He said nothing.

‘Sofy needs my help. Just for a week or two. If you only knew.’

Then he turned to me.

He said, ‘I have heard talk.’

Of course he had. I don’t know how I’d ever imagined such a secret could be kept. The whispers had begun even before Sofy’s lying-in was finished.

I said, ‘You guessed then? When I was with her last summer?’

‘None of my affair,’ he said. ‘I’m not one for tittle-tattle.

You know that.’

‘It’s the cruellest thing, Jack. That baby boy. She can see him, but she can’t keep him and she can’t speak of him, not to her sisters at any rate.’

‘Load of nonsense,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t they just marry her off quick and be done? They wouldn’t be the first to cuckold the parson. Or is the fellow already wed? Is that it? What’s his name?’

‘I don’t know,’ I lied, and I was never so grateful for a darkened room.

‘Well,’ he said, settling down to sleep, ‘you can be a softhearted soul, Nellie, and I doubt you’re appreciated by any Royalties, but if you must go, you must.’

The news sheets had hardly reported the King’s indisposition. Vice-Admiral Nelson’s victory at Copenhagen was more newsworthy and stories about the Princess of Wales outsold even that. At the Princess’s house in Blackheath an infant girl had appeared, about two years old. Her name was Edwardine. Rumours had it that she was George Canning’s child. He often dined with Princess Caroline and was known to be a great darling of hers. Others said Admiral Smith was the father. He was another of Caroline’s favourites, admitted to her presence even before she was dressed, and the child was reported to have his dark curls. Sofy would have none of it.

She said, ‘Edwardine was a foundling and Caroline has taken in the little lamb. She just longs to fill her house with children, and as my brother swears he’ll never share her bed again what else is she to do?’

Sofy’s only criticism of what went on at Blackheath concerned the visits the King made.

‘His Majesty means well,’ she said. ‘I see his intention, to be her friend when so many have turned against her. He is her uncle, after all. But the doctors shouldn’t allow him to go in person, Nellie, not so soon after his delirium. Caroline is liable to jangle the calmest person’s nerves.’

Sofy and I grew closer that summer in Weymouth. I’d put all thoughts of Tom Garth behind me. Though he was oblivious of having done me any hurt I felt he had betrayed me just as much as he had Sofy. The indifference of him that August morning! As I remembered it, he hadn’t even looked at his son. And then the counting out of money in the Sharlands’ back room, as though nothing of more consequence than a horse was being traded. He disgusted me. And Sofy needed a friend more than ever. In her family she was the only one who took the Princess of Wales’s part. In her sisters’ company it was heresy to say the fault lay as much if not more with Wales himself, but she dared to say it. She had grown up too. During the month I spent with her we often walked past Mr Sharland’s shop and twice we were rewarded with the sight of Tommy, just a year old and taking his first comical steps. Sofy never flinched, never cried. No one would ever have guessed. And Garth, Mrs Che informed me, was promoted full general and given command of the First Royal Dragoons. An extraordinary reward, I thought, for a man who had ruined the King’s daughter. I could only think that there was a bigger plan afoot, to marry Sofy to him quietly, when the story of a Weymouth foundling was forgotten.

That summer there was another baby born that was not to be spoken of. Prince Gus’s wife had slipped free of her banishment to Devonshire and gone to live with him in Hanover, quite openly. But his allowance was insufficient to keep a wife and child so he had come home to try and improve his circumstances and Goosy with him, visibly carrying another child. They stayed at Lower Grosvenor Street, where Goosy’s mother had taken a house, and there a baby girl was born. Augusta, sister of Augustus, daughter of Augustus and Augusta, and born, very fittingly, in August.

Prince Gus declared nothing would now part him from his wife and children, that he would live privately in England with his little family, come what may. It was fine talk. The Queen told him he was a fool if he didn’t understand that a winter in England would kill him and leave his so-called wife a widow, and so he caved in and agreed to go to a kinder climate with a royal dukedom and a kick up his hinder parts. By the end of the year Gus, Duke of Sussex, was in Lisbon and his wife and children were consigned to oblivion. His sisters may have styled him a great romantic but the truth is he was ever one for a peaceful life.

19

For a few years Weymouth summers replaced the gloomy Windsor visits I used to make to be with her on her birthday. It suited Jack better. October and November were two of his busiest months but August was dead in London. In Weymouth things were livelier, though the Royalties had the gift of stifling anything that threatened to stimulate them. Their routines were sacred, the wheels of their lives struggled through ever deeper ruts. Princess Augusta grew stout. Her dutiful attendance on the Queen kept her from the active life she would have liked, but there was never any question of rebellion. Princess Elizabeth longed for a husband but as there was no prospect of one she ate cake instead and grew fatter even than Royal had been.

With the Royalties there was always at least one topic that must not be discussed. That year there were several:

August 4th 1802

Another child has appeared at Blackheath, an orphan boy called William. The Princess of Wales says she intends to raise him as her own. There will be talk as to whether he actually is her own, but not in this house. At Gloucester Lodge he is referred to as Caroline’s new ward.

P. Amelia is violently in love with an equerry called Fitzroy. This is not being talked about either but I shall say something, to Mrs Che if not to Sofy.

Louisa Chevely wouldn’t be drawn on the subject of Amelia’s flirtation. She said she knew of no partiality on either side.

I said, ‘But she talks of nothing else. If they ride out she’s always at his side. When we go to the theatre he must have the seat beside her.’

‘Perhaps he does make a pet of her,’ she conceded, ‘but who can blame him? She’s such a dear child.’

But Amelia wasn’t a child. She was only a few days short of nineteen and I had seen her designing how she might embroider Fitzroy’s initials entwined with her own.

I said, ‘Hasn’t there been tragedy enough? Does the Queen know about it? Doesn’t she care? Or does she think Sofy’s little setback was managed so well it won’t matter if history is repeated?’

‘Nellie Buzzard!’ she said. ‘You had better hold your tongue or go away.’

Only Miss Gouly shared my anxiety but she was more concerned for Amelia’s feelings than for her virtue.

She said, ‘I wish Lord Fitzroy would take care. Amelia so looks up to him and he’s very indulgent of her. Of course he has a wife in town and a child too, so there can really be no question … and I do worry when I see her building these castles in the air. They’ll come crashing down and then she’ll suffer. You know she’s never been strong.’

Charles Fitzroy was married to Lord Londonderry’s daughter but that didn’t seem to prevent his encouraging Amelia. He was a soldier. Perhaps he enjoyed flirtations wherever he found them, seeing we know not the hour. There was no reason he should understand the working of a girl’s heart. Men in gentler professions than his find women an unfathomable mystery.

I had no great affection for Amelia. We had started on the wrong foot all those years ago and I always found her silly and affected, but I didn’t wish Sofy’s fate on anyone and I would have said something, offered her a gentle reminder, if the subject hadn’t been entombed in Royal silence.

August 6th

Two years ago today Tommy was born. We went this morning to Ryal’s to buy a new bowling hoop for Princess Charlotte. Sofy also bought a horse on wheels and we left it at Sharland’s door. The boy wasn’t at home but we saw him later playing on the sands. He is tall for his age. Sofy v. quiet afterwards. She asked me why I have no child yet. I told her it’s not the getting of them that is my difficulty. Only that my body seems not to know how to keep them. She suggested I take to my bed the minute I know I’ve caught. Sofy has no notion of my life. Tomorrow we are expected to be sailors.

The Southampton stood guard in the bay that summer and the King was rowed out to her as often as the weather allowed. He liked to cruise about off Portland. The Queen didn’t go to sea, but if he called for his daughters to accompany him not even a Humble Companion dared refuse him. There was quite a swell that day, I remember, and there were moments when I wished myself on dry land, but then a wonderful thing happened. A convoy was sighted, of victualling boats and transports bound for Guernsey with an escort of frigates and cutters. The Southampton signalled that she had His Majesty aboard and as they sailed past us their men stood out along the yardarms and cheered ‘God Save the King’. It was something to be there and hear it. I found I had a tear in my eye, though it may have been brought on by the wind for it was blowing very fresh.

We came back to Gloucester Lodge in time for dinner and were met by the sound of laughter coming from the equerries’ room. I recognised one of the voices and so did the Royal Highnesses. Minny flung open the door and there sat Wales, unwigged and as fat as a brewery pig, drinking with the equerries Gwynn and Price. What a welcome he had, even from Sofy who was always whispering to me about how cruelly he treated his wife. She loved him nonetheless. All his sisters did. Perhaps even then they had shifted their hopes of freedom to the unmentionable future date when their father would die, Wales would be King and there might be husbands for them all.

He squinted at me.

Sofy said, ‘You remember, Nellie?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nellie. Nellie Welche, how do you do? And your father?’

I said, ‘My father died, sir, nearly two years ago.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. Fine steward, Welche. Damned fine.’

I went home to an unhappy house. Jack often grew quarrelsome when I was away with the Royalties, and with every year that passed Ambrose was more inclined to stand up to him. I was to blame, of course, whatever the quarrel.

Jack said, ‘You’ve ruined him with all your teaching. He didn’t need it and now he’s growing too big for his boots.’

Ambrose was trying his muscles. Eighteen, it was only natural. But there was more than that gnawing at Jack. The war was over, or so we thought. An accord had been signed, the Treaty of Amiens, that everyone believed was a Godsend until they woke up to Boney’s wiles and realized it was a five-minute wonder. With peace breaking out Jack expected business to grow livelier, but the opposite had happened. People who had grown bored with giving balls and dinners in London went off in great flocks to Paris and the bell over the door of the Pink Lemon fell very quiet. We lived carefully and we were managing well enough but the question of money came between us that winter and after that it never really went away. Jack thought I was holding out on him.

Since Papi’s death I had a small income of my own and I wasn’t willing to throw all of it into the Pink Lemon. Jack often enough made his plans and decisions without consulting me so I felt entitled to do likewise. Some of my money was invested in the Surrey Iron Railway. It was for my old age. I was twenty-seven and childless and, unlike my mother, I’d have no kindly brother-in-law to take me in when the time came. Then there was my book. I was almost done writing, but for want of a patron I knew I’d have to meet the cost of printing it. Money wasted, Jack thought.

He said, ‘I’m damned if I know where you get your giddy ideas. You ought to be helping me through a bad patch, not throwing brass away on story books. And you ought to set your mind to giving me a little lad of my own.’

I said, ‘Set my mind to it? Is that where you think the deficiency lies? That my babies come off unfinished because I don’t apply myself? Don’t you know anything?’