‘Ach!’ he said. ‘But Miss Fitz iss finish! Now he doss not never see her. Only he plays cards viz his friends. Soon he vill make gut marriage viz gut German Princess. You see.’
Jack didn’t want me to go to Kew. He said, ‘How long will you be gone?’
With Royalties you never could say.
He said, ‘Well that’s not right, Nellie. They should say how long. They should make it clear. You’re not a servant.’
I said, ‘No, I’m a friend.’
‘Do you reckon so? Friend to a princess? Can that be?’
‘I don’t know. I never had a friend before Sofy so I’ve no measure for it.’
He went away cross but he came back before I left for Kew and brought a bottle of walnut cordial for Sofy, highly recommended for debilitations of the throat.
Sofy’s condition was much worse than Mrs Chevely had described it. She was very weak and could swallow nothing but clear soup. But the worst of it was the spasms that gripped her, sometimes twenty times in a day. She might be sitting comfortably at her work or listening to me read and suddenly be thrown about by terrible convulsions, gasping for air, sometimes to the point of fainting away. Then she’d revive and seem to have little recollection of the crisis. Mrs Chevely slept by her side every night and the physician came every day, scratched his head and went away again.
Gradually though, in the third week of my visit, she began to regain her strength. The spasms lessened, and there came an afternoon when she seemed so improved and was sleeping so peacefully beneath the horse chestnut that we crept away, Minny, Amelia and myself, to net butterflies. We hadn’t been gone more than five minutes when we heard cries of alarm and ran back to find Sofy in the throes of another fit and Mrs Che fanning her with one hand and waving a bottle of hartshorn salts under her nose with the other. When she came to her senses she was in the very devil of a mood.
She said, ‘Where were you? I couldn’t swallow.’
Amelia said, ‘But you were asleep. Why did you need to swallow?’
Sofy said, ‘I wasn’t asleep. I was resting. And when I looked up you’d all gone away and left me, and I couldn’t swallow. I could have died.’
Mrs Chevely was quite put out. ‘Royal Highness,’ she said, ‘I swear I was no more than two steps away.’
Minnie said, ‘As Sofy very well knows.’
Then Sofy began to weep. She declared that no one cared for her except her brothers and they were all far away soldiering.
Amelia said, ‘I might say the same.’
‘No,’ Sofy said, ‘you know you’re quite the favourite. Fred and Dolly write to you much oftener than they write to me and so does the King. You’re their treasure and Minny is their beauty and I’m nothing.’
Minnie said, ‘You’re a goose, that much is certain.’
And Amelia said she didn’t know that Minny was so very beautiful.
Two thoughts occurred to me sitting on the lawn at Kew that afternoon. One was that the Queen showed no concern for Sofy’s health. To my knowledge three weeks had passed without Sofy receiving either a letter or any promise of a visit. Her Majesty remained stubbornly at Windsor, absorbed in her new venture. She had exchanged her Frogmore cottage for the larger house beside it and was attending to every detail of its refurbishment. My other thought was that it didn’t matter if the Queen never came. There was nothing she or anyone else could do. Sofy had decided upon a profession. She would be an invalid.
Jack was no great correspondent but his letters arrived too often for me to keep Sofy entirely in the dark.
I said, ‘It’s from the gentleman who sent the walnut syrup.
He asks how you get on with it.’
‘Tell him I thank him but I get along very poorly. Who is he, did you say?’
‘A confectioner. He makes ices sometimes for the Prince of Wales.’
She said, ‘Is he old?’
I said, ‘He’s thirty-two.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I see. So I expect you’ll marry him and I’ll be left without a friend.’
I said, ‘No husband will ever keep me from my friends.’ It was the best I could do. How could I explain to her what I could hardly explain to myself, that I prayed every day for deliverance from Jack’s expectations. He was a careful, steady man and I wished him no injury, but if he had happened to fall for another girl it would have suited me very well. For in spite of my duty to my father and mother, to do what was prudent and be grateful for the chance of any husband, I could no longer deny that my heart belonged to someone else. I was in love with Tom Garth, a man widely regarded as old and ugly, not to say faithfully married to his regiment and oblivious to my feelings. No sensible person would ever believe it.
How we all tried to humour Sofy that summer. The Prince of Wales sent her a pair of slippers. Princess Augusta came from Windsor and gave us an impersonation of the Illustrious Personage, bustling about Frogmore, playing the hausfrau. And I wrote a little entertainment—an imagined conversation between Twyvil and Morphew in which Morphew tried to explain to Twyvil the newest animal in the Kew menagerie: a kangaroo. Minny and I acted it out, she playing Twyvil, padded fore and aft with pillows, and a bed sheet wrapped around her for an apron; I played Morphew, with my nose rouged and a nest of mop strings on my head. Augusta said it was better than any of the theatricals she had seen at Weymouth.
When Sofy was strong enough to travel it was decided she should go into Kent, to drink the Chalybeate waters at Tunbridge Wells, and I was dismissed. I could remember a time when I was eager enough to go home and leave off being a Humble Companion, but that was before Jack Buzzard began laying out my life for me, like a recipe for candied ginger.
Some days I dreaded seeing him, some days I bore it better by provoking him. He rarely failed to prove to my satisfaction what a dullard he was and I lived in the hope that he might conclude I was too ungovernable to be his wife.
He said, ‘I’m glad to see you back, Nellie, but you talk different when you’ve been with those Highnesses and I can’t say I care for it.’
I said, ‘Oh but an author must sometimes take on a different plumage, you know? To try a voice and see how it might be used?’
‘Author!’ he said. ‘I wish you’d stop harping on that. There’ll be no time for your scribbling when we’re wed. Scribbling won’t get the baby a new bonnet. You write a good letter, I’ll give you that, but authoring’s a different line altogether. For one thing you need an education for book writing.’
I said, ‘Fanny Burney had no education.’ And he said, ‘Fanny who?’
11
Sofy wrote to me in high excitement. Her brother Dolly was on his way to England, with sabre wounds to his cheek and his shoulder. His regiment had tried to capture a Flanders port called Dunkirk but they had been routed in a fierce battle at Hondeschoote and there were very many casualties. I scanned the list of dead and wounded in Papi’s Gentleman’s Magazine, fearing what name I might see but still unable to stop myself looking. Hondeschoote was a great reversal for our soldiers and a blot on Freddie York’s command, but Sofy didn’t dwell on that. All that mattered to her was that Prince Dolly was coming home. She wrote:
September 30th 1793
I suppose I shall hardly know him. He was a boy of twelve when last I saw him and now he’s a grown man. We hoped he would come straight to Kew but our Illustrious Personage means to keep him to herself first, at Windsor. Prinnie recommends sea bathing for his wounds and would have him go on to Brighton but the King says we cannot be seen GADDING ABOUT when we are at war. I pray Dolly’s wounds are not grave. A scar can be very dashing as long as it doesn’t run too deep. And dear, dear Nellie, my spasms have quite subsided and I have no further trouble with my swallow.
Her prayers concerning Dolly were answered. His cuts were not life-threatening, but just enough to add an interesting feature to his rather empty face and to gain him a few months’ furlough. And to add to her joy another brother was on his way back to England, though without the glory of a battle scar. Prince Augustus, who had been settled in Italy for the sake of his weak chest, had been ordered home by the King. A rumour had reached the King’s ears that instead of sketching ancient ruins Augustus was courting an unsuitable lover, Lord Dunmore’s daughter, Lady Augusta Murray.
You might think love was a natural enough pastime for a man with nothing else to do, but Augustus was only twenty years old and Goosy Murray was fully thirty and merely the daughter of an earl, so the Majesties wished to rein him in before things went too far. But things had already gone too far. Prince Gus and his Goosy had been secretly married in Rome. I was at Windsor when he arrived, without his new wife. He was a pale, willowy figure, almost girlish. There was no sign of the corpulence the Hanovers ran to so easily. That caught up with him much later in life.
As was usually the way with the Royalties, the facts of the case emerged slowly and to a selected few. Princess Elizabeth was Gus’s first confidante. He and Lady Murray had not only married in Rome, a foreign ceremony that surely counted for nothing, but the very instant they reached London Goosy’s mother had made sure they compounded the crime by marrying again at St George’s in Hanover Square. She was evidently determined to have a royal son-in-law. Perhaps she’d been too long away from England to understand that the statute books were piled against the marriage.
A king’s son may not marry without the king’s consent. And then, what was the second ceremony worth when Gus had made his vows under a false name? The vicar could hardly be held accountable but he apparently feared he could and so promptly passed the blame along to the curate, who handed it on to the parish clerk, and he no doubt found it was due to the negligence of his wife’s cat. When all was said and done, Prince Augustus was well and truly married, and yet he was not. It was a puzzle.
Elizabeth came to Lower Lodge and told Minny and Sofy but not until Amelia was out of earshot. The Majesties and Princess Royal were still in the dark.
Minny said, ‘Can it be annulled without the King knowing?’
Elizabeth said she thought it could not. ‘And anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure it would be the right thing to do. The situation is delicate.’
A child was on the way.
Sofy said, ‘A baby! We shall be aunts! Well then, there’s no need for Gus to fear telling the King. The King loves babies.’ But of course the King didn’t love babies conceived without his consent. He expected such babies to be put quietly away, with a small allowance paid for their upkeep, if absolutely necessary.
