The pamphlet laid out the causes of France’s ills. I have it here still. Every other Frenchman was a lord, it seemed, and all congregated at court, perfumed, pirouetting parasites who paid no taxes and left their estates to rot. ‘The cupboard is bare,’ the text runs, ‘but it is a well-known fact that kings don’t cut the coat according to the cloth they have but rather snap their fingers and order more cloth to be supplied. So the poor working man is squeezed to pay for it.’

Twyvil said she couldn’t remember the last time she had a new coat and Morphew said, ‘The touch-paper’s lit, Sarah Twyvil. Mark my words. The touch-paper’s lit.’

Susan the Necessary Maid had fallen asleep.

Above stairs, Miss Tod came every day to pass on the news sheets’ warnings that the French contagion could easily spread to England. Eventually she reduced Mother to such a sleepless wreck she had to be asked to stay away. Papi was calm but watchful. I know he called in several loans he had advanced, and a quantity of gold was taken out to my uncle’s house in Hammersmith to be stored in a secret closet. A new axe was purchased too, at Mother’s insistence, and kept convenient to the street door, until I asked whether it was intended for us to use against the mob or the mob to use on us. Then it was concealed and forgotten.

At the end of July Papi set off for Brighton to prepare Marine Pavilion for the season. The Prince of Wales, nothing daunted by the stories from France, planned a great celebration for his birthday. There were to be seated dinners, and dances and bonfires and illuminations. My Aunt Hanne had an unshakeable affection for the Prince. When people criticized him she defended him as nothing worse than a high-spirited boy. The fact that he was rising twenty-seven and had already come within a mad King’s whisker of sitting on the throne did nothing to change her view of him. And so she conceived the idea that she would like to see this Brighton that God-fearing people so deplored, and perhaps even catch a glimpse of the Prince himself. She also wished to try the sea bathing for relief from an abdominal derangement and, as I had already been there and returned unscathed, she claimed me as her companion. We travelled to Brighton in Uncle Christoff’s sociable.

Our days in Brighton followed the pattern laid down by discerning lady visitors. On alternate mornings we went either to Dr Awziter’s Consulting Rooms or to the shore to be dipped from Mrs Gunn’s bathing machine. If it was a morning for Dr Awziter’s, where my aunt would drink a vile, salty whey made from milk, sea water and cream of tartar, I could depend on her being confined for much of the day within easy reach of the close-stool. She swore it did her a power of good and it left me free to walk about and visit Crawford’s Library. If it was a day for being dipped, Aunt Hanne would screech a great deal and declare the terror of it would kill her but she never failed to go back for more. I thought it the most wonderful sensation, to be held in a dipper’s big, mottled arms and feel how the salt water lifted me.

In the afternoons, abdominal derangements permitting, there was shopping to be done and fashionable ladies to critique, and in the evenings there were theatricals. We saw Love for Love and a burlesque with pierrots. The houses on the Steine were filled with the Prince’s friends, many of them famous reprobates, and sometimes in the early evening they could be seen playing a game of cricket, or at least their own version of it. Lord Skeffington, Colonel Hanger, Hellgate Barrymore, the Dukes of Norfolk and Orleans. There was always some onlooker who could put a name to them for us. The day before the Prince’s birthday Papi brought us into the kitchens to see the feast that was being prepared. An ox roast and free ale had been ordered for the people of Brighton but there was to be a far richer spread for the Prince and his friends. There were woodcock and snipe, and turkeys stuffed with pigeon and trussed into ballotines. There were pike ready to be stuffed with lobster meat and a pièce montée of Marine Pavilion made of pie crust, with lawns of chopped spinach and the little marchpane figures of sea birds. A fat, sweating man was spinning white sugar and fashioning it into diadems, one to be placed before each guest, and the tabledecker was already at work in the dining room.

The heat and noise of the kitchens proved too much for Aunt Hanne who was fit to faint so Papi took us to one of the stillrooms for a glass of cordial. A man was at work there making ices, directing two boys in a quiet voice.

‘Iss der best,’ Papi whispered, as though we were in church. ‘From Gunter’s, you know? On Berkeley Square?’

There were to be two water ices served, one of brandy punch and one of muscadine with white currants, and two cream ices, one made of rye bread and one of toasted filberts. We were given a spoonful of each to taste. They were very good.

Aunt Hanne asked the man from Gunter’s if he knew how to make a buttermilk ice.

He said, ‘I can make anything.’

He had a funny flat way of speaking, and said to me, ‘And what’s your name, Tuppence?’

I was fourteen and not inclined to be called Tuppence by anyone. I stuck my chin out to show him ‘Cornelia’ was all he’d be getting from me.

Aunt Hanne said, ‘But ve call her “Nellie”. Nellie is companion to Princess Sofia, you know? She goes many times at Vindsor.’

‘Does she now?’ he said, and turned back to his freezing pots. ‘Then we’d best mind our manners.’

And that was Jack Buzzard.

6

I was shocked the next time I saw the Queen. Her hair had turned entirely white and everything about her seemed reduced in size. Suddenly she was an old lady. Now I calculate it she was forty-five.

I thought she must be sick but Sofy said she was simply ravaged by the worry of what was to become of the poor French Queen, who had been harried from her country home, forced to lodge in Paris whether she liked it or no, and had her rooms ransacked. It seemed an excessive reaction to someone else’s distant misfortunes but, as Morphew liked to remind me, Her Majesty was merely hooman and if Queen Marie Antoinette could suddenly be at the mercy of vicious, common people, what queen was safe? Of course, if our Queen Charlotte had only followed what the news sheets published she might have been reassured. Public opinion had never held her in greater affection. It was all on account of Lady Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke.

The King, it was said, had visited the Countess in his past delirium and forced himself upon her. At fourteen I was still not fully acquainted with the particulars of men’s appetites, but if the King had truly gone to Sofy’s birthday dinner with his breeches unbuttoned I guessed there might be some truth in the reports. Lady Herbert was certainly much handsomer than the Queen.

And whether it was true or not, my mother was convinced. ‘Ach!’ she’d say. ‘Poor vooman. Fiftin children und now ziss.’

‘Well,’ Mrs Lavelle would reply, ‘all men are beasts, even kings,’ and Miss Tod would agree, although she had never married so I don’t know how she’d formed this opinion.

The material point though was that the King, who had been the nation’s treasured father while he was mad and kept in a strait weskit, had ceased to be the object of affection or interest now he was well again and all sympathy was with his Queen. That’s the way it goes with the man in the street. He enjoys a good tragedy and is much more excited by what is done to a person than by what a person does.

At Lower Lodge no one seemed concerned about the Queen or Lady Herbert. All the talk was of husbands, or rather the want of them. Prince Ferdinand of Württemburg, a lieutenant general reckoned to be tolerably handsome, had paid court to Princess Augusta and Augusta would have been happy to have him, but the King said Ferdinand and all other suitors might save their boot leather because, as everyone very well knew, Royal must marry first.

Royal kept to her rooms at Upper Lodge. Sofy said it was because she had a summer cold but I believe it was because of her humiliating situation. The Duke of York was marrying, Mademoiselle de Montmollin was marrying, but Royal was left to moulder, like a chop in a meat safe that everyone agrees had better soon be used but no one volunteers to taste.

Prince Billy was home that summer, retired from the Navy and newly created Duke of Clarence. He seemed not to have any occupation except rising late and apologizing for one drunken rout before embarking on another. I first saw him at Sunday prayers. He looked like a man who had dressed in a hurry. Sofy believed it was the Navy that had coarsened him. ‘I’m sure Ernie would never behave so,’ she said, ‘nor Gus nor Dolly. Thank heavens Billy has come back to us before he grew too fixed in his ways. A season at St James’s will soon refine him.’

The refining of the Duke of Clarence was a minor project that summer. The principal thing was the Queen’s new plaything: a cottage in the castle park, called Little Frogmore. I suppose it was intended to distract her from the plight of the French Majesties. Royal and Augusta had assisted with the choice of furnishings and Elizabeth, who practised very hard at her drawing, had been called upon to decorate the walls with botanical paintings. On Midsummer’s Eve we were invited to take tea there and admire the finished effect:

June 22nd 1791

HM’s cottage parlour is all ribbands and swags. V. hectic. She wore a plain gown and cap and poured tea. She called me ‘dear child’ and made me stand closer so she could see if there had been any improvement to my face. There had not. She has snuff stains around her nostrils. L. Herbert passed the cups so I think it cannot be true abt. the King, unless HM means to keep Lady H always in view to prevent further mischief. Miss Burney was not present. P. Royal perspired and was v. glum. Her gown was too heavy for the season. There is thunder and our room is airless but Gouly says we must go to bed.

The storm we all longed for didn’t come until the next day. It rolled around all afternoon without reaching any great conclusion, and then in the evening came a different kind of thunderbolt. The King and Queen of France had been arrested. Minny heard it from a footman and hurried to tell us but she was soon silenced by Miss Gomm who said it would give Amelia the night terrors and must on no account be discussed. I had to wait until I was back in Soho Square to hear the story in full.

King Louis and his queen had left Paris in disguise, playing servants to their children’s governess who was got up as a grand Russian lady. Whether they had intended to flee the country entirely or just wished to escape the angry mood of Paris depended on who was telling the tale, but the sequence of events that undid them was generally agreed.

They had stopped for refreshment and a change of horses and the innkeeper had remarked to his wife how one face in the party was quite the double of a certain profile on a coin in his pocket. I imagine a great deal of whispering in the scullery.

‘Say something, Jacques.’

‘No, you say something.’

‘You’re the one who noticed it.’

In fact no one said anything and the royal party might have got clear away if their coachman hadn’t taken a bridge too fast and their carriage lost a wheel. Then, while they waited for a wheelwright to be found, news of the King and Queen’s flight reached the little town. Who was dressed first, the innkeeper or his wife? Or did they both run out of the house in their nightgowns, hearts pounding, racing to waken a justice of the peace and charge him with the unhappy duty of arresting his king and queen. Wretched man. He must have wished himself far, far away as much as the King did.

Miss Tod said there had to have been a traitor in the King’s household.

She said, ‘Dressed as a butler? Then why was his face observed so close? In a country inn, and by candlelight? No, they were betrayed, poor dears.’

Perhaps she was right. But I could see another way it might have happened. I could picture King George got up in Morphew’s greatcoat and periwig, and the Queen in Twyvil’s apron and cap. No one would suspect them as long as they kept their mouths closed, but there lay the difficulty. Any fool knows how to play a king, but few kings bother to study how ordinary men behave. One word from a royal mouth would have been enough to make that innkeeper look again at his guests.

It had been a foolish plan from first to last and it lost King Louis such friends as he still had. Some said it wasn’t his leaving Paris they disapproved of as much as his manner of going, sneaking away like a thief. Others said it was all of the Queen’s doing, which was a greater condemnation for it showed she was the one who wore the breeches. Whatever the truth of that, it had been very badly conceived.

At the beginning of August I was called back to Windsor. I was to spend a week there, then go on to Kew with Sofy and Minny and Amelia while the Majesties and the senior Princesses travelled to Weymouth for the waters. Then the plans changed. Minny was deemed old enough to join the Weymouth party and Sofy and Amelia were to go with Lady Harcourt to her home in Oxfordshire. So Sofy envied Minny, and Princess Elizabeth said she envied Sofy because Weymouth was boring, with nothing to do but walk on the strand or be rowed about the harbour by handsome, untouchable young oarsmen.

Humble Companions are taken up and put down as easily as dust sheets. No longer required for Kew, I was to be driven back to London as soon as Morphew could be spared to fetch me, and as I very much wished to speak to Miss Burney before I left, I walked across to Upper Lodge one afternoon. I knew that on any fine day the Queen was likely to be at the Frogmore cottage, botanizing with her gardener and Miss Burney might be free. She seemed very pleased to see me.

‘Cornelia Welche!’ she said. ‘You’ve come to say goodbye. How good you are.’

‘I expect to leave on Friday.’

‘Oh but I go tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Her Majesty has graciously released me.’

She was retiring from her court duties. One more day and I would have missed her.

I said, ‘So now you can be a writer again.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I believe I shall write another book but perhaps not yet. I’m going home to rest and be with my family. My health hasn’t been good this past year. But I see you haven’t been idle.’

I had with me a story I was working on for Amelia’s eighth birthday. Amelia had requested a book about a beautiful golden-haired princess, beloved by everyone, but I found I made little progress.