Sofy said, ‘I think she was a saint. After Royal escaped our Illustrious One fastened on to her like a limpet, and you know, Gusta never complained. I think she just never longed for a husband.’
That wasn’t my impression of Augusta. I hardly knew her but I remember very distinctly a late summer’s day at Windsor … how many years ago? I lose count, but I know Tommy Garth was still a boy. The sun was low but hot and the King was sufficiently restored to health to be allowed to ride in the park. Brent Spencer was the equerry, most attentive to His Majesty, watching for any sign that the excursion was proving too stimulating. Spencer’s eyes never left the King and Augusta’s eyes never left Spencer.
42
Annie, who likes to investigate every new enthusiasm and anything that promises progress, decided we must try out one of the new railroads, to judge for ourselves whether rail travel has a future. We took a hansom carriage to the London Bridge Railway Station and then were forced to wait behind a closed gate while the first class passengers took their seats. Annie wouldn’t hear of our travelling in the superior accommodations. It is her philosophy that if some people must suffer the wooden benches of life, we must all suffer with them. It’s my philosophy that those who can afford a padded seat should buy one and those who can’t should aspire to.
The gate was eventually opened and we were swept along in a great crush of people fighting for a place to sit. A young man took pity on me, otherwise I should have had to cling to Annie and hope that the sheer press of bodies would prevent me from falling over. At Croydon we changed to a different locomotive and a different line, but not before I had paid five shillings for a first class seat. Annie stuck to her communistic principles and stood all the way to Brighton.
They say the railroads grow more popular by the year but I don’t know that I should ever be tempted again. It was faster than travelling post, but surely the point of travel is to see different landscapes, not to hurtle past them at thirty miles to the hour and plunge into suffocating tunnels. Admittedly there are no delays while fresh horses are put in, but we seemed to stop just as often to take on water for the locomotive, and if we didn’t end the journey covered in dust we certainly came away from it with a fine coating of soot. I think the public will soon cease being enchanted by it.
It was thirty years since I’d been to Brighton, since Sal and I had taken little Annie there, to get away from the summer stench of London. An esplanade had been built along the water’s edge, much like the one at Weymouth, and that was where the crowds now walked up and down. There were very few people on the Steine and the Pavilion was closed up. Tiles had fallen from its walls and the rose beds looked neglected. I was telling Annie how it had grown in my lifetime, from a small villa to a grander house and then to the most fantastical confection of a palace, when who should come strolling by with a young lady on his arm but Mr Ernest Jones. He recognized me at once.
‘Mrs Buzzard,’ he said, ‘do you know this building?’
I said, ‘I did know it. My father leased it for King George IV when he was Prince of Wales.’
‘Oh, King George!’ he said. ‘Wasn’t he a fat old soak?’
I said, ‘The years weren’t kind to him, but when I first saw him he was a fine young man. He cut a figure, I can tell you. It was his doing that I was sent to be a friend to Princess Sofy.’ Mr Jones introduced his companion as Miss Atherly. He said they were soon to be married. Miss Atherly looked a good deal more pleased with herself than she did for making our acquaintance.
He said, ‘I must tell you, I’ve recently published my first novel. Messrs Boone took it. Now I think of it I shall send you a copy. You won’t find my name on it, mind. I’m going in for the law, you see, so I thought best to bring it out anonymously.’
I said, ‘I congratulate you on all counts. You’ll have the satisfaction of seeing your words in print without the irritation of people telling you how you might have done it better. And with lawyering you’re guaranteed never to starve. How is Major Jones?’
He said, ‘My father passed away this past winter. A tragic accident.’
A mishap whilst cleaning his pistols, apparently. I condoled. We parted, he and Miss Atherly in the direction of the seafront, Annie and I towards the tea gardens.
‘Major Jones?’ she said. ‘Another of your old military beaux?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yet another.’
It was too tangled a story for explanations.
I thought what a very careless way it was for a soldier to die. Cleaning a pistol without emptying its chamber first? More likely I’d been given a version of his death suitable for telling in front of Miss Atherly. And then, a week later, after a signed copy of The Wood Spirit had been delivered to my door, I thought, well, God is good. At least the poor, mad soul didn’t live long enough to have to read that.
When Sofy told me that Ernie was coming to England I had no reason to think I would see him, and yet something urged me to make sure I did. There were two purposes to his visit: a wedding and a christening. Dolly and Gussy Cambridge’s daughter was getting married to a Mecklenburg cousin, a grand duke who was as rich as Solomon, and Ernie loved any opportunity to play the king in front of his German neighbours. Also, our queen’s new baby was to be christened and Ernie had been chosen as one of her godfathers. Princess Alice was the Queen’s third child and she’s had three more since, though I don’t know why. She doesn’t seem to like any of them very much. Perhaps she means to continue until she gets one she can love.
King Ernie duly arrived but within a week there was a quarrel. It was all about the order of seating at a dinner Minny Gloucester gave in Piccadilly. Ernie said he must take precedence over Albert because a King of Hanover certainly outranked a Prince Consort, and the Queen said if Minny gave way to Ernie’s demands neither she nor Albert would attend. It was an easy decision for Minny. She loved her Queen and she adored the Queen’s babies. She wasn’t going to risk her place in their lives just to humour old Ernie. So Minny stood firm and then, seeing the way things tended, Ernie announced he wouldn’t go to the dinner and furthermore, he wouldn’t go to the christening to be insulted. Dolly Cambridge had to stand proxy.
Sofy said, ‘It’s so difficult. I’m very fond of Albert but Ernie is a king after all. Albert doesn’t even have a dukedom.’
I said, ‘Yes he does. He’s a Duke of Saxony.’
‘Oh but, Nellie,’ she said, ‘that doesn’t count at all.’
In the two weeks between the christening and the Cambridge wedding Ernie seemed to recover his sense of proportion, at least until after the marriage vows had been exchanged. Then a genteel tussle had occurred when Ernie tried to sign the register ahead of Albert, but our little Queen had overmastered him and gripped the pen tightly until she could put it in her husband’s hand. But as the wedding party formed up to process to the breakfast, a most unroyal scramble had broken out.
Minny said, ‘What do you think! Ernie quite jostled Albert out of the way, and Albert, I will say, stood very firm, but they processed far too quickly and glued shoulder to shoulder, each of them determined not to give way to the other. It was too shaming. Well, actually, it was rather comical.’
Sofy said, ‘That was naughty of Ernie. Of course he’s perfectly correct. He should take precedence over Albert, but sometimes we old ones must be prepared to save the blushes of the younger generation. And you know, Minny, we must make allowance too. Ernie isn’t at all himself since Frederica died.’
A few days later I saw the King of Hanover for myself when he walked into Sofy’s drawing room. His hair was thinner, his face more livid and his eyebrows more prodigious, but in temper he seemed to me to be entirely unchanged.
Sofy said, ‘Darling Majesty, you remember Nellie Buzzard.’
He didn’t say he did, he didn’t say he didn’t. I don’t know whether Sofy hoped I’d withdraw. She peered for him with her one dim eye and grasped his hand, and I kept my seat and observed him. He was quite the king, even if all he had was Hanover. Of them all, of the seven Princes who lived to manhood, he’s the one that has the steel, the bearing. Sooner or later the others all ran to blubber and silliness.
I said, ‘I’ve become acquainted with a godson of yours, Majesty. He was named for you too, I imagine. Ernest Jones. The late Major Jones’s son.’
I saw the name hit its mark but I rattled on, just like the railway journey I described in tedious detail and how it had taken me to Brighton where I’d learned of the Major’s demise. That registered too.
I said, ‘I once met Major Jones. I liked him very much. He was so full of wonderful soldiering stories. Such a sad end, but not unexpected considering the tortures he’d endured, wouldn’t you say, sir?’
Sofy said, ‘What tortures? And who was Major Jones? Did I know him?’
I reminded her of the day young Ernest Jones had called on her but she couldn’t call it to mind.
I said, ‘He’d come to ask you to intercede with His Majesty for a pension for his father, but Conroy headed him off, of course. You know how Sir John likes to protect you from supplicants. So I took him out of your way. We walked across Hyde Park together and he told me a little of the Major’s story. People do that, you know. When they learn that a person is a writer of fiction they often come out with a splendid tale that deserves to be published, indeed they keep meaning to write it up themselves but somehow they never find the time. Well of course, I couldn’t resist. I went to see the Major, to hear the dreadful details from his own lips.’
Sofy took the bait. What ‘dreadful details’, she wanted to know.
‘Damned lunatic,’ Ernie muttered. ‘Had to send him packing. You don’t want to hear Jones’s ravings, Sofy. Fine soldier but he went to the bad. Battle fatigue.’
I said, ‘But you’ll be glad to know he made a kind of recovery. He wasn’t raving at all when I saw him. Quite the opposite. He was very composed, but oppressed. And when I heard his story I understood why. A murderer had confessed to him, Sofy, confessed all to relieve his own conscience and then sworn him to eternal secrecy. Well, who could endure that? I lost a little sleep myself, wondering if I should report what I’d heard to a constable, but then, I thought, that was the Major’s prerogative, and as long as he lived I should leave it to him.’
Sofy said, ‘But Nellie, if the Major’s dead I think you should tell a constable. After all, the murderer is still free to strike again. If you know his name you must report it, then we can sleep more safely in our beds. Do you know his name?’
I said, ‘I do. But he’s an old man by now, and settled overseas. I’m sure we’re quite safe from him. And I take a deal of comfort from the thought that soon enough he’ll stand before his Maker. Better for him to be required to answer to God Almighty than to a mortal officer of the law who might bungle the affair.’
Sofy shivered. I kept my eyes on Ernie and he never once looked at me, but his cheek twitched and the jutting eyebrow above it, like a great rippling silver caterpillar.
He jumped up and said, ‘Can’t stay, dear one. I promised Dolly I’d call on him. But I’m going to send you Hildegarde Groote for a companion. You’ll like her. You can practise your German. It’ll be better for you than listening to gossip about murders.’
Sofy said, ‘You’re very good to think of it, but you know I have my readers, and I can’t be without Nellie. She comes here in all weathers and she keeps me very cheerful.’
When I stood up to leave her I found my legs had been turned to water by my pretty little speech to the King of Hanover, and that instead of my customary route across the palace gardens and over the Long Water into Hyde Park I turned onto Kensington Gore and hailed a hackney. I’m not a woman given to nervous imaginings but Ernie’s cold-eyed parting had made me think of deserted paths and shrubberies and cut-throat razors.
43
Gus Sussex died in April of ’43 so Cissie Buggin, or Her Grace, Cissie Inverness as I must remember to call her, didn’t have him for long, but she has borne her widowing with a smile.
‘We were very happy,’ she said. ‘And nothing is for ever.
I’m content.’
By rights he should have gone to the vault at Windsor but he knew they’d never allow Cissie to lie beside him so he had left precise directions with Dolly Cambridge that he was to be buried at Kensal Green, with space for Cissie, when her time comes.
