“I know, they offered me one.”
“It’s no use in your case—you’re committed for libel. It means the cell, as I told you. This is Mr. Brooshooft, the Marshal’s clerk.”
A square pot-bellied man advanced towards her, hat on the back of his head. She smiled and curtseyed. He did not take any notice but turned to Brougham.
“Has she brought a bed?”
“The bed will be sent in the morning. And blankets, of course, and a table and a chair, and any other things that may be necessary.”
“No room for anything except the bed. The cell’s only nine feet square. Has she got any candles?”
“Are candles not provided?”
“Nothing’s provided. Only the straw, and that was fresh this morning.”
“Where can I buy candles?”
“The coffeehouse master may have some. That’s not my province. And don’t forget she’s here on a criminal charge. I’ve had my instructions, no privileges allowed. Only the prison fare from the dining room.”
“What would that be?”
The Marshal’s clerk shrugged his shoulders. “Gruel for breakfast, soup for midday dinner. It varies from day to day, the cooks arrange it. The debtors can buy what they want from the coffeehouse depending upon their means… Her case is different.”
Henry Brougham turned to his client. She waved her hand.
“What did I say? Régime pour embonpoint. I’ll come out like a willow wand and set the fashion.”
The Marshal’s clerk had beckoned to a turnkey. “Conduct the prisoner to number 2. Her bed’s being sent tomorrow, no other privs.”
“No chits to the coffeehouse?”
“It’s not on orders.”
The Marshal’s clerk permitted his bulbous eye to fall upon the prisoner with indifference.
“If you do fall sick,” he said, “you can always complain. Send up a written notice to the Marshal, and it’s put on the books and is shown when the prison’s inspected.”
“How often is that?” asked Brougham.
“Supposed to be twice a year, by the Crown Office, but it don’t always follow—next visit’s due in June. If a prisoner’s dying, of course, I have power to shift him, but the relatives or friends are obliged to pay. I’ve made a concession in this case, as it’s happened, the prisoner being a female and over thirty. Number 2 strong room has a wooden floor; number 1 is stone, and no glass to the window.”
The prisoner smiled and gathered up her rugs.
“How very thoughtful and kind. What do I owe you?”
“That’s up to your friends. I don’t take money direct. Against the regulations, counts as offence. Will you follow the turnkey? Loitering’s not allowed unless you’re committed for debt or have served three months of sentence. Good afternoon.”
He nodded to Henry Brougham and disappeared. Counsel took the rugs from his client’s arm, and together they followed the turnkey along the passage.
“What a pity,” she said, “we’re not arriving in Brighton, with lodgings on the front and a party tonight.”
Henry Brougham held tight to her arm. He did not answer. The turnkey led them through a maze of passages, leading at corners to stairways where people loitered. These were the meeting places of the debtors. Men and women and children sprawled on the stairs, the adults eating or drinking, the children playing. A game of dice was in progress in one of the stairways, on another a game of skittles, with broken bottles. The walls of the prison echoed; shouting and screaming, laughter and raucous singing filled the air.
“There’s one thing at least—I shan’t complain of the silence. But I’m rather afraid the scavengers haven’t called. I don’t like the look of those tubs without any lids on…”
The stench in the passage was worse than anything known in Bowling Inn Alley days. Or had she forgotten? Could it be there was something familiar in the smell? Unemptied slops of neighbors… leaking floors… wet walls and fingermarks… suggestive stains… even the shrieks of the children round the corner might have been Charley and Eddie playing marbles.
“Do you remember Mary Stuart?”
“Why Mary Stuart?”
“In my end, she said, is my beginning. Perhaps it applies to us all… I think we’ve arrived.”
The turnkey had stopped at the farthest end of the passage and was wrestling with his key in a double lock. He opened the heavy door and flung it wide.
The Marshal’s clerk had not exaggerated: the cell was nine feet square, no more, no less. A window, high in the wall, barricaded by iron and covered with cobwebs, gave three feet of light. The floor was of wooden planks, and in a corner, against the wall, was a pallet heaped with straw. A small tub, like those observed along the passages, stood beside the door, without a lid.
The prisoner measured the cell with her arms extended.
“The trouble is,” she said, “when I get my bed there literally won’t be room for anything else. I shall have to wash, and dress, and take my meals straddled across it, or standing on one leg—a new exercise in deportment, la flamingo.”
She gave a demonstration, lifting her gown. The turnkey stared. She threw him a dazzling smile.
“Since we’re bound to see a lot of each other,” she said, “let’s begin as we mean to go on. I hope we’ll be friends.”
She shook his hand and gave him a couple of guineas.
“Now what about those candles, Mr. Brougham? In half an hour the room will be black as pitch. And rather cold—I see I have no fireplace. So candles will give an atmosphere of fête. What with the straw and your rugs I’ll be rather cozy, and soup from the debtors’ dining room piping hot. What is the soup this evening, tomato or turtle?”
The turnkey, puzzled, gazed at his latest charge.
“It’s always the same,” he said, “a kind of gravy, potato peelings on top, and a slice of bread.”
“Potage parmentier, I’ve had it at Almack’s… Now, Mr. Brougham, I think it’s time you went.”
Her Counsel took her hand, bowed, and kissed it.
“If there’s any mortal thing that I can do to get you out of this hole and into a room, it shall be done—I promise you most faithfully.”
“Thank you a thousand times. Will you come and see me?”
“Whenever it’s permitted. By the way, I think I ought to have that doctor’s address…”
“Bill Dowler’s got it.”
“Is there anything else you want? I mean—immediately?”
“Candles from the coffeehouse; and if they stock them, ink and pens and paper.”
“Not another letter, I hope, to Mr. Fitzgerald?”
“No. A report on King’s Bench prison, as seen at first hand. To be shown, if need be, to the House of Commons.”
He laughed and shook his head.
“I think you’re incorrigible.”
“Good God, I hope so. Otherwise why live?”
The turnkey opened the door and he and Henry Brougham stepped outside. The door shut to with a clang. The key was turned. The prisoner’s face appeared at the little grille. She had thrown her hat on the straw, and round her shoulders she was wearing one of her Counsel’s carriage rugs.
“Just one last word,” Mr. Brougham said. “I’m so terribly sorry…”
She looked at him and smiled. One blue eye winked. She murmured in broadest cockney, learned in the Alley, “You pays yer money, and you takes yer choice.”
She heard their footsteps echo in the passage, then merge into the distant prison sounds, the shouting and the screaming and the laughter. At ten o’clock that night, as the candles guttered, the turnkey unlocked the cell and brought her a letter. It had been sent by King’s Messenger to the Marshal’s office, with orders to give it direct, the turnkey said.
She stretched out her hand from the straw and took it from him. The letter had no beginning and no ending, but the paper was headed Horse Guards, at Whitehall, and dated the 7th of February 1814.
The message was very bri
ef, and ran as follows:
“His Majesty has been pleased to grant a commission to George Noel Clarke, in the 17th Light Dragoons. The appointment will date from the 17th of March, four weeks after the officer’s sixteenth birthday, when Cornet Clarke is ordered to report for duty.”
H.R.H. the Commander-in-Chief had remembered his promise.
6
They were always moving. No house was home for long. An eternal restlessness filled her heart and spirit—what Ellen used to call “mother’s divine discontent”—so that once again trunks would be clasped and corded and boxes packed, and the three of them set forth on another pilgrimage, in search of some unattainable El Dorado. Brussels perhaps today; Paris tomorrow; or, fancy seizing her for some place yet untried, they’d rumble along the dusty roads of France humped in a diligence, the window closed, her questing face pressed hard against a pane, enthusiasm riper than her daughters’.”
“Hôtel de la Tête d’Or, that’s where we’ll stay”—simply because a cobbled square held mystery, and women washed their linen by a stream, and peasants in cobalt blue flashed sunburned smiles. Besides, hard by was a château on a hill, lived in by some Baron or seedy Count, who might be called upon and prove amusing, for nothing daunted her, no Gallic protocol—she’d wave a carte de visite in her hand and claim acquaintance with the stiffest stranger.
Her suffering daughters would sit with downcast eyes, pride turning them to mutes, while their smiling mother, rippling in a French of no known origin, accent impeccable and grammar crude, made her introduction with lavish gestures.
“Ravie de faire votre connaissance, monsieur!” And monsieur, not so ravi, clicked and bowed—his château hitherto impregnable except to maiden aunts and ancient curés but now defenseless, conquered by piercing eyes that swept his rooms and priced his objets d’art: and, shame upon shame to the anguished daughters, the hiss behind the hand, the stage aside—“A widower. Might do for one of you.”
Plombières-les-Bains, Nancy, Dieppe, watering places pinpricked on a map because of something heard two years ago, forgotten and then remembered. “Who lives at Nancy? The Marquis de Videlange? A heavenly creature who sat next to me once at dinner and never uttered the words ancien régime—we’ll look him up.” And Mary and Ellen, exchanging a glance of horror, cried “Mother, we can’t, he’ll find out who you are.”
“But darlings, what if he does? It makes it amusing.”
And out would come the well-worn quips and stories, the scandals of days gone by, the fun and folly, the life of London twenty years ago—now lost and scarce remembered by two young women whose minds were overshadowed by an image of prison walls, of horror beyond description, of someone white and wan who could not stand, whose eyes were glazed, who stared without recognition when carried out of hell into the world.
Was it true what the doctors said to uncle Bill—that the mind always blotted out what it feared to remember? Or did she never speak of those hidden months because she knew, and wished to spare them pain? Even between themselves it was never mentioned, and when their mother launched into the past, spilling the anecdotes she loved, ridiculing the Court of a vanished age, a momentary panic held them taut. But if a tactless stranger touched upon it, murmured the word “imprisonment,” what then? Would floodgates open up a turbid memory? The girls were never sure.
So let her indulge her fancy, roam the Continent, avid for new scenes and fresh experience, a summer here, a winter somewhere else, because, she would say to the girls, you never know… A Spanish duke might feast his eyes on Mary, or a Russian prince cast rubles in Ellen’s lap.
On, then, from lodging to lodging, vagabonding, the three annuities stretched to the furthest limit. A moonlight flit; bills often left unpaid; relics from the past pressed into service, rings handed over counters, bracelets sold and sordid bargains struck with doubting jewelers.
“I assure you that necklace belonged to the late Queen Charlotte.”
“Madame, je regrette infiniment…”
“How much then will you give me?”
Fifty louis! Fifty louis for a necklace worth five hundred? The French were a race of robbers, the scum of the earth, they never washed, their very houses stank. But once in the street the money was quickly counted, the coins rung in case they were counterfeit, and then there’d be a smile, a wave of a parasol, a passing fiacre hailed to conduct them home—home for the moment being a small hotel, prix modéré, in the Faubourg Poissonnière. “Darlings, we’re rich again, let’s spend our all!” Dresses would be ordered, a dinner party given, a furnished apartment taken for two months.
“But mother, we can’t afford it!”
“Does it matter?”
The French were no longer thieves and the scum of the earth, but angels with melting eyes, sworn to her service. Her life history was told at once to concierges, her love affairs were discussed with the femme de chambre, Paris was the only city in the world—until the money went and they moved again. And still no Spanish dukes or Russian princes appeared, with Mary delicate and Ellen bookish. She saw them fated both to spinsterhood and talked about them as “my vestal virgins,” delighting riff-raff friends and old acquaintances but scaring off prospective sons-in-law. George, become very pompous, disapproved.
“The girls will never marry until you settle. And Paris is not at all the place to choose. I don’t like to think of you roaming about without me.”
Possessed and bossed by her son, she gazed, adoring. How handsome he looked in his beautiful uniform, and always the most distinguished of his regiment! “My son’s in the 17th Lancers. He’s doing well—only just twenty-seven, and a captain.” But what pleased her best at the moment—he had no eyes for women; there were no frightful daughters-in-law to share his leave; his mother was supreme in his life. Long might it last.
But the girls—she’d go on hoping for belted earls, or foreigners with millions, or merely men. (They did turn up in the end, but both without prospects. A fellow called Bowles for Mary, who loved her and left her, and a Frenchman sans souci for Ellen called Busson du Maurier.)
The trouble was that as she reached middle age, déracinée, an exile on alien soil, however much she plunged into the present, took active interest in the day-by-day, watched seasons pass, gave parties, wrote to friends, her thoughts went sweeping back to other days.
I remember… Then she’d stop herself. The young are bored with reminiscences. Who minded whether dandies in Vauxhall had stood on tiptoe once to watch her pass? What did it matter if a gaping crowd had climbed her carriage wheels in Palace Yard? Or that she’d queened it in the House of Commons, the only woman in that world of men? Those things are best forgotten, George had told her; everyone’s very decent in the regiment, so why not draw a veil? She took the hint. But sometimes, in the night, and no one with her, a strange nostalgic yearning came for the past; and baffled by the silence, oddly lonely, a church clock in Boulogne chiming the hour, she thought, “There’s no one left who gives a damn. The world I knew has gone. This is tomorrow.”
If so, were all things lost? Did nothing remain? Did no stray fragment cling to a shadowed corner and stay there to be gathered by other hands? One moment her brother Charley was a boy, dragging at her skirt in Bowling Inn Alley; the next, a bill for some seventy pounds came in a lawyer’s letter—“Dear Madam, there were costs to the above amount incurred in proving the death and the identity of Charles Farquhar Thompson.”
Which of these two was Charley, known and loved? And what relation did a battered body found near a Thamesside sewer bear to a boy?
Bill fetching her from prison, holding her hands, arranging the passage to France, unaltered, unchanging, saying, “Whenever you need me, I’ll come at once.” What sense, then, in those words, when he couldn’t keep them? And Bill, so strong, dependable, becoming “Your late dear friend who was taken from us suddenly… Held in respect by all… The town of Uxbridge… Mourning rings, of course, to be transmitted.” Where was all the tenderness an
d patience? Gone with the “late lamented” to the grave, or about her in the darkness, bright and steadfast?
“Mother dyes her hair. I wish she wouldn’t.”
“It makes her look so cheap. George ought to stop her.”
“A woman should grow old gracefully, accept her age.”
She overheard this conversation between Mary and Ellen. But what was grace, and when was a person old? The mornings smelled the same, dew-fresh and exciting, and the sea at Boulogne sparkled as it used to do at Brighton. Kick off the slippers. Sand between the toes. Dabble the feet in water. Shrieks of “Mother!” the vestal virgins rushing with parasols… But that was life, that sudden ecstasy, that upsurge of the spirit for no reason, calling the blood at eight, or fifty-two. It came upon her now, as it always had done: a happy flood of feeling, a wild unrest. This moment counts. This moment, and no other. The Grande Rue in Boulogne is Ludgate Hill, is Brighton Crescent, is Bond Street in the morning; she’d go and buy a hat in the marketplace, or a basket of pears, or a ball of colored string. The point was people, people and their faces.
That old man with a crutch, that woman crying, the boy with a spinning top, those lovers smiling; they were part of something known and shared and remembered, an oft-recurring, richly colored pattern. The child who fell in the gutter was herself, and so was the girl who waved from an upper window. “This was what I was once, I’ve been them all”—that aching heart, that burst of sudden laughter, those angry tears, that bubble of desire.
Life was still an adventure, even now. Forget tomorrow and the lonely hours. There might be a letter from England in the morning, there might be English news and English papers. There might be someone passing through on his way to Paris. “What’s happening? What’s the gossip, the latest scandal? Is it true? Does it go on still? Does he look very old? But I remember…” Back to the past again, the life that used to be, the days that were. “What fun we had. How long the summer seemed.” And so on, till nearly midnight, when the visitor, glancing at the clock, caught the coach to Paris.