He said, ‘I know it’s not me that’s lacking. I’ve done my duty. I work hard and I’ve put a good roof over your head. You were let run too free before we were wed. I can see it now. You’re too wrapped up in your Royalties and your scribbling.’
Oh how I boiled at his words, as much because there was a seed of truth in them as because he didn’t know the half of it. That I’d married him to please Papi and now Papi was gone, so what did his wishes signify now? That I’d wasted my dreams on Tom Garth and he’d betrayed me, without ever knowing it, and ruined my dear friend. Worst of all, that I had once carried a child for nearly three months without any sign of losing it and if I wasn’t to blame for the conceiving of it I’d certainly been foremost in destroying it, and with it all further hope of being a mother.
I said, ‘All those long years we were walking out, it’s a pity you didn’t notice we weren’t suited. I told you from the start I wasn’t cut out for a shopkeeper. I told you I was going to be a writer.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you did.’
He picked up my fair copy. Three hundred pages.
He said, ‘You wouldn’t credit there was that many words in the world.’
I said, ‘It’s about your sister, Beatie. About what it must have been to live with a broken face and believe no one would ever care enough to see behind it. Only it has a happy ending. I’ve written her the life she should have lived. It’s about her, Jack, and it’s for her.’
He looked at me. ‘For her?’ he said. ‘How do you make that out? Putting her in a book for silly, idle women to read about? You’ve no right.’
Then he threw the bundle of pages into the fire and held it there with the poker even though I cried and begged and screamed until Ambrose and Morphew both came running. There was nothing they could do. What wasn’t burned to ash was scorched beyond reading. It was destroyed.
He said, ‘Never disturb the dead, Nellie. Beatie’s gone to a better place and she don’t need strangers tramping over her grave. Now, let’s have dinner on the table and no more quarrelling.’
I didn’t speak to him for a month entire, not that he minded that.
‘Cold tongue again, eh?’ He’d smirk when his dinner was put before him, and he’d bolt it down, scrape back his chair and find some reason to walk back to the shop till late. I didn’t lie with him either, which he found a greater deprivation, and I only allowed him what he wanted after I had my revenge well in hand. I commenced rewriting my book.
I hid the pages between the second-best sheets in the linen press and took them out one at a time. Some passages came back to me without any effort, like a spinet exercise remembered by my fingers long after I’d left off practising it. Other passages quite eluded me and I was forced to reinvent them. I comforted myself with the thought that they must have needed improvement and Jack’s mean act had done me a service he could never imagine.
20
By May of 1803 we were at war again. Treaties were a joke to Boney. The world lived on eggshells while he marched wherever he pleased and only our Navy kept him at arm’s length from England. The Liable List was posted on the door of St George’s and Jack’s and Ambrose’s names were both on it, though Jack wasn’t likely to be taken for a soldier at forty-one. But he was strong and healthy and he owned a cart so he could have been called for a constable or a pioneer, and he didn’t want civic duties interfering with business. He paid the levy and had his name taken off the list. He said it was twenty pounds well spent and was prepared to do the same for the lad, but Ambrose didn’t want to be bought off. He took the King’s shilling.
Seven years Jack had invested in him. He called him an un-grateful runt that didn’t have the brains he was born with, to volunteer when he could have been exempt.
Ambrose said, ‘I can’t stay here boiling sugar when there’s war on. It don’t seem right.’
Though it saddened me to see him go I had to give him my blessing. I knew he wouldn’t get one from Jack. They never spoke again. I hoped the Middlesex militia would keep him safe from any battlefield but the next I heard he’d joined the 3rd Regiment of Foot, the Buffs, and when he came back from Kent to show off his red coat Jack found he suddenly had urgent business in Cheapside and made sure it kept him there till the lad had drunk a dish of tea and gone.
The Buffs went to Spain and a lot of boys fell in battle there. Maybe he was one of them. Or perhaps he survived but thought better of ever calling by and risking Jack’s anger again. I still look for him. When I see a skinny rabbit of a boy my first thought is always ‘there’s our Ambrose’. It’s foolish of me, I know. He’d be an old man himself by now. I suppose I wouldn’t know him even if I did see him.
Jack wouldn’t take another apprentice; once bitten he said, but he couldn’t manage without help so he hired Henry Topham who was twenty-three and had already learned his craft at Gunter’s. Henry was too rickety for the infantry but he was patient enough to sit on a high stool and do the fine sugar work, and companionable too. He was an enthusiast. Henry could talk about bonbons till the seas ran dry. He suited Jack better than Ambrose ever had.
There was no Weymouth for any of us that summer. It was deemed too risky for the Royal Family to lodge by the coast when we might be invaded at any moment. Sofy bore the disappointment well:
Windsor, July 17th 1803
Dearest Nellie,
You are quite right to say we shall enjoy Weymouth all the better next year for missing it this. Confidentially, I’m relieved. The older Tommy gets the more I dread the prospect of suddenly happening upon him in the street. When he was a baby I could go to the Sharlands’ door quite composed but now they take him out and about he can be around any corner.
Garth has proposed to adopt him formally and raise him at Ilsington with a governess. It will be much more suitable and private than his remaining with the Sharlands, don’t you think? Things go very bitterly between the Waleses. The Prince has been summoned twice by the King to discuss what’s to be done, and twice he sent word that he was too ill to attend. Now the King seems determined to make a project of Caroline and has granted her the Rangership of Greenwich Park which, with the stipend and the rents for grazing and the sale of milk and whey if she chooses to turn out cows of her own, will bring her in a little extra. I’m happy on her account for I think she has been cruelly used but she’s an incorrigible flirt, you know, and His Majesty returns from visiting her VERY flushed and all fret and fidget. You’ll understand that we fear for his health.
We shift to Kew tomorrow. I shall hope to see you there.
Yr Sofy
So Garth, whom I’d once thought of as my Garth, well up in years and never married, took on a three-year-old and gave him his name. At the time I supposed he had done it as a small act of reparation, to give Sofy a private place, far from London and Windsor, where she might at least visit her child. But then, why not marry her and be done? She stood thirteenth in the succession. She could have married a commoner without the least harm to the house of Hanover.
I put it to her.
‘Marry Garth?’ she said. ‘Lord, no. I’m very glad Tommy’s gone to him. I know he’ll raise him well. But marriage? Nellie, it’s unthinkable.’
I said, ‘I don’t see why. You tell me you’ll get no other offers.’
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘The word has gone out. For reasons best not examined Sofy Hanover is no longer quite suitable. So I must remain an old maid. I’m quite resigned to it. And I shall have the consolation of watching my son grow up. I think he’ll be a cavalry man, don’t you? Garth is getting him a Welsh mountain for his first pony.’
I was three weeks at Kew with Sofy, Minny and Amelia. We had perfect peace. Building of the King’s new house had come to a halt—I suppose it was reckoned too costly to continue with it now we were at war again—and the old white house had been left to grow too damp and neglected, so the Majesties remained at Windsor and kept Augusta and Elizabeth there with them. The weather was so delightful we sat out under the trees every day with our books and sewing and every afternoon Sofy and I walked to the menagerie to see the growing tribe of kangaroos.
She said, ‘I wish I were a kangaroo. I should bound over the wall and be gone.’
I said, ‘There is no wall.’
‘Oh but there is,’ she said.
In May of 1804 Miss Tod did me the great kindness of delivering my newly copied pages to the offices of Mr Joseph Johnson in Paternoster Row. I impressed upon her the need to keep her errand secret from Jack.
‘Don’t say another word,’ she said. ‘What I don’t know I can’t let slip.’
I’d called my story The Blessed, which was the meaning of Beatie’s name, and I signed my work C. Welche. Miss Tod came back quite as excited as if she’d penetrated enemy territory and lived to tell the tale.
‘Mr Johnson,’ she said, ‘is now retired from business, on account of asthmatical seizures, but I put your package into the hands of his assistant, Mr Hunter. He said he’d look it over at his very earliest convenience and I made him promise to recommend Lucas’s Pure Drops to Mr Johnson too. Mrs Romilly takes them every day, you know, and they bring her great relief.’
