She said, ‘I’m an old bore today, Nellie. Come on Monday. I promise to be livelier by then.’
We’d been bottling gooseberries, five pounds of red and ten of white. I don’t know why we do so many for there’s only me and Annie to eat them, but I still take a kind of comfort in a shelf of preserves. I was standing in the cool of the larder admiring the look of them when a messenger came to the street door. Sofy was dead.
Gussy Cambridge had been with her, and Mrs Corcoran, her dresser, and the chamber nurse. I went directly to Vicarage Place. Doctor Snow had been, confirmed the diagnosis and left. Minny Gloucester was there, and Dolly Cambridge, very teary and blowing his nose. Another sister gone.
Minny said, ‘I was with her this morning. It never crossed my mind.’
Gussy said, ‘But she vent vair easy, like she vass aslip.’
Dolly said the Queen wished to be informed of the arrangements.
‘Windsor, of course,’ he said. ‘So the only question is when.’
I said, ‘No, not Windsor. If you find her will you’ll see she wanted to go to Kensal Green.’
They didn’t like it. Dolly shook his shiny dome of a head.
Kensal Green!
I said, ‘It’s not as though she’s the first.’
I helped Mrs Corcoran to wash her and put her in a cambric winding sheet and we sat with her through the night, with eau de cologne on our handkerchiefs and a fly tormenting us. At ten the next morning Minny returned with the Cambridges and the search was begun for Sofy’s will. Everything was gone through, though that didn’t amount to much: books she’d still liked to have read to her, a few pictures she’d kept though she couldn’t see well enough to make them out, and her old sewing table she hadn’t used in years. She’d perched in that house like a little bird that was too tired to flutter any further.
It was wrong of Dolly to shout at Mrs Corcoran. A lady’s dresser may know a great many things but she couldn’t be blamed for not knowing where the will was kept. John Conroy was the man they needed to ask about that, but the very mention of his name brought on one of Gussy’s nervous sinkings.
‘Oh Dolly,’ she whispered. ‘I beg you vill not send for him.
Zey say if you look in his eyes he kenn bevitch you.’ Minny said, ‘What nonsense. Have him come at once.’
I agreed with Minny. I’d looked John Conroy in the eye often enough and all I’d seen was the glitter of other people’s money. Some people said he was the Devil incarnate but in my opinion he was just a regular scoundrel. On the subject of Conroy Sofy and I never did agree. Personally I’d no more have trusted him than I would a rat in a coal hole but in all matters financial she deferred to him. He was sure to know where her will was lodged but he couldn’t be asked. He was out of town, visiting his estate in Montgomeryshire. Then Mr Drummond came from the bank with the vital document in his hand and the burying at least was settled.
Dolly Cambridge was Sofy’s executor, he and Minny her residual legatees.
He said, ‘Very simple, very straightforward. Just a few modest bequests.’
Drummond said, ‘Just as well, sir. Her Royal Highness spent rather freely these recent years. There’s very little left.’
Dolly said, ‘Spent on what? I never knew anyone live as modestly as Sofy. Has someone been fleecing the old girl?’
I said, ‘I can tell you Tommy Garth got nothing. Conroy and Taylor saw to that.’
Gussy Cambridge said, ‘Who iss Tommygart?’
Then a terrible hush descended. I’d said the unmentionable and drawn attention to my strange position. What was I? Not a servant, not family, not a suitably noble attendant. Mrs Corcoran would be dismissed, the doctor would be paid, but what was to be done with Nellie? There were no rules concerning a humble companion. I was something left behind by Sofy, like the felt slippers worn to the shape of her feet, and it was time for me to be disposed of. As I descended the stairs for the last time I heard Dolly say, ‘Less than two thousand pounds! Then where has it all gone? There should be three or four hundred thousand at least.’
I met Cissie Inverness at the front door. Another encumbrance for the Royalties but not one they can so easily dismiss. Gus Sussex had married her before God but he did it without the King’s permission and that made all the difference. Was she a duchess? Sussex certainly thought so. Could she be a royal duchess? Never in a month of Sundays.
‘Nellie,’ she said, ‘what a sad day. But I’m glad to hear she’ll be buried near my Gus. I shall go there too, of course, in time. We shall be neighbours again.’
So indeed Sofy was buried at Kensal Green. It’s a pretty place, with lawns and winding walks and birds singing. These new garden cemeteries are quite the fashion.
As we drove back along the Harrow Road Dr Snow returned to the subject of my connection with Sofy. He thought the idea of a humble companion for a princess was a singular theory.
‘King George,’ he said, ‘must have been more of a thinker than is generally allowed.’
I said, ‘Yes, I believe he was, when he had his health. The Queen was too tired to interest herself in how they were raised. Fifteen children, it’s no wonder. But the King was quite attentive to a great many things.’
Dr Snow said, ‘And did you ever see him?’
I said, ‘I saw him as close as I am to you, and conversed with him, and ran away from him once as well, when he seemed not quite himself and I was afraid of what he might do.’
‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘his indisposition. An interesting case.’
‘An interesting case? Is that what they say about it now? I can tell you the physicians were at their wits’ end. They thought whatever it was would kill him and ruin them. Still, they lived to prosper.’
‘And the King lived to a good old age.’
I said, ‘There was nothing good about his old age, and I’ll tell you something else. I knew the two who came after him, George who was the Fourth and then King Billy, and neither of them was right, not in the constitution nor the head. There was a weakness in them all. Well, now we have a queen to reign over us, which I think is a good thing for women are often made of stronger stuff.’
He said, ‘And the idea of a companion like yourself was to give the Royal Highnesses an insight into the lives of the humbler classes? A very advanced theory.’
‘Well I wasn’t so very humble a companion. My father kept a house on Soho Square. I’m talking of sixty years ago, when it was a good address. But King George was a husbandman and a horticulturalist, you know. I think he was testing the old saw that if you grow an onion or two in the cabbage patch they’ll help to keep the worm away. It’s a pity he didn’t think of it before Princess Sofy. Some of her brothers might have benefited from it.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘You were the onion in Princess Sofia’s cabbage patch. Really very interesting. And was the experiment repeated?’
It was not.
I said, ‘After Sofy there was only Princess Amelia and by then His Majesty’s mind had begun to cloud. It wouldn’t have suited Amelia, anyway. She’d have driven any humble companion to distraction. It was a long time before she could be convinced I wasn’t going to give them fleas and steal their horses. And I don’t know that the plan worked, even for Sofy. There was certainly one worm I failed to keep away. Her Royal Highness never did grow very worldly but I became her friend, which is an entirely different and better thing to be than an onion.’
