331. Cupid Rides Pillion, page 8
The Dowager raised her quizzing glass to her eye.
“I see Rudolph,” she said, “but I have no idea who he is with.”
“I can tell you who he is,” Lord St. Vincent said.
He had accompanied Panthea and the Dowager to the bowling green. He was a rather boring young man who had attached himself to Panthea since he had heard rumours of her fortune, the size of which had grown with the telling, until a quite outrageous sum was whispered to be her dowry when she bestowed her hand and heart on some fortunate young man.
The only asset Lord St. Vincent had, as far as Panthea was concerned, was that he was a mine of information about everything and everybody at court. He was not only a gossip, but also an authority on the history of the Palace and though as a suitor Panthea would have dismissed him easily and without another thought, however as a guidebook and an informant, she found him so interesting that she was willing to endure his companionship for several hours a day.
“Well, who is he?” Panthea asked now, watching Rudolph and his companion draw steadily away from them, so intent on their conversation that they had no idea they were being watched.
“That is Sir Philip Gage, the Justice of the Peace, who has been sent for by the Lord Chancellor to advise the King on how to create a law-abiding community. He will find it hard enough when there is as much corruption and robbery in high places as in low.”
“If he can advise the King how to disperse the pickpockets round the playhouse, it will be something,” Lady Darlington said. “Lady Sears, in Waiting on Her Majesty, had a gold bracelet taken last night from off her arm, and two gentlemen of our acquaintance had their pockets picked between stepping from their coaches and entering the portals of the theatre itself.”
“It is a disgrace, I agree with you,” Lord St. Vincent said, but I doubt if Sir Philip will be much use in ridding us of pickpockets or thieves. There is only one thing in which he is really interested and that is the abolition of highwaymen. The story goes that he had his family jewels stolen by one when he was conveying them to London for the Coronation. Anyway, whether it be that or something else, he certainly loathes the sight and sound of a highway robber. It is reported that he has hanged more highwaymen these last eighteen months than any other Justice has got rid of in ten years.”
“A good thing too, for they are a menace to peaceful travellers,” Lady Darlington exclaimed. “I vow when we came to London from Wiltshire, I never closed my eyes the whole way for fear I should open them again to see a pistol pointing through the window at my heart. Do you remember, Panthea, how nervous I was?”
She glanced round as she spoke and realised that, while she and Lord St. Vincent had walked on over the smooth lawns of the garden, Panthea was still standing just inside the entrance and was watching Rudolph and Sir Philip Gage, although they were almost out of sight.
“Panthea,” the Dowager called, “come along, dear. We must be getting back for it is almost dinnertime.”
Panthea gave a start, realised she was being called, and joined her great-aunt and Lord St. Vincent. She said nothing as they moved across the lawns and entered the Stone Gallery. After bidding farewell to their escort, they moved upstairs to their own apartments.
“I find that young man surprisingly interesting,” the Countess said as she went towards her own room. “If he was not so foppish in his dress, I vow I should think twice before I allowed you to refuse him.”
Panthea laughed.
“He is all right to listen to, Aunt Anne, but one must not look at him. His style is scarcely a quality one could find enviable in a husband.”
“Go and change, you naughty child,” the Dowager said affectionately. “Heaven knows, I have no desire to lose you as a companion, but at the rate you are refusing the offers of marriage that are made to you, you will die an old maid.”
“I will risk it,” Panthea smiled, and reaching up kissed the old lady on the cheek. “I am far too happy with you to want anything else for the moment,” she added, then turned and went to her own room, while the Dowager, with a smile of pleasure on her thin lips, retired to hers.
Alone in her bedchamber, Panthea closed the door behind her, and her face was serious. She did not need to ask herself what Rudolph was doing with Sir Philip Gage. She knew. She was well aware that her cousin was desperate to have himself acknowledged as the Marquess of Staverley and to be allowed to lay claim to the house and estate. From the first day when he had come to call and had pleaded for his aunt’s help, Panthea had sensed Rudolph’s impatience and had known, as the weeks passed, that his impatience was growing in urgency.
It was difficult for him to be in the Dowager’s company for long without returning to the subject. Panthea did not know whether Lady Darlington had spoken to the King or not. She seemed to watch her nephew with shrewd eyes and yet she said little to Panthea on the subject.
Since that first strange occasion when Panthea had found out from Marta who Lucius was, she had never been able to drag any more information from the girl or persuade her to return to the subject. For the first time in her life, where Panthea was concerned, she had become surly and uncommunicative.
“I know nothing,” she would repeat again and again. Panthea had realised that she had managed to place a guard over herself and her emotions, so that never again could she wring from her an admission concerning the highwayman White Throat.
It seemed to Panthea as if she were up against a brick wall where information regarding Lucius was concerned, and yet at the same time some inner premonition told her that gradually she would learn more. She watched Rudolph, encouraged him to talk, tried to catch him out in some admission, or induce him to give her some clue to what he knew about her cousin. But he was too clever for her. However much she plied him with questions, he managed to circumvent the more penetrating ones, and would only reiterate, over and over again, that poor Lucius was most certainly dead, either hanged or lying shot in a ditch.
It had been difficult for Panthea to play her part in trying to extract information and at the same time not to let Rudolph guess at her curiosity regarding Lucius. Only by pretending a deep interest in his future could she persuade him to talk about himself and therefore learn a little of his plans. At times, she felt so inexperienced and so ineffective that she could have cried at her own helplessness.
She had a feeling that something was about to happen, something tremendous, and yet there was nothing tangible to which she could put a name. She could only grope, as it were, through a fog, trying to find her way, trying to see what was happening. Here, she was sure, was something new. Why should Rudolph be interested in Sir Philip Gage except for one reason?
They were walking away together, and she guessed they might be going to a tavern or to Sir Philip Gage’s lodgings. There they would talk. Was there any information that Rudolph could give Sir Philip with regard to one highwayman whose arrest and death would benefit him more than anything else?
Panthea put her hands to her face. What could she do? There must be something she could do in the matter. Her thoughts went over the information Lord St. Vincent had given her. She remembered him saying that Sir Philip’s family jewels had been stolen by a highwayman when he was coming to London for the Coronation. Panthea gave a little start. Jewels would mean that Sir Philip had a wife! Here was one approach at any rate. She must persuade her great-aunt to call on Lady Gage the following day. Women were more talkative than men. Perhaps here was a way she might learn of Rudolph’s plans.
Delighted at her idea, Panthea rang the bell for Marta and started to change her dress. She and her great-aunt were dining at about six o’clock in the great Banqueting Hall. It would be a convivial scene tonight, as it was most nights, and Panthea, putting on her dress of white satin over a petticoat of blue taffeta embroidered with pearls, felt excited at what lay before her.
There was something about the majesty and splendour of the Banqueting Hall that never failed to thrill her. The trumpeters and kettle-drummers, with scarlet cloaks faced with silver and their trumpets hung with taffeta ribbons and banners of gold, always seemed to her like something out of a fairy story. The music of the King’s fiddlers made her feel as if she were a princess, and as the lords and ladies of the Court went in procession into dinner, the scent of the flowers and the French perfume that the King loved made the air fragrant and sweet.
There would be that sudden pregnant hush when the King and Queen entered the room. There was something about His Majesty, too, that made Panthea feel as if he were a hero of romance, so tall, slim and dark, a glint of irony between his tired smiling eyes. Even now, after two years, she would see that look of exaltation in the eyes of his Cavaliers as they viewed him, their King, whom so many had secretly toasted, dreamed of and dared to mention only in bated breath. He was their King, this man who had suffered and yet retained his sense of humour. A man of extraordinary generosity and kindness, a man who loved animals and had a passion for his own children, who took a delight in dancing, music and the theatre, who liked to talk of astronomy, architecture, chemistry and gardening and had an endless repertoire of stories, which were nearly always witty but not always refined.
It was little wonder that many of the more prosaic Englishmen found their King an enigma. Perhaps they understood best his love of sport – his prowess on the tennis court, where he would be at play before six o’clock in the morning, his hunting and his rides to Hampton Court in the cool of a summer morning, and the delight he took in boating so that his barge lay always off the piers that jutted out from the Palace wall.
A strange, unaccountable, cultured man of exceptional good manners and tremendous virility – a man who looked every inch a King as he entered the Banqueting Hall, followed by his court of brilliant men and lovely women, while a French boy sang love songs in the gallery.
Sometimes Panthea would feel the tears fill her eyes as she watched him seat himself, this man who had suffered poverty and privation, exile and misery for so many years – and then as she watched the little Queen look up at him with adoration in her eyes, she would see Charles’ eyes wander down the table to where Barbara Castlemaine flaunted her dark, outrageous beauty.
It was then Panthea would feel sad. The fairy story was not ending the way it should. Charles should have come to the Throne and lived happily ever afterwards. But there was Lady Castlemaine, to twist the tale from its happy ending. And suddenly, the illusion of ethereal loveliness was gone and instead Panthea could see the human feelings, emotions and heartbreaks underlying all the glamour.
The Queen was anxious and worried lest she lose even her husband’s kindness – Barbara Castlemaine grasping and greedy, demanding more of everything, more of the King’s attention and time, more from the Privy Purse, more presents of money and goods, which he afforded her so generously.
Their faces would swim before Panthea’s eyes, and with them the worried look of the Lord Chancellor, striving to keep a balance between the King and Parliament, the lewd eyes of the wicked Duke of Buckingham, whose entanglement with the Countess of Shrewsbury was the scandal of the Court, the coarse plebeian countenance of General Monk, whom no one remembered to call by his new title of the Duke of Albemarle, and his ill-looking, ill-natured wife, who had been his seamstress, laundress and mistress, and who was always referred to as ’The Monkey Duchess’. There were so many other faces, all stamped with their own individual thoughts and feelings, their desires, and hungers, and occasionally, across the room or beside her at the table, Panthea would catch sight of Rudolph’s face and wonder what he was thinking. Sometimes he would be smiling at her, striving to attract her attention, but at others he appeared to be watching Barbara Castlemaine. Sometimes she thought there was another expression in his eyes, one she feared and hated.
For a long time, she would not put a name to it, even to herself – then at length she knew the truth for what it was. She had seen it glint there in Rudolph’s expression when he first talked to his aunt of his ambitions and Lady Darlington had told him that Lucius was the rightful heir. She had seen it not once, but many times in the days that followed, although she had been unable then to see his face, Panthea was sure it was lurking there behind his eyes as he talked to Sir Philip Gage.
There would be, too, desperation, anxiety and that ever growing impatience to get what he wanted, to achieve his ambitions. But behind all this, as menacing as a coiled snake, was the desire to kill – to kill and know there was no longer the shadow of a highwayman between himself and his heart’s desire.
5
The two old ladies’ heads nodded together.
“They say that the Earl has gone to France to enter a monastery.”
Lady Darlington made a sound with her lips that expressed her disapproval all too clearly.
“It is not surprising,” she snorted, “that he is disgusted with his wife’s behaviour.”
Lady Gage, who was thin and cadaverous and had a face not unlike a horse, bent a little nearer.
“’Tis whispered that she is again with child.”
“That would not surprise me,” Lady Darlington said grimly. “It is a national calamity that such a woman should hold the position she does at Court.”
At their side, a piece of embroidery in her lap, sat Panthea. It seemed to her that no one had anything else to talk about except the misdemeanours of Lady Castlemaine. She had heard it before, not once but a hundred times, but all such talk got the gossips nowhere. Lady Castlemaine continued her triumphant progress with the King completely in her power.
She had even been clever enough to become on friendly terms with the Queen. How this had been achieved no one knew, but there was no doubt that the Queen not only had accepted the inevitable, by having Lady Castlemaine as a Lady of the Bedchamber, but was apparently determined to make the best of a bad business and accorded her public favours, which was galling to her other more respectable Ladies in Waiting.
It was a sad setback to those who had advised Her Majesty not to accept her husband’s mistress on any terms whatsoever. That they were discomfited was to put it mildly, for they had lost face, and it was obvious that only a very few were prepared now to stand by their guns and continue to ostracise the triumphant Countess.
The younger members of the Court, who had been half hearted at the beginning, had all drifted away, leaving but half a dozen angry, impotent and helpless old ladies to whisper and gossip amongst themselves and be utterly powerless to do anything more.
Lady Gage, a newcomer to court, was unwise, Panthea thought, to let herself be drawn into this bitter controversy on the losing side, for it was obvious that her feelings where Lady Castlemaine was concerned were aroused only by jealousy – the bitter jealousy of an ugly woman of one who is supremely confident of her charms and her ability to gain anything she wants by their use.
“I hear that the Lord Chancellor is in despair at the money she is taking from the Privy Purse.”
“There is a rumour that the King has promised to buy her Berkshire House in St. James’s for five thousand pounds.”
“She is insatiable in her demands. The Lord Chancellor declared yesterday, ‘That woman will sell everything’.”
Panthea got to her feet and went softly from the room. The old ladies took no notice of her departure. Their hooked noses, like parrots’ beaks, seemed to grow more pronounced than ever, as their withered lips mouthed and repeated the latest scandals.
It got nobody anywhere, Panthea thought a little wearily as she went along the passage that led to her bedchamber. She personally could not help but admire Lady Castlemaine. She was so cheerful, she laughed so easily, she made the tempo of every party rise when she came to it. Had things been different, Panthea thought that she would have liked to be friendly with the beautiful, if notorious, lady. But such a course was impossible. Her great-aunt had offended the woman who held captive the King’s affections and whose power at court was unassailable, so the Dowager was branded as Lady Castlemaine’s bitter enemy and she, Panthea, perforce was relegated to the same category.
She wondered often enough how Barbara managed to hold men so securely and so abjectly at her side. Panthea was well aware that, although Rudolph made love to her with his lips, his eyes often wandered in Lady Castlemaine’s direction, and there was a look in them such as she had seen in other men’s eyes when they gazed at that lovely petulant face with its drooping eyelids. It made Panthea realise all too clearly that there were many sorts of love.
Yet this unceasing gossip and talk and whispering against Barbara Castlemaine disgusted her. She felt as if there was something primitive and savage in the way the older women delighted in any new slander about her, and Panthea knew that they would, if they could, hurl filth and dirt at the object of their enmity with their hands rather than their tongues. There was, in fact, little difference between the fine ladies of the court who spat poison in the privacy of their closets, and the crowds who jeered and spat at the women beaten naked at the pillories, or who watched with amusement the poor lunatics fighting amongst themselves in Bedlam.
It was a fine afternoon, the September sun warm and golden, and only a breath of wind was coming from the river to move the flags on the palace roofs and ruffle the ribbons of the ladies walking on the Embankment.
It would be a nice day for riding, Panthea thought, and calling Marta, she told her to order her horse from the stables and help her change into her riding habit of sapphire blue velvet. Her aunt, she knew, would not be requiring her for some hours now that Lady Gage had come to call.
Panthea often regretted that she had ever instigated this new and ardent friendship when she had asked her great-aunt to call on Sir Philip’s wife. Her hopes that such a course might lead her to learn more of Rudolph’s business with Sir Philip were doomed to disappointment. From the very beginning, Lady Gage had made it clear that her husband’s activities bored her to distraction.
