Plate 70

Plate 61

1712

CHAPTER ONE

Beak Street, London

Pain cracked across the back of Henrietta’s skull, filling her vision with white light. As her body smacked against the floor, her skirts ripped. She spluttered and tried to roll over, but Charles planted his boot in the small of her back. ‘Give it to me, bitch!’

Noise fragmented into shards. A cry soared, cutting through her husband’s voice. It was Henry – poor boy. He would be so afraid.

‘What?’ she gasped. ‘What do you want now?’

‘You know what!’

Money. Money for the bottle, money for the faro table, money for his whores. Money he never earned. A pitiful amount of interest on her dowry, intended for her sole use.

Her hand flailed across the floor, trying to find purchase. Only mouse-droppings met her fingertips. ‘I have none.’

‘You do!’ His breath hit her ear, stinking of tobacco and alcohol.

‘You feed the child, don’t you?’

Resentment boiled up inside her but she could not let it show. Submission was the only safe path. She had tried the other way more than once – and barely escaped with her life.

‘Henry!’ she called out to her son. ‘Tell Papa when we last had something to eat. It wasn’t today, was it?’ she prompted. ‘Nor yesterday . . . ’

Charles’s boot pressed down, choking the breath from her. Her ribs mashed into the floor. With no fat to cushion them, they threatened to burst through her wasted skin. ‘What? Starving my son?’

The pressure on her back lifted for an instant before Charles stamped upon her shoulder blades. Vision flickered. Henrietta tasted vomit in her mouth and suddenly it was all around her, sticking to her cheeks. Her consciousness retreated, fleeing the squalor and pain. Hanover. She had to think of Hanover: the sparkling court, the fine dresses. Fountains that danced in the sunlight. It was her only hope of escape.

‘For God’s sake, woman! Look at the state of you.’ Charles spat on her prone form. ‘I won’t have this mess in my house. Get it cleaned up by the time I return.’

‘Yes, Charles.’

He slammed the door, shaking the thin walls and rattling the windows in their frames. Henrietta waited a few moments, testing the silence against his return. Nothing. The void was like the sound of angel wings.

She struggled up and leant one arm against the wall. Another chip, another piece of torn wallpaper. At least it wasn’t a bloodstain this time. She grabbed a rag from the chair and wiped her face. Her woollen gown was past repair; soiled, torn and shiny at the seams. The frayed linen around her elbows caught up dust and dead flies. She would have to go on wearing it: the humiliating rag that marked every step she had fallen from her place as Miss Hobart of Blickling Hall. It was the only piece of clothing she owned. A whimper broke the bruised silence. Henrietta looked up from her gown to see Henry, watching her. His eyes brimmed with tears.

‘Henry. Henry, it’s all right. Look, Mama isn’t hurt!’ She spread her arms and moved to embrace him, but he dodged out of the way. She couldn’t blame him. She was a frightening figure, covered in scratches and vomit. She wished she could light a fire, give him something sweet to take the edge off the shock. But she had nothing – nothing except her love. And it wasn’t enough.

‘Mama has a plan,’ she told him. ‘A plan to get you food and an education. You’d like to go to school, wouldn’t you?’

He didn’t answer.

She knelt softly and put her head level with his mop of dirty hair. ‘I’m going to tell you a story,’ she crooned. ‘A story of a sad old queen called Anne who was very, very ill. Winter drew near and her days fell away like autumn leaves. She wished and wished for a child to take her throne, but it didn’t come.’ Henrietta had a vivid memory of her own mother, putting her to bed with a fairy-tale. She swallowed. ‘But then, guess what happened? The queen found a magical place, across the narrow sea. A place where there were generations of princes and princesses, just waiting to keep her country safe.’

Still on her knees, she shuffled over to the bed. As she pushed the frame, straw burst from the mattress and fluttered down on her head. ‘Now, your Papa’s name is a key to that magical place. You only have to say Howard and the doors will open. We need to go there and serve the princes and princesses. Then, when they come to England to take their throne, Mama and Papa will be right there beside them.’ Henrietta rapped the floorboards with her knuckles.

One returned a deep, hollow sound.

‘But how do you get to the magic place?’ Henry’s voice was a tiny thread. ‘How do you cross the sea?’

Henrietta laid a finger on her lips. ‘It’s a secret. You mustn’t tell Papa.’ Her nails closed around a loose piece of wood and wriggled it free. ‘But at night, the fairies come and . . . ’

Breath left her in a rush of anguish. No. It cannot be. Her careful hoard, the stash she had starved for, was gone. A yawning gap met her frantic gaze, her groping fingers.

Somewhere out there, she knew, Charles would be sitting on a battered stool, drinking her dreams into oblivion.

© Laura Purcell

1

Debut

‘It’s a taupe,’ announced the doctor, poking at the lump with a scratchy yellow finger, ‘a French tumour they call it, though couldn’t rightly tell you why. Most unusual – got a bit of hair growing on it too, see here?’

Several thin strands grew, wet-wisped, from a lump the size and shape of a duck’s egg at the bottom of the baby’s head.

‘Might kill him,’ the doctor carried on with scientific stoicism. ‘But probably not, most likely grow a-pace with the rest of him.

My goodness though, he does rather resemble the back end of a baboon, don’t you think?’ He winked at Frau Kranz, who had never seen a baboon let alone its back end, but understood well enough what he meant.

‘Schweigen Sie!’ she hissed, ‘be quiet, sir,’ and nodded her head at Shminiak, who had slumped into a stupor by the empty fire, bowing his head, wondering how much more brandy it would take to make everything go away. He’d already clapped his hands about his ears to shut out the baby’s awful squalling, moaning quietly: ‘For God’s sake, make it stop, make it stop, for God’s sake . . .’

Frau Kranz, who was the most patient of women, could put it off no longer and chivvied the child up carefully from the bassinet and carried him over to the bed, clamping him onto his mother’s sweaty breast. Nelke, exhausted as she was, woke abruptly at the application and tried to swat the intruder weakly away. She refused to believe this monstrosity was of her flesh, that she had given birth at all, the pain of labour nothing more than a terrible nightmare, a twilight dream. But it was no dream, not for Nelke, Shminiak, nor the child who was oblivious of the outside world – a world that seemed peaceful on the surface, there in Staßburg as elsewhere, but the jigsaw puzzle of Europe was beginning to crack along its edges, breaking up from within, harried from without, each piece tugging itself away from the other, the Holy Roman Empire snuffed out years before by Napoleon, a shaky German Confederation created to fill the void. There was civil war in Iberia, and every Italian state clawed at the throats of its neighbours, and soon the entire continent would be utterly fragmented, Metternich packing the prison fortress at Spielburg in Bohemia, its stones reverberating with the cries of the spies and subversives he’d locked inside its walls; but no matter how many he crammed in there seemed an inexhaustible supply, and the secret operatives of princes, kings and Junkers were soon running the country up and down as freely and frequently as the tides run up and down the sands of coastlines the world over. Conspiracy and subterfuge would become bywords for those coming years through which that child of Nelke and Shminiak would grow up, and the slump of 1844 a few years later would scuttle ships and rip the Guilds from nape to knee; potato blight and famine would squeeze the stomachs of labourers and peasants across the land; there would be riots in Aachen and Bavaria, Berlin and Saxony; the Silesian silk workers would break their looms and tools; the Slavs and Poles and Magyars rise up against their masters; the railways would crash and the rivers stutter to a stop with the piling up of the dead.

But all that was yet to come and, as Philbert bullied his way out of Nelke’s womb, there was no inkling of the terrible and significant part he would play in these events, no thoughts at all thrumming around inside his monstrous head. Later in his life he would meet people who claimed to understand the language of the wind as it whispered through the trees, who saw omens in the entrails pulled from still-warm lambs, interpreted the future by studying the murfles and mottlements that grew upon men’s skin. Perhaps if they’d been there at the very start, attendant at Philbert’s birth, they might have foreseen what would happen, maybe had the nous to stop it before it all kicked off. But only Frau Kranz was there with a screaming mother, a drink-sodden father, and the doctor scratching his yellow fingernail on Philbert’s taupe.

© Clio Gray

I

VIRTUOUS TEMPERAMENT

Tuscany: 49 BC

I was sixteen when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and rode into Italy at the head of Legio XIII. I knew several of the young men in Tuscany who joined his auxiliaries and begged my father’s permission to enlist as well. He refused.

I was old enough, or so I thought, but my father possessed a farmer’s slow reckoning of time. He said I would be of more use to Caesar if I finished my education. I protested that Caesar needed me now, but my father assured me a man like Caesar would always have another battle waiting.

In the three years that followed, Caesar chased the senate out of Italy, routed the legions of Pompey Magnus in Spain and Greece, secured Egypt and sailed to Pontus on the Black Sea, where he defeated an enemy force on the very day he arrived, uttering in the aftermath of that battle the immortal words, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Then, when the last of the senate’s forces rallied in Numidia, Caesar sailed his wearied legions to Africa and, after a series of desperate battles, brought our great Civil War to its conclusion.

In the history of Rome, there had never been three more glorious years of war, or any general the equal of Julius Caesar. And all the while I sat in Tuscany adding summons and learning to parse Greek sentences.

Rome: 46 BC

When word came of Caesar’s victory in Africa, my wise father kissed my head and sent me to Rome with his blessing. I was nineteen. My eyes were good in those days, my feet swift, my hands strong. I had a heart brimming with ambition. Like a few thousand other young men of

my stripe, I had learned from my early childhood onwards to fight with a sword and hunt with a spear. I could box and wrestle with some skill and even had modest talents in archery. As for the art of horsemanship, I was unrivalled in all of Tuscany.

I was handsome in my youth, taller than most, with powerful shoulders and dusty brown locks. At seventy years of age, I still have broad shoulders and most of my height; the beautiful locks, however, have gone the way of all that is mortal. Judah, my secretary, smirks as I dictate this. It is always the same with young men: they can imagine any fate for themselves except old age and baldness. I was no different.

In Rome, I spent each morning for nearly a week in the vestibule of the house of Cornelius Dolabella. I had never met Dolabella, but my father enjoyed a long friendship with his great uncle, who was one of the lords of our province and the grand patriarch of the Cornelii. He had therefore instructed me to approach Dolabella before speaking to any other patrician. This seemed good advice. Dolabella, as everyone knew, was then a rising star in Caesar’s party, which happened to be the only viable political faction left in Rome. Dolabella was twenty-eight years old; in the old days that would have made him too young for command and certainly too young for a position of any importance in the government. In the world Julius Caesar had fashioned, Dolabella was a general of the legions. In fact, he had already been promised a consulship in another year or two.

To my thinking, no man could match Caesar’s accomplishments, and even with all my ambition I never imagined myself overtaking his glory, not if I had three lifetimes. But I thought I could hope for what Dolabella had accomplished. I decided all I had to do was observe his manner and conduct myself exactly as he did. Of course, I came to this dubious conclusion before I had ever set eyes on the man.

© Craig Smith