Sea Change (27 page)

'Hello, Ma.'

Spandrel's greeting was hardly equal to the momentousness of the occasion. His mother gaped at him in astonishment for fully half a minute, seemingly — and understandably — unable to believe that he was standing before her, alive and well, alive and uncommonly well, to judge by his healthy complexion and newish clothes. Fifteen months of unexplained absence, during which she had often been reduced to believing him dead, had ended on an April morning of fitful sunshine, with her opening the door in answer to a strangely familiar knock and finding her son standing before her, smiling a smile she knew so well.

'Aren't you going to give me a kiss?'

She did kiss him, of course, and hugged him too. Tears started to her eyes. She hugged him again, then stood back and frowned at him. 'I thought you were dead, boy. You know that?'

'Not dead, Ma. As you can see.'

'Come inside and close the door before we have half the neighbourhood goggling at you.'

'I bumped into Annie Welsh in the yard.'

'What did she say to you?'

'Something about a bad penny.'

'She probably remembers what I said to her when you first went missing.'

'What was that?'

'That I hoped for your sake you had a good excuse for leaving me in the lurch.'

'I don't know about in the lurch.' Spandrel looked around the room. The piles of washing and the rack-load drying before the fire indicated that his mother was still plying her trade as a washerwoman. 'You probably found living was cheaper without me.'

'Cheaper, maybe. But not easier.' She grabbed his left ear lobe, as she often had when he misbehaved as a child. 'What have you been up to?'

'Ow!' Spandrel's exaggerated cry persuaded her to let him go. 'Some breakfast would be nice.'

'I'm surprised you don't expect a fatted calf.'

'Have a heart, Ma.'

'Lucky for you I've a bigger heart than's good for me. I'll make breakfast. While you explain yourself.'

Explaining himself was something Spandrel had already given much thought to. The Green Book — and the secrets it contained — was a subject he had no intention of broaching to his mother. He doubted she would be able to comprehend what he himself now found difficult to believe. The year that had passed since his departure from Rome had cast the events that had led him there in the first place into a semi-fabulous compartment of his memory. And he was content for them to remain there. Accordingly, while admitting that Sir Theodore Janssen had sent him on a secret errand to Amsterdam, he claimed that he had no idea what the package he had been charged to carry might have contained. He had been robbed of it in a tavern in Amsterdam, so he related, and, ashamed of such foolishness, had remained abroad rather than return home empty-handed to face Sir Theodore's wrath.

His account grafted itself at this point onto the truth. For the past year, he had worked as a surveyor's assistant in the French city of Rennes. He had met the surveyor, a kindly but ailing fellow much in need of assistance, by the name of Jean-Luc Taillard, during a coach journey (from Brest, a detail he omitted). Taillard, having no family of his own, had appointed Spandrel his heir. And Taillard's recent death had left Spandrel in possession of his life savings, amounting to 15,000 livres — about £1,000. This was a fraction of what Spandrel had dreamt the Green Book might bring him. But it was also far more than he had ever had to his name. And it meant he could return to England without fear of being imprisoned for debt.

'All the debts are paid, Ma,' he said, as he finished his breakfast. 'And there's plenty left over.'

'To spend on what, may I ask?'

'Somewhere better for you to live, to start with. You'll be sending washing out, not taking it in. And I'll be finishing the map.'

'That old dream of your father's?'

'This is one dream that's going to come true.'

'You mean that?'

'I certainly do.'

'All our troubles are over?'

'Yes. Thanks to Monsieur Taillard.' He plucked a flagon of gin from his bag and pulled out the cork. 'Let's drink to happier times.'

'You'll be the ruin of me, boy,' said his mother, unable to stifle a grin.

Viscount Townshend hurried into the Treasury that morning with an altogether lighter tread than he had felt capable of when entering Spencer House the previous day. This time, he had news for Walpole, not the other way about, and it was a rare enough experience for him to relish.

Walpole was standing by the window of his office, munching an apple and gazing out at a leash of deer in St James's Park. He looked exactly what Townshend knew him not to be — a man without a care in the world. But Townshend also knew that the cares of state were what lent him such a genial aspect. They were what made him happy.

'What do you have for me, Charles? Something, I'll be bound. I've seen that twinkle in your eye too often to be wrong.'

'A despatch from Sir Luke Schaub.' (Schaub was the British Ambassador in Paris, second only to Rome as a centre of Jacobite plotting.) 'Sent two days ago.' (Sent, then, on the day of Sunderland's death.)

'What does Sir Luke have to say?'

'Cardinal Dubois has alerted him to a request from the Pretender for the use of three thousand French troops.'

'When?'

'Within weeks.'

'How fortunate we are that the French Foreign Minister is such a devious man.' Walpole raised the window and tossed his half-eaten apple out through the gap, then turned to Townshend with a broad smile. 'It seems we'd have known something was afoot even without the run of Sunderland's study. But no doubt Sunderland would have persuaded the King there was nothing to worry about.'

'We should inform His Majesty.'

'I agree. We'll see him this afternoon. You'd better bring Carteret with you. It'll give the impression we're all of one mind.' Walpole chuckled. 'But then we are, of course.'

Shopping for anything but the barest necessities was for Margaret Spandrel a half-forgotten indulgence. Shopping for a new home was something she had not expected to do this side of Heaven. But that afternoon, equipped with a copy of the London Journal and the addresses of several reputable house agents, she accompanied her son on a tour of properties which were considerably larger and more elegant than many of those where she had latterly called to collect washing and which — miracle of miracles — William assured her they could afford.

Yet she was not to be lured into extravagance. Such money as they had should be used wisely. There were only two of them. They deserved no more than they needed: a modest level of comfort. This they found to her satisfaction — though not entirely to William's — on the second floor of a house on the southern side of Leicester Fields.

'Four rooms and a palace in view whenever you look out of the window for fourteen shillings a week,' observed the agent. 'You'll not do better.'

The palace in question was actually Leicester House, whither the Prince of Wales had fled after falling out with his father a few years previously and being expelled from St James's. It was not a palace and it did not look like one. But the square was quiet and its residents respectable. It would do. It would do very well indeed. They took the lease.

In the King's closet at St James's, which really was a palace even though some had been rude enough to suggest that it looked no more like one than Leicester House, what would do and what would not do were also matters of moment.

The King was not in one of his more pliable moods. Sunderland's death had shocked him to whatever lay at the core of his Germanic being and his reaction veered between the lachrymose and the suspicious. The triumvirate of ministers facing him — First Lord of the Treasury Walpole and Secretaries of State Townshend and Carteret — wished, it seemed, to vex him with problems beyond his fathoming while failing to answer the questions that most troubled him.

'What made Lord Sunderland to die?' he demanded, not for the first time that afternoon.

'Pleurisy,' said Walpole. 'According to the doctors.'

'Pleurisy? So sudden?'

'It is a puzzle,' remarked Lord Carteret, despite a sharp look from Walpole. The youngest and best bred of the three, Carteret impressed the King by his fine manners and independence of mind. Would that he could have more such courtiers about him, instead of coarse-tongued, beetle-browed Norfolkmen. 'But of puzzles we have no lack.'

'Nor of plots, Your Majesty,' said Townshend. 'There seems no doubt that the Pretender is set upon another attempt.'

'They tell us his son may die also.'

The ministers needed to exchange several glances before realizing that the King was referring not to the Pretender's son but to the Honourable William Spencer, youngest son of the late Earl of Sunderland. 'The boy has smallpox, sir,' said Walpole. 'It's not connected with—'

'Where is the Duke of Newcastle?' barked the King. 'We are needful.'

'I'm sure the Lord Chamberlain will wait upon you directly, sir,' said Townshend. 'He has as yet, however, no knowledge of the threat to your person.'

'Person? Threat?'

'We fear it does amount to that,' said Carteret.

'Who? When? How?'

'The Jacobites,' said Walpole darkly. 'When you travel to Hanover. An assassin on the road. Simultaneous with—' He broke off, then began again, expressing himself more simply. 'At the same time as a rising here in London.'

'In the circumstances…' Townshend began.

'It would be best to postpone your visit to Hanover,' Walpole continued. 'We must have regard for Your Majesty's safety.'

'I will go to Hanover.'

'Perhaps not this year.'

'I will go.'

'There is still much resentment among your subjects on account of the Angelegenheit South Sea,' said Carteret, smiling faintly at his own Germanism. 'That is what the Jacobites hope to exploit. We should give them no opportunity.'

'It is easy enough to frustrate their plans now we know of them,' said Townshend. 'We can station troops in Hyde Park and expel all papists and non-jurors from the city. That, together with Cardinal Dubois' refusal of assistance for the Pretender and his withdrawal of Irish regiments from the Channel ports—'

'And the postponement of your visit to Hanover,' put in Walpole.

'Should render us safe,' Townshend concluded.

'Ja, ja.' The King chewed at his knuckles. 'I stay here,' he conceded glumly.

'But for the moment,' said Walpole, 'we should do nothing.'

'Nothing?' The King glared at him. 'Nichts?'

'Nothing to alert them to our knowledge of their plans. Once they know the game is up, they will go to ground. We will not catch them then.'

'So how will we — how will you, Mr Walpole — catch them?'

'By luring them into betraying themselves.'

'We believe the Bishop of Rochester to be at the bottom of it,' put in Townshend.

'No doubt he dreams of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury,' Carteret remarked.

' Verrater,' growled the King. 'Why do we let Atterbury to give sermons in Westminster Abbey when he plots behind us?' Francis Atterbury was Dean of Westminster Abbey as well as Bishop of Rochester. His sermons in the former capacity, uttered a mere stone's throw from the Palace, had often been thinly veiled dalliances with treason. Small wonder that the King did not understand why he had to tolerate him. But there were reasons. And they were good ones.

'He is undeniably popular,' said Townshend.

'A veritable darling of the mob,' said Carteret, smiling weakly. 'Against whom there is a singular lack of evidence.'

'Evidence that would secure his conviction in court, that is,' added Townshend.

'But give me a few weeks,' said Walpole, 'and I think I can gather such evidence.'

The King frowned at him. 'How?'

'You'll remember, sir, the… Green Book?'

'Das Grune Buck?' The inflexion of horror in the King's voice suggested he was hardly likely to have forgotten it.

'Indeed, sir.' Walpole smiled at him reassuringly. 'I believe we can use it to bait a trap… that will snap shut round Bishop Atterbury's overweening neck.'

Margaret Spandrel returned to Cat and Dog Yard that afternoon to commence the less than daunting task of packing her belongings in readiness for the move to Leicester Fields. William did not accompany her. On the pretext of visiting the engraver who was holding the completed sheets of the map (and who he would later say had not been at home), he left her to make her way back there alone. He headed north to Bloomsbury, an area of the city favoured by those who had sufficient money to buy themselves a charming view of the meadow-patched hills of Hampstead and Highgate. George Chesney, a director of the New River Company, which piped Hertfordshire spring water to a goodly portion of Londoners from its reservoir at Islington, was one such person. His home in Great Ormond Street backed onto this vista of rural meadowland, while presenting an imposing Palladian face to the city.

The Chesney residence was not Spandrel's destination, much as he would have liked it to be. The year he had spent working for Monsieur Taillard had rid him of many delusions, most notably the idea that anything could be had for nothing, be it beauty or wealth. Life could only be bettered by honest endeavour. He was financially independent because of such endeavour, whereas fortune-hunting across half of Europe had yielded only fear and a fugitive's despair. All that was behind him. He missed old Taillard, he really did. He wished the poor fellow could have lived longer. But his death had handed Spandrel an opportunity to improve his station in society. For that he needed a wife, not a dangerously alluring dream-lover. And as a wife Maria Chesney would be ideal. But was she still available? He could hardly knock on her father's door and ask. He could, however, enquire of the Chesneys' loquacious footman, Sam Burrows, who was unlikely to let a Saturday afternoon pass into evening without calling at his favourite local tavern, the Goat.