Courting Her Highness_ The Story of Queen Anne - Jean Plaidy [196]
Sarah, therefore, reading his dignified offer, was flattered; he must have a very high opinion of her, for one thing she had to admit she lacked was noble birth. Of course as Duchess of Marlborough she stood as high as any, and she would have everyone know it; but such a man as Somerset would certainly consider the Jennings’s and Churchills very humble folk.
Sarah took some pleasure in her reply. “If I were young and handsome as I was, instead of old and faded as I am, and you could lay the empire of the world at my feet, you should never have the heart and hand that once belonged to John, Duke of Marlborough.”
Having despatched this reply she went to John’s study; her thoughts were back to the past and the terrible sense of loss was as strong with her as it had ever been.
She decided that she could no longer delay sorting out his belongings and as she went through the treasures he kept in his cabinet she came upon a package; and when she opened this her own golden hair fell out.
She stared in astonishment. Her hair! Then she remembered that occasion when in a fury she had cut it off and thrown it on his desk. So he had gathered it up and preserved it.
She discovered that she was crying—not the tempestuous sobbing which was characteristic of her—but quietly, heartbrokenly.
She put the hair back into the packet and went to her room. There she lay on her bed, quietly weeping.
“Marl,” she murmured, “why was it so? You should never have left me. We should have gone together. For of what use is life to me without you.”
She continued to battle her way through life—but much of the old zest was gone. Life had little meaning without Marl. But she was the same Sarah—bellicose, furious, quarrelsome, impulsively going to battle. She had a new name now. “Old Marlborough.” And she was old; she had been sixty-two when the Duke died.
She might have found some contentment in those last years. She was an extremely rich woman—and she had always loved money. She had only two daughters it was true but many grandchildren. But she could never live in harmony with them. She could never resist meddling—neither in the affairs of the country nor those of the family.
She would not be excluded from the country’s affairs and since she had always sought for her opponents in the highest quarters chose the Prime Minister Robert Walpole as her number one enemy and Queen Caroline, wife of George II—who had now succeeded his father—as the second. Nor did she neglect her own family. Mary, who was perhaps more like herself than any of the others, could never forget how her mother had prevented her marrying the man she believed she had loved. It was true she had been little more than a child at the time, but the memory of that romance remained with her and all through her unsatisfactory marriage she thought of what might have been and blamed her mother.
“You are an ill wife, a cruel daughter and a bad mother,” Sarah screamed at her daughter. “I married you to the chief match in England and if it hadn’t been for me you might have married a country gentleman with nothing more than two thousand a year.”
Mary turned on her mother and cried: “You are an interfering old harridan. You interfered in our lives when we were unable to stop you. You shall not do so now.”
Mary stalked out of her mother’s house and declared she would never enter again.
And Sarah went about the house complaining to everyone who listened—and none dared do otherwise—that she had the most ungrateful daughter in the world. “And as to Montague her husband, he’s a fine specimen of man, I declare!” she shouted. “He behaves as though he’s fifteen although he’s all of fifty-two. He thinks it fun to invite people to his house and into his garden where he squirts them with water. And in his country house he puts vermin in his guests’ beds to make them itch.