I said, ‘I know German.’
‘Oh, so do we,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows German.’ Sofy said, ‘I expect Nellie forgot to bring her sewing.’
The truth was, Nellie wasn’t gifted with a needle, for no matter how much Nellie was rapped across her knuckles she still favoured her left hand, which as every sensible person knows is the Devil’s hand. So Nellie spoke up, before something was found for her from the mending bag. I said that I preferred not to sew because it reminded me of my dead sister and Miss Gouly replied that industry was a better cure for grief than sentimental moping and it was a terrible thing if I was allowed to sit idle at home.
I said, ‘I don’t sit idle. I run important errands and help my Papi with his receipt books and I read to my mother every night.’
I might have added that I was only obliged to read to Mother till her head drooped, and if it was a book I didn’t care for I’d read it in a slow, droning fashion so that sleep would overtake her quickly. As soon as she began to snuffle I was free to creep away to the morning room and hide there, writing my own stories until my candle was spent.
The hours passed and no carriage came to take us away. The sky was still light when Gouly instructed us to wash our faces and put on our nightgowns. Sofy and I shared a bed in Amelia’s room so that Princess Minny shouldn’t be disturbed. The news from the sickroom was that she was still in much pain in spite of being cupped but bore it as bravely as ever. By all accounts Princess Minny was a saint as well as a great beauty.
I waited until Amelia was asleep before I dared to ask Sofy my most urgent question: was this really a royal palace?
She said, ‘I think so. It’s called Kew Palace. Why do you ask?’
I said, ‘Because it’s just a house. I think it should be bigger, don’t you, to be called a palace?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s quite big enough for us, don’t you think?’
I tried a different approach and suggested it didn’t seem quite royal enough for a king.
‘Oh I see,’ she said. ‘But the King and Queen don’t live here. When they come to Kew they stay in the white house, across the lawn. Royal and Augusta and Elizabeth stay there too. Then Lady Finch has a place on Ferry Lane, and there are plenty of houses on the green for the princes to live in if they ever come, so we really manage very well.’
I didn’t want to appear boastful but I could have told her that my family’s house was much better appointed than Kew. Our windows didn’t rattle. We had well-stuffed chairs and a new flushing water closet, and fruit tarts at teatime every day if we wanted them. I tried to let her down lightly.
I said, ‘I suppose there may be different kinds of palace. I saw the Prince of Wales’s house at Brighton and it was nothing like this.’
‘Oh, tell about it,’ she begged. ‘Only whisper, because if Amelia hears you she’s sure to blabber and the King dislikes talk about the Prince’s houses. They cost a very great deal of money.’
‘Yes, and some of it borrowed from my father,’ I might have said.
Sofy was enthralled by my account of the Marine Pavilion, especially the card room with its scarlet walls and the maraschino cherries that were dipped in chocolate and set in little dishes here and there. She said she’d like to see it for herself but would never be allowed.
I said, ‘When you’re of age you can. Then you may go anywhere you please.’
‘No, Nellie,’ she said, ‘you’re mistaken. Not if the King doesn’t wish it.’
That was my first lesson regarding Sofy’s lot. She could only do what the King permitted. She had to live in bleak houses, eat yesterday’s mutton, and wait for a German cousin to offer her marriage, but only after four of her sisters had been suited before her.
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.
