She was right, but I had no appetite for any more changes. My mind was entirely on Garth. I knew I wouldn’t have him much longer. First our walks ceased, then our conversations dwindled. Often he would doze while I sat beside him and read, but if I got up from my seat and tried to slip away without waking him he would sense it and catch my hand to keep me there. I took him beef tea, I had Henry make him egg custards, but nothing tempted him.
‘Waste of rations,’ he’d joke. ‘Broken down old nag. I don’t merit my oats, Nellie.’
He seemed tired of life and yet did not know to quit it. I believe he clung on hoping to see an end to Tommy’s difficulties, but Tommy was in a worse state than ever. He had received none of the funds Sir Herbert had promised and the papers, his great bargaining weapon, were in the hands of a turncoat. Westmacott held the receipt and the key to the safebox and would not surrender them. There could be no clearer sign of Tommy’s desperation than that he had applied to Chancery for relief. The Court of Chancery was and is a graveyard for litigants and a screw press for filling lawyers’ pockets.
Spring arrived and with it returned Ernie Cumberland, twirling his moustachios. He said he had come to dissuade the King from caving in to the Catholic faction, but he had other business. When he wasn’t at Windsor browbeating the King, he was in town conspiring to silence Tommy Garth. Everywhere there was talk of the action Tommy had begun in Chancery, and whispers about a scandalous secret he threatened to reveal. Sofy’s name wasn’t spoken but the hints were heavy. In The Age Westmacott wrote in defence of his new master. Gossip about the Duke of Cumberland, he claimed, was a vile falsehood put about by those who feared defeat of the Catholic Bill. The Standard asked, ‘Who is this Captain Garth? The Duke of Cumberland knows nothing of him.’ The Times published the figure of £3000 a year, promised by Sir Herbert in exchange for the contents of a certain box.
As Henry Topham said, ‘Three thousand a year. I wish I had such a secret to sell.’
I feared Garth would be dragged into the affair and called to give evidence and I said as much when Tommy came to Grosvenor Place one afternoon.
He said, ‘He won’t be troubled. I have such damning letters. York knew the whole business. The Queen knew. And it wasn’t just my mother, you know? Princess Amelia made allegations too.’
I said, ‘But York is dead, and so is the Queen and so is Amelia. Who does that leave? Sofy mustn’t be shamed to get you your annuity. And Garth mustn’t be questioned. It would kill him.’
‘What’s that to you?’ he said. ‘He can’t live for ever.’
He wanted me dismissed while he talked to Garth but Garth wouldn’t have it. He said, ‘You can speak freely before Nellie. She is my dearest friend. We have no secrets.’
Tommy said Herbert Taylor and Westmacott had tricked him out of his documents, therefore he had no choice but to speak publicly of the claim he had.
Garth said, ‘You know I gave you those papers on condition that you’d never use them in any way to harm a certain lady’s reputation.’
Tommy said, ‘I surrendered them on condition I was given a fitting income. An agreement was made but I haven’t seen a penny. That certain lady has it in her gift to help me but she does nothing. And what about Georgiana? She’s a lady too. Why should she suffer?’
Garth said, ‘Lady Astley had a husband. If she’s thrown away the protection of marriage it’s hardly Her Royal Highness’s fault. This is a bad business, Tommy. I can’t tell you how your mismanagement grieves me.’
‘You might judge me less harshly,’ Tommy said, ‘if you knew what Taylor begins to say about you. He says you tricked my mother out of her papers, then doctored them, out of malice, to destroy the Duke of Cumberland.’
Tommy was like a thwarted child. But at the end of the interview he took Garth’s hand and promised to be careful of Sofy’s good name. I confess I felt a twinge of pity for him. He did have a claim, of sorts, but compared to him Herbert Taylor and Ernie Cumberland were a pair of Goliaths. He seemed doomed to fail.
Garth was silent for a long time after Tommy had gone. Eventually he said, ‘Nellie, I believe I’ve made a great mis-
take. I should have claimed Tommy as mine from the start. I could do it now. Is it too late, do you think? Half the newspapers already have me as his father, and what does it matter? I’ll be gone soon enough.’
I said, ‘I think it is too late, and besides, why should you sully your own good name to save Cumberland’s? You know, the outcome of this may be that he scuttles back to Hanover and never shows his face here again. The country might thank you for that. And changing your story wouldn’t help Sofy. Nothing can do that.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s true. And no one in their senses would believe it anyway. An ugly old devil like me? Who would ever have had me for a husband?’
So there it was, in an innocent little remark, in a closing note of self-mockery, the invitation I’d longed for and imagined. It hung between us in the twilight of Garth’s drawing room but only I was aware of it. Garth was already thinking of tea. And for all the years I’d had to rehearse my lines when my moment came all I managed were tears. Men hate a woman to commence crying, I know. A weeping woman is a puzzle they’ve no appetite for solving. They’d rather have doors slammed and dishes thrown and be done with it.
I tried to master myself. Garth sat frozen. All he said at last was, ‘My dear.’
Then he said, ‘It was an unpleasant conversation. I shouldn’t have asked you to be witness to it. Forgive me.’
Now, I thought, go cautiously, Nellie Buzzard. Don’t alarm a dying old man.
I said, ‘Not at all. There was nothing said I hadn’t heard before. It just saddened me to hear you speak of yourself that way. You’re one of the kindest men I ever knew. I’m sure you would have been the best of husbands to Princess Sofy. Or to any other woman lucky enough to win your heart.’
He took my hand and raised it to his lips. ‘Dearest Nellie,’ he said.
Had I been twenty years younger I fear I’d have said more, grown bold and perhaps struck out for deeper waters, but it was enough. I felt at peace.
36
Whatever Ernie Cumberland did to oppose it, however many troops he mustered in Parliament and the press, the Catholic Relief Bill progressed slowly towards victory. The Duke of Sussex supported it, Billy Clarence was indifferent towards it. The King, wavering, feared it but recognized the inevitable and lay down and waited for its wheels to roll over him. Sofy pitied his situation.
‘Poor King,’ she said. ‘It goes contrary to his Coronation Oath, you know, but Wellington means to wear him down and His Majesty is too sick to resist him. If he’d just listen to Ernie. He has all the arguments at the tip of his tongue. He should leave it to Ernie.’
Parliament passed the Catholic Relief Act in March 1829 and in April the King gave it his assent. I expected, hoped, that Cumberland would leave immediately, that he would want to put many miles between himself and the defeat of his campaign, not to say the matter of Tommy Garth’s suit in Chancery. But Cumberland stayed on and, furthermore, sent for his duchess and his son to join him at Kew. He hoped to make a match between his son and Princess Victoria and so reinforce the crumbling walls of the House of Hanover, but Vicky Kent wouldn’t countenance it. She loathed Ernie and anyway, George Cumberland and Victoria were still children, barely ten years old.
Sofy said, ‘Little George is such a sad stripling. He’s pale and thin and blind in one eye. The measles, you know? Major Conroy says he will never amount to anything.’
So that was the end of that. But Ernie’s wife was very pleased with the outcome of her visit. Where she had once been ostracized by the old Queen, she was now welcomed warmly, by order of the King. She dined at Frogmore with Augusta and at Bagshot with Minny Gloucester and eventually took tea with Sofy at Kensington Palace. Sofy played her cards close.
Was the Duchess beautiful?
‘I couldn’t say. My eyes were very bad yesterday.’ Was she amusing?
‘Her English is limited. My German is rusty. It would be difficult to judge.’
I was never in Frederica Cumberland’s company, but I saw her being handed in to her landau one day and had an impression of loftiness. She was like a woman got up to play the part of a royal duchess.
Fritz Homburg died that spring and Elizabeth was left a widow. For years she had promised to visit England and Sofy quite expected she would now come, and stay for good. But with every letter she found some new reason to delay. Humbug’s brother had succeeded to the title so Elizabeth’s rank was reduced to dowager, but she found she was by no means discarded. ‘I find I’m as much needed here as I was when dear Fritz was alive,’ she wrote to Sofy. ‘Louis won’t hear of my leaving.’
As Minny Gloucester observed, it wasn’t Elizabeth that Louis Humbug feared to lose, it was her money.
Tommy Garth was still out of funds and Sir Herbert Taylor wriggled on the hook of the offer he had made. He said he had never actually read these famous documents. Nevertheless, without putting himself to the trouble of reading them, it was his learned opinion that they would have no value in a court of law and he had only offered to buy them to secure their destruction and protect the feelings of certain individuals whose names might be muddied by their mischievous publication. But Tommy Garth, he said, had now devalued his treasure by speaking of its contents to every one of his hunting friends. Therefore the offer was withdrawn.
It was a wretched, cold summer. I went to Grosvenor Place every day to sit with Garth and eat my commons with him, though all he took was boiled sago or a little rice pudding. He liked to talk about Dorset, the loveliest county in England, he believed, and I had no grounds to disagree. It was the furthest I had ever travelled out of London, and still is.
He had a fund of stories about the Dorset smugglers, ‘owlers’ he called them, and there was no romance to his tales. Garth was firmly on the side of the Excise and the Preventy Men.
‘Armies must be paid for,’ he’d say, ‘and how’s that to be done if tobacco goes untaxed, and brandy and tea? They call themselves free traders, but they wouldn’t be free anything if law-abiding people hadn’t paid their dues. They’d be under Boney’s heel and speaking French. And they’re savage men, Nellie, and their womenfolk too. They’ll murder anyone who crosses them, even one of their own.’
That was how the seed was sowed for The Owler’s Daughter, though a year passed before I began working at it. My writing life was something Garth and I never talked about. Caesar’s Gallic Wars were his only reading and C. Welche was my secret refuge.
Sofy was a little jealous of my attention to Garth.
She said, ‘Great heavens, how good you are. Old Garth has really done very well. He’s had the joy of Tommy and now he’s gained a devoted daughter without ever having the inconvenience of a wife.’
Sofy was feeling lonely. Billy Gloucester was away shooting grouse so Minny was making the most of her husband’s absence and had gone to her country house. Ernie Cumberland no longer called at Kensington Palace quite so frequently either. While Frederica played the duchess at Kew he had a new interest. Her name was Lady Graves and she was no girlish sprig. She was in her middle years and had brought a vast number of children into the world. Her husband was one of the fattest men in England and one of the most pitied, for it was said that others had already been where Cumberland now trespassed and, so to speak, warmed the sheets.
The Morning Chronicle reported that a lady related to Lord Anglesey—Lady Graves was his sister—had been discovered by her husband, surprised in the arms of a person of the very highest lineage and no stranger to scandal. I was afraid the story would revive the embers of interest in Ernie’s connection with Tommy Garth but it had the opposite effect. Tommy was forgotten and the Graveses were talked about everywhere. The public will always choose fresh meat over yesterday’s fish.
At the end of September Garth’s nephew and his wife called on him, to see how he did. He was quite his sharp old self after they had left.
‘Well, Nellie,’ he said. ‘I suppose I had better be measured for my box. When relations drive fifty miles to take a glass of sherry wine with an old man, it’s an infallible sign.’
