Elisabeth Fairchild (24 page)

Dulcie did not like to see the colors crushed and muddied in the gutters. Too much did they remind her of Peterloo.

The top of the carriage was down. Despite a brisk nip to the air, the wind had died. The sun beamed weakly from an uncharacteristically cloudless sky. Lydia, in high spirits, insisted upon demonstrating the advantages of possessing a fold-back calash.

“It is far easier to see and be seen with the top folded down, don’t you agree? You are a sight worth seeing, my dear, in your new bonnet and Spenser. The epaulets suit you. Rather regimental. Even heroic. Captain Stapleton is sure to approve.” Lydia laughed--in her element, looking exceptionally well herself, pride and the chill painting her cheeks. “Is that not the Prince we follow? Hard to mistake the yellow coach. Shall we wave?” She jested, of course, carried away by high spirits, reveling in her latest possession.

Dulcie tried hard to be cheered, to participate in the non-stop chatter. She tired of gossip, new carriages, new gowns. Her every sentence seemed in some way disconnected, as if she and Lydia found little common ground for conversation.

“The Prince is returned from the regatta in Crewe?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” Lydia said. “For the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Kent’s daughter, Victoire Georgina Alexandria Charlotte Augusta.” She rolled the name off her tongue with a flourish.

Dulcie laughed. Roger Ramsay would have laughed along with her, had he been there. “A burdensome name for a baby. Only imagine trying to spell that out on a slate.”

“Dulcie!” Lydia looked personally offended, as if it were a child of her own they discussed and not the niece of the Prince Regent. “A perfectly appropriate name for a little girl who stands in line to inherit the throne. The king is not long for this world.”

“Poor mad George,” Dulcie said softly. “I hear he has lost all of his teeth. That he lives on milk and sops.”

“Indeed. Already the Prince plans palatial renovations to Buckingham House.”

“He would do better to renovate the foreign import laws.”

“And what do you know of such laws?”

“I know they threaten the livelihoods of many an honest Englishman.” Dulcie shrugged, missing Roger, missing a sense of her own importance. Lydia must never know the whole of it. “I find it very foolish in the Prince to address a letter to the Manchester militia, commending them in their actions at St. Peter’s Field.” She closed her eyes, heard the screams ring, body remembering the heated moment. “Innocence murdered, Lydia.”

“Peterloo, again?” Lydia sighed. “But my dear, your unending fascination . . . Good God, what are those ragamuffins doing?”

Ahead, along Piccadilly, at Green Park, an unhappy crowd thronged the grassy area just past the pen for the King’s dairy cattle. People thronged the walkway in front of The Baron pub, spilling into the street, booing and hissing the Prince as he passed.

“Stop!” Dulcie cried. Alarmed, she stood swaying and yanked the coachman’s sleeve. “Stop! Turn the carriage. We must not ride blindly into that rabble.”

She knew too well the ways of the mob, and from this crowd radiated a familiar dingy orange. From their mouths tumbled curses and catcalls. From their hands flew stones and rotten eggs, tomatoes and cabbages.

Lydia sat open-mouthed, muttering, “How can they?”

Mud, bricks and refuse bounced and splatted against the yellow body of the Royal coach. Dulcie berated the coachman. “Turn the horses. Now!”

The coachman moved to do just that, but before he could gain the pavement, a stone cracked his forehead. It made a horrible noise. The cut ran blood into his eyes.

He shook his head dazedly and sank back onto his bench cradling his pate.

Well into the spirit of things, Lydia urged him, “Lead them up onto the grass between the trees!”

“I will go,” Dulcie opened the door and jumped down.

“No, no!” Lydia called. “Not in your new dress!”

Deaf to her objections, Dulcie ran to the horse’s heads, and caught up the harness. The street narrowed, boxed in between shops and residences and the cow pen. Coaxing and soothing the matched bays with treacled tones, she led them onto the grass. Beyond the fence, the Royal dairy cattle raised their heads to gaze with placid interest.

The crowd, not content to defile the Prince’s coach, turned their missiles at the finer carriages whose passage they blocked. A rotten egg splashed the door of Lydia’s landau, eggshell sticking.

“No! The paint!” Lydia shrieked.

The lead horse, unnerved by her voice as much as by the attack, flung up it’s head, rearing, landing, huge hooved, on Dulcie’s foot, then on the hem of her gown.

Reminded afresh of her own diminutive size compared to the height and girth of the bay, Dulcie backed away from the animal, away from the shouting, milling, angry crowd, abreast of them now, blocking her path to the coach door.

Careful neither to run, nor show fear, moving with purpose despite the pain in her foot, Dulcie took shelter not on the park side, where all gates into the milking area at the Deputy Ranger’s Lodge were locked to the public--but across Piccadilly, in the doorway of a gas fixtures shop along the north side of the road.

The door was locked. She hovered in the doorway eying the crowd’s progress.

The bay reared again. The coachman recovered enough to control him, to set wheels in motion. A handful of mud landed explosively on Lydia’s seat, who fought off the mob with the point of her parasol. “Oh God! Dulcie! My new upholstery! Hurry! You must hurry!”

Separated from the coach by an intimidating sea of angry people, Dulcie flapped a hand at her. “Go, Lydia. Go!”

A head of cabbage thunked the door to the landau, a brick cracked against a wheel rim.

Lydia screeched, “Set the horses to, Malden, at once!”

From the crowd he watched her leap from the carriage, courageously turn the horses, wisely remove herself from harm’s way. He could not believe his eyes when Lydia turned tail and ran, could not bear to see his brave Dulcie stand alone in a doorway. Too much did her pose remind him of the night of the Spa Field’s riot, of the doorway where he had first kissed her.

A desire to kiss her surfaced, almost as urgent as his need to rescue her. She looked the lady today--no milkmaid, orange girl or weaver here. He had almost forgotten how lovely she looked, how proper. Yet, he above all others, knew what strengths, what passion, lurked beneath the ladylike facade.

Arm throbbing, he thrashed a way through the milling crowd only to be stopped by Lady Hertford’s dilemma.

The Prince’s current favorite, followed the Prince’s carriage in a chair. The crowd seemed bent on tipping her into the street. Mouthing lewd suggestions, they shoved the chairmen, shoved the chair. Roger paused to help the chairmen steady her course, his shoulder jarred into fresh pain.

The King’s mistress safe, guards rushing to the rescue, he turned once more to locate Dulcie.

Too late. Another hero preceded him, a gentleman in Navy blues. Captain Stapleton lent Dulcie Selwyn his protection and his arm. Her eyes lit up in looking at her hero. The pleasure, the relief in her gaze struck disappointment home in Roger’s heart, slowing his progress.

Dulcie glanced up, spied him, eyes widening, mouth going round. Her hand reached out, past Stapleton, their visual link an odd mixture of pleasure and disappointment.

Roger stopped in his tracks, remembering her father’s plea. She was safe in the Captain’s capable hands. Best that way. Best for both of them.

He turned his back on her. As the Bow Street Runners arrived, whistles keening, he disappeared into the milling crowd.

Chapter Thirty-One

January 24, 1820

Cato Street Loft

Roger’s boot heels clattered on the ladder to the loft. With a whoosh, flickering lamps and a flurry of scattered straw, he pushed open the trap door, dirty brown wig whipping against the low-brimmed hat he favored in his guise as George Edwards. With him, coat tails flapping, came a fresh draught of icy, manure scented air.

“Devil take the cold, lads,” he called cheerily from the depths of the plaster stained, high-collared, Garrick coat he lived in as he checked the adhesion of the pale beard that hid his chin with a characteristic swipe of the hand.

A disgruntled chorus met his entrance. “Close the door!”

“Poor way to greet a man who brings you news.” He waved a newspaper as he stamped his feet and plunged his hands in bulging pockets, no heat in the room.

The loft above the old stables that had most recently served as a cow bier was nose numbingly chill, no heat save that which rose from the backs of the two nags below, and the little pools of warmth that hung about the oil lamps carefully positioned at a distance from the gunpowder.

Three lamps lit the room, no open flame tapers or candles allowed. The windows, there were two, jittered and hummed in the wind, frost glazed, cracks jammed with wads of newspaper. They proved small source of illumination even in daylight, if one could call it daylight, so overcast hung the sky. The panes were covered in burlap, that the men might bend to their work without fear of observation, shoulders hunched inside cloth coats, mufflers about their throats, fingerless mits to warm their hands.

“Bloody artist!” Brunt, muttered. The out-of-work cobbler muttered as well, his world a rich source of discontent. “I thought you went to get us sommit ‘ot to warm our bellies.”

“Aye. And so I have. Hot jacket potatoes.”

Roger pulled the blessed warmth from his pockets and tossed the edible missiles. They steamed the air as they flew, momentarily dispelling the odors of sulfur, gunpowder and saltpeter. As nimbly as he dispensed them, the potatoes were grabbed up.

“To go with your tasty repast . . .” He made the word sound very fine and in it’s fineness laughable. He waved plaster-besmirched hands for effect. “The tastiest of news. The Duke of Kent, you will no doubt be pleased to hear, is even colder than you are today, gents.”

“Colder than we are? A Duke? ‘Ow so?” Adams glared fiercely with his one good eye.

“He has, you see, died of a trifling cold.”

“Cold meat, indeed.” Ings, out-of-work butcher, looked about the room with a wink.

Laughing, the men fell upon their meager meal like famished wolves.

“A pity,” Roger said, voice low, garnering attention nonetheless.

“Pity, Edwards? Why pity rich old men who make our lives a misery?” Once a rich man, himself, Thistlewood rose from his corner, looking finer than the rest in his velvet-collared coat, blue waistcoat, and black neckcloth. The wife who had stayed by him through thick and thin--and it had been desperate thin of late-- kept him clean and pressed, clinging, in her own way, to the smartly uniformed officer who had won her heart. He had fought in France, and been to America--the worldly one of the lot.

His gaze was keen, searching. Roger did his best to avoid that gaze. It rarely paid to come too much to the attention of those in charge. Risk increased with familiarity. He patted the tube of tin Ings stuffed as if it were the skin of a sausage.

“A pity we shall not have opportunity to deliver him one of these.”

A pity he could not reveal his true feelings to this bunch of ruthless radicals. He knew the Duke, a young man, newly blessed with child. A pity any brat went fatherless for no more reason than a trifling cold. He had himself gone motherless for no more reason than an icy road. Cold weather always brought his loss to mind.

Brunt snorted around a mouthful, black-grimed fingers stuffing in more. “Ha! Won’t be needing one for the King neither. Rumor has it, ‘is next breath may be his last.”

“Per’aps de ‘ole Royal family will be a’dying of ‘dis  ruddy cold and all our work wasted!” Davidson’s voice rang faintly with the rhythm of warmer climes. His father had been the Attorney General to Kingston, Jamaica, his mother a beautiful island girl. Better educated than most of the gathering, his background was romantic and sad. Roger had heard the whole tragic tale. Davidson spoke of her as often as he mentioned his own lost love.

An English heiress had been entranced by his dark eyes and skin, his cultured Island accent. She had given herself up to the exotic, to the island heat of him. She had agreed to marry him. Her father, appalled, whisked her away to relatives in Scotland where she married a suitably pale-skinned Scot.

Heartbroken, Davidson had frittered away job, money and prospects, failing, falling, landing here, among this rough lot, the lowest step on the ladder of his life.

They had all failed, all fallen from better times, more glorious positions. Each carried his burden of sorrow and pain. Harrison, militiaman from St. Peter’s Field, rank given up as a result of that day’s work, now cut and shaped and soldered together tin tubes and pike’s heads for the taking of the lives he blamed for his fall.

He and Thistlewood, and one-eyed Adams, boot maker for the army in France, had taught the others the making of these colorfully named “fireballs” and “Duke’s dumplings.”

He said now, his manner amused, “The Prince is looking none too spry, gouty old dotard. What do you think, Thistlewood? Shall we march into St. James’s and find it full of ghosts ‘afore winter’s out?”

“St. James’s does not interest me,” Thistlewood’s languid, cultured voice carried over the noise. His mind teamed with inspiring, worldly, radical notions. The men held him in highest esteem.

Brunt dared to ask him, “Don’t it gall, that the Prince is asking taxpayers to foot bill for improvements on Bucking’am ‘ouse, when ‘e ‘as just squandered a great wad of soft on the Marine Pavilion?”

Thistlewood shrugged. “The Royals mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. It is Parliment we must concern ourselves with, when the time comes. For the moment, I am more interested in materials. We are running out. Did you not promise more, Edwards?”

Roger nodded. Like Ings he bent to the work of loading the cooling tin tubes with the three main ingredients that made up the heart of a bomb. Surreptitiously, every move guarded, he dampened the mixture from his water jug, hoping to sabotage its effectiveness. They would kill him if they caught him.