlikely too.                                                                Their forces must be                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    totally engaged on the continent by the sound of it.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

                  “Not so engaged they can’t                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             retake some of the islands…”

                  ‘True. Their navy seems to operate more independently from the army than ours does…’

                ‘Ah. Maybe that’s a good idea?’ 

                      He’s thinking of a nuisance, recently inflicted on him by King George’s Navy: a right to send out ‘press gangs’ around the harbour. If you’re dressed as a gentleman, you’re safe; yet if you happen to be a farmer or fisherman, or anyone emerging tipsy from the taverns, you’ll find yourself grabbed by the neck, and then hauled out onto one of His Majesty’s ships, where another and altogether different career is waiting. You have no say in this. The prince regards the practice as morally wrong. It leaves families in dire distress, without any knowledge concerning the fate of loved ones and providers. The men have one day simply disappeared without a trace. If a family is lucky, a letter might arrive in six months explaining what has happened – but few are so lucky. And fewer still can even read or write letters.

                      Since part of the packet mail includes a package for Julie, he takes it to her when Weatherall and he have finished their glum luncheon. She sits in a Government Hall drawing room, cutting panels for a dress from a length of lilac silk. She has many talents and makes her own clothes – makes them beautifully too. Taking the weighty parcel eagerly, she uses her pinking shears to cut it open, extracting first a letter that she reads carefully. “It’s from dear Rose in Paris,” she says eventually, a pleased yet puzzled tone in her voice. “She married her mathematician soldier, and everything is going very well for them. Hortense and Eugene – that’s the children — love their new father. Eugene is already in the army…” A pause. Then, with enormous hesitation, she goes on, “Indeed, things are going so well that she sent us this…” Julie pulls an exquisitely fashioned marquetry-inlay box from the wood and wrappings. The delicate veneers depict an eagle on the lid, and tableaux with Greek gods on the sides. The craftsmanship is exceptional.

                    ‘Ah. Very pretty,’ he says. ‘Very thoughtful…’ 

                       But then she opens the convex lid slowly, turning the box so he can see inside. A large cache of gold coins all but fills the interior. These coins do not wink at him, however.

                  “What in heaven’s holy name is all that?” he says, confounded by the sight. “Why would she send you money?”

                  “Perhaps,” Julie replies sheepishly, weighing some coins in her little hand before closing the lid, “I did mention in one of my letters to her that our debts were burdensome…”

                “Madame,” he growls, “you do not discuss my affairs with a total stranger! And accepting gold from France at such a time as this – it is… well, it’s unconscionable is what it is!”

                “But it is also very kind of her…and it will come in very useful, won’t it?’

                    ‘Well. Yes…There’s no denying that,” he admits. He has taken money from French strangers before now too: usurers on the Rock. He’d take it from Abaddon if the interest were low enough. “But,’ he goes on, ‘tell her not to send any more. What are they paying their artillery commanders over there now that a box of gold is nothing to them – it’s astounding, no?”

                  “Perhaps she inherited some properties? Confiscated lands are being returned, in some cases…’

                     ‘And one of them a gold mine?’ he says.

                    ‘I’m just happy things are going well for her – that’s the main thing…”

                  “I assume there’s no news about the war…the wars?” 

                “No. Not a mention of anything like that, of course.”

                ‘No, of course…’ He looks at the package and its wax seals, which bear the image of bees around a hive. This is a common masonic emblem: bees are industrious, organized, a society making honey not money. Is Rose’s new husband a mason? She probably wouldn’t know anyway. Men rarely tell their wives – it avoids awkward questions. Julie has no idea that he attends the Orient Lodge in Halifax twice a month, sometimes more. Although she did once stumble across part of his secret.

                ‘Darling,’ she called out, ‘why do you keep a leather apron in your dresser?’

                ‘Ah. Yes. I wear it when I’m supervising messy building work…’

                  ‘But it’s still spotless…’

                ‘Is it? Well, the work hasn’t been very messy yet…’

              November 2nd, 1797. During the dinner and ball to celebrate his thirtieth birthday, he turns to Weatherall and says, ‘Where has this whole year gone? Three hundred days just vanished…’

                  ‘Leaves in the wind, Edward. It speeds up…’

                   ‘What does? The wind?’

                 ‘Time. We know it’s not concrete or fixed, but when the middle years approach, time really begins to reveal its nature…’

                   ‘Which is what? What’s its nature?’

                   ‘You’ll see…’ 

                      Just then a guest asks him, ‘What happens to Canada in the event of a successful French invasion of England, sire?’ 

                   ‘A cheerful celebratory topic,’ he says. ‘What do you think? We hold on and fight it out, I imagine.’ 

                  He knows more than he’s allowed to say about this. There are contingency plans in place for the King and Court’s flight to Quebec. Why burden them with this, though? They look grim enough as it is; hearing the British strategy for defeat would send them gibbering off into the dripping woods. 

                “Do I detect a downcast sentiment?” asks Weatherall, a little later on, when he’s flushed brick red from dancing and the countless toasts.

                  “Ah. No. Just wondering where my misspent youth went, Fred — that’s all.”

              “Overspent, perhaps,” Weatherall says, gripping his arm tightly, “but never misspent.”

                  ‘Thanks for your friendship, Fred. I value it…’

                   ‘As do I, and it has no need of thanks…’ 

                “I must be the worst host in North America,” he says, gesturing around. “Look at them. Everyone looks terminally sad, except for those around Madame Julie. Thank God for her.”

                “I second that!”

                  The atmosphere at Bedford Basin reminds him now of Baron Wangenheim’s disastrous Yuletide dinner — which makes him gloomy. He thinks of his guests complaining to one another in their carriages as they leave, complaining of the dreariness and lack of cheer.

                  ‘It’s more like a funeral than a birthday party,’ he says to Julie, as they wave people farewell at the door.

                ‘I must go to more funerals,’ she says, ‘for I had a simply wonderful night…’

                ‘You always do – what’s the secret?’

                ‘Oh,’ she tells him, ‘leather aprons and a light heart…’

-xxiv-

                       Even his diary seems to think the year 1798 begins in March, not January. The fifteen weeks since his birthday are a blur of picayune activities: drills, inspections, training exercises, and the interminable simulations of a French attack that never comes. His letters reveal little more, but they are rarely personal. He writes endlessly to confirm details of his defenses to London, always asking for information that is never sent. For some of this time he’s confined to his bed with ravaging rheumatism, not helped by the coagulating effects on his blood of a damp deep freeze. Leeches are applied; potions are brewed; pints of blood are drawn out into steel bowls. All that raises his spirits is the flag hoisted above the Citadel to signal the arrival of an English packet. The official boxes sent by Parliament invariably take second place to newspapers, despatches, and navy gossip. The war is his sole concern now. Particularly any news of that seemingly unstoppable force of nature, General Buonaparte, who now spells his name Bonaparte, but prefers to be called by his Christian name, Napoleone, which he now spells Napoleon.

                  ‘Like a king,’ says Weatherall, scanning the newspapers on his desk in the garrison.

                   ‘What?’ The prince is also reading avidly.

                    ‘Kings are known by their first names…as you will know.’

                   ‘Are they? Yes, of course they are…’

                    ‘But we won’t give him that honour, will we?’

                  ‘Won’t we?’

                   Bonaparte’s continuous victories in battle are now evidently beginning to make him a political threat in Paris, since the masses always value strength and vigour over endless talk and useless committees. While politicians debate and line their pockets with public funds, Napoleon Bonaparte acts, he fights, he invades, he conquers, and he pours the wealth of conquest back into French coffers. He has a gift for turning apparent failure into resounding success.  King Ferdinand IV of Naples declared war on France, for example, Edward reads, retaking Rome. But Bonaparte’s forces swiftly regain the city, going on to invade and plunder the Kingdom of Naples as punishment, deposing Ferdinand, and then declaring a Neapolitan Republic. At Berne, a Helvetian Republic has been proclaimed. The left bank of the Rhine has been seized; as has the island of Malta – our island. The monarchies of Europe are trembling in their calfskin boots, uncertain whether to unite against France, or to make peace with her warlord. War is a dense miasma in which you hear many voices, yet you cannot see who they belong to. Some are now saying the Directoire suspects Bonaparte of plotting to stage a coup and overthrow the Republic; others say that a leading member of the Directoire, Paul Barras, is in secret negotiations with the exiled Louis XVIII to restore a Bourbon monarchy, in exchange for wealth and titles, of course. Still other voices hail the triumphant general as a national saviour. No one, it seems, can agree on what his next move might be, but many believe he’s intent on creating a republican empire, spreading revolutionary doctrines across the whole continent. But, some voices add, this would be purely in the interests of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood. It is all unprecedented, and all so confusing that you never know what to believe, or, if you do know, what to take seriously. 

                    London’s communications with Prince Edward repeat interminably the same instructions: protect Halifax and the eastern coastline at all costs… make certain the new American president, John Adams, intends to maintain the pledge of neutrality… arrest anyone suspected of spying, imprisoning them without trial… No one should be trusted, and no one, except senior officers, should be privy to details regarding the fortifications, such as situation of powder magazines or arms, the locations of which ought to be changed regularly. 

                 ‘They truly fear an invasion,’ he says grimly. ‘Above all they fear it…’

                Weatherall looks up from his yellowed copy of the Times and says, ‘And rightly so: it’s already been attempted…’

                ‘It has? I haven’t heard that…’

                   ‘A French fleet briefly landed armies in Wales…rather unsuccessfully, it must be said…’

                   ‘In Wales it would be unsuccessful, wouldn’t it?’ he says. ‘But Bonaparte won’t land in Wales — of this I feel certain. He’ll cross to Dover, where, given the right conditions, he could have 300,000 men marching on London by nightfall. But he will require a long dark night for his massive fleet to cross the Channel undetected, and then land so many troops, with all their supplies, cannon, weapons and equipment…’

                    ‘You’ve obviously thought this through…’

                    He has thought it through. He feels an affinity with this Corsican general – like Achilles and Hector, the one destined to fell the other. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I reason that his invasion will have to be staged during the winter, and in the moon’s dark half…’

                     ‘I believe you’re right…How do you envision the invasion of Canada?’

                    ‘It will only happen if the French take Britain,’ he says incisively.

                   ‘I agree…It will be a French fleet out beyond the harbour,” opines Weatherall. “They’’ll send someone ashore with a message, saying Britain is in French hands, and we have no choice but to surrender unconditionally…”

                “No,” he says. “They’ll have the King write it, announcing his abdication, and ordering all colonies to submit to French rule. That way the governors and commanders will know it’s not a ruse…”

                  “My God! What a dreadful thought. Will we surrender, Edward?”

                    “That’s a question I’d rather answer when or if it arises, Fred. It involves much more than our own honour, doesn’t it? So many lives to consider. It’ll be no easy decision… and a sad day indeed.”

                “The saddest…”

                  The expense of conflict, he reads, is already proving ruinous in England, which is still trying to pay off debts incurred by the American War and the Seven Years War. All the wars. London is also financing allies abroad. Trade in the Low Countries and Mediterranean has been impacted disastrously. Parliament has now been forced to devise various ways of exacting money from citizens to fund the latest conflict, including an ‘income tax’, whereby mainly the wealthy will give five percent of their annual income to the government. There is no practical way of taxing the poor. This new tax, claim the London papers, is not popular, yet it is patriotic; and it’s also a temporary wartime measure.

                  ‘Sir John, why should we not raise some money to assist the effort?’ he says, in Wentworth’s smoky office. The governor is sitting with Judge Adam Strange – who disapproves intensely of the prince’s relationship with Julie, attending no dinner at which she will be present.

                  ‘The municipality could do that,’ says Sir John. 

                 Judge Strange scowls.  But they duly manage to raise four thousand pounds from the more prosperous citizenry –it is half what the London coffee shops raised — including twenty-eight pounds and eighteen shillings donated by the boys of Halifax Grammar School from their own pocket-money.

                  ‘One is reluctant to take it,’ remarks Edward. ‘Those small fellows, so generous with what little they have…’

                   ‘Never be reluctant to take money when it’s offered,’ says Judge Strange icily. ‘For it rarely is…’

-xxv-

                  ‘Oh, God, I hate this place,’ he tells Julie, as a malevolent east wind rattles the windows of Bedford Basin, howling down the chimneys like a creeping demon, thick raindrops turning fires to acrid smoke. ‘That wind blows through the marrow in my bones. I do so hate it here…’

                    ‘Oh, Julie tells him reticently, glancing up from her copy of La Fontaine, ‘you’ll look back on it fondly one day…’

                     ‘Would that day were this one…’

                   But his fondest memories of Nova Scotia will derive solely from two honours accorded him and, in his mind at least signifying the gratitude for all his herculean efforts here. The first comes on June 30th, when, in the House of Assembly, Mr. Ulricke proposes that an address and ‘a star’ be presented, ‘to His Royal Highness in a grateful sense of the very essential services which His Royal Highness has rendered to this province…’ Five hundred guineas are voted to cover the expense of this ‘star’. 

                In accepting the address and award, he says, “My utmost endeavours have always been exerted to obtain your good will and pursuing that line of conduct which I thought would be most acceptable to the King, and most beneficial to His service, as well as best calculated for the protection of the province.” A diamond star of the Order of the Garter – his own current one being the customary cheap enamelled metal — is ordered from Messers Ransom and Co. of London on July 6th, and he eagerly awaits its arrival. 

                These testimonials bolster his confidence, for London will surely hear of them. Not long after this, another and more extraordinary honour is accorded him. With permission from the Assembly, the citizens of St. John’s Island have voted to change its name to “Prince Edward Island”, ‘in gratitude for His Royal Highness’ indefatigable efforts to ensure our defense from enemy attack’. He’s overwhelmed.

                   In his speech of acceptance and thanks, remembering Mr. Donne from the Quebec Assembly, he tells the citizens, “I had the inestimable honour at Quebec of meeting a descendant of the great English poet, John Donne, who, were he alive and here today, would surely have rewritten some of his most famous lines to read: No man is an island, unless his name be Prince Edward…” This elicits such applause and general merriment that he cuts short his further remarks to simple, sincere and heartfelt thanks.  That surpassingly beautiful island paradise, with its rich red soil, well-tended farmlands and lush forests means more to him than all the forts, jewelled stars, gold braid and medals in the King’s treasury. Even Julie is impressed.

                    “It’s better than having towns or streets named after you,” she says, squeezing his hand. “That tranquil gem of an island will stand forever as your monument, outlasting all equestrian statues, triumphal arches and jewelled medallions. It will survive until the world’s own end. You could not ask for a finer testimonial. You must be so proud…”

                     In fact he’s thinking of the mocking scorn he’ll receive from his brothers, who’ll doubtless fetch a globe and pretend every little speck on it is his island. ‘Can you walk around it in a minute or an hour? Does its one inhabitant worship you? Is there a tree? Is it still there when the tide comes in?’ There will be no end to their jibes, and no way to avoid the subject – because there’s no limit to their spite and jealousy. He thus resolves to commission artists to portray the place in glorious terms. It is glorious after all.

                   ‘I hope it’s bigger than Leiningen,’ he tells Julie, ‘and Coburg, Mecklenberg-Streilitz, or even Hanover — just in order to have some arrows in my quiver when they mock. Wales and York aren’t named after George and Fred, are they? They’re named after places my brothers have no connection whatsoever with. Theirs are mere titles; mine is a genuine honour, isn’t it?’

                   ‘Don’t be so petty, Edward,’ she tells him. “You always have to pick everything apart until there’s nothing of joy left in it. Enjoy something for what it is, not for what it cannot be. This is a great honour and a pure joy. Imbibe it. Wallow in it. Cherish it. But don’t bother with those base brothers, whose own actions are so reprehensible they have no right to reprimand even the basest cutpurse or highwayman…”

                    ‘They’ll demand that right…Ah, well. My brothers just like a bit of fun…”

                   “A bit? They’re drunk from dawn to collapsing-time, according to you and everyone else; and I doubt if they even know any more if it’s still fun or not. When everything is fun, nothing is fun. The nuns taught me that.”

                  “Today was fun,” he says. “I love being an island.”

                     “Will you row me there tonight, my love?” 

                   “But surely you are always there, since I am always here?”

                   ‘Ha. He jokes…his annual jest – sound the alarum!’

                    ‘Am I really that stolid, that dull?’

                   ‘Let me think,’ she says, pausing with eyes scrunched up before replying. ‘Yes,’ she tells him.

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 8.6

-xvii-

                     His own reward from all this subterfuge is the ready availability of funds for a rapid communications system all along the eastern seaboard. He decides to use flags of different colours and patterns which, when held in differing positions, spell out letters of the alphabet, excluding vowels. Certain combinations will indicate entire words or key phrases, like ‘England’, or ‘French vessels attacking’. The first trial line extends, hilltop to hilltop, from his house at Bedford Basin to the Halifax Citadel. This soon means he can receive urgent information from the garrison within minutes. At night, lanterns with coloured glass are used to achieve the same result. His plan is to extend this line around the Bay of Fundy to St. John’s, thence on to Fredericton, and finally all the way west to Quebec – in all, a distance of six hundred miles. He establishes the line as far as Fredericton – 250 miles – but dense mists and fogs in the Bay of Fundy make the system frequently invisible, and thus too unreliable to be of much use beyond the limits of Nova Scotia. Instead, though, he decides to link provincial strongholds, soon connecting Annapolis Royal (which claims to be the first European settlement in Canada, preceding that of Samuel de Champlain near Quebec City in 1608), Windsor, Truro, Yarmouth and other fortified settlements. It now takes a mere twenty minutes to send a message to somewhere fifty miles away. Using the system, he’s even able to authorize the flogging of some deserters at Halifax while visiting Annapolis Royal, a marvel noted by one Daniel Lyman in a laudatory letter to the local newspaper.

                  It is upon his return from this memorable visit that he finds a letter from Louis de Salaberry awaiting him. It conveys the astonishing news that, during a private luncheon, Lord Dorchester has informed Salaberry that he will soon be retiring permanently to England, once a new Governor-General has been appointed. 

                  ‘A fine stroke of coincidence,’ says Weatherall.

                      ‘I thought there weren’t any of those in politics,’ he says. ‘I swear I had no idea, Fred…’ Salaberry also cautions him that Dorchester gives the distinct impression of not liking him, the prince. The man ought to be viewed warily. ‘I don’t know why this should be,’ he says, ‘but I’ve always sensed it. Did someone poison his mind against me? Was it just the King’s disapproval? Was it the bad behaviour of royal princes in general?’

                       ‘I don’t know, Edward…’ Weatherall finds it better not encourage the prince’s gloomy ruminations when they start up.

                      ‘Surely my achievements during Dorchester’s absence spoke for themselves regarding my character?’ he says. ‘Or is it simply Madame Julie, and the rumours associated with her? ‘

                       ‘I don’t know…’

                       ‘It could be Lady Dorchester. Her attitude toward Madame Julie was always two-faced…’

                       ‘It could well be…’

                       ‘Yes, well, no point in worrying over it now, though, is there?’

                    ‘No, probably not…’

                 Immediately, he sits down at his busy desk to compose another letter to the King, citing once more his galactic accomplishments, and requesting that he himself now be promoted to the position of Canadian Governor-General, as well as Commander-in-Chief of British forces in North America. In an afterthought, he adds that, if the two posts are now to be divided, he should be content with being C-in-C alone. After all, his experience is military rather than administrative – not that he doubts his ability at mastering new challenges. No, he doesn’t doubt that in the least. He has other doubts, though. As always, he frets over the letter’s tone. Is it too humble? Is it too braggardly?  Is it insufficiently deferential? Is it too formal, and not filial enough? How long would the King take to reply… if he replies at all? Yet someone had to be assigned the Governor-General’s post — this much is certain. Lord Simcoe has his hands full in Upper Canada. Or I hope he does. Who else could there possibly be?

                  The following day, two letters from England arrive. One is from an aide to the Duke of York – who was obviously too harried or drunk to write anything himself – informing Edward that Martello Towers are now built all around the English coastline; and a rapid communications system is already in place, utilizing swiveling slats, much like huge Venetian blinds, a method deemed far superior to flags. The letter is a wet slap in the face; it’s two stinging slaps in fact; yet it ends with a caress, announcing that seven hundred thousand pounds has been allotted to pay for defenses at Halifax and along the eastern seaboard. ‘The likely imminence of a French attack makes defense of the only safe British harbour in North America a matter of the utmost concern and urgency’. No expense should be spared. York had scrawled what was presumably ‘York’ at the end. It looks like something else though. Does he even read my letters? The fortifications are built, however, and he’s already spared no expense. Has York not been informed of this? Or does he just wish to deflate my spirits…yet again? Who will rid me of this mettlesome bishop?

                  The other letter is a rare screed from his favourite sister, Sophia, written in her tiny perfect hand, yet clearly in haste, and possibly in the dark, since some lines disappear off the page, and others partially cover a line above them. To his great surprise, she informs him that the Prince of Wales, his eldest brother, George, is to marry Princess Caroline of Brunswick. Will Edward be attending the wedding? Sophia says she hopes so, because it’s been a long time since they’d last seen one another. For a total of ten minutes in our lives, he thinks. She adds a bit of gossip, as she’s always wont to do: George is still seeing his latest mistress, Lady Jersey, who, ‘with devilish cunning’, has insinuated herself so deeply into the Queen’s good graces that his mother – who likes no one — terms her ‘bewitching’, and has even appointed her to be Lady of the Bedchamber to Princess Caroline, after the marriage – ‘isn’t that the oddest thing you ever did hear?’. It is certainly among the oddest of the queen’s unnumbered oddities. A mistress as lady of the bedchamber is a fine old tradition of the English monarchy, though, he tells himself. The King is evidently so pleased by George’s decision to marry into Brunswick’s royal house that he’s paid off some four hundred thousand pounds of Wales’ formidable debts. ‘Will we soon be obliged to have seven of these dreary German girls around us night and day?’ Sophia grumbles, going on to say that the Duke of York is ‘still smarting’ from his public reprimand over the defeat at Dunkirk. ‘He hates you on account of your great success and commendations from Parliament,’ she adds, urging him to ‘tread carefully with him’. She ends by writing that all the talk in England these days is of the war with France, yet she sees little evidence of military activity ‘in my little prison at Windsor’.

                  His heart aches with homesickness, and his head aches at the strangely recondite news. How many women did Wales have in his life? Would the King pay off his, the prince’s, debts if he married well? A sigh. He dislikes facing the advantages of a slavishly obedient life. He writes a note of congratulation to Wales, urging him to argue his case with the King for attendance at the wedding. Then he writes yet another letter to his father, asking humbly for permission to be present at the wedding. To expunge his guilty conscience, he adds a postscript suggesting that Lieutenant-Governor Wentworth would make a competent Governor-General should His Majesty deem him, Prince Edward, too young and inexperienced for the administrative post.

                You are no longer amazed to find that the only reply he receives to all these entreaties, months later, is a brief note from one of his father’s secretaries stating that His Majesty would not be granting permission for any of his sons stationed abroad to leave their posts in order to attend the Prince of Wales’ wedding. The King had not even signed it, although the note did bear his seal. No mention was made of his earlier requests, not a word, nothing, rien. But at least he now knows for certain that his letters are in fact read. By someone. It’s something. 

                   “He has seen me once, for ten minutes, in ten years,’ he wails to Julie, ‘yet I cannot attend my own eldest brother’s wedding! God, this damned climate is killing me; it’s worse than Quebec. I’m not even thirty years old, yet already I suffer from rheumatism! How long, in God’s name, is he going to keep me out in this stultifying excuse for a colony, eh? Am I to die protecting a harbour I’ve made invulnerable? If the French ever come, I shall sit on a cliff and yell obscenities at them!”

                       “Calm yourself,” advises Julie, “or else you’ll die of apoplexy instead.”

                The rheumatic pains in his joints throb out their own grievances. Julie picks up baby Jean from his crib, since Edward’s shouting has scared him awake, holding the infant close and cooing lullabies until his anguished bawling ceases. He has grown so fat by now that his head seems to be a more normal size, although the prince is still dubious about its trapezoid shape. Jean de Mestre’s mother moves the huge frowning brow from side to side in a stirring motion. The gesture reminds him that, for her, leaving Halifax would mean leaving baby Jean, perhaps forever. He now resolves not to mention the subject again.

                  “It’s the damp,” Julie tells him softly, rocking the baby in her arms.

                “What is?”

                “In Quebec the winters were cold, yet mostly very dry. Here they’re cold and always very damp.”

                  “True,” he says, although it is not the Nova Scotian winters that are currently plaguing him. “Besides, you haven’t yet experienced English weather in all its drizzling glory. There, it can be cold, hot and damp all at the same time. It rains for months on end. For years sometimes. Winters can be wet and mild; summers can be wet and icy. There is often no spring or autumn, or not that one would notice; and even if there is they’ll both be damp. So, don’t blame anything on damp here; my damp bones come from being hatched in England… where my parents still firmly believe that misery is beneficial to children.’ A pause. He wonders why he’s saying this. ‘Damn them all!’ he decides is the best conclusion.

                “Their ideas are certainly antiquated,’ says Julie irritably. ‘But I did not require a lecture. Is the weather now out of bounds in conversation, along with money – excuse me, I meant ‘along with debt’? And when I was in London the weather was perfectly fine…” She does not feel like letting him off the hook today.

                “You know how these torments from England depress me – I know you know it…”

                  “Oh,” she says curtly, “all I know is that you think you know everything when it suits you. And when it doesn’t, it’s “poor abandoned me, kept in the dark like a mushroom, never told anything…” These are a child’s sentiments, Edward, not a man’s. What you most need is to grow up and take responsibility for what happens to you, rather than blaming fate, father, damp, stars, or rheumatism…”

                  “You understand nothing about my position,” he barks, nearly baring his teeth at her, although also wanting to cry..

                  “Your position? You don’t have a position,” she replies instantly. “What you have is a predicament.”

-xviii-

                   There is a month of wind and salt sea-spray. There is a month of mist and seeping rain. The forests sag beneath their damp burden. It’s hot and humid; it’s cool and wet. Time piles up on him like the soggy months. It crushes down heavily, the counterweight keeping him over here, far, far away across the wide, wide Atlantic. He tries to lessen time’s oppressive burden with constant activity. Besides the dinners, balls and concerts out at Bedford Basin, he drills his soldiers relentlessly, at 5 a.m. six days a week, holding obsessive inspections, during which reprimands are frequent, and for the slightest of dress-code infractions. The punishments are trivial, though, as trivial as the infractions. He is trying to create perfection in his most imperfect world. He is trying to root out faults before they are spotted by his enemies. But all the same, the result is a flawlessly imposing body of men, smart, highly disciplined – and even proud of the fact. They know what a rabble they were; thus, they know what they’ve now achieved. For men who never expected to achieve anything in life, this is deeply meaningful. Every Sunday, he marches them out around the city, led by the Fusiliers’ band and its thundering drums, pounding away beneath the piercing wail of rousing fife tunes. Captain Weatherall and he are at the head of this proud procession. Cheering crowds now come out to watch. It’s quite a sight, as hundreds of gleaming boots crash down in perfect step, piping, frogging and belts shining white in the pale sunlight, brass buttons, steel buckles and muskets glinting, and well-barbered faces looking sternly ahead beneath their polished shakos. His pride would be complete if his father had been able to witness this, taking the passing salute himself. 

                  ‘But,’ he says, ‘all he knows of me and my work – beside commendations for the West Indies campaign – is debt, importuning for promotions and general debauchery… Unless he happens to read all the material countering these lies…’

                     ‘Let it go, Edward,’ says Weatherall. ‘Let it go, man…’ 

                     His diaries and journals for this period contain little more than maudlin ruminations on this same subject, redolent of self-pity, threaded through with deep unhappiness, and a profound longing to be home in England. There, he believes, lies the bubbling vitriol, source of all his troubles – and thus, also repository of their solutions. ‘Is it not logically so, Fred?’

                      ‘I couldn’t say…’

                     ‘Or wouldn’t say?’ 

                     ‘Don’t make me part of the problem, Edward…’

                     ‘No.’ But he says no more, remembering now the King hollering to Wales at Kew: ‘You’re the problem with this family, boy!’ And that very evening – or maybe it was later that week? – they found a local peasant asleep in a drunken stupor under the garden hedge. The poor wretch had spew all down his ragged shirt. ‘He’s the problem with this bloody country,’ one of his guards had said, kicking the fellow awake, and then driving him down the road with the muzzle of his rifle. ‘No,’ he says presently. ‘I’m all of the problem, Fred. It’s just me…’

‘Isn’t that just another kind of problem?’

-ixx-

                    It is in March of 1796 that another thunderbolt hurled from London strikes him. He’s sitting in his rooms at Government Hall reading a copy of the Gazette, which he’d obtained on his way back from early morning drill, when he comes across a small article headlined “New Governor-General Named”. With shaking hands, he learns that Major-General Robert Prescott, aged 84, has been nominated, by order of His Britannic Majesty, to become Canada’s new Governor-General, as well as Commander-in-Chief of British Forces in North America. It goes on to mention Prescott’s apparently distinguished career; and it offers thanks to Lord Dorchester for his own long and dedicated service in the colony. Prince Edward is stunned, unable to move. He can’t decide which is worse, being denied the posts or post himself, or having to discover the decision in a newspaper. All the air and life seem to drain out of him. Then, with a start, he remembers Sir John Wentworth, knowing it behooves him to get the governor this news before he too reads it in the press.

                        Trusting in the knowledge that Sir John is no early riser, and thus won’t have received breakfast yet, let alone a paper, he hastens over to the governor’s private apartments, unsure of just how he will dash the man’s most dearly-cherished dreams of preferment. He leaves the Gazette behind, however. It will not do for him to appear to be someone who gets his news from the press, will it? A bleary-eyed negro servant, reeking of wine and dressed only in a greasy nightshirt, protests that the governor is still asleep.

                “And so are you, I surmise,” he says, pushing past into darkened rooms. “Damn. This is urgent, man! Show me to his bedchamber.” 

                  Not a little scared by his manner and size, the man slouches ahead, soon pointing out an ornately-carved set of doors. Without knocking, Edward bursts in, to find Sir John sleeping very soundly in a gilded four-poster resembling a boat, its prow at the foot complete with the gaudy figurehead of a full-breasted mermaid. Tow him out to sea, my gal, he thinks. One of Wentworth’s arms is draped around the shoulders of a very young and attractive mulatto girl, who’s also sound asleep, her shiny black hair fanned out across a creamy satin pillow edged with fine lace.

                  “Sir John!” he shouts. “Wake up! I have terrible news!” The words flit about the still chamber like dazed moths with burning wings.

                Wentworth sits bolt upright, astounded to find the prince in his bedchamber. Then, noticing the girl, who sleep has obviously erased from his mind, he orders her out of the room. She leaps from the bed in abject terror, as if catapulted out, and, totally naked, disappears into an antechamber, perhaps a dressing room.

                  “Just a nurse,” announces Wentworth, clearly too surprised and sleep-befuddled to find a more plausible explanation. His teeth smile, but his eyes do not. “She’s been massaging me rheumatic shoulders… and she, or we, I mean, musta fallen asleep.’ This embarrasses even him. ‘Now, good grief, what is it that brings Your Highness here at such a godless hour? Not the darn Frenchies attackin’, I trust?”

                  Your nurse’s clothes must have fallen off when she fell asleep, he thinks, saying instead, “We’ve been betrayed in the most foul and dastardly fashion.”

                    The governor would now engage with any topic that will get Edward to ignore the girl, saying, “Betrayed? Who in tarnation has betrayed us?”

                    The prince explains, adding, ‘Dorchester must have overridden my recommendation with one for his old friend, Prescott… Remember,” he goes on, “it’s Parliament which advises the King, and Dorchester has many powerful friends at Westminster.”

                  Wentworth removes his nightcap and scratches some strands of stained white hair. He doesn’t appear unduly mortified by this news.  “If, as you say, sire,” he says, with a tiny wobbling smile, “this Prescott fella is 84, well then, we shall soon have another opportunity at snaggin’ the post, shan’t we?”

                ‘Well… that’s the spirit, Sir John… Yes. It’ll probably be in the press, though, I fear…’

                    “No matter, Highness,” Sir John says with a shrug. “Like you instructed, I told no one of your recommendation, not even Lady Frances; so there ain’t no cause for either me or Your Highness to feel humiliated. I shall write Prescott with my congratulations and…et cetra.’ A pause. Then he adds with a sly smirk, ‘Perhaps I shall recommend the old boy long walks on the St. Lawrence when it freezes over, especially in April… ah-hah. Well, nothing ventured, nothing lost, as they say…”

                  ‘Yes,’ he says, as guilt flows its cold shadow through his veins. “Sir John,’ he continues uneasily, ‘I shall take every opportunity to extoll your achievements here – the roads, communications, fortifications, everything – both to the King, and to my own friends in Parliament; so that, when Prescott expires, or plunges beneath spring ice, your name will be an obvious choice, a swift replacement… since you’re already here, aren’t you? And Prescott will be 85 by the time he arrives…” 

                     “Mighty kind, Highness,’ says Wentworth, laughing faintly to himself, ‘yet I have scotched that ploy meself by writing many letters, both to your father, to those in Parliament, and to others of me acquaintance in London society, extollin’ your own many virtues, and laudin’ your military genius in creating a damn fine army here, yeah, as well as the fortifications, communications and, of course, the tremendous improvement of our darn roads. It would, I fear, read like false modesty for you to ascribe all these here achievements to me. No, no. I shall wage my own campaign, based upon me own merits… such as they be these days…” He falls back upon his lacy pillow, clapping his useful hands once, as if to seal this bold decision — or possibly to catch a stray merit in its flight across the thrumming room.

                    What, thinks the prince, is this going to cost me?  “Ah, truly?’ he says, shamed. ‘That was very kind of you, Sir John, and…I never forget a kindness…” No, he thinks, it’s the unkindness I forget, isn’t it?

                    “Neither do I, Highness,” the governor assures him, “and I’d deem it a great kindness if you’d say nothin’ about that…that  ‘nurse’ in me bed here…”

                  “There was a nurse in it?” 

-xx-

                     Rather than an attractive mantle of pristine snow, the winter of 1796-97 has mostly provided grey pellets of freezing rain, which actually manage to kill birds huddled on bare branches, and then lie over the ground looking more like great clods of porridge. The war with France is heating up, as wars tend to do, not that you’d know it here. No French warships are seen out on the flashing shards of an iron and silver ocean. Indeed, few ships are seen at all by the Halifax harbour, unless they carry fishermen or lobster traps. It is peaceful out at Bedford Basin, and the grounds are beautiful no matter what the season, no matter what the weather. At least, they look beautiful from indoors. Before the buds appear, you can see the Atlantic vastness out there, slowly pulsing, the globe’s great beating heart. But he, the prince, is rarely present these days to see any of this. To exorcize the demons of injustice and paternal abuse that haunt him – that go Boo and scream around, shaking his bed curtains at night – he’s impelled to keep moving. 

                It is now early in the alleged spring of 1797. With Weatherall and a small entourage of soldiers, he often covers 75 miles in a day on inspection tours, stopping along the way for brief visits with provincial acquaintances. These inspections are largely unnecessary, superfluous, and he knows it.  A typical example is riding to Windsor, stopping for an hour at the home of John Ruggles, before setting off on the thirty-mile journey to Aylesford, where they’re entertained with a sumptuous banquet by Bishop Charles Inglis. After this, they travel a dozen more miles to spend a night at the Horton home of Edward de Wolfe, oligarch and professed philanthropist. The next day finds them checking repairs to a barracks at Annapolis, and then galloping back into Windsor, from whence, after dealing with some ridiculously trifling business, and despite muffled protests from his men, Prince Edward proposes they ride all night back to Halifax. Why?

                      ‘My thought exactly,’ says Weatherall, massaging sore muscles in his thigh. ‘Why?’

                       ‘If I don’t keep moving,’ he replies, stroking his steaming charger, ‘I’ll decay and crumble…’

                       ‘No. You’ll brood darkly…’

                      ‘That too. The faster I go, the more I leave behind me…’

                        ‘Then perhaps we should have you shot from a cannon?’

                       Time and its efficient use are becoming signal preoccupations with him, as is a microscopic attention to detail. He starts to believe that for any activity to be performed correctly, he has to oversee it personally, be this a building, be it barracks hygiene, assessment of supplies, or new button designs. During his innumerable tours of the province, he often imagines himself at the head of an army rushing across Europe to shock the enemy by showing up at a location no one believes it possible for him to have reached in the time available. The man is a soldier, after all – a soldier without a war. His formative years were spent training to lead men and fight; but he has only done this once for several weeks in the islands. Praised by General Grey as one of the finest officers in the army, why is he not now where he’s most needed? A world war is looming, a great conflagration that will transform Europe utterly and forever. His military sense can taste it. Every atom in his body quivers with pent-up energy; although his joints ache, his commissures throb. All he has is speed.

                ‘The readiness is all,’ he says, as he often does, convinced that an army’s greatest asset is the element of surprise – which is speed.  But the greatest test of an army, as we so frequently hear, is often inaction rather than combat. It is important we hear this military truism, for it will make the prince’s postings seem distinctly punitive. Even Napoleon will risk a Russian winter in preference to making camp till spring with idle men. Edward’s troops are restless too, as eager for battle as he. Their time also drags; shadows float over the square; a bugle sounds; the taverns call out: Bring us your pennies and we’ll cut this day as short as we’re cutting your life…They drink; they whore; they gamble for buttons; they brawl. With his drills and nitpicking inspections, Prince Edward can’t provide a substitute for combat. The problems of inactivity are creeping back into what had become an exemplary force. The army has no solutions, no recommended fix. Only in the West Indies has he experienced the difference between combat and inactivity. Leadership is like spreading butter when a battle looms ahead. The men crave it; they don’t resent or resist it. He knows the only salvation for these men is going to be participating in the war they hear so much about, the war whose plunder will provide the only opportunity in their lives to make a little money and stash it away for when they’re too old and broken to soldier anymore. Most are only thirty or so when this old age claims them. It’s crucial to them, this chance to ravage and loot. But he despairs of laying on any combat here at Halifax. Particularly when a large French fleet has attacked Newfoundland yet decided not to head further west. French spies have relayed back to Paris news of the nasty surprises the prince has waiting for them here.

                  ‘Our efforts may have deterred an assault on the eastern coast,’ he tells Weatherall, as they survey the harbour’s redoubts and towers, ‘and possibly we’ve prevented the recapture of Quebec – which would be an end to English Canada — yet this hasn’t done very much good for me, has it?’

                      ‘I must say, Edward, that I don’t understand those brothers of yours…’

                       ‘No.’ He’s recently been informed that more aspersions are being cast on his character by the Duke of York, who perpetuates Edward’s undeserved reputation as a brutal martinet, an obsessive stickler for military etiquette, and a punisher feared by troops everywhere. None of it is true — well, he is a bit of a stickler. All commanders are punishers; but if there’s a more lenient one than the prince I should like to hear of him. The testimonials from citizens, officers and men witness the true reality, yet no one reads them. York sees to this. His discipline is necessary; his punishments are usually extra duties; and, most telling of all, men come to love him, as General Grey himself had noted. Yet York says he is feared, and York alone controls the evidence countering his accusations. Under such circumstances, the accusation is enough: we are guilty until proven otherwise – if we’re ever given a chance to defend ourselves. Those who hold the reins of power know how to use them; a tug here, a weak there, and truth is trampled. Soldiers who never served with the prince will forever believe he ruled by fear.

                      ‘Feared more for their tedium, I imagine, those punishments,’ remarks Weatherall, wiping a fine mist of rain from his eyes. ‘One man even told me he’d prefer a flogging to peeling potatoes and stitching uniforms all night…’

                      ‘That’s the only advice there is in the Code,’ he says, refastening his oilskin. ‘We keep them busy…yet it’s in the same mindlessly simple ways we keep idle children out of trouble…’ He makes a clucking noise with tongue and teeth.

                     ‘Yes. But children don’t seem to be as doggedly determined at seeking out fresh trouble, do they?’

                     ‘I wouldn’t say that…’ He’s thinking about his brothers. He’s always thinking about his brothers. ‘It’s just that, the bigger the child, the bigger the trouble…’

                       ‘You’re talking about yourself?’

                       ‘No, Fred. No, I’m not – I’m just so damn frustrated here…’

                        ‘As am I…’

      ‘I was hoping to hear a solution,’ he says.

                      ‘So was I…’  

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 8.5

-xiii-

                     But if it is war, then a truce is declared. So great is Lady Frances’ need to shelter under Prince Edward’s good graces that she rapidly reforms her bacchanalian revels into sedate facsimiles of his own dinners; and she even begins regularly attending Sunday services at St. Paul’s Anglican Church, where he goes with Julie, the rite being as close to a Roman mass as anything Halifax provides. There are modest Catholic chapels scattered about, to accommodate the steady influx of Irish immigrants; yet the prince can hardly be seen at their services. In the ardently sycophantic interests of royal patronage, the Wentworths are also willing to attend his post-church at-homes, which he keeps as bleakly Calvinistic as possible, with no refreshments served, conversation generally held to theological issues, and perhaps a recital of some sacred music by Julie on the harpsichord. He believes in keeping the Sabbath day holy, whenever possible; he just doesn’t believe “holy” should be equated with joyless tedium. He has the Freemason’s love of portentous ritual and deep symbolism. He enjoys intelligent discussions of theological issues too; and his old tutor, now Bishop Fisher, gave him a good grounding in canon law, so he can debate with church hierarchs if he so chooses. It is during the lull in a discussion of divine vengeance that Lady Frances seizes an opportunity to further ingratiate herself. 

                  “Would it not be highly agreeable,” she says, “if Your Royal Highness could have a place of his own out in the country, just as Sir John and I enjoy?” The oil in her voice makes you slide along the floor.

                  He has in fact been thinking   for some time now of such a rural dwelling. He misses the open country; and thus, he agrees with her that it would indeed be pleasant. 

                 “Well, we just happen to own a sweet little cottage on a large estate at Bedford Basin,’ Lady Frances tells him, ‘about six miles out on the Preston road. It’s known as ‘Friar Lawrence’s Cell – ain’t that so darn cute! – very twee it is; but the grounds are extensive, more than large enough for a much swanker house. The view out over the Atlantic is simply divine! It would be so darn perfect for you both; and it’s yours for the asking…” Considering it is a free gift she’s pushing, her eyes flash with all the rapacity of a street-market vendor claiming trash is a bargain at fifty times its worth.

                  Julie is looking at him importunately. She’s tiring of their house on Citadel Hill, which resounds with the general martial din from dawn drill to evening taps. The area swarms with army hangers-on and all manner of vagrants too. The incessant noise makes her head ache. But the last straw was when she’d looked out her bedroom window to find a public hanging in progress mere yards away. Livestock theft is common here and Wentworth punishes it with death.

                  ‘You’ve got to admit she’s a tenacious old bird,’ he says to Weatherall after accepting the offer. ‘I admire her cunning. If there’s a way to advance herself or Sir John, she’ll seize it…’

                  ‘In her glinting fangs…’

                  ‘I should mount her down in the harbour, pointed out to sea at the French,’ he says.

                ‘I don’t think you want to mount her anywhere, Edward…’ Weatherall admires his genuine innocence, yet he cannot resist toying with it.

                ‘Ah. No. Quite so…’ The prince is no longer so naïve; he simply doesn’t share the barrackroom conviction that anything related to sex is a cause for lupine cackles or knowing winks. 

                Like his father and eldest brother, Wales, he’s a competent technical draughtsman. Before long, he has sketched out plans and is supervising construction of a wooden mansion, overlooking the rolling land and its seascape frontier as seen from Bedford Basin. The vision he transfers to paper tunnels in on itself, so that simplicity is merely an outer garment of complexity. His new house has a flat roof framed by railings in the Italianate manner, with high narrow windows, and a double-tiered portico supporting lattice-work, up which flowering creepers will grow. Inside, he designs a large central hall, for levees and the like, as well as a spacious ballroom, with French windows which can be opened onto the gardens in fine weather – very much in the style of Baron de Vincy’s ballroom. Behind the main structure, he creates another building, in the Gothic style, which will serve as a guardroom and house kitchens, as well as containing a space for his private office. He debates the need for gargoyles here; are naiads appropriate? Opposite this building, he places a bandstand fashioned in the Oriental manner, with a gilded cupola supported by three columns. Concealed in the woods, for the delight of strollers, is a Greco-Roman parth… no,  a fussy Chinese temple, with hanging copper bells that tinkle in the breeze. The more he thinks about it, the more delighted he is by the percussive effects of wind. Similarly, he hangs strings of clinking glass coins in little shelters where rustic benches overlook an ever-changing silvered immensity of the Atlantic Ocean. Has he imagined enough? No. Even too much is not enough. As a secret tribute to his love, he has the winding pathways carved from natural woodland spell out ‘Julie’, a delicacy known only to them – unless, of course, some errant balloonist happens to float over the estate one day. Surely it is not done yet? To complete the grounds, he creates a series of artificial brooks, leading from a central stream. These waters tumble over rocks and down waterfalls into a main lake. Something is still missing here – but what could it be? Ah, yes. He alters the lake’s shape to form a heart. You ask why. It is love poetry as landscape, all designed to be Julie’s private garden, as a testimonial of his abiding passion. The Book of Love protests innocence: there is no chapter on symbolic prospects. He pictures the two of them walking there together on summer evenings, with the Fusiliers’ band playing romantic music in the distance, the sound growing ever fainter, to be lost in tinkling bells and wind-chimes, as they sit entwined on a bench, with only the ocean’s great breath rasping in and out beneath them. He can always see everything in his mind so clearly before he builds it. They say the optimist constructs castles in the sky; so, the romantic optimist builds love nests there. He can see the complete image, with all its details; and he can even see the multifarious pleasures everything will provide. It is an holistic vision. The result never holds any surprises for him.

-xiv-

                     ‘But I think it will for Madame Julie,’ says Weatherall, eyebrows hidden beneath his hairline, when he is first shown the estate at Bedford Basin. 

                  The prince, chief devotee of the surprise, has worked in secret, riding daily back and forth along the Preston road – which, thanks to Wentworth, is the only decent stretch of highway in the province.

                    ‘You think she won’t like it?’ he says in mild alarm.

                      ‘No. I think she will be… surprised by it… very surprised…’

                        Indeed, she is more than just very surprised. She’d been told the place was to be a simple rural cottage. By no stretch of the imagination could it be called “simple”; but if a cottage has a ballroom, concert hall, oriental temple, twenty bedrooms and a hundred acres of formal gardens, then call it “cottage” if you wish. He now wonders if he’s gone too far. Again, like the King and Wales, is he gripped by a mania for excessive embellishment? Most of us would answer this in the affirmative. Yet when Julie finally sees his creation, if she finds it pretentious or overdone, she doesn’t say so. Indeed, she doesn’t say much at all, gazing open-mouthed as he shows her all the intricacies of this monument to love. What can she say? It’s all so touching, so sweet. The Book of Love advises us to be enthralled by any gift from the beloved, because whatever the gift may be, it is love taking on that form in order to be manifest. But what in hell did it cost? She will not raise the subject of his finances again, though, not after his angry rebuke. She remembers every contretemps, every harsh word. She’s a wife now, remember, with easy access to that cobwebbed attic where old grievances are stored for future utility.

                      Even his diaries and journals for this period are devoid of any personal news beyond those matters concerning the new house and grounds, which his imagination obviously regards as anything but complete, even in its current complexity. Pages contain more rough sketches and designs for further improvements than they do words. He does have to admit to his diary that, without this architectural orgy, the increasingly elaborate fortifications and the house at Bedford Basin, his time at Nova Scotia would now weigh very heavily on him indeed. He dreads these projects coming to an end; for time spent profitably is no time at all. 

                  ‘Why am I always stationed where nothing happens?’ he asks Julie. ‘The Duke of York has to know inaction is a killer, doesn’t he? It’s deliberate. God, I’m so sick of this…’

                     ‘So am I,’ she says, eyeing him critically. ‘So am I…’

-xv-

                   Early in the autumn of 1795, a ship arrives in Halifax harbour carrying Julie’s old friend, Louis-Philippe, the Duc d’Orleans, accompanied by his faithful valet and friend, Baudouin. They are fleeing France to seek refuge in America, whence the duc’s two brothers, Louis-Charles and Antoine-Philippe, have already fled. Their father was executed for treason after leading a mob of peasants and Third Estate radicals to press the Orleanist claim to France’s throne. As a Valois, son of the late Phlippe Egalite, and distantly related to Louis XVI, Louis-Philippe has a strong claim to the throne himself. But after being implicated in a plot concocted by his commanding officer, General Dumouriez, to ally with the Austrian army and force France to restore the Constitution of 1791 — a conspiracy exposed by no less than his own father, a prominent supporter of the early Revolution — Louis-Philippe feared for his life, first fleeing to refuge in Sweden, then Austria, Finland, Germany and numerous other places. using forged papers.  O n account of their exhausting travels and dishevelled appearance, he and Baudouin were often taken for vagrants. When, despite stalwart revolutionary sympathies, his father  was guillotined during the Terror, Louis-Philippe sought a safer refuge than Europe, where he now had to avoid both republican and émigré circles in every country where he travelled.  By this stage, these noble gentlemen have lost everything; they’re penniless, owning nothing but the tattered clothes in which they stand. When the mighty fall, their drop is a steep one.

                      The tragic state of her old friend brings back painful memories of Julie’s own flight to Geneva. Naturally, she wants to invite the men to stay at their country estate, tfor rest and recuperation at least. He and Julie are also eager for recent news of events in France. The last they’d heard is that a royalist counter-revolution was in progress. But that is some time ago. 

                  “The pro-royalist riots were put down by Republican forces with the utmost severity,” Louis-Philippe tells them, his pear-shaped countenance now gaunt and grave, his black wavy hair greasy and knotted. “Thousands died, and the streets of Paris flowed with their blood – French blood spilled by Frenchmen. Incroyable! And the general responsible for this massacre is now widely hailed as a hero. No, my friends, the Republic has not fallen, but the Revolution has failed, coopted by a new oligarchy even more venal and mendacious than the old aristocracy — yet lacking in all virtue.”

                “The people don’t care about that massacre?” asks Julie, disturbed by this news and now twisting her necklace nervously, until the pearls resemble fat beads of sweat in her fingers.

                  “The Directoire, which ousted our Assembly, tells them the riots were fomented by foreign influences, especially that of the British crown  – if Your Royal Highness will excuse me for saying so.’ The prince nods. ‘The threat of invasion makes them look for a military saviour, not the return of a despicable and detested monarchy. The rioters are so often referred to as ‘traitors’ in the press that everyone now believes what this so-called government tells them to believe.The hoi-polloi are maddening in their stupidness!”

                  “The Revolution has indeed failed then?” says Julie, quietly contemplative, but her mind still ticking away.

                  “It replaced a corrupt monarchy with a still more corrupt and infinitely more brutal tyranny of plutocrats – if that is what you mean by ‘failed’?”

                “What of opposition by our allies?” Edward asks the troubled Frenchman, realising a little too late that he ought to have the answer to this himself.

                “Most are now more concerned with republicanism spreading across their own borders than they are with restoring the Bourbons,” replies the Duc d’Orleans. “They think the French army is intent on spreading revolutionary ideas, and that it may attempt to create popular uprisings to assist with thinly-disguised campaigns of invasion.” There seems to be no side in France for him to be on.

                    ‘Is that likely?’ asks the prince, wondering if England is on this list of campaigns.

                    “It has mad Czar Paul of Russia inspired. He’s contemplating an alliance with the French to realize the old Muscovite dream of seizing the Turkish Empire, or so we’ve heard. But the Prussians and Austrians are worried…” Louis-Philippe looks even more worried than Prussia or Austria.

                  “We have also heard,” says the melancholic valet, Baudouin, “that the army has new and advanced weaponry. Oui, and they’ve also devised a system of messaging, using inter-visible flags waved from hilltops, their positions representing letters of the alphabet. Bien sure. They can communicate in this fashion over hundreds of miles within an hour or less. These are detailed messages – it isn’t like signal fires on the hills. Such advantages, along with rigorous training, make them a formidable opponent, far from the undisciplined rabble they were once thought to be – oui, c’est vrai.”

                ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘we also once thought them to be that…’ He thinks: We thought it a minute ago.

                “Yet their generals have holes in their breeches and patches on their sleeves,” Louis-Philippe adds scornfully. “My country is digging her own grave… helped by twenty million idiots with shovels, malhereusement.”

                  He finds all this interesting; yet it soon becomes clear their news, like everyone else’s, is largely based on rumour. Their principal concern during the last weeks of their time in Europe had been in saving their own necks, hiding in remote locations, scratching out a meagre living in whatever way they could, and always moving on, friendless and frightened. So destitute was their appearance, so fearful their vagabond-mien that even monasteries had denied them shelter, and farmers had threatened to kick them on to the next town, or shoot them if this were too far for kicking. The refugees are still eager to leave for America as soon as possible, though unwilling in present company to admit they feel unsafe in English territory. They clearly worry that Louis-Philippe could prove useful as a hostage, should the need for one arise – and it usually does arise during a war. The prince tries his best to reassure them, guaranteeing their safety; yet their ideas are fixed upon refuge in a neutral  country. Insisting they remain at Bedford Basin at least until his barber and tailor can remove all signs of vagrancy, Prince Edward loans Louis-Philippe two hundred pounds, for which paltry sum the duc is embarrassingly grateful. Kindness is not something either man has experienced in a long time. This sum will one day be repaid to the prince’s daughter, when Louis-Phillippe visits England as King of France. Edward also arranges safe transport for conveying them to Philadelphia, the journey taking place three weeks after their arrival. 

                       News comes much later that Louis-Philippe, heir to the French throne, scion of one of France’s noblest and most ancient families, has taken a position as schoolteacher in the City of Brotherly Love – that so masonic of place-names. The prince greatly admires the man’s humility. The duc has met up with his brothers there too, both also similarly employed at menial work. Anything is preferable to worrying every minute if your head will still be attached to your shoulders tomorrow.

                   ‘A noble man. We haven’t heard the last of him, I’ll warrant,’ he says. He misses the duc’s civilized, sagacious company for weeks after their departure. It makes him realize how cut off from intercourse with his peers he is out here. There is something different about talking with those of his own caste — so much that need not be said or explained, so many concerns no one else shares or even comprehends. ‘If republicanism spreads across the Channel,’ he says, ‘I too could be a penniless exile like him – I think he saw that in me…’

                   ‘You’re already exiled,’ Julie tells him bitingly, ‘and you’re far worse than penniless…’

‘Unfair.’

‘Then make it fairer,’ she says. ‘Go beg your daily cust and see how that feels.’ Sometimes she feels so much older than him. She is of course several years older, but it is not chronological age she feels.

-xvi-

              Over the turbid waters gulls are crying like lost souls. A thin drizzle slides down diagonally from the greyish murk above. With every packet from England bringing increasingly worrying news about the French threat, he further expands the range of his fortifications, installing a mobile battery at Sandwich Point, near the harbour’s entrance, with a chain boom that can be raised as a barrage to prevent any vessel from entering. Reading of an ingenious structure encountered by the Royal Navy at Cape Martello, Corsica, he resolves to construct something similar here. It is a tall, narrow tower of very thick stone, with a single door twenty feet off the ground, whose ladder of access can be pulled in if there’s an attack. Its narrowness makes it very hard to hit by cannon from the sea, and it is virtually impossible to take by land, any force attempting it coming under heavy sniper fire from above. He builds one of these ‘Martello Towers’ at each of three points along the coast, with cannon on their battlements pointed out to sea. On St. George’s Island he constructs a star-shaped fortress, from which three hundred riflemen and thirty cannon crews can fire in any direction. This bastion also contains two furnaces for making shot red hot. The glowing balls will set ships on fire. He constructs a similar defense, guaranteeing the safety of St. John’s Island. He then rebuilds, strengthens and fits out with new armaments existing forts, like Ogilvy and Imperoyal. Old American War trenches are filled in with earth, necessitating, for this purpose, the removal of fifteen feet from the height of Citadel Hill. On the plateau which then remains, he designs and builds a square fortress with robust towers at each corner. Approaches to this fort are hampered by a deep moat lined with sharp spikes. In this enormous structure’s central core is a parade ground, framed by barracks for 650 men. Its roof, strengthened by stout timbers, holds twenty cannon pointed at the harbour; and the storerooms are to be kept stocked with sufficient enough ammunition and supplies to withstand a siege of over a year — in the unlikely event of any French fleet slipping past his shore defenses and landing an army. 

                     ‘Christ,’ he tells Weatherall. ‘We’ve made this place so secure I almost yearn for a French attack just to test the impregnability…’

                    ‘Almost…’ 

                  He now writes to his Commander-in-Chief in London, his perfidious brother,York, detailing his achievements at Halifax, and inquiring if York knows anything about the French army having developed some system of signals for long-distance communication. He then writes a similar letter to the King, suggesting that his own achievements and victories now surely warrant further promotion, leaving its nature up to His Majesty, but strongly implying a command in Europe would be highly appropriate as a promotion. Awaiting replies to these letters reminds him of a painful past that he’d been able of late to shelve by having no time to dwell on it. To keep busy, he begins paying more attention to the garrison, which Captain Weatherall’s sheer persistence has by now utterly transformed into a relatively smart and disciplined army. The prince also has the French prisoners-of-war rounded up and incarcerated, just as they ought to have been upon arrival. Many of them could easily be acting as spies through conduits in America. 

                    It is after this latter action that he receives a note from Governor Wentworth requesting an urgent meeting. By this stage, the prince has given up the house on Cogswell Street for economy’s sake and is using a set of apartments at Government Hall when working in the city. Thus, it takes him barely a minute to reach Sir John’s offices.

                  “I’m most concerned about your expenditures, Highness,” says Wentworth, after formalities have been exchanged. There are deep furrows ploughed into the governor’s brows to reflect the turbulence behind them in his brain. 

                  “My expenditures?” he exclaims, feigning amazement, and of course heartily sick of this whole toe-curling subject.

                  “The house at Bedford Basin,” the governor goes on, counting items off on his thick pink fingers, “the fortifications, the new armaments, new uniforms for the army, and now,” – he’s running out of fingers – “jailing the French prisoners at municipal expense…”

                  “I fail to understand your point,” he says, trying to look authentically baffled, and adding, “Prisoners are supposed to be in prisons, aren’t they?”

                  “City funds are in a dreadful state of arrears…” Wentworth gropes for words, only managing to find, “There is no money. Less than that, in fact. There is debt. Debt!” He makes it sound like ‘death’. 

                      Yet the prince is now so accustomed to debt that the term scarcely bothers him, even with its claws dug deep into his conscience. Neither does death bother him, at least not much anymore, not after his recent brushes with it in the islands. 

             “Will a million pounds cover it?” Edward asks him blithely, as if he has the sum in his pouch, all in winking gold sovereigns.

                  “Good Lord,” Sir John cries, his voice now quavering, “half of that would be m-more than sufficient, sire.” He wipes his moist lips on a black coat sleeve, thinking of the golden tide now flowing his way.

                “Good,” the prince tells him briskly, all efficiency now, “because I shall require some of the funds London is sending you for my own military purposes. I would also like you to repair and extend our roads. Have you noticed that what we call ‘roads’ here are in reality what other cities would term ‘goat tracks’ or ‘footpaths’? ”

                “Yes, yes, indeed. It’s a project I’ve long wished to embark upon myself, Highness,” Wentworth lies. “Lack of funds has always made it impossible, utterly impossible…”

                  The lack of funds had not make it utterly impossible for Wentworth to build himself two lavish mansions, thinks the prince, not to mention a schooner, a royal barge, more clothes than the Emperor of China, three opulent carriages, twelve superlative horses, four-and-twenty chiming gold timepieces, a diamond partridge in a platinum pear tree, and God only knows what else. ‘Citizens will observe, Sir John,’ he says, ‘that it’s probably not by sheer coincidence that the only serviceable road is the one leading to Preston, where your country estate happens to be located…’

                      ‘And,’ Wentworth protests quite rightly, ‘your own lies six miles along the same road…’

                     ‘Very true,’ he concedes, kicking himself for overlooking this salient detail. Because Wentworth is such an inveterate liar, and he also needs him off his back and firmly on his side, he feels at liberty to lie a little himself now. “Sir John,” he says, his voice lowered in a conspiratorial manner, “there’s something you’re unaware of, and which must, for the time being, remain a secret between you and I.”

                    Sir John nods readily, leaning forward in hungry anticipation of privileged information.

                    The prince continues in a whisper, “Lord Dorchester will soon be resigning his post, and returning to England for retirement. I have recommended that you be named the new Governor-General of Canada – if, that is, you’d be willing to accept the position?”

                Sir John’s bovine face shuttles through a bewildering range of expressions and hues, growing at first pale, then flushing red as a sunset, his eyes widening in amazement, and then squeezing, perplexed; his thin lips smiling, pursed, and then flapping around with the inchoate forms of inaudible words. His hands clasp themselves bone-white, presently spreading into fat veiny flippers. He sits back; he sits forward; he stands, and then he sits again.

                 ‘Was it premature or presumptuous of me?’ inquires the prince, circumspectly guileless.

                  “I d-don’t know w-what to say…”

                  “As I said, this is our secret, so you are not required to say anything…not yet.”

                    When Weatherall hears of this, he says, ‘My God. Besides making him King of England, there’s nothing else in the world you could give that man… But what are you going to do when he finds out the truth?’

                      ‘That will be months,’ the prince says dismissively. ‘More worrying is if he blabs and Dorchester gets to hear of it…’

                      ‘Yes, that could be misinterpreted, couldn’t it?’

                      ‘How the hell could that be misinterpreted?’ he says.

                       ‘That you’re spreading rumours of his retirement to get rid of him…’

                    ‘Ah. I see. Yes. And the current King of Canada would be prone to much misinterpretation when it comes to me…’ He recalls a catalogue of wrongs done him by the Dorchesters. Why are some people just born to be your enemy before they even have a cause? 

                  ‘I do hope Sir John doesn’t imagine Lady Frances is behind this ultimate promotion…’ Weatherall’s face looks as if some huge invisible hand is crumpling it up like paper.

                 ‘He’s bound to tell her. You can’t expect husbands and wives to keep secrets from one another.’ Well, he thinks, you can if the secret only benefits one of them.

                 ‘Oh, but she’ll simply smile knowingly, neither confirming nor denying her role, won’t she?’

                     ‘Yes. While deciding what reward she ought to demand for her efforts…’

                     ‘The Crown Jewels, perhaps?

                      ‘She already has those…’ The words send him off to that distant moment when a jewel fell from his father’s coronation crown. They say this was a portent of losing America. He says it portended the loss of a son. Me. The jewel has long since been reattached. How do you reattach a son?

Queen Victoria’s Secret: Chapter 8.4

-x-

                It is now a dripping October, most of autumn’s leaves a soggy rug trodden into the rutted mud of streets and lanes. He accepts the invitation to a Saturday night dinner, with ‘a ball and sundry other diverting entertainments’. He dresses in a splendid new uniform, with his full regalia of rank and honours. He even wears a spotless white wig – an accoutrement he’s always loathed and feels to be ridiculous.

                   “My goodness!” exclaims Julie, admiring the dazzle of gold, red, blue and white. “You look like an emperor!” 

                “That’s the whole point,” he says. “I want these people to know who’s now the real power in this midden-heap.” He’s told her why she is not accompanying him to these preliminary functions – he’s not hiding her. 

                  ‘I’m happy to be spared,’ she says. She prefers to spend her time with baby Jean, who she dotes over, barely allowing a servant or even a nursery maid near the bawling little bundle. What had been suppressed with little Eduard now floods to the surface in a rip tide.

                  Captain Weatherall will accompany him to the dinner, in the role of stickler for royal protocol – making it up if he needs to. “These people don’t know how to behave,” he’d explained to Weatherall. “You are going to stuff them so full of decorum and delicacy that they’ll choke on it.”

                  They arrive at Government Hall deliberately late, riding in a magnificent landau with an escort of horse guards, who blow his personal fanfare on polished brass horns. People inside begin crowding at windows, pushing one another aside to obtain a better view. Lieutenant-Governor Wentworth, towed by Lady Frances, comes out to the carriage, fairly swelling with pride and waving to onlookers, the chartered witnesses to his latest honour. Weatherall is first to climb down, once a postilion has unfolded the steps. Prince Edward follows him, seeing Wentworth start forward with outstretched hand. Weatherall deftly dodges between them.

                “His Royal Highness does not shake hands, sir,” he says firmly. “Indeed, his person is not to be touched at all…not under any circumstances.”

                  After the prince’s original masonic grip, this must confuse the man.

                “How should we greet him then, eh?” Wentworth whispers anxiously.

              “You simply bow, sir, and make sure to speak only if spoken to.”

                Weatherall enjoys this game. He has no respect for the governor. Wentworth now bows low enough to kiss his own shoes. Lady Frances, urgently trying to catch the prince’s eye, embarks on an ungainly curtsey. He then accompanies Wentworth into the house. The place attempts grandeur in its decor yet achieves something between shabby ostentation and monumental tastelessness. Like the building itself, everything is out of proportion, doors and windows either too big or too small for the rooms they serve. “Have you been quite well, Sir John?” he asks the governor.

                “Oh, excellent well, Highness,” he blurts out, spittle spilling in a froth from his lips onto the lace of a cravat, where it blends in perfectly. “And so exceedingly much looking forward to your first official visit.”

                ‘Yes. As am I…’

                A throng of men in various versions of dinner dress, and women in handsome yet antiquated satin gowns, has by now pushed its way into the hall. The women are so laden down with an excess of jewelry that they resemble thieves running from Aladdin’s cave with booty. A collective gasp goes up as he enters, bowing to them indifferently. Weatherall goes ahead, a Moses of protocol, parting the sea of eager faces, uttering his rigid instructions. Edward takes in his surroundings. Well, he thinks, you can see where the appropriated funds from London go. There are gilded marble-topped tables; there are monstrous gold urns, holding paper flowers the size of latern pans in a dozen garish hues; there are vast mirrors with golden cupids crawling around their frames in search of love. The Prince of Wales could do no worse.

               “Oh, Edward!” a husky voice breathes in his ear. “How wonderful to see you again!” Lady Frances is goggle-eyed with excitement and craving.

              “Madame,” he says coldly. “I do not countenance such familiarity, particularly not in public.”

                  She takes a step back, as if he’d slapped her; and then, smiling wickedly, she says, “Then I shall hope we will not always find ourselves ‘in public’…”

                He ignores this remark, proceeding into the wake created by Weatherall, which takes him into a large salon. The walls are covered in a terrifyingly pink silk, and hung profusely with portraits of dogs, cats and parrots. 

                 ‘My God!’ Weatherall whispers. ‘What a nightmare…’

                   ‘Badly painted too,’ he whispers back.

                    Sixty or seventy men and women now gawk at him; both sexes are equally and obviously drunk. A negro servant, clad in cheap many-coloured livery that gives him a clownish appearance, offers the prince a glass of champagne. He declines politely, requesting water instead. 

                “Now they don’t know what to do,” Weatherall mutters. “I have protocolled them into mutes.”

                “Good,” says the prince. “Silence is golden – not gilded. Let them get a taste of what good society is like. Or is supposed to be like. Only dinner with my mother is this deadly. Have Sir John and Lady Frances introduce me to all the guests formally — married couples first, then singles. That ought to kill the time before we are summoned to table.” 

                      Since the West Indies, he’s become far more confident in dealing with strangers. He’s been told that one advantage of blue eyes is their ability to convey nothing of what goes on behind them. They are curtains of the soul — and he uses this. His purpose here is to improve the place, and improve it he will, no matter who he must offend in the process. Like that, he tells himself, looking down.  Covering rough-hewn planks on the floor is a carpet of stupendous dimensions, incorporating a Greek key motif border with an inner section containing a hothouse full of unlikely blooms, each a yard wide. There are vines too, and odd green cat-like creatures. ‘It does its duty, Fred,’ he whispers, ‘this rug…’

                    ‘I’m not sure I…’

                    ‘Its function is to cover this floor, and that it does, not caring in the least who it offends by doing it…’

                  ‘No. It certainly doesn’t care about that…’

                   ‘Oh,’ says the prince brightly, looking across the room, ‘look at those!’

                  Upon a broad stone mantelpiece, framing a lacklustre fire of steaming birch logs, there stand several interesting timepieces. More are scattered around the room on side tables. For some years now the prince has recognized in himself his father’s enthusiasm for clocks, indeed for mechanical marvels in general. He cannot resist the more novel examples. Is he making up for that timepiece he smashed as a child? No, these days he even attributes that incident to an early, if crude manifestation of his current interest. In this curious manner, he strives to erase a disagreeable past. Little wonder his success is minimal. Peering at one clock, in which a small porcelain couple suddenly pops out from a gold door as the hour strikes, moving in a circle to disappear through another door, he’s aware of an encroaching odour, one of spiced rum mingled with stale tobacco. This is the habitual aroma of Sir John Wentworth. “Is this your collection?” he asks him.

                  “It is, Highness,” Wentworth replies in an oily voice. “Allow me to show you my favourite piece…if it pleases you, sire?”

                  The prince follows him over to a table whose marquetry design is merely circles within circles, the veneers in three shades of brown. Upon this dizzying surface sits a complex device under a glass dome. It has a clock-face with two wicked-looking eyes made from onyx and lapis lazuli, the hands carved from ivory to resemble long beaks. Seated among the cogs, springs and levers are three stuffed birds, finches perhaps, of differing colours, red, white and blue. Wentworth carefully removes the dome, and then turns the beaks – which are twenty minutes slow – until the larger one stands close to its zenith at twelve. “Now watch, sire,” urges Sir John, aglow with pride.

                  As the hour rings out, each of the little birds, wings flapping, beaks twittering sweetly, moves in ascending and descending spirals all around the clock for a full minute, before coming to rest once more upon their perches. 

              “Where did you find such a wonder?” he asks Wentworth, completely enthralled by what he’s seen – and quite forgetting his purpose here tonight.

                “There’s an old Swiss clock-maker out in Shelburne,” says the governor, “and he makes ‘em for me. He likes to surprise with new marvels every time. But I should be real honoured if Your Highness would accept this piece as a gift…”

                “I could not do that, Sir John, no,” he replies, though without much conviction. He wants this clock. It is the helpless and inexplicable need of an inveterate collector.

                “Please accept it, Highness. It’d make us so darn happy to give you a memento of your first weeks in command here…”

                “I see. Yes… Well, but only on that condition,” he says, eager to show Julie and their baby the marvel, “Then in that case I do accept most gratefully. Yet you must introduce me to this Shelburne wizard…”

                  “It’ll be my pleasure, sire… and no doubt the old boy’s delight too. He’ll be tickled pink when he finds out a son of King George has one of his clocks.”

              Not as pink as this room, I hope, he thinks. ‘Just one?’ he says. ‘I suspect one of many, Sir John…’

                As they start towards another timepiece, this one resembling a castle standing in its own silvery moat, Lady Frances intercepts them, irritably announcing that the reception line is ready.

                “Duty calls,” he says. ‘Another time for all this time, perhaps?’

              “Sire.”

              “By the way, Sir John,’ he says, ‘where did you find this astonishing carpet?”

                “A Turkoman weaver in Philadelphia made it for me before the Revolution,” he replies wistfully. “His own design, too. But the problem was I’d asked for a rug one hundred inches by eighty, and the guy makes it a hundred feet by eighty feet. But the thing was so darn beautiful, and had taken him so long to weave, I couldn’t refuse to take it, could I now? Until we moved here, though, I never had a room big enough for it. It’d been folded up for years — years! But when I had it spread out here it looked even prettier than it had back then, so bright, so cheerful…”

                ‘Yes, indeed it is…cheerful.’ He likes this story. Despite the rumours and gossip, he’s beginning to like Wentworth too. They are brother masons, after all. And now brothers in clockwork, he tells himself, only too well aware of contrary emotions, but dismissing them. 

                   Lady Frances is annoyed by the attention paid to Prince Edward by her young lady guests, especially the pretty ones. Attractive and provocative she certainly still is, in her late forties, she also knows her game will soon be lost to some of these budding beauties the prince will dance with after dinner. The knowledge has a bitter taste, a spiteful virtue

                “The one thing Halifax appears not to be sorely lacking in is comely maidens,” says Weatherall, whistling quietly through his teeth.

                  “Perhaps we should find you a wife, Fred?” the prince suggests. “Better to marry than to burn, as St. Paul advises us.” He indicates Weatherall’s ruddy face.

                  “Didn’t he burn anyway?”

              “No… Wasn’t it a stoning?”

              ‘Well, I’m sure marriage is better than a rock in the face…’

                  ‘Not always,’ he says, laughing.

                “What is so funny?” asks Lady Frances, shooting over to them, probably wondering if she is the source of their evident mirth.

                  “His Royal Highness and I were just recalling a naval battle,” Weatherall tells her.

                “And where is the humour in that?” she demands. 

                “Oh, you had to be there, ma’am” Weatherall replies, as annoyingly as possible.

                The prince is seated at the head of the main table, with Sir John to his right and Lady Frances on the left, with Weatherall next to her. The other guests appear to be the dullest couples from the receiving line. All the prettiest ladies are at a far table, looked down upon by glassy-eyed stag and moose heads affixed to the dark pine panelling. 

                “May I say the Grace?” he asks Wentworth, who nods sheepishly.

                “Benedict nobis domine deus,” he intones, adding to this prayer some others that dry old Bishop John Fisher had taught him at Kew. “Perhaps our host will care to utter a blessing of his own,” he then says, looking at Sir John expectantly.

              “Oh, well,” mumbles the governor, proposing a toast more than a grace, “of course, yeah: we thank the good Lord for all his bounty; but we ought also to thank him for sending us so darn heroic and so…um…royal a Commander-in-Chief as the prince. Ladies and gents: His Royal Highness, Prince Edward. May God keep and protect him!” Wentworth raises his glass.

                Several more toasts are drunk, to King, Country, Army, Province, Canada, and even to Lord Dorchester. Glasses are refilled instantly from magnums ferried about by negro footmen, now dressed more like blacksmiths. Edward keeps a hand over his glass.  

                “His Royal Highness never drinks more than a sip,” you can hear Weatherall telling Lady Frances, “and he disapproves intensely of drunkenness… as indeed he does of gambling and all the other… the other vices…”

                “So…gee, what does he do for amusement then?” she asks, genuinely perplexed.

            “Amusement? I would not call it that, ma’am. He studies his Bible, and other edifying books,” Weatherall confides in hushed tones. “And, of course, he works…indeed he works very hard. Up at four in the morning, and rarely home before nine of an evening. His work gives him the greatest pleasure, or so I believe, ma’am.”

                  “Then he’s most unlike his older brother,” remarks Lady Frances. She laughs behind her napkin. “I always knew what gave him the greatest pleasure — yes, I sure did…”

                Weatherall coughs artificially, raising a dangerous eyebrow. “Indeed, ma’am, he is most unlike all of his brothers… which is why he’s the apple of his father’s eye. Many even think that Parliament will insist the crown next pass to him, and not to the elder princes…”

                ‘Is that so?’

                  To avoid bursting with laughter at this, Prince Edward asks Sir John if he’s read Mr. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The governor regrets he has not, thereby allowing the prince an opportunity to relate for him the entire plot, with its ogres, demons, cautionary tales about vanity, and all the other deadly sins. Unable to get a word in and listening in mortification to what sounds like a personal indictment, Lady Frances begins to worry about the diversions she’s planned for this evening. 

                  “Is all this here yarn taken from the Bible?” Wentworth inquires anxiously, when Christian has finally been saved from the waters of death by his Redeemer.

              “Naturally,” the prince assures him. “Which is why Mr. Bunyan’s book was once more popular than the Bible – a feat no other work has ever achieved…”

                    Soon Sir John is yawning over his venison – a dish the heads nailed to wall panelling strongly disapprove of.

                “Your husband seems weary,” he remarks to Lady Frances, who seizes upon this opportunity to speak.

                  “No reason why the old goat should be,” she says disinterestedly. “After all, he hardly does anything. And what, if I may be so bold, is it that keeps Your Highness so very, very busy here?”

                He launches into an interminable account of the minutiae involved in rethinking and rebuilding the city’s fortifications, including types of stone best suited to the different structures, optimum positioning of redoubts, variety and poundage of guns to be deployed, and so forth, on and on and on. Only when he’s paused, wondering whether to discuss the best diet for men on guard duty in winter, does she get a word in.

                “And this is seriously what you actually regard as fun, is it?” she asks, no longer so sure of herself at all.

                  “Indeed, it is, Madame. The Good Lord proscribes idleness and frivolity, does He not?”

                “What about all them flirtatious young girls you invited to dance?”

                  “I have the best and prettiest one at home already,” he says. “Here I am merely trying to be civil and dutiful… as is my, ah, my duty.”

                “When shall I meet this fine lady of yours?” she eventually asks, looking much deflated now.

                “When she chooses to invite you, I should imagine. She never visits strangers in their own home. Besides, she’s extremely busy at this moment.”

                  “What very busy lives you both must lead. It’s a wonder you found the time to meet, ain’t it?”

                “There is a time for every purpose under heaven,” he tells her gravely. “And now it must be time for those ‘entertainments’ promised by your invitation, no?”

                     ‘Excuse me for a Halifax minute, Highness.’ She now whispers to Weatherall: ‘Would he be offended by our negro slaves singing some rather bawdy songs?’

                    ‘Ma’am, he’d be deeply offended by the slaves, as well as by their songs. He regards slavery as a sin…’

                   ‘What about a local girl performin’ as Salome in that Dance of the Several Veils?’

                    ‘Absolutely appalled, ma’am.’

                    ‘Some card games?’

                    ‘No. But listen,’ says Weatherall considerately, ‘His Royal Highness will be leaving after his duty dances, so you could postpone your entertainments until then.’

                      She turns back to him, to the prince, and tentatively asks if he’d care to hear the city’s most eminent poet reciting some of his verse.

                  ‘No, not really, Madame.’ He places a hand on Sir John’s arm and says, ‘Are you fond of poetry here, Governor?’

                  Wentworth jumps out of his slumber. “I can’t tell a poem from a pisspot, Highness,” he says in an exhausted tone. “I’m not your man. To me it’s all flowery thoughts that rhyme. I don’t need my more mundane thoughts to rhyme, do you?”

                  “No. But I should require it of my flowery ones, though, Sir John – if ever they bloom, that is…”

                ‘How darn witty,’ says Lady Frances despairingly. ‘His Highness is quite the conversationalist…’

                  ‘He is quite the conservationist too, my lady,’ says Weatherall, ‘conserving his strength for the work of improving this country in every way. So, if you please…’

                The prince now performs all his duty dances, leaving many a breathless, flushed little face dizzy with delight. Then, announcing a busy day on the morrow, he takes his leave. 

                  Card tables are being put in place before he’s through the main doors, where he deftly manages to avoid further private moments with Lady Frances. He’s made sure, however, that the marvellous timepiece of beaks and twittering birds has been carried to his landau wrapped in a blanket. The slight concern lingering in him about this gift evaporates the moment he sees the giggling delight it brings to baby Jean’s eyes, as they gaze wonderingly at those fluttering, swooping, tweeting birds.

-xi-

                  The winter of 1794-95 is a busy time indeed. The desultory skirmishes and local sea-battles with France have now escalated into an all-out conflict, with much of the world seemingly as its major battlefields. The French navy, as we’ve noted, manages to retake Guadeloupe, Martinique and other islands. Because of a renewed French presence near the eastern shores of the American continent, London suddenly becomes gravely concerned that a concerted attack on Halifax might be imminent. It would comprise a first stage in their effort to regain the old French colony. You can’t wage war across the Atlantic Ocean – the English army has grasped this idea by now – so everyone is banking on Prince Edward, as the first line of defense, to keep French soldiers from landing at the only viable Canadian swaport; and also to keep French sailors from entering the St. Lawrence, headed west for Quebec. 

                     By now he’s hired many Maroons to work on rebuilding fortifications around the harbour. He’s sympathetic to the plight of these men – and at least this work will pay them – but he’s also impressed by their great strength and tireless stamina. Being so heavily forested, Jamaica received the strongest slaves, and these Maroons, originally from the Coromandel Coast of Africa, are among the strongest of all, something they prove daily clearing the roots and stumps on Citadel Hill. They still speak the Twi language of their homeland, are high-spirited, reliable and never object to the work, content now to be free men with paying employment. He has far more trouble with the local working men – especially the Scotch — than he does with the Africans. The white journeymen have a haughty attitude, regarding work as an irksome necessity, and their wages as a God-given right. They are explosively quarrelsome and annoyingly unreliable, recognizing no form of authority but their own. The provincial militia, also employed in building, he has a fondness for, however; and he’s sympathetic to the unavoidable exigencies of their personal lives. They’re obliged to return to their rural homes from April to August in order to tend farms and fields, lest their families starve during the harshly deprived winters. ‘Nova Scarcer’ is one nickname some of these hard-working, affable, mainly Irish farmers have given the province. 

                      Ever on the alert for French vessels, he keeps the pace of building at a fever pitch, soon constructing a truly formidable defense system. Yet it never seems to be formidable or extensive enough for him. He knows London is watching, his father is watching and, as always, his need to please the King overrides all other concerns. He must make Halifax impregnable — and he will.

                  Governor Wentworth’s greed, and his need to placate Lady Frances with gifts, begin to interfere with this vital project, since the funds to pay for it go first through Wentworth’s hands. This is,  as we’ve already noted, where a goodly portion of them remain too, spent on such preposterous fripperies as an ornately gilded galley, rowed by Maroons, in which Lady Frances reclines upon pillows like Cleopatra, with her various gallants peeling grapes to feed her as she slides langorously about the harbour on a sunny afternoon.

                   ‘It does not so much burn upon the waters, does it,’ he says to Weatherall, while they watch the royal barge, ‘as it smoulders in the murk out there?’

                    ‘Indeed,’ says Weatherall. ‘When people of doubtful moral quality are placed in positions of near-absolute power over remote areas the size of some European states, it swells the head…’

                ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘And can that head just keep on swelling?’

                ‘In the lady’s case, I’d say it could…’

                ‘Then we shall have to hope a strong wind comes up to blow her away one day…’ 

                     Wentworth has also taken some fifty Maroons off to his country estate out at Preston, where they work as slaves, living in wretched hovels outside the perimeter wall. To further aggravate already grievous conditions in the city, the place is now becoming overrun with French prisoners-of-war, sent up from battles in the West Indies and elsewhere. The governor was supposed to incarcerate and care for these men; yet instead, and to keep in his own offers the money provided for this purpose, he’s allowed the ragged, dispirited Frenchmen to roam city streets, plying their former trades in order to eke out a living,  though at greatly reduced rates. There are goldsmiths, shoemakers, dancing masters, perfumiers, leather workers, and men who carve dice or little boxes from animal bones. Every one of these bereft souls is being exploited in his pitiful situation by citizens eager for a bargain. The sight of her countrymen in such a poor state and so ill-used makes Julie very indignant indeed. She soon hires some of their skills, for a fair remuneration of course, in decorating the house Edward has just bought. It sits upon the northern slope of Citadel Hill, leading down to Cogswell Street and, although only made from wood, boasts Corinthian columns and an entrance lodge lit by copper oil lanterns. It is his first attempt at designing and building a house, but it will not be the last by a long chalk.With Julie’s French craftsmen, she soon makes the interior comfortable without it being  in the least part  ostentatious, like the exterior. 

                 ‘They’ve done excellent work, wouldn’t you say?’ she asks Edward, as they inspect the rooms.

                     ‘I’d also say you ought to be careful showing preferment to the French. We are at war with them, remember…’

                   ‘Them? I’m one of them… remember?’

                    ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But don’t remind everyone…’

-xii-

                      In the late spring of 1795, Julie receives another letter from her friend, Rose in Paris. She fears more bad news, yet it is not. “She’s met an artillery commander,” she tells the prince excitedly. Not another one of those, he thinks. “And they are to be married. He adores her and her children;d his real interest is mathematics, which he hopes to pursue at the Institute when this war is over. Isn’t that wonderful?”

                    ‘Yes,’ he says obligingly. ‘But it probably won’t be very wonderful for the French when it is over…’

                    ‘It’ll be wonderful for all of us.’ She hugs the letter to her breast, sighing with relief. She’s a good, faithful friend.

                      But, he thinks, interesting to find an artillery commander who’s also a mathematician. Perhaps they won’t be firing their guns quite so randomly anymore? 

                   By now he’s informed Julie and Robert Wood that, should he be transferred to the war in Europe, Wood and Chloe, his wife, have been selected as baby Jean’s potential adoptive parents. Struck dumb by the honour, they have agreed to play this role. So far there have been no signs of their own brood appearing. ‘It may be we cannot,’ Wood had said.

                    ‘You’ll never want for anything,’ the prince had assured him. ‘Money will be provided for little Jean’s schooling and personal needs as required and upon demand. Always…’ 

                   Julie had initially objected to a mere servant adopting her son, but she was easily persuaded of Wood’s exemplary character, since she has so often seen it for herself. Her main concern is that Jean’s name never be changed from ‘de Mestre’. Inwardly, however, the prospect of another appalling loss torments her, driving glacial knives into the heart.

               “In any case,” Edward had said in a placatory manner, “I regard Robert as a friend, not a servant; and this is just a contingency plan. I may well remain here. But if I am ordered to Europe, it will happen swiftly, and we need to be prepared, do we not?” With York as C-in-C, he thinks, we only need to be prepared to stay here forever.

                “We do. It’s hard, though. It’s not easy. But I know I could not care for him properly when I have no idea where I’ll be…where you’ll be…’ 

                  In the new house, they soon begin to entertain in the formal manner they’d done back in Quebec. There are levees, dinner parties, and balls enlivened by his Fusiliers’ band. For guests, they invite officers, colonial officials, landowners, manufacturers, tradesmen, and a wide variety of other local worthies – including of course the Wentworths. These are rigidly sober events, though, with Captain Weatherall informing everyone of the conduct expected from them. Prince Edward does permit games of whist, however, but only for absurdly small stakes, and mainly because Julie enjoys playing. He never touches a card himself, and he remains abstemious, rarely drinking more than a half-glass of wine. The point is not to harass and bore people, but to set an example of proper behaviour in good society; or rather to reinstate the example that was so effectively undermined by his brother, the Duke of Clarence. It’s a good thing, he thinks, that no one here can see the habitually grotesque behaviour of his brothers back home. That too is trickling down to influence every stratum of society in one way or another. The wealthier classes emulate it; the increasingly radicalized poor bitterly resent it. Edward’s entertaining also allows him to meet and befriend the kind of men who are never seen in the company of his family. The financiers, manufacturers, and particularly the aspiring industrialists make him realize with startling clarity that, while good government will always be vital, the life-blood of any country flows through the veins of an economy not an administration. The implacable force of this flow will push all the old ways aside. Land and power will soon be handing over the reins to commerce. He can see it very clearly; just as he can see the immense changes or adaptations it will require from every echelon of every society.

                    ‘Well,’ says Weatherall, after the first dinner, ‘Madame Julie certainly put that Messalina Lady Frances in her place…’

                 ‘Indeed,’ he says. ‘Poor lady, trying to trade with rapidly staling goods… I feel sorry for her…’

                    ‘That would be premature, Edward, I suspect…’

                      ‘Why?’

                      ‘She’s not someone to underestimate.’

‘Then it’s good we aren’t at war with her, is it not?’

‘Aren’t we?’