Death at Dawn - Caro Peacock [66]
‘Please do not contradict me. I couldn’t understand a word she was gabbling. I shall examine her again next week and expect her to be speaking French like an English gentlewoman.’
The children slept in the afternoon and so did I, so deeply unconscious on my attic bed that I woke thinking I was back at my aunt’s house, until the clash of saucepans from the kitchens below reminded me. I cried for a while, then dressed and tidied my hair and went down. Betty was laying out Henrietta’s white muslin frock with the blue sash.
‘We’re surely not taking them down tonight,’ I said. ‘Not after what happened.’
‘If they’re sent for, they’ll have to go.’
At first, James flatly refused to change into his best clothes. He wanted to see his mother but his fear of his father was greater.
‘Your papa is a very important man,’ Betty told him. ‘He’s angry sometimes because he works hard, that’s all.’
But her eyes, meeting mine over his bowed head, told a different story. Henrietta was impatient with her brother.
‘Don’t be silly. Papa didn’t mean to hurt me.’
I looked at the blue bruise on her jaw and thought there was a kind of courage in her. James let himself be dressed at last, but began crying when the bell rang for us and clung tightly to my hand as we went down the staircase to the grand hall. There were servants at work, dusting and polishing. This was a surprise because normally cleaning was done early in the morning, before the family were up and about. The reason seemed to be a re-arrangement of the pictures. There were dozens of them round the hall, some of be-wigged Mandeville ancestors and their white-bosomed ladies, others of great moments from British history. Julius Caesar confronting the Druids had been one of the most prominent, next to the door to the larger of the two drawing rooms. Now it had been taken down and propped against the wall and a portrait was being put up in its place. Sir Herbert himself was supervising, with Mrs Beedle, the butler, Mrs Quivering and two footmen in attendance. Since all this was barring the way to the drawing room, we could only stand there with the children and wait. When they’d fixed it in place at last, and Sir Herbert had nodded his grudging approval, the painting seemed a poor substitute for noble Caesar. The portrait was a comparatively modern one of a pleasant though somewhat pop-eyed young woman, dressed simply in white silk with a blue sash, arms bare and hair piled in curls on top of her head, surrounded with a wreath of roses, all in the easy Empire style of our parents’ time. To my surprise, I recognised her from other portraits I’d seen, and when James tugged at my hand and whispered, ‘Who is she?’ I was able to whisper back.
‘That’s poor Princess Charlotte.’
My father had not encouraged concern about the doings of royalty, but even a republican’s daughter may be interested in princesses, especially young ones who ended sadly. So although I was no more than a baby when Princess Charlotte died, I knew a little about her. She was a grand-daughter of mad King George III, the only legitimate child of his son George IV and his unruly and hated Queen, Caroline. Her lack of brothers and sisters was accounted for by the fact that her father, on first being introduced to his arranged bride, had turned pale and called for a glass of brandy. They spent just one night together in the royal matrimonial bed and Princess Charlotte was the result.
Charlotte showed signs of being one of the best of the Hanoverian bunch, which to be sure is not saying a great deal. She was, by most accounts, more amiable than her father and more sensible than her mother. They married her before she was twenty to one of those German princelings who are in such constant supply, and she became pregnant with a child who would have succeeded her and become king of England – only she died in childbirth and her baby boy died too. Which was why we were about to celebrate the coronation