Poor Ernie. Why do they pick on him so? He truly has nothing but bad luck. All he wishes for is a corps to command but he’s been refused even that. He says there’s nothing for it but to go overseas and try his luck and as sad as I shall be to see him go I believe he’s right.
Cumberland did go abroad. He offered himself to Bernadotte in Sweden and to the Russian Tsar but neither of them wanted him. Then he went to Hanover, expecting he’d be given the governorship, but he didn’t even get that. It was given to Dolly Cambridge instead. Ernie’s luck did turn though. He found a wife, or at least someone else’s wife. Frederica was one of his Mecklenburg cousins and was very conveniently about to be divorced. The Queen was appalled. Even when Frederica’s husband was obliging enough to die, rendering a divorce unnecessary, the prospect still laid Her Majesty so low with catchings of her breath and swimmings of her head that she bowed to medical opinion and went to Brighton to take the waters.
Sofy was chosen to go with her, an honour she would have been happy to cede to one of her sisters but they insisted that Sofy was in need of a cure herself. It was true she’d never entirely thrown off the slow fever and she had grown so thin that her gowns hung loose. Now, when a royal pebble drops into a pond the ripples travel far. Billy Clarence’s discarded wife was supposed to open in The Beaux Stratagem at Brighton the very week the Queen wished to go there. Clearly something had to be done, and quickly. Dora Jordan found her engagement suddenly postponed and she was obliged to go to the Isle of Wight to play Mrs Sullen instead. How she must have fumed, for the Queen tried the Brighton waters for two days, declared she felt no improvement and hurried back to Windsor. Sofy stayed on and wrote immediately, begging me to keep her company. As London was so stifling and we were caught, if there was a breeze at all, between the smell of the Guards’ stables and the flies from Copley’s slaughterhouse, I took Sal and baby Annie with me, and we lodged a week at the Old Ship.
It was the first time I’d been there in twenty-three years, since I’d visited with Aunt Hanne in 1790. I should hardly have known the place. Where Papi’s accommodations had stood there was now a garden and a conservatory, and curved wings had been added either side of the oval drawing room with bedchambers and wardrobes and toilettes for Princess Caroline and her Ladies, who had never occupied them. The old breakfast room had been made a library, and where the old library had been a wall had been removed and a yellow room created, all paradise birds and bamboo chairs and Chinese wallpaper. The ceiling of the drawing room was painted like a summer sky and its gas lights were housed in immense tassled Chinese lanterns. And the work was by no means finished. I believe Wales enjoyed dreaming up new schemes for his houses far more than he enjoyed living in them. Plans were already underway for a great banqueting hall, and a music room that would be even more fantastical with serpents and dragons and painted scenes that tricked the eye. Only the stillroom, where I tasted my first water ice and Jack Buzzard had decided I’d do for a wife, remained unchanged.
Sally’s great hope was that she’d be presented to the Prince Regent so that when she was grown up Annie would be able to say, ‘King George? I met him, when I was a babe in arms’, but we saw him only from a distance, lumbering about like a caparisoned old elephant.
Sofy said, ‘His hands shake, Nellie. I believe he takes too much laudanum.’
She may have been right. Too much laudanum, too much cherry brandy, too many roasted chickens and candied chestnuts. His great project that summer was to find a husband for Princess Charlotte. The Duke of Gloucester was available, but he was a first cousin, a closeness some people advised against, and anyway he was no sprig.
Sofy said, ‘I think Gloucester would do very well. He may not have the most brilliant mind but he’s not completely ancient and he seems not to have any vices. I believe Charlotte might agree to him. But the Prince Regent, you know, is pressing for her to make a foreign match. He’s very keen on Dutch William. I see his stratagem. He wants her out of the country. She begins to put him too much in the shade.’ On that point she was certainly right. Our Prince Regent was getting up in years, fifty-two, and still the King omitted to die and vacate the throne. The country had had years enough of the Prince’s debts and his dramas. It was avid for something new, like a young Princess it might take to its heart. Wales was no fool. He understood that a daughter can eclipse her father without even trying. And then, what if she conspired with her mother to bring him down? What if they wore him out with their lies and their plotting and he never gained the throne he’d waited for all his life? No, marriage to Prince William of Orange was the thing. Pack her off to the Low Countries and the sooner the better.
25
We had a hard, hard winter of it. The Thames froze, the last time I remember it happening. That was 1814. The first week of February we went down to the Frost Fair, Sally and I and Morphew, who carried little Annie on his shoulders. He could still out-skate me. There was a skittle alley set up at Hungerford Stairs and two book stalls. Sal told the man at Nicol’s stall that Thomas Crosby was going to publish my book.
‘Oh yes?’ he said. ‘Well I hope you live to see it.’
He didn’t even trouble to look at me. I suppose to a bookseller writers are like waves on the sea. They rise up all roar and bubble, but before you know it there’s nothing to see but a patch of wet sand, and it doesn’t matter because there’ll be ten more along directly.
We had hot mutton, a shilling a slice, and glasses of porter, and I took Annie to ride on a merry-go-round, which is as close to being on a horse’s back as I ever wished to be. It was a splendid, sparkling day.
‘All right for some,’ Jack said, but he was happy enough. He had a full order book. We’d defeated Old Boney at Leipzig and we had him on the run. People were in the mood to give dinners.
By dusk the sky was full of snow again and it fell without a pause until the next morning. In Hammersmith, while Uncle Christoff slept Aunt Hanne walked out into the drifts. She wasn’t found until the thaw came in March.
Uncle Christoff said, ‘She couldn’t rest, you see? She was always on the move. It was the brain fever caused it. She didn’t know what she was doing, Nellie.’
I’ve often wondered. My aunt had gradually slipped into a world of ghosts, searching for my mother, mistaking Uncle Christoff for her own father, but occasionally she would return to the land of the living. I’d seen her take my uncle’s poor, tired face in her hands and kiss it with such tenderness. So perhaps that last walk in the snow was intended, to spare him any more heartache. We’ll never know. What was clear was that Uncle Christoff couldn’t remain alone in that big house. Jack told him he must move and live with us at Seymour Street and he gave us no argument. With Aunt Hanne gone he shrunk and withered like a pricked pig’s bladder and Morphew, who had always made a mystery of his age but could surely have given my uncle ten years, made it his business to push him out every day in a wheeled chair, whatever the weather.
All through that year the Prince Regent and his wife tussled over the future of Princess Charlotte. He wanted her to marry Dutch William. Caroline opposed him. She said William was insipid and would not do. Minny had seen him with her own eyes and said that apart from his rabbit teeth and spindly legs he was a fine figure. Charlotte had grown quite florid and she had sturdy Brunswick legs so it seemed to me a passable child might have come out of the mix, but no one asked for my opinion. Anyway, Caroline’s real objection was that the marriage would remove Charlotte from England. The English people would forget they loved her, Wales would force a divorce and try to get a son by some new wife and Charlotte’s importance to the succession would be reduced. It was the bark Caroline clung to, that whatever was said against her, however much she was investigated and deplored, some day her daughter would be queen. Then people would treat her with more respect.
In any event William of Orange was suddenly in a crowded field of suitors. With Napoleon confined to his little empire on Elba, London began to fill up with foreign Royalties eager to travel and see old friends. We had Bourbons and Hohenzollerns and Saxe-Coburgs and Romanovs. Royal’s Württemburg stepsons were in town too, staggering from one drunken rout to the next. All summer there were levees and balls. Princess Caroline was quite excluded from every occasion at court, and though she had her loyal clique she must have known that nothing she did in Blackheath could compare with the splendour of Carlton House. In August she flounced off to Italy and took her wards, Edwardine and Willy, with her.
Minny said, ‘Good riddance. I hope her ship goes to the bottom.’
Sofy said, ‘She shouldn’t have gone away. Charlotte needs her.’
But Charlotte managed very well without her mother. Her eye had been caught by Prince Leopold, a Saxe-Coburg and a major-general in the Russian cavalry. Sofy approved and, far more importantly, so did the Queen.
‘A rare thing indeed,’ Sofy whispered to me, ‘for me to agree with our Illustrious Personage, but if Leopold is amenable I truly think Charlotte should be allowed to marry him.’
Prince Leopold was amenable but the Prince Regent, reluctant to give up his own preference for William of Orange, took such an age pondering and dithering that Leopold gave up hope and went back to his regiment.
‘No matter,’ Sofy said. ‘They’re both young. Better they wait than rush into something that turns to misery. I’m sure we’ve seen enough of that in our family.’
Those summer celebrations of Bonaparte’s abdication turned out to be premature. In Vienna they were drawing a new map of Europe, but the war had been long and the grievances and claims were many. Every little duke and princeling wanted his slice of the cake, and every new dispute gave Boney fresh hope that his old enemies were far from united and that France would welcome him back. He escaped from Elba. Slipped away at night, they said.
‘Slipped away, my foot,’ Jack said. ‘He was let go.’
And Jack wasn’t the only one of that opinion. Miss Tod believed Napoleon had diabolical powers and had escaped in the form of a cat. Uncle Christoff said it was clear enough he’d been allowed to escape so we’d have a sound reason to put him away for ever, in a deep dungeon at the ends of the earth.
Morphew had another theory: that with Louis XVIII as the alternative, Bonaparte seemed like a better choice. ‘Old Bumblehead on the throne?’ he said. ‘The Frenchies don’t want it and no more do we. That’s why the powers as be let Boney get away. Where was his guards? And how did he happen to get a brig all at the ready to sail away? No, Miss Nellie, that was a put-up job and you heard it here.’
We had had nine months of peace. Now we were at war again.
It had rained all day so when the sky cleared in the evening Morphew took my uncle out for a late airing. They came home very excited. They had been crossing Grosvenor Square when a chaise and four passed them at great speed and stopped outside Lord Bathurst’s house. It was the Duke of Wellington’s adjutant, they’d learned, and he was looking for the War Minister to give him news of a great victory in Flanders.
Morphew said, ‘He was a sight, weren’t he, Master Christoff? Covered in mud. You couldn’t make out his rank nor his regiment, but he bounded up them steps so lively. Well, that’s old Boney beat and I’ll quote you why. We’ve got his flags. The coachman told us. He said that soldier was Major Percy, come directly from the battlefield without sleeping, and he had Boney’s standards rolled up under his arm, one for the Minister and one for the King—well, for the Regent. He’ll be on his way to Carlton House with it now. And all I can say is, Boney brung it on hisself. He bit off more than he could chew.’
That was how we heard of Waterloo. The news spread and the church bells started up and by the next morning there was quite a crowd gathered outside Major Percy’s house, just around the corner from us on Portman Square. People wanted to see the man who had brought the news of victory. There was dancing in the streets and two nights running there were firecrackers let off in the park. But I’ll tell you something else I remember: within a week there wasn’t a yard of black crêpe to be had. This really was the end, they said. This time we really would have peace. But how many widows had it taken to pay for it? How many mothers’ sons?
None of our royal dukes fought at Waterloo though, as the years passed, the Prince Regent managed to convince himself that he had been there. He always did love a good story and drink and the befuddlement of age did the rest. Ernie Cumberland would have fought; Sofy said he had begged for a command. But if he won no battle honours, he at least brought home a wife. In spite of the bride’s hectic marriage history and the complete disapproval of the Queen, he married Frederica in Mecklenburg and sent word that they would be in London before the end of the summer.
Sofy talked more of Ernie’s marriage than she did of Waterloo.
‘I’m glad for him, Nellie,’ she said. ‘I truly, truly am.’ I said, ‘Of course. Why would you not be?’
‘People think so ill of him. I know you did. That much was clear when his valet was found dead. I remember the faults you found in Ernie’s account of what had happened, but you don’t know him as I do.’
I assured her I was glad to hear of any happy marriage. Even better, I thought to myself, if Ernie decided to settle in Germany and spare us all his swaggering.
I said, ‘And perhaps his duchess will make a more satisfactory sister-in-law. You haven’t had much luck so far.’
‘If the Illustrious One ever allows us to meet her,’ she said, ‘which I very much doubt.’
