‘I meant my face.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I did think of that. But looks are soon gone and then what are you left with? No, you’ll do very well.’

I didn’t give him any encouragement, not even the faintest smile. But Jack had everything worked out.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘I know it’s usual to give a thimble but I hear you’re not much of a needlewoman. I hear you can keep accounts and write a clear hand and that’s a more useful thing. Sewing girls are ten a penny. So I picked this out instead.’

He brought a small package out of his coat pocket. It was a traveller’s inkwell, with holes for two quills and a tiny castor for pounce powder hidden in its base. There was that side to Jack. He could surprise you. It was a very lovely gift.

I said, ‘I write stories too and keep a journal. A writer likes to write something every day, you know?’

As well to get that on the table, I thought, but he showed no interest.

He just said, ‘I thought it’d come in handy. I know you’re up and down to Windsor a good deal. But you can tell those Royal Highnesses to enjoy your company while they may. Once we’re wed I won’t have you coming and going.’

I see Twyvil outdid herself:

October 15th 1792

Mushroom soup, roast pheasant and sherry wine syllabub. All like ashes in my mouth. Jack Buzzard is hard working and very ambitious. He doesn’t drink, his fingernails are immaculate and he is a stranger to self-doubt. I cannot love him because I think I love TG. I am trapped.

10

I didn’t tell Sofy about Jack, at least not immediately. It was my way of pretending nothing need come of it. He’d find a pleasanter face to look at across the table or a father-in-law with deeper pockets. The Royalties, anyway, were distracted by the turn of events in France: the King was to be tried for his crimes. But was there still a King of France? Some clever devils argued that the monarchy had been extinguished so how could charges be brought against it? Louis, they said, could only be indicted of crimes committed since he lost his crown and there were none, kept as he was under lock and key, unless playing shuttlecock and battledore had become an offence. Others argued that a trial was quite unnecessary. A man, they argued, need only be tried to establish his guilt or his innocence, but Louis had been king and all kings were tyrants whether they intended it or not, therefore Louis was guilty. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Amelia said, ‘It’s too absurd. How can a king be locked up in a prison? Why doesn’t he tell the jailer to release him immediately?’

Minny said, ‘Read your history, you silly baby.’

Sofy was gentler with her. She said, ‘I expect he’s kept there for his own well-being, until he can be given safe conduct. I expect he’ll go to Vienna, to his queen’s people.’

Sofy knew her royal houses and her geography. I always thought how strange it was that she could place all her cousins, in Mecklenburg and Saxony and Hesse, when her own world was so very small. There was the Queen’s House at Buckingham Gate, there was Windsor, and the old red house at Kew. Then she might go to Lady Harcourt’s in Oxfordshire once in a month of Sundays and to Weymouth in the summer, if the King decreed it. That was her orbit and she had no say in any of it. The Queen’s spaniels had more freedom. They could at least run into a shrubbery and sniff around unchecked.

Beyond the walls of Lower Lodge everyone guessed that King Louis was doomed. People would have been disappointed if it had gone otherwise. His sorry situation cheered them up. They might be struggling through the mud and misery of winter but at least they weren’t locked away, waiting for the footfall of a priest come to confess them for the last time.

Papi, who had found it sensible to subscribe to St George’s, Hanover Square, when he became an Englishman, suddenly insisted on our attending services. He said we must pray that sanity would prevail and the French King be spared. But like our own first King Charles, King Louis was beyond saving. He wasn’t a cruel man or a particularly avaricious one, but the times were against him. The French people were like a fire that had been banked and now began to burn bright. If he gave way too much to their demands, he was weak. If he resisted them too firmly, he was a tyrant. He was caught on a turning wheel that could not be stopped.

It was evening when we heard. Papi came home at an unusually early hour. The Prince of Wales had been giving a supper at Carlton House, but when the news was received his guests’ appetites had failed them and the party had broken up. Papi said the theatres had closed and people were milling about in the streets in spite of the cold, telling and retelling the awful details of King Louis’s fate.

He had been woken at five. No, he had been woken at four. Well, to tell the truth, he hadn’t been woken at all for how could a man sleep when he knows what the dawn will bring? He had seen his queen one last time, but then again, he had not, and the Queen for her part had rent her garments, fallen in a dead faint, or conducted herself with quiet dignity, depending on who you listened to. On certain points there was unanimity. Paris had closed its gates before first light and ordered all windows shuttered, and when the long, slow carriage ride was over and the King arrived at the scaffold and had been shorn and bound, a loud drum roll was ordered so that his final words shouldn’t be heard. At first it seemed a great novelty for a king to be treated with such insolence. Eventually I recognized it for what it was. Sheer malice, to the very end.

By morning the mood around Soho Square had changed.

What had shocked people at first hearing became less chilling and more thrilling. What a thing it would have been, people said, to have seen it, to have dipped a pocket handkerchief in the King’s blood and taken it home for a memento.

January 22nd 1793

Twyvil says King Louis’s execution doesn’t sound to her like much of a spectacle if honest people weren’t allowed to watch it from their own windows. Morphew says it’s a mark of how well things are done now in France, that a king can be despatched with no more fuss than the sticking of a pig and the ordinary business of the day resumed before his body had even been laid in lime. Susan takes it all in. They make me sick to my heart with their talk. I should write to Sofy, but what can I say? They must all be quite terrified.

I needn’t have worried about Sofy. She had decided to dispel any dreadful thoughts that might have kept her awake at night by treating King Louis’s execution as a very distant affair, the outcome of a quarrel between people too foreign for us to judge. ‘French ways are not at all our ways,’ she wrote, ‘but I think he cannot have been a good king and father to his people as our Majesty is.’

That was all she had to say on the subject. She was far more interested in the war now declared between France and England. To Sofy it held out the promise of battlefield glory for her beloved brothers. She certainly didn’t seem to fear for their lives:

Dolly is promoted colonel in the Hanoverian Foot Guards and Ernie is in the Light Dragoons. Gusta wishes we had all been born boys then none of us would be left out of the campaigning, except the Prince of Wales of course. His health must be preserved AT ALL COSTS. Fred York is already on his way to Flanders. His wife encouraged him to go as quickly as possible.

It was whispered that the Duchess of York found her husband dull-witted, that she preferred the company of her dogs, and whenever possible remained in her apartments until she heard him leave for town. She really had no one to blame but herself. She’d been acquainted with York for several months before they were married and any person with a brain in their head needed only an hour in his company to know he was a perfect blend of tedium and foolishness.

War can be a bracing thing as long as it doesn’t come too close to your own door. London was suddenly full of men parading about in their red coats and shakos, admiring themselves in shop windows. Indeed, I think it was the notion of wearing so splendid a hat that made Morphew threaten to join the Westminster Militia. He, who had so recently thought it an excellent idea for the French to kill each other, had changed his tune when they threatened to kill Englishmen. Twyvil told him they’d never take a man of fifty. Jack Buzzard, on the other hand, was just the age to enlist and he was worried for his position at Gunter’s and any setback to his plans to go into business on his own account. Papi said I shouldn’t fret, that there were always ways to ensure a man was spared from the levy, but of course it wasn’t Jack I was concerned for.

My thoughts were all for Tom Garth. I guessed that any cavalry major would soon be sent to the battle front and I decided to prepare myself for the worst. Instead of a secret lover I imagined myself a secret war widow. That way, if ever I heard Garth had been killed practice would have made me strong.

I see from my journal that even Mother was roused to domestic war effort:

March 15th 1793

Twyvil has orders to buy only prime roasting meats so that there will be gravy beef enough for our soldiers. Mother also resolved to give our skim-milk to the poor French refugees who are lodged in Meard Street but Papi says better to sell it to them at a fair price because charity weakens the character. I’m sure I shall never see TG again.

I was supposed to join Sofy at Windsor after Easter but then I received word that she had chicken pox and I had better delay my departure until she went to Kew to recuperate. Jack was pleased. He’d paid to be excused the Army lists, and war or no war he’d begun his search for premises. He came to Sunday dinner at Soho Square every week to tell us what progress he’d made. Finding the right place for his shop was no easy matter. The address had to be good but the lease affordable, there had to be accommodations above for us to live in, and the place of business had to be of a particular conformation. He needed store rooms and cool rooms, a good-sized window to display his confections, and a private office that could be made comfortable for ladies to sit and peruse the catalogue.

He said, ‘I’m not setting out to ape Gunter’s—nobs lounging about all day for the price of a jelly—I’m going to be catering to households. High-quality confectionery, bespoke or ready-made, for delivery.’

I said, ‘I wonder if there’ll be enough demand for sweetmeats, now we’re at war? Papi says the Prince thinks of closing up Carlton House.’

Since the French King had lost his head there had been no shortage of advice for the Prince of Wales. Some said displays of pomp and splendour were more important than ever, to reassure people that whatever abominations the French stooped to, there would always be an England, with processions and levees and a good King firmly on his throne. But louder voices said the Prince would do well to settle his debts and go quietly into the country to shoot birds until such time as he was required to fulfil his destiny.

Jack said, ‘The Prince of Wales! I won’t be looking to HIM for custom. I’d as soon build a house on sand. If he won’t pay Coker for silver dishes he looks at every time he sits down to dine, what hope is there he’ll pay for sugar plums, eaten and forgotten? No, Nellie, we’ll do a steady kind of trade, with people who settle their accounts. There’ll always be ball suppers.’

One day he showed me a sketch he’d done of how the shop sign would read.

At the Sign of the Green Pineapple

sole proprietor John Buzzard

Purveyor of wet and dry sweetmeats, ices, cordials and ornamental table furnishings.

He said I might have my name on it too, once I’d learned the trade. I couldn’t think what he meant.

He said, ‘There’s a good deal to know, Nellie. The sugar work alone takes years.’

I said I had no intention of being a confectioner. I was going to write books. Mother laughed nervously, Papi said ‘Pfft’, and Jack said books didn’t fill bellies but no matter because I was young and would soon get over that silly fancy. I was in a fury:

June 17th 1793

Sometimes I don’t mind Jack Buzzard but today he was so condescending I quite hated him. He said there’ll be no time for scribbling when we have a shop to run and children to raise. He said we’ll have two boys and then a girl, as though you order babies like cream ices. Well I may be young but I don’t see that writing stories is any more fanciful than making castles out of pastry. I wish Sofy would send for me.

Sofy didn’t but Mrs Chevely did. She was at Kew supervising Sofy’s convalescence. She said Sofy was now clear of the chicken pox, though still weak and troubled with spasms of the throat, and I might attend her at my earliest convenience. Papi said it sounded like the family malady: swelling of the glands. He said Sofy should go to Brighton and try the waters.

I said, ‘With Mrs Fitzherbert in town? Papi, you know she’d never be allowed.’