The Last Protector Page 12

  As the minutes crawled past, I stared about me. The Duke’s father, or perhaps a previous owner, had designed the apartment as the Great Chamber, the room reserved for entertaining honoured guests. It was shaped like a double cube. Far above my head, the plaster ceiling was a riot of fruit and strap work, enriched with the occasional plump-bellied cherub. Two tall windows gave a glimpse of the leafless treetops of St James’s Park, which lay to the rear of the house. Armorial bearings in stained glass filled their upper lights. A portrait of the present Duke filled the place of honour above the fireplace.

  After a few minutes, I had the sensation that someone was looking at me. I glanced to the left. My old adversary, Mr Veal, prominent by his height, was standing in the corner beside a shabbily dressed gentleman. Veal’s eyes locked with mine. His companion turned his head as well, perhaps curious to see what had attracted Veal’s attention. He wore tinted glasses and an untidy grey beard that straggled down to his collar.

  Veal was the first to look away, shifting his position as well, shielding his companion from my view. He scanned the room. A moment later, Durrell, Veal’s servant, made his way through the crowd towards me from the other side of the room. He too was dressed in black. For once he looked almost respectable, though his great belly strained at the buttons of his coat. I watched him approach, as helpless as a rabbit before a fox.

  ‘For ye are all sinners,’ cried Dr Owen. ‘Woe upon you all.’

  When Durrell reached me, he took my elbow and swung me round to face the door through which I had come. The footmen stationed on either side sprang to life. Durrell propelled me on to the landing. Half a dozen servants were waiting there. They straightened up when they saw us.

  The door closed, reducing the preacher’s voice to a grating mumble, like the sound of distant sawing.

  ‘I won’t throw you down the stairs, you pox-ridden knave,’ Durrell said in his gravelly voice. ‘Not with the gentlemen at their prayers.’ He beckoned the nearest manservant. ‘We’re going to take this rogue down to the kitchen yard and beat him within an inch of his life. Half an inch, if we can.’ He turned back to me, thrusting his face so close to mine that a wave of his foul breath swept into my nostrils. ‘That’s what we do to trespassers here.’

  My legs were shaking. I put out a hand to the wall, to steady myself. Durrell terrified me. It wasn’t just the man’s strength. It was the ruthlessness I sensed in him. Unlike Veal, he was a man without boundaries.

  Inside me, however, was a tiny flame of anger born of fear. ‘I advise you to let me be, fellow,’ I said. My voice was faint but at least it didn’t tremble. ‘I’m here at your master’s invitation.’

  ‘You whoreson liar. Come on. This way.’

  ‘I’m here to represent my Lord Arlington. If you lay hands on me, you lay hands on him.’

  That gave him pause. ‘What folly is this?’

  ‘The Duke invited my lord. To this – what does he call it? This day of humiliation. And my lord sent me in his place. I have his pass in my pocket. Why do you suppose the servants admitted me, you fool? You know they’re checking everyone who comes in.’

  Durrell held out his hand and I gave him the pass. He stared at it for several seconds, though I was by no means certain that he was able to read.

  ‘I’ve no mind to go back and hear the rest of the sermon,’ I said. ‘Not now, after this rude interruption. Pray have them show me out.’

  He cleared his throat. His cheek muscles moved as if he were gathering phlegm before spitting. He came close to me. My stomach clenched. ‘One day,’ he murmured, ‘you wait.’ He drew back. ‘Let him go,’ he said to the footman. ‘Make sure he leaves.’

  Durrell turned away. Another servant opened the door of the Great Chamber for him. The preacher’s voice rolled out on to the landing.

  ‘Yea, I say unto you again, ye are all sinners.’

  There was no reply from Cat when I returned to my house. By this time I had reminded myself that I had given her no reason to write to me again unless she saw Veal or Durrell. I’d written to her too much in haste, I thought – I should have asked her what she had wanted to discuss with me at Arundel House the other day.

  The next day was Saturday, and I spent it working at Scotland Yard. I told Mr Williamson about Dr Owen’s sermon at Wallingford House, and how two of the Duke’s people had recognized me, and turned me out of the gathering.

  ‘Did they offer violence?’ he asked. It might have suited him very well if they had damaged me.

  ‘One of them wanted to, sir, but I showed my lord’s pass, and that held him back.’

  ‘If they’d mistreated you, we might have made something of it.’ Williamson shot me a glance and added without much conviction, ‘Though of course I’m glad for your sake that you weren’t inconvenienced.’

  He sent me back to my work. One thing I hadn’t mentioned to him was the man I had seen with Veal – the elderly gentleman in the green spectacles and the shabby clothes and the ill-kept beard. I hadn’t mentioned it because there was nothing of substance to tell. Only the barest hint of something: Veal had moved so swiftly when he saw me there; whether he meant it or not, his change of position had shielded the old man from me; and he had wasted no time in sending Durrell to eject me from Wallingford House.

  In the afternoon, Mr Williamson called me back into his private office and, to my alarm, told me that the King commanded me to attend him this evening.

  ‘He’s heard about the Duke’s day of penance yesterday, and he wants to hear what happened from somebody who was actually there.’ My master frowned, possibly at me, possibly at the King. ‘He finds the notion entertaining, I understand.’

  ‘I’m surprised he doesn’t ask the Duke about it directly, sir.’

  ‘Perhaps he will.’ Williamson rubbed his eyes, which were bloodshot with too much close work. ‘The Duke will amuse him, the King knows that. But he won’t necessarily tell him the truth. The King knows that too.’

  When I waited on the King that evening, I was directed to Lady Castlemaine’s lodgings. That was not a good omen. She was the King’s principal mistress. By birth she was a Villiers, first cousin to the Duke of Buckingham and not unlike him in her vigorous appetite for intrigues of all sorts. Sometimes the cousins quarrelled with each other, and sometimes they were allies.

  Last year, they had allied themselves in the party that strove to expel Lord Clarendon from the office of Lord Chancellor. When the news of Clarendon’s downfall reached her, she danced for joy in her aviary, wearing only her shift and caring nothing if the whole world was watching her. At present she and Buckingham were still close friends, and I couldn’t help wondering if she would report everything I told the King to the Duke.

  Lady Castlemaine’s lodgings were at the far end of the Privy Gallery in a large and lavishly furnished suite of apartments that ran westward above the Holbein Gate towards the Park. It was growing late – Mr Williamson had told me the King would find a moment for me after supper. I walked through the Privy Garden to her ladyship’s recently built private staircase in the corner. Around me, the windows of the palace glowed with candlelight, and lanterns had been hung at intervals in the garden to light the paths. It was a cold night, but dry.

  At the door of the staircase, the guards let me through when I gave them my name. A servant escorted me through the chambers over the gate and to the range of apartments beyond. The painted ceilings, the gilded cornices and the furnishings were as lavish as those in the royal apartments themselves.

  The servant brought me to an anteroom. He told me to wait until I was called and whispered something in the ear of a page. The page went through an inner door, allowing a burst of music and laughter to escape.

  I was left alone to kick my heels. Servants came and went, and occasionally ladies and gentlemen went through the same door. Time passed, measured by the chiming of clocks and the growing emptiness of my belly.

  At last a gentleman emerged and told me I should follow him
. To my surprise, he did not usher me into the chamber where the King was, but through another door and a passage to a closet. It was hung with tapestries that showed St Sebastian shot through with arrows. A prie-dieu stood in front of it. I wondered if my lady used the chamber as an oratory – she had converted to the Catholic faith a few years earlier, which did not make her more popular with the staunchly Protestant Londoners who already loathed her for her profligacy. A second door, opposite to the one by which we had entered, was ajar, and the sounds of the supper party poured through the gap.

  My guide put a finger to his lips. ‘You’re to wait, sir,’ he murmured. ‘Someone will come for you.’

  The closet was lit only by the broad stripe of light that came through the doorway from the other room. I took a pace to the right that enabled me to see directly through the gap. The music had stopped. I heard the sound of men’s voices and then a great bray of laughter.

  ‘Here’s the gown and bands,’ a man shouted. ‘Show us, Bucks.’

  ‘Let me help you robe, sir,’ said another voice, a woman’s.

  ‘Aye, sir,’ said another man. ‘A carelessly dressed clergyman is an abomination in the eyes of God.’

  There was more laughter and a shuffling of feet. I shifted my position again, which enabled me to see directly into the apartment, a drawing room furnished in the French style with the light of many candles sparkling on the gilding. At least a dozen men were there, and three women; some were sitting at a table, others stood in a knot near the fire.

  One of the women was Lady Castlemaine. Over the years I had glimpsed her on several occasions, but I had never before seen her at such close quarters. She had grown plumper than she had been, though that did not diminish her allure; her charms had always been on the grand scale. She had black hair, vivid blue eyes and a reputation for greed.

  Suddenly there was a cheer. ‘A toast!’ someone called. ‘A toast to the reverend gentleman.’

  ‘Faith, you look the part, Duke,’ another man said. ‘What a loss to the stage you are.’

  ‘Yet more of a loss to the Church,’ added Lady Castlemaine, which earned another burst of laughter. ‘George, you must ask the King to make you a Bishop.’ Her voice took on a caressing tone. ‘You’ll do it, sir, won’t you?’

  I heard the King’s soft laughter and then the rumble of his voice, too low for me to distinguish the words.

  ‘Yea, verily,’ Buckingham declaimed in a loud nasal voice that was not unlike Dr Owen’s, ‘I say unto you, ye are all sinners, and the gates of hell yawn open before you.’

  It was, in its way, a virtuoso performance. The Duke strode up and down the drawing room, in his black clerical gown and his white bands, declaiming upon his chosen text, ‘A lewd woman is a sinful temptation, her eyes are the snares of Satan, and her flesh is the mousetrap of iniquity.’ He captured perfectly Dr Owen’s mannerisms. Even the content of his sermon was a wicked parody of the preacher’s at Wallingford House. ‘My text (beloved) I could divide into three and thirty parts, but for brevity’s sake I shall confine myself to three only—’

  At this point there was a cheer from some of his audience. Others shouted ‘More! More!’ and hammered their glasses on the table. Buckingham ignored them, and continued his sermon.

  ‘… I shall now explain at large what I mean by a lewd woman. I mean that unsanctified flesh which breaks through the confines of modesty and rambles through the brambles of impurity to graze on the loathsome commons of adultery and glut their insatiable appetites with the unsavoury fodder of fornication …’

  ‘Oh, sir!’ cried Lady Castlemaine. ‘Should I cover my ears to spare my modesty?’

  I moved a few inches to my left, which gave me a clearer view of her. Her ladyship was not the King’s only mistress, or even the current favourite, but she was by far the longest established of them. She was also the one who most effectively exploited her influence over her royal lover – as much by force of personality, it was rumoured, as by the attractions of her body.

  ‘… in the tents of the wicked,’ Buckingham proclaimed, his voice rising to a stentorian whine, ‘nobody will hear till they have glutted their souls with forbidden fruit and sowed their polluted seed amongst the thorns of abomination …’

  Mr Williamson was particularly wary of Lady Castlemaine, though he had not said as much to me. He was never at his ease with women. With her, it was more than that. I suspected that he feared her shadowy power over the King, and her habit of using it erratically in ways he could neither understand nor predict. She meddled with politics, and he did not think women should do that.

  ‘… Thus ye are never satisfied till you are well pickled in the abominable souse-drink of corrupt filthiness and come out loathsome swine, fit for nothing but the company of that polluted herd which the devil drove …’

  Her precise relationship with the King was the subject of much speculation at Court. She had been his mistress since the beginning of his reign, and she was the mother of several of his children. But it was said that he rarely lay with her now. In truth, he had plenty of alternatives available, and at this present time he was particularly taken up with an actress named Mary Davis. But he continued to shower wealth on Lady Castlemaine and her bastard children, not of all of whom, it was rumoured, were his. He still spent much time in her apartments, relaxing there with his intimate friends. He treated her almost as some men treat their wives of longstanding, with an offhand affection rather than desire.

  ‘… This trap of Satan lies hid like a coney burrow in the warren of wickedness between the supporters of human frailness, covered over with the fuzzes of iniquity which (beloved) grow in the very cleft of abomination.’

  The Duke paused here, because this latest sally earned an even louder and longer burst of applause and catcalls than the others. His audience was as drunk and as easy to please as Sam and his cronies in the alehouse.

  Lady Castlemaine leaned forward in her chair, clapping her hands, her face alight with amusement. She was lovely enough for any man. Indeed, the likenesses of her that the print shops sold by the thousand did not do her justice. But I felt no desire for her. I had learned to be wary of beautiful women of high station, and it had been a hard lesson.

  Buckingham reached his peroration at last. ‘May Providence hedge you and ditch you with His mercy and send His dung-carts to fetch away the filthiness from among you. For – verily, verily, I say unto you – you are all sinners.’

  Had the King forgotten I was here? Or had he intended me to hear this blasphemous parody of yesterday’s sermon? He kept us all in uncertainty. Sometimes I wondered whether he did so from carelessness or policy.

  The whooping and clapping died down at last. The King said something, and the party reshuffled itself like a pack of cards. Two footmen appeared and set up a tall leather screen around the fire, shielding the King, Castlemaine and Buckingham from the rest.

  Suddenly the door from the drawing room was pushed fully open. Mr Chiffinch, the Keeper of the King’s Private Closet, appeared on the threshold. I blinked at him – I had grown used to the half-light, and the glare of the candles near blinded me.

  ‘You’re to attend the King now,’ he said curtly. There was no love lost between us.

  He turned without another word, leaving me to follow him. The King was sprawling in an armchair, his face flushed with wine, and his heavy eyelids half closed. Lady Castlemaine sat opposite on a sofa, and Buckingham stood beside him, with his back to me. The servants had herded the other revellers to the far end of the drawing room.

  I wondered if Mr Williamson realized how close the friendship between the Villiers cousins had become. Given this private access to the King, an alliance between them could be a formidable counterweight to anything Lord Arlington and Mr Williamson could contrive.

  The Duke’s clerical gown was draped over the end of the table. His face was red and shiny with sweat. He tore the bands from his neck and tossed them into the fire.

  ‘Faith, s
ir,’ he said to the King, ‘preaching is hard work. Labouring in the vineyards of the Lord ain’t as easy as it looks.’

  ‘You make everything look easy, George,’ the King said, slurring his words a little. ‘If you ever finish your play, you should act it on the public stage: you have a gift for it.’

  ‘Your Majesty is too gracious. I feel shockingly virtuous. I must souse myself in sin to restore the balance of nature.’ He laughed. ‘When you give me leave to go, the dog shall go to sniffing after the bitch. Or rather bitches, if God vouchsafes me strength.’

  ‘Ah.’ There was a low chuckle from the shadows of the armchair. ‘The dog and the bitch. I remember it well, pox on it.’

  ‘Oh, sir!’ said Lady Castlemaine, covering her face with her hands in mock horror. ‘Pray spare my blushes!’

  The dog and the bitch? The words resonated in my memory. In his fever, Lord Shrewsbury had been rambling about the dog and the bitch when I had left him on his sickbed at Arundel House almost three weeks ago. And perhaps Buckingham had said them a day or two before, in those desperate moments after the duel. Now here they were again, in quite a different context.

  Chiffinch stood aside and gestured that I should approach the King. No one spoke as I stepped forward and bowed low to him. The first person to break the silence was Buckingham.

  ‘Good God, sir,’ he drawled, turning his head to stare down at me from his greater height. ‘I do believe it’s the Marworm.’

  The King glanced at him. ‘I hear your people insulted Marwood yesterday morning, when he was representing Lord Arlington at your day …’ his mouth twitched, ‘your day of penitence.’

  ‘Sir,’ Buckingham said, bowing, ‘it distressed me beyond measure when I heard of the indignity offered to my lord through his lowly proxy. If only I had known at the time, I should have moved heaven and earth to prevent it. The difficulty was that two of my people had reason to believe that Marworm – I mean Marwood; I do beg his pardon – was a nasty sneaking spy. So they acted as seemed best to them, believing they were anticipating my wishes. Of course they were quite wrong, and I’ve reprimanded them most sternly. But indeed, sir, their only fault was loyalty to me, and since my lord did not see fit to tell me he was sending me a deputy, let alone who it would be, it’s hard to see how it could have been avoided. By the by, I wonder why Lord Arlington didn’t come himself.’ Buckingham cast his eyes towards the ceiling, as if expecting to find the answer there. ‘I can only assume he felt he had repented enough already.’