She said, ‘What games shall we play tomorrow?’

I asked if we might go to the menagerie, to see the tiger, but there was no tiger at Kew. It had died.

‘Royal says it was because they didn’t find it a husband, so it grew sad and pined away.’

The Princess Royal might have been speaking from her heart: twenty-two and still not established. She’d a long while yet to wait too, thwarted and kept a maid because this one didn’t suit the King and that one didn’t suit the Queen. A lonely tiger had at least had the option of refusing its food.

I couldn’t sleep that night, for the silence. In Soho Square there was always some comforting racket to lull you. When the sound of carriage wheels began to subside the night watch started up, and when the night watch had called his last hour the milk maid and the night-soil men began clattering about. Kew was like a graveyard.

We did visit the menagerie the next morning. Miss Gouly allowed it on condition we went equipped with paper and pencils and the guidance of Mr Wuppert the drawing master. There were few moments of idleness for Sofy, or even for Amelia who was really still a very little girl. The hours were filled, the day’s activities were preordained, the year portioned out; this month at Kew, that month at Windsor. Time was killed before it could give birth to any dangerous whimsies.

I’d had some schooling myself—Papi had taught me to add a column of figures, Mother had done her best with me on the spinet and the rest I’d learned from Miss Barbauld’s Lessons for Children—but my education had been administered quickly, like a draught of senna, not dragged out for the sake of keeping me occupied. There was no need. I wasn’t the kind of girl to get into mischief or to lollop on a couch, sighing with boredom. I could be helpful if needed, and when not required I had the gift of becoming invisible and entertaining myself. The more I learned about the Royalties the more I thought my own family’s way of doing things vastly superior.

Even the menagerie didn’t impress me. I noted:

… pheasant and peafowl and an elk which is a mighty kind of deer sent from Canada. Also a striped horse from Africa, called a quagga. We were not allowed to stroke it in case it kicked. P. Sofy said she hoped it would soon have a baby. I think she is old enough to know a quagga cannot have a baby if she doesn’t have a husband. A surgeon called Mr Hawkins attended Princess Minny and lanced her abscess. Mrs Chevely who is her nurse said she didn’t cry out even once. Sofy gave me a fairing of a milkmaid and P. Amelia gave me a hair ribband because Sofy told her she had been unkind to me, refusing to kiss me goodbye. I don’t know if I was found suitable as a Humble Companion. I should like to be Sofy’s friend but I don’t much care to go to Kew again. Mother told Miss Tod I came home with bites and now it’s all around the square that the Royalties have bed bugs.

3

It was late October before I was summoned again, to be present at the celebration of Sofy’s eleventh birthday at Windsor. Whatever test had been set me, I had apparently passed it. My trunk was prepared, this time with a silk gown as well as a woollen one, and Mother was triumphant. Nellie Welche, invited to a Royal Highness’s birthday! Then the King was indisposed, the Royalties delayed their departure for Windsor and my gowns were taken out of the trunk. They were put back when he was reported to be a little improved, taken out again when he was sufficiently unwell to be taking laudanum and out they stayed—until it was confirmed that the Queen and the Princesses had finally shifted from St James’s and the King had followed on after attending a levee. On the morning of All Hallow’s Eve Morphew drove me out to Windsor in the berlin.

The news sheets said His Majesty was suffering from a bilious form of gout but Papi said more likely he had the marsh ague, for he’d heard the King had been seen wading in the river at Kew to talk to the basket weavers who lived on Lot’s Eyot. It was certainly true that when I got to Windsor the King was drinking cinchona in peppermint water and feeling much better.

There was a castle at Windsor, that much I knew, and I was thrilled to see that it had towers and battlements and arrow slits. Unlike Kew Palace, it conformed to my idea of what a castle should be. But the castle wasn’t my destination. In those days only the Prince of Wales ever lodged there. Such other rooms as were habitable were occupied by tenants who had tenancies for life and therefore, disobligingly, lived to be a hundred. The rest of the castle was in a shocking state of disrepair. Papi said if it were his he’d have had it pulled to the ground and the land built upon, but the King loved Windsor for its hunting and its venerable history and so had begun a scheme to restore it, little by little.

Meanwhile the living arrangements were much like those at Kew, with the King and Queen and older Princesses in one house, just outside the castle walls, and the younger Royal Highnesses in another close by. Their numbers dictated it and Sofy welcomed it, for who would want to be under the eye of a Queen every minute of the day?

The Princesses were all present on that occasion. I know because I critiqued them:

November 1st 1788

P. Royal is 22. She has a thick waist and never smiles.

Poor Royal. No Wonder. She wanted a husband and she needed one, for until she was matched there were no prospects for her sisters, and there were certainly husbands enough to choose from. Mecklenburg and Brandenburg and Saxony had princes by the cartload. Royal’s problem was that the King couldn’t bear to part with her.

P. Augusta is jolly with v. red cheeks. She is a great taker of walks, whatever the weather. P. Elizabeth has dark hair and dimples. I think she is the prettiest. P. Minny is pretty too but v. thin.

I hadn’t wanted to like Minny, praised as she’d been by Miss Gouly as a paragon of sweetness and accomplishment, but I found I did like her and I still do. The famous beauty of the family, with the voice of a nightingale. You’d never think it to see her now, more shrunk and lined even than I am and as tough as a bone button. Minny observes little things, though not unkindly. As we grew to know one another, if she was amused by something that had escaped everyone else’s notice she would look to see if I had caught it too and raise a quizzical eyebrow. She’s the last of the sisters left now, sitting in her merlin chair with her memories.

That Sunday we trooped up to the castle for morning prayers, with Her Majesty and Royal leading the way and all of them in enormous hooped skirts, quite out of fashion. It was my first sighting of the Queen and the Queen’s first sighting of me.

‘Ach!’ she said, ‘poor child. Vot a face! Ken nussink be done?’

I might have said the same of her. She still wore her hair high and was as ugly as a turbot, sallow and stooped, with no neck to speak of, which must have been a great disadvantage for a queen with so many fine necklaces at her disposal. I was tall for my age so we were able to inspect each other eye to eye and, though I learned to dread encounters with her, that first day I felt bold. If she didn’t like me, I thought, let her send me back to Soho Square. It’s common knowledge that companions are liable to be ill-used, but at least I wasn’t one of those unfortunate creatures with no home to retreat to. Besides, I’d heard Sofy and Minny mimicking her, and if they had so little respect for her I saw no reason why I should care for her good opinion.

The King was a different matter. They all adored him and, well, he was the King. Even my father, who believed in progress and enterprise and was in the service of the Prince of Wales, even Papi esteemed King George. But that Sunday I was spared the ordeal of being inspected by the King because his legs were gouty and he was feverish again, so on the advice of his physician, he kept to his bedchamber.

After prayers we went to Upper Lodge for a breakfast of hot oatmeal and there I saw Miss Burney, the author of Evelina that Mother had once tried to read but had found too facetious. Miss Burney was a member of the Queen’s household, an assistant Keeper of the Robes. I imagined some terrible reversal must have forced her to leave off authoring and become a servant. I longed to speak to her, but at the Queen’s table conversation was by Her Majesty’s invitation only. The Royalties were hemmed in by many silly rules but this was one of the most regrettable, for the Queen was no judge of wit. Quite the opposite. Unerringly she turned to dullards and left people with lively minds to stew in silence.

It became my great hope to see Miss Burney again, perhaps even to speak to her, because she had been a real authoress, even if her fortunes were shockingly reduced. On Sofy’s birthday she appeared at Lower Lodge with the gift of a crewel-work heartsease pansy, framed in wood, and Sofy, dear soul, showed her the book that had been my gift to her: The Queen’s Quagga, written and illustrated by Cornelia Welche. I had decided ‘Cornelia’ looked handsomer than ‘Nellie’ for a book cover.

Miss Burney looked it over most carefully. ‘My compliments, Cornelia Welche,’ she said. ‘This is a fine piece of work.’

Which set my heart thumping and robbed me entirely of my voice and all the questions I had planned to ask her.

Sofy said, ‘We call her Nellie.’

And Amelia said, ‘She’s Sofy’s humble companion and there’s nothing can be done about her face except to paint it with ceruse when she is growed a little older.’

Miss Burney said, ‘I hope she will not. A young face should be left fresh and natural.’

Then Miss Gouly tried to hush Amelia but Amelia wouldn’t be hushed.

‘Oh, but Burney,’ she said, ‘the Queen says Nellie must paint it for if she don’t she’ll frighten the horses.’

My face was on fire but not because of Amelia. I was burning with happiness because Miss Fanny Burney had called my book ‘a fine piece of work’.

Sofy stared at her slippers and Minny threw a ball of paper at Amelia. Miss Burney bobbed a curtsey and hurried away. She almost always was in a hurry. When you were a Keeper of the Robes you never knew when the Queen might require you for her toilette. How terrible, I remember thinking, to have no time to call your own.

Miss Burney had no sooner left when the Prince of Wales arrived, with gifts of a clockwork parakeet and a necklace of seashells. He was accompanied by Frederick, Duke of York, who wore a bob wig and a coat that was far too tight. He giggled like a girl, and he had forgotten to bring a birthday gift. Then at three o’clock Lady Finch came to escort the Royal Highnesses to Upper Lodge for Sofy’s birthday dinner with the King and Queen, and I was left to dine with Miss Gouly, Mademoiselle Montmollin and Mrs Chevely, a poor widow, who had been the nursery nurse and was kept on out of charity, and against the day any of them should fall sick.

We ate in silence until I said, ‘It seems very odd to me, to invite a friend to your birthday and then go to dinner without her.’

Gouly and Mrs Che looked at each other as though the cat had coughed up a fur ball. Which of them should deal with it? It fell to Mrs Chevely, whose manner was less severe, perhaps because it was my first offence.

She said, ‘You mistake your position, Nellie. You’re a companion, not a friend. Do you understand the distinction?’

I said, ‘I know I’m not paid.’ Another fur ball.

I was sent to the school room to consider whether I was suitably grateful for the great honour done me. My mind though ran on other things. I wanted Sofy to return, to tell me what they’d had for dessert and who had said what. I waited and waited but she and Minny and Amelia slipped back into the house without my hearing them and went straight to their beds. Miss Gouly sent a maid to tell me I should do likewise. I found Sofy weeping and when I asked her why, she wept all the more.

‘I cannot tell you,’ was all she’d say. ‘I cannot.’

And I, fool that I was, couldn’t leave it at that but had to start guessing what was troubling her.

I said, ‘Is it the Illustrious Personage?’

That was what they called the Queen when they made fun of her.

‘Don’t be disrespectful, Nellie,’ she said, and cried all the more. ‘Poor, poor Mama.’

That was how I learned that though it was acceptable to laugh with Royalties it was not permitted to aim a solo barb at Royalties. I fled down the back stairs and out of the house. I thought I would run away from Windsor and never return, but in my haste I hadn’t put on my warm joseph or taken my change purse which contained two shillings and six pence. It was dark and an icy wind was tossing the trees. I believe I should have frozen to death if Miss Burney hadn’t come upon me.

‘Cornelia Welche!’ she said. ‘What do you do out of doors without a coat?’

I told her I was quitting my position as Humble Companion and asked her which was the road for London. She said it would be the greatest pity for a promising author to have her throat cut by a footpad before she had begun to make her name in the world, and she wrapped her mantle around my shoulders and took me to her little chamber at Upper Lodge and gave me a dish of tea.

I learned then that Miss Burney had had published not one novel but two, and though she was presently unable to write a third, kept as she was in a permanent dither by the Queen—forgotten for hours, sent for with great urgency, dismissed, not needed after all—she still wrote a journal. When I asked her if she thought she would ever write more books she said, ‘Oh yes. Writers, you know, never stop, no matter how many obstacles life throws in their path or how much publishers plead with them. I’m afraid it’s an incurable vice. Now, tell me why you planned to run away.’