‘No. What’s the point? We’ll never see any of them again.’

‘But we can dream.’

Sofy said, ‘Oh but Nellie doesn’t need a sailor to dream about. She already has an admirer.’

Amelia shot up in her bed.

She said, ‘Nellie? An admirer? Great heavens!’

And there was an anxious pause until I said, ‘Astonishing, isn’t it? But I’ve had the great good fortune to meet a man who loves nothing so much as a girl with her head in a bag. I’m really very hopeful.’

It was the only way with Amelia. I couldn’t bear her being made to kiss me to make amends for her rudeness.

I said, ‘But if you insist I choose someone from the Southampton, I’ll have one of those strapping side boys that brought us safe on board. In fact, I’ll take them all. They say you can’t have too much of a good thing.’

Which set them all squealing, even Amelia, though I’m sure she didn’t understand the half of it.

On the afternoons when we weren’t out on the water or driving about hoping to hear the tramp of ghostly legionnaires, we’d sketch or read or ride around the gardens in a little cart pulled by a jenny ass. Then, at five o’clock, we faced the greatest challenge of the day: turning ourselves into visions of loveliness ready for the evening’s entertainment.

The Queen didn’t care for going out and would happily have sat at the card table every night of the week, but the King loved to go to the theatre, and a king trumps a queen. It didn’t matter that he’d already seen the play. He would laugh as loudly the sixth time he saw it as he had the first and I believe he would have found a joke even in Macbeth, but we were never fortunate enough to see it acted.

By September I was word perfect in Mistress Warnock’s Triumph and Barnaby Brittle, but the theatre wasn’t our only diversion. Twice a week there was a ball at Stacie’s Assembly Rooms and this gave the Royal Highnesses what they really craved: a setting where they could see and be seen, where they could inspect young men at close quarters and even brush fingertips in the innocent name of dance.

One Tuesday evening the King put aside his own prejudices about dancing and looked in at the rooms for an hour. He was attended by two equerries, Major Garth and Major Manningham. Coote Manningham was reckoned gay enough to be recruited to the dance floor and he was showed no mercy, Gathering Peascods with Elizabeth, Beating the Kettle Drum with Sofy and Climbing St Margaret’s Hill with Minny, and all with a cheerful smile. Garth stood with his back to the wall longing, I was sure, for His Majesty to signal that he’d seen enough and it was time to retire. As equerries and humble companions are mindful to speak only when spoken to I feared we might stand there all night in polite silence, so I opened the bidding.

I said, ‘Major Garth, I should like to know about your parrot.’

‘She’s a yellow bill,’ he said. ‘Found her in Jamaica. No, that’s not quite true. It was she who found me. I was close to death till she decided to nag me back to health.’

He had had a fever, he told me, contracted in the jungles of Nicaragua, and had not been expected to live. I had never heard of Nicaragua. He explained it very well. If North America was his hand and South America was his coat sleeve, Nicaragua was the pearl button on his shirt cuff.

‘Bad business altogether,’ he said. ‘Plan was to break through to the Pacific, do you see? Doomed from the start. We went out on the Hinchinbroke. Young whippersnapper of a captain, only just made post, took it into his head he’d lead the transports upriver. Never should have happened. No experience, you see? He paid for it though, by God, and so did I. They took us both back to the Jamaica garrison in cots, more dead than alive.’

‘And is that when the parrot comes into the story?’

‘It is. Flew into the infirmary one morning, fixed me with her eye, and we’ve been together ever since. Did you hear her talk?’

‘I did. Her voice wasn’t what I expected. She sounded more like a grand old lady than a bird, and I didn’t understand everything she said.’

‘Just as well,’ he said. ‘She has some Spanish curses, acquired I may say before she lived with me. I aim to make her fit for polite society but a parrot won’t be hurried, you know? I teach her new words but weeks can pass before she condescends to say them. She seems to wait until I’ve given up hope.’

I said, ‘I’ve heard Miss Gouly make the same complaint about Princess Amelia.’

He smiled. ‘Nellie,’ he said. He had remembered my name. ‘There is something I should like to say to you.’

He studied his boots for what seemed an age.

‘Your face,’ he said, when he finally dragged it out. ‘I mean to say, your mark. I observe you’ve painted it over.’

‘I don’t like to, but it’s Her Majesty’s wish.’

‘Ah,’ he said.

‘And my mother agrees, although she never thought of it until the Queen did.’

He said, ‘Then I find myself in some difficulty. Obedience to your Queen is laudable and to your parent is natural. Nevertheless …’

‘You disapprove.’

He said, ‘I’ve seen its consequences. Countess Torrington. Have you ever seen the Countess? You’d remember if you had. She’s as yellow as a Chinaman. Lady Thynne and Mrs Bly Lennox too. Teeth gone, hair gone. And all devoted users of ceruse. How old are you, Nellie?’

I said, ‘I’m seventeen. Her Majesty said my face would frighten the horses if I didn’t cover it, but you have the same mark and you’re a cavalry man, so I suppose you disprove her theory.’

Another smile. Then we saw Princess Augusta approaching us.

He said, ‘I believe I’m about to be drafted to the dance floor.’

But Augusta said, ‘No more dancing for me. I made the mistake of wearing new slippers so I’m hors de combat, but I don’t believe I’ve seen Nellie dance at all this evening, nor you, Major. It won’t do, you know.’

I longed to dance of course, but not as a charity case. I said, ‘I don’t think Major Garth is a dancer.’

‘What rot,’ she said. ‘All soldiers are dancers. How else do you think they pass their winters?’

And so I had my moment. Tom Garth partnered me for Mr Isaac’s Maggot. He was light and neat on his feet and as we led up he said, ‘God save you, Nellie, from the interfering of well-intentioned fools.’

I wasn’t sure if he meant the Illustrious Personage for insisting I paint my face or Augusta for making him dance with me, but I clung to my preferred interpretation, that he cared for my health. When it was time for the carriages I was only too happy to make more room for the Royalties’ hooped skirts and go back to Gloucester Lodge by chair. I wanted to be alone, without anyone to enquire why I smiled so inanely. Major Garth was a man who had seen the world. He had battle honours, he was the King’s most esteemed equerry and he was no fool. And yet he smiled at my quips and cared for my well-being. The thought caused me a pang of sheer pleasure, though later it turned to an ache, the hopeless longing that I could ever find a man like that to love me.

The summer of 1792 was the best I ever spent in Dorset.

I saw Tom Garth almost every day and stored up every detail of him, to feed my little secret. The colour of his eyes: grey. His quiet attentiveness to the King. The little neckscratch of thanks he always gave his horse before it was led away.

The mood at Gloucester Lodge was happy too. The King was in robust health therefore the Queen was in good spirits, and no Princes came visiting, to discompose the Majesties with petitions for more money or higher command. With six daughters around him the King was a picture of contentment. One afternoon, too wet and windy for outdoor pleasures, I came upon him playing spillikins with Amelia.

‘Nellie Welche,’ he said. ‘How do you do? What do you think I did this morning?’

‘Did you ride, sir?’

‘I did,’ he said. ‘I rode to Portland with Garth, and do you know what I did there? I bought six ewes. Six. Yes. Fine breed, the Portland. I mean to cross them with one of my Merino rams, do you see? That way we shall have the tastiest mutton clothed in the warmest wool.’

To see him seated on the floor, in his shirt sleeves and a soft stocking cap, it was easy to forget he was my king. Later I realized he must have heard the news from France but he betrayed no sign of it and made sure it was kept from the Royal Highnesses. It was only after I returned to London that I learned all its horrid particulars from Morphew.

9

In August a machine had been set up in front of the Tuileries Palace where King Louis and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were confined. It was called a guillotine. Morphew said it was sharper than the Halifax Gibbet, faster than the Scotch Maiden, and could separate a head from a body faster than you could blink.

He said, ‘They say they don’t feel a thing.’ I said, ‘How do they know?’

The machine was a great advancement, according to Morphew, because it granted its victim, no matter how lowly, no matter what his crime, the same privilege at his execution that a lord had always enjoyed: a swift end from a sharp edge instead of a slow death by rope or flames. I had never seen a burning or a hanging but Twyvil could remember when the Tyburn tree was still used. Indeed, in her locking box she had a scrap of the very rope that had been used to turn off John Rann, a highway robber. It had been bought for her by the late Mr Twyvil. Some people might think it a gruesome love token but Twyvil was a connoisseur of executions.