But as long as Darcey was willing to wrap herself around him long into the night and help him forget Alice, he was willing to follow her ideas just about anywhere.
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That afternoon, he slipped out of the shop while Belle was in the storage room. She'd be furious, but he would make sure to come home long after she was asleep, which would take the edge off her anger the next day.
The walk to the Horse and Groom was a pleasant one, a few blocks north up Edgware Road to Cato Street. Entering the tavern's taproom, he immediately saw Darcey at a game table, attempting to play a game of chess with an opponent Wesley didn't recognize. She was concentrating intently, licking her lips as she decided her next move.
So attuned to her was he that he nearly came undone at her subconsciously alluring move. He pulled her away from the game, leaving her opponent grumbling.
He put his lips close to her ear. “Were you waiting for me?”
She stopped. “Now why would I be waiting on the likes of you, Wesley Stirling? Have I not better things to do?”
Her eyes were challenging, but her smile was seductive. His gaze traveled downward to the cut of her bodice, which was low but respectable, and which he planned to divest her of soon.
She shook her arm free from his hand. “Besides, it's about time you showed your mangy cur face in here. I saw Mr. Thistlewood earlier, and he's planning a meeting of the Spenceans tonight. You should attend and ask if you can join his group.”
“Tonight? What time? I've a powerful thirst that needs slaking first.”
“Is that right, now?” She ran a fingernail lightly down his arm. “And just how do you propose to take care of it?”
“Quickly and firmly and to the great satisfaction of all concerned. Come, woman.” He took Darcey by the arm once again and led her to their favorite private room upstairs.
Afterwards, feeling sated and drowsy, he allowed her to drag him to the tavern's ballroom, which had been set up with chairs in rows facing one end of the room. A gathering of men were already seated and waiting for their speaker. Wesley sat down with Darcey near the front. Her face was flushed and her hair untidy, but a bonnet covered most of the damage. She stared straight ahead, looking neither at him nor anyone else in the room.
He refrained from looking down at her bodice again, fearful that he might drag her out of the meeting and back to their room again.
But his attention was soon diverted for real, as Arthur Thistlewood entered, a mug of ale in his hand, which he downed and handed off to a serving boy before stepping onto the six-inch platform at the head of the room.
“Ah, friends,” Thistlewood began. “Are we not well served by the proprietor of the Horse and Groom? He's an honest man doing an honest day's work, is he not, and deserves our praise.”
Wesley couldn't see the proprietor anywhere in the room, but it didn't stop the group from breaking out into huzzahs for the provider of libations in the tavern.
Thistlewood motioned for quiet. He was a man of intense, fiery passion. A man Wesley would not want to have Darcey become too well acquainted with. Thistlewood's thick, expressive eyebrows were upstaged only by a shock of curly hair on top of his head that smoothed out and grew straight below his ears. He opened his mouth again, and Wesley noticed the man's graying teeth, which in no way detracted from his magnetism.
“Many of you here tonight already know me. But I see new friends, and I hope you are thinking men, rational men, men who care for the safety and welfare of your fellow tradesmen. For those of you who have never joined us before, let me introduce myself. I am Arthur Thistlewood, the son of a farmer and the husband of a butcher's daughter. I am one of you.
“Yet, would you believe, the authorities have declared me a dangerous character? Someone who advocates revolution and sedition?”
He bent over to address the audience in hushed tones. “I fear they may be right.”
People leaned forward to hear more.
“For the government has imposed unprecedented suffering upon us of a magnitude not seen since our civil war. And I have personally been the victim of their inhumane and brutal aggression. You know about the riots of Spa Fields from three years ago, do you not?”
Heads nodded.
“You know that the Prince Regent refused a hearing of our grievancesâour reasonable request for parliamentary reforms. And you know that a group of evil-minded constables attacked us, determined to run us to ground.
“But what you may not know is that, I, Arthur Thistlewood, was humiliated by arrest right before the eyes of my wife and infant child, followed by a prison stay. Of course, they had no case against me, and I was quickly released.
“Then, two years ago, I was greatly insulted by Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, who also refused to hear my complaints against him. When Lord Sidmouth wouldn't grant me an audience, I did the only thing that any man of honor and courage could do: I challenged him to a duel. Coward that he is, he wouldn't face me, but instead had me arrested with threatening a breach of the peace.”
Thistlewood shook his head dolefully. “For shame, Lord Sidmouth. You bring disgrace upon the country.”
Murmurs of “for shame” and “coward” floated through the room. All eyes were riveted on Thistlewood.
“And so I was proclaimed guilty and sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment in Horsham Jail. Further indignity found me there, for I was forced to share one bed with three men, in a cell measuring a mere seven by nine feet! A dog should not be subjected to such conditions.
“But my constitution is such that I endured with as much poise as I could muster, and I earned the admiration of the men in my cell for my composure and self-confidence. But by this point I was a man of experience in oppression, wasn't I?”
More nods.
“And we all here have heard about the recent tragedy, now known as Peterloo in comparison to Waterloo, where the military was sent in to overwhelming victory against its enemy. Only in this instance, the cavalry galloped in to trample upon and murder more than five hundred innocent men, women, and children peaceably assembled at St. Peter's Field to demonstrate for suffrage and reform.”
The audience was visibly agitated at this. News was just flowing into London about Peterloo, and it looked as though not everyone knew the details about the altercation. Wesley sensed that Mr. Thistlewood was not overly concerned about the slaughter of innocents in St. Peter's Field, for it advanced his important movement.
And on that point Wesley could agree, although recalling Belle's horrified expression about it did give him a moment's pause.
But what was Belle's opinion as compared to Darcey's rapturous expression and Thistlewood's inflamed oratory? She was a mere draper.
“And so, my friends, I ask you: What is the only way such indiscriminate violence against us can be addressed? Is it by hiding behind our womenfolk's skirts? No! For they will hack our women to bits. Is it by pleading and begging for redress of our grievances? Again, I say, no! For they will ignore us and throw us into prison.”
Once again, Thistlewood dropped his voice for effect. And effective it was. Even Wesley was holding his breath.
“Friends, we will only accomplish our aims of freedom and equality for all men by the shedding of blood.” He raised his fist and his voice together. “The blood of our oppressors, our tyrannical leaders, yes, even of our neighbors who stand in the way of our noble goals.”
Flecks of foam appeared at the corner of Thistlewood's mouth. The orator seemed overcome by his own speechmaking, mopping his forehead with a kerchief. “I submit to all of you that we are all coming to a momentous decision. That decision is whether we will stand or fall, be brave or cowards, preserve or lose our very lives. And so the question is: Will you join us? Will you join those of us who will conquer the unbearable, inhumane forces that persecute us?”
The room exploded in elation.
“We'll join you!”
“Eliminate the oppressors!”
“Death to Parliament!”
Thistlewood extended his arms as though to embrace everyone in the room. “It pleases me to have so many generous supporters who understand my vision. You are joining a great movement by uniting with the Spenceans. I will lead you to victory. My genius is so great just now, I don't think there is any man alive who has so great a genius as mine at the moment.”
He paused dramatically, looking upward as though in deep cogitation with the divine. “If it is the will of the Author of the World, should He exist, that I should perish in the cause of freedom, His will, and not mine, be done! It would be quite a triumph to me!”
Thistlewood threw his arms up in the air, and the audience cheered. Wesley glanced at Darcey. Her eyes were shining and her cheeks were wet with tears as she clapped wildly in support.
And so Wesley knew that he would happily join the Spencean Philanthropists to please the very enthralling Darcey White.
9
Awake! Arise! Arm yourselves with truth, justice, reason. Lay siege to corruption. Claim as your inalienable right, universal suffrage and annual Parliaments. And whenever you have the gratification to choose a representative, let him be from among the lower orders of men, and he will know how to sympathize with you.
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âThomas Spence, founder of the Spencean Philanthropists, 1793
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August 1819
London
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W
hy did I have to choose this moment to go out?
Belle asked herself as she retreated back inside her shop.
Having left an unusually happy Wesley to manage alone one afternoon, she went shopping. She planned to buy a packet of paper while she was out, but also wanted to browse windows. She started with the C. Laurent Fashion Dolls shop next door, which she'd only visited once since arriving in London.
The proprietress, Lady Greycliffe, was an older French beauty, tall and willowy. Her blond hair was shot through with silver bands, revealing her to be at least in her fifties, even though she looked younger. She possessed beautiful manners and a delightful accent, although she told Belle she'd been in England for more than thirty years. Born Claudette Laurent in Paris, she'd been orphaned at a young age and fled to England, scratching her way up to finally opening this fashionable shop on Oxford Street, even having met and married a minor lord along the way. Although she now had a fine estate in Kent and a London townhome, Lady Greycliffe could never give up her passion for dollmaking, and still spent considerable time in her Oxford Street location.
Belle lauded the dollmaker's tenacity and courage.
The shop had dolls of extraordinary proportions, from the tiniest creatures to fit little baby houses up to life-sized creations set on iron frames with translucent wax heads and hands.
The shop's specialty was fashion dolls made to resemble real people. Belle was so intrigued by them that she gave the proprietress a list of Amelia's features, to have a keepsake made of her friend. Lady Greycliffe promised to have it in three weeks' time.
From there, Belle browsed nearly every shop window on her side of Oxford Street. She hadn't realized the number of various businesses in this shopping district. Confectioners, jewelers, dressmakers, bootmakers, milliners, penmakers, and stationers all displayed wares in their windows. She wandered in and out of the shops, splurging only to buy herself a steel-nibbed pen and some India ink, in addition to a small sheaf of paper for writing up the shop's sales.
She came out of the stationer's shop, intending to return back to her own, when she looked across the busy road, full of pedestrians, carriages, horses, and their droppings, and saw something that made her heart sink.
Put Boyce sat at a table outside a coffee shop with that attractive woman she'd seen him with before. This was certainly far afield from his cabinetmaker shop for him to be.
He said he liked walking everywhere, didn't he? And this
is
the most fashionable shopping district in London. Why shouldn't he be here with his lady love?
Put was dressed again in his uncomfortable dark tailcoat over a striped waistcoat with buckskin breeches. Except he didn't look ill at ease at all. No, in fact, he appeared quite jovial. He and the lady, with her fashionable bonnet tied with a dark green sashâsilk if Belle wasn't mistakenâwere laughing at some terribly funny joke.
Put leaned in to speak to her, and the woman leaned toward him as well, offering him the side of her face.
He was close enough to kiss her cheek.
Surely he wouldn't commit such an act in public, would he?
At that moment there was a long gap in horse traffic in the street. Put looked across Oxford Street and saw Belle standing there. She knew she must look a complete idiot, but she was rooted to the spot.
She half hoped he would look embarrassed, but he didn't. He held up a hand in greeting, then stood and directed a bow her way. The lady with him saw that Put was looking at Belle, and raised a gloved hand to her, as well.
And that was too much. To have the woman waving to her energized Belle into motion and she fled back to her own shop, once again the rabbit acting on instinct.
The shop was empty except for Wesley, thank goodness. She hung the “Closed” sign in the window and locked the door.
“I think we're done for the day,” she said.
Wesley looked up from where he was writing in a journal. “What's wrong, Sister?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. How were things in my absence?”
“Mostly lookers, only one sale of some palm-and-bird-of-paradise damask to Mrs. Jennings. Oh, and Lady Logan sent along a note that she wants to meet with you. Something about seat cushions and her new Italian greyhound.”
Oh dear.
“Anything else?”
“No. Except that I've been having an interesting time lately.”
“Have you?” She looked around, and noticed that the floor was littered with threads, broken buttons, and scraps. She retrieved a broom and began sweeping the floor.
“Yes. I've been to some meetings led by my friend, Arthur Thistlewood. He makes some valid points about the Peterloo Massacre.”
“Thistlewood? Isn't he the one you said knows more about anything than we could possibly hope to?”
“Well, er, I may have spoken harshly, but he really is very clever. He heads an organization called the Spencean Philanthropists, dedicated to destroying the oppressive power of the government. I've joined them and have already impressed Mr. Thistlewood with my quick grasp of politics.”
Belle shook her head. There was a pile of scraps at one end of the cutting table. It must be days' worth. Why did Wesley have time to scribble in a book but no time to clean up scraps?
“Did you hear me, Belle?”
She snapped back to attention. “I'm sorry, what?”
“I asked what you thought about my joining the Spenceans.”
“If they're radicals, I don't approve.”
Wesley slammed his journal shut. “No, of course not. You'd never stand firm for principle or ideals.”
“What do you mean? I merely said I don't support extreme movements.”
“What you really mean to say is that you don't support anything in which I might involve myself.”
“I said no such thing, nor did I intend it.” Belle scooped all of the litter into a dustbin. “Must you constantly go off your head with me, Wesley?”
Especially when I'm this tired and disheartened.
“Must you constantly insult me and oppress me?” he retorted.
“Oppress you? Honestly, I don't know where you get such ridiculous ideas.”
She put away the broom and attended to other tasks to avoid further conflict, not noticing the burning glare in Wesley's eyes.
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September 1819
London
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Wesley was attending regular meetings of the Spenceans. At Darcey's urging, he volunteered for various small tasks and errands for Mr. Thistlewood, resulting in the leader pulling Wesley into his inner circle of cronies.
Darcey was pleased by his advancement.
“You're at the forefront of this movement, love,” she said, drawing languidly on his pipe while stretched out on the bed in their room at the tavern. He always found it devilishly amusing not only that she was smoking a pipe but that it was the very one Belle gave him.
Smoke swirled around Darcey in a wispy, exotic dance. She wore only a gauzy shift, made from a length of cotton batiste he'd cut without Belle's knowledge, and which was now wrinkled from the stays Darcey had removed earlier. Darcey had teased him about it when he gave it to her, saying she was surprised he'd had the nerve to steal something from his sister.
It was the only moment of irritation he'd ever had with Darcey.
Wesley joined her on the bed, propping himself up on one elbow as he took the pipe from her to draw from it himself. Now they were both enveloped in the sweet, fragrant smoke.
“So, are you ready for more?” Darcey asked, slowly blinking her almond-shaped eyes. Wesley felt that familiar stirring.
“Already?” He grinned at her and handed the pipe back.
She pushed it away as she sat up. “No, addlepate, I don't mean that. I mean are you ready for more involvement with Mr. Thistlewood?”
“More? You don't think I'm close to him?”
“You are, but I want further glory for you.” She snuggled back down next to him, inserting one foot between his legs and sliding it up and down from his ankles to his kneecaps. “You should be Mr. Thistlewood's closest confidant, my love. He implies that a close, inner circle is meeting outside of the Horse and Groom. I'm certain he plans to do something dramatic against the government, and it should be my Wesley at his right hand, don't you think?” She gently nipped his chin.
“Yes, you know best. Just tell me what to do.” Between the opium and Darcey's teasing, he was quite beyond even paying attention to what she was saying.
“Don't worry, love, I will. We'll start with you getting into that inner circle and finding out where they meet.” She giggled as she tugged at his clothes. “Now, let's entertain ourselves.”
Wesley could hardly remember the next hour after that.
5 October 1819, Tuesday
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Dââis pleased with my progress with the Spenceans. Mr. Thistlewood has been giving me more responsibilities, and last week assigned John Harrison and me to find a secret meeting place for the Spencean inner circle. We happened upon a clean hayloft over an unused stable on Cato Street, almost directly across the street from the Horse and Groom! The owner was more than glad to rent the abandoned space, which I told him was for meetings of a new chapter of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Very clever of me, I thought.
Mr. Thistlewood praised our find, and today called me his “boon companion.” He says I will be integral to the inner circle's future plans.
Dââwas a bit put out, now that she realizes she can't be present for the same meetings I will be attending.
Promised I will repeat to her every word that's uttered.
She said she'll have to be satisfied with it. She wants me to influence Thistlewood to act against the House of Commons. Wants her father to be punished somehow.
I don't see how it can be done, but I will do my best.
Found a mouse nesting under the cutting table. Drowned it in a bucket, but forgot to empty it before Bââfound it. Ha! I keep reliving her horror in my mind. Very gratifying.
Have not had a visit from Mr. Ashby lately. May have to seek him out.
November 1819
Brighton
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Progress on the Pavilion was moving along rapidly. However, no matter what stage construction was in, there always had to be sections of palace in good working order so that the Prince Regent could entertain at a moment's notice. So, if on a whim the prince desired a twenty-course meal with fifty of his closest friends, it was expected that his new French chef would have the cooking facilities to do so and that a dining room would be elegantly serviced and ready.
If the prince wished to stroll about a perfumed and pastoral-set garden, it must be available.
If he wished to bring Lady Conyngham for a visit, why, flawlessly appointed rooms must be prepared.
As Belle witnessed the extraordinary lengths to which workers and servants went to satisfy these requirements, she realized that part of a monarch's privilege was to have his world set perfectly around him.
How did a king or prince contend with a world that, as she well knew, could change in an instant?