The snow began in October. I didn’t remember it ever having come so early. Sally left off begging me to move in with them over the Pink Lemon and nagged me instead not to walk about while the streets were so treacherous. But I did walk about for I couldn’t be away from my Garth, and that was how I came to fall and crack my wrist, and I thank God every day I live that it was my right I injured and not my left, for people were tumbling like skittles and there wasn’t a surgeon or a blacksmith to be hired. The best we could get was Jane Bunney, who had had a good reputation for her bone-setting before she went into retirement with her gin bottle. By the time she came my arm was red and swelled and she put me through an hour of torment, returning the broken part to its correct place and fixing it there with a piece of flour sack stiffened with egg-white and the end boards of Mrs Turner Smith’s Marchmont. I never cared for the book.
All this was how it came about that my right wrist is now so twisted and useless and how I had only one good arm to wrap around my darling Garth as he died. It was a Monday. Tommy had been with him all night and was overcome with grief when he realized the end was truly near. There was no sign of his usual bluster. Garth kept asking was it morning yet. He seemed to want to see the sun rise, but even when the day broke the sky was dull and yellow with more snow. Tommy told him he was heartily sorry for any distress he had caused and Garth scrabbled about on the coverlet, searching for his hand. I should have liked one last moment alone with him but Tommy wouldn’t leave his side.
I told him that I loved him with all my heart and I wished he would not leave me.
‘Nellie,’ he whispered. Then, ‘Milady,’ reminding me of the promise I’d made all those years before. Then he closed his eyes and never opened them again.
He was buried, Friday sennight, in the new vaults at St-Martin’s-in-the-Fields. They hadn’t yet been consecrated and I’d have preferred to see him taken to Bayswater Road where Jack Buzzard and my uncle and Morphew all lay, but it was for Tommy to decide, not me. And as it had to be St Martin’s I was only glad he hadn’t died sooner. They were clearing away the old burying ground for a grand new square to honour the victory at Trafalgar. He’d have been no sooner buried than dug up again.
No Royalties attended Garth’s funeral. Sussex had a shaking fever, Ernie Cumberland had a head cold and His Majesty was too indisposed even to think to send an equerry. Sofy said, ‘To tell you the truth, the King is quite deranged.
Minny says he keeps to his bed in a greasy old nightshirt and cannot do without his Bateman’s Drops. He flies into a rage if he finds his bottle empty and no fresh one put in its place. And he’s telling everyone how he rode Zinganee to win the Gold Cup. He gives them every particular of the race, furlong by furlong, but you know he didn’t win any such race. He didn’t even go to Ascot last summer. I’m terribly afraid for him, Nellie. What if he ends like our poor darling Majesty?’ That was a sad prospect. I’d seen enough over the years to dilute my affection for the King but I could never forget what he had been when I first knew him, how warm and kind, in spite of his splendour. Sofy was too worried for her brother to notice my grief.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘Garth was a great age. He was “Old Garth” for as long as I can remember. But I’m glad Tommy was with him. It must have been a comfort to them both. And now I suppose Tommy won’t be in such straits. I’m sure Garth will have left him something.’
In fact Tommy inherited the London house and fifteen hundred a year from consol bonds. Such furniture as remained at Piddletown was his too, though the house itself was rented, and also the contents of Grosvenor Place, after I had taken any pieces I especially wished to have. I chose Garth’s leather lug-chair that bore the impression of his head, and a woollen greatcoat—not the one that had been my undoing with Enoch Heppenstall, but his favourite one, that had been with him in every campaign he fought. It had a faint smell of Hungary water.
But my principal legacy, a parrot that had never done more than tolerate me begrudgingly, was short-lived. She refused her food and plucked out her neck feathers and then, on the very day she was to come to live with me at Seymour Street, she disappeared.
The men had come from Bonhams to take away furniture for auction and the door was open for hours while the carts were loaded. I can only think she saw her opportunity and hopped out into the snow to die. May God and Garth forgive me, I was relieved not to have the care of her.
37
In the New Year, in that dull grey time when ballrooms fall silent and spring still seems a distant prospect, the news sheets returned to the topic of Lady Graves and her royal lover. The Duke of Cumberland had been seen leaving her Hampton Court apartments at an hour when ladies don’t receive. But Sofy still wouldn’t have it.
She said, ‘Ernie only visits her to relieve her loneliness, I’m sure, for she never sees her husband. They say he’s a horrid man.’ I said, ‘Then Ernie would do better to send his duchess to see Lady Graves. You can’t really be surprised if there’s talk.’ She said, ‘Those newspapers are determined to dislike Ernie. Whatever he does they’ll always find fault with him.’
Even Minny Gloucester grew impatient with her. ‘Nellie’s right,’ she said. ‘Ernie invites scandal. He should at least install this person in town. To keep her so close to Kew is quite flagrant. A lover should be lodged at least seven miles distant from a wife. Everyone knows that. Well, Frederica has endured enough. She means to go back to Hanover as soon as the roads are fit for travel.’
But before Frederica Cumberland could escape the talk in London there was worse. Lady Graves’s horrid husband was found dead. His throat was cut and his dressing room awash with gore. An inquest was convened, a verdict was reached that he had picked up the razor in an inexplicable moment of insanity, and he was buried, all in a single day. No Lord was ever so swiftly rubbed out. But the story was too tasty for the news sheets to cease picking over it. Had Lord Graves left any letter, any message for his many children? Why wasn’t Lady Graves called to the inquest to give an account of how things stood between her and her husband? And what an unfortunate coincidence it was that yet again a royal duke was associated, albeit glancingly, with a death by razor.
No one went so far as to suggest Ernie Cumberland had wielded the razor, indeed Ernie was never named, but what other royal duke could it have been? Dolly Cambridge was in Hanover and neither Gus Sussex nor Billy Clarence had ever been connected with any violent death. And the speed and manner with which Lord Graves had been tidied away didn’t go unnoticed. Unlike Mr Sellis, he wasn’t buried at night at a three-went way. He was committed like a good Christian to the vault of the Hanover chapel-of-ease, just as surely as if he had died quietly in his sleep.
At Kensington Palace Ernie was held to be blameless. Vicky Kent said, ‘Ziss iss nonsense story. I can tell you,
Frederica never did hear off ziss Lady Grave. Und who vill be loffer off Ernie? He iss ugly old man.’
Sofy said, ‘He is not an ugly old man. He’s still very dashing. But anyway, all men have their needs and they have their ways of settling differences too. Why couldn’t Graves have called him out? No blood need have been shed. They could both have mis-aimed. Taking his own life seems to me very mischievous of Lord Graves and quite unnecessary.’
I said, ‘Perhaps Lord Graves loved his wife. Perhaps he despaired of winning her back from a royal duke.’
She said, ‘Despair is a weak, unmanly thing, Nellie. Lord Graves should have had more spine. Now Ernie is blamed for everything and threatened and I don’t know what. I hope he doesn’t go away on account of this but I shall understand perfectly if he does.’
‘You mean if Ernie doesn’t show some manly spine?’
‘That isn’t at all what I mean,’ she said. ‘Ernie has the succession to consider. His life is precious.’ Which jolted Vicky Kent back to life.
She said, ‘For succession ve heff Clarence und den ve heff my Victoria. For sure Ernie can go avay, bye-bye.’
But Ernie didn’t go avay, bye-bye. Lady Graves moved back into town and after a few weeks he began calling on her again, to take tea, as Sofy interpreted it, with a lonely widow. Sofy was a little lonely herself and made great claims on me now that, as she put it, Old Garth didn’t have me on a string. Even Gus Sussex didn’t look in on her as often. Goosy, his long-abandoned wife, had finally given up the ghost so he now felt free to look about for a companion for his dotage. There was something dog-like about Sussex. When he’d married Goosy, contrary to law, the old Queen had beaten him with her scowls and threats and cowed him into giving up his wife and children, yet I think he’d never quite ceased dreaming of digging up his treasured bone. Why else did he not marry again until he was an old man and Goosy was in her grave?
In May Sofy talked of going to see the King and of my accompanying her.
‘He never comes to town,’ she said, ‘and I should so like to see him. If only it were any other place but Windsor.’
His Majesty had been sounded and discovered to have a stone in his bladder. He had been leeched but without any relief, and laudanum didn’t help him either. Perhaps he had grown too accustomed to it. So he avoided the jolting of a carriage ride and remained where he was. His ministers went out to Windsor almost every day and so did Ernie Cumberland, to whisper in his ear and warn him against any more reforming ideas, for what the Catholics had won others began to agitate for: a vote for every working man.
I was sorry for the King’s pains and wished him long life, but I had no more desire to go to Windsor than Sofy did, and far less reason. In the event she didn’t go. He had his sister Augusta close by at Frogmore and Minny, who often stayed with her, and a dozen doctors and apothecaries to care for him. I think we didn’t understand how sick he was. He’d cried wolf so often we didn’t pay much attention until Minny came to Kensington to give Sofy her report. The bladder stone, she said, was the least of it. He was bloated, like a dead sheep, and suffered terrible spasms that left him blue in the face. He was tapped every day.
‘Pints and pints,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t help. He sleeps in his chair now and he’s so big it takes three men to sit him on his night-stool. I fear for his life, Sofy, I really do. Billy had best prepare himself.’
If Billy Clarence was readying himself to reign he didn’t show it. He was a regular sight around town, purple-faced, white-haired, swaying along the pavement as though he was still on the quarterdeck. Henry Topham knew one of the waiting men from Brooks’s Club. He said Clarence made the windows rattle with his booming laugh and often he seemed to laugh at nothing, though of course his friends were always kind enough to laugh with him.
Henry said, ‘I reckon he’ll wear a straitcoat, that one, before ever he wears the crown.’
But less than a month later George was dead and Clarence was King. The Abbey bells began tolling at six. It was a fresh summer morning, full of promise. It didn’t seem right that anyone should die on such a day and I must confess I shed a tear for my king. I’d been privileged to see the very best of him, when he was a young buck but kind, and yes, a little silly. It grieved me to think of what he had become. How he’d ruined himself with drink and gluttony, how spitefully he’d treated his wife, and how his people despised him to the point of no return. In the end there was no love for him, even when he lost his child.
I went to Sofy as soon as I was dressed. People were on the streets already, making for St James’s, hoping to catch sight of their new king. Kensington Palace was all a-buzz too. Vicky Kent and John Conroy were closeted in a state of high excitement for Princess Victoria was now the next heir and only eleven years old. Major Conroy was laying his plans for when Vicky might be called upon to be regent and he would be her indispensable chamberlain.
Minny was already with Sofy, more angry with the Kent carryings-on next door than she was grief-stricken for the King.
‘Insufferable,’ she said. ‘Our darling has hardly been laid in his casket and that Irish fox is scheming.’
King George had died at three of the morning and had suffered very little at the end. Sofy wept, regretful that she hadn’t gone to Windsor to see him, but Minny had no patience for that.
She said, ‘Don’t maudle. You could easily enough have visited him but I’m sure he thought none the less of you when you didn’t. He didn’t ask for you. He didn’t ask for any of us.’
Cumberland, Sussex and Gloucester had gone to the palace ready for the proclamation and the King and Adelaide were on their way from their country house at Bushey. What a thing to wake up to. They had gone to bed the Clarences and risen king and queen. We heard the cannon salute at ten. King William IV was proclaimed at St James’s, then at Charing Cross and Temple Bar and the Royal Exchange. That was June 26th 1830.
