The Regency (47 page)

‘
I think most people will be,' Anstey said. 'There may not
be any brilliant men in the Cabinet, but they are united in
their desire to win the war, and not to compromise with
Boney. And at least they know their limitations — they'll
leave expert decisions to the experts.’

Lucy nodded. 'And what happens now?'

‘
The swearing-in is to be tomorrow, at Carlton House. I
believe they mean to make something of an occasion of it,
with bands and banners and so on. You ought to drive past
there at around noon: you might find it diverting. And then
the serious business of the Regency will begin,' he added with
a suppressed smile.

‘
What's that?' Lucy asked guardedly, seeing that he was in
a frivolous mood.

‘The Prince will give the most enormous party!'

‘
It's a serious matter, the beginning of a Regency,' Lucy
said reprovingly. 'Even if it is only a conditional one.'

‘
It is indeed,' he said, 'though I doubt whether it will be
conditional this time next year. I can't believe the King will
ever recover. Don't worry Lucy, I feel the solemnity of the
occasion just as I should; though you must forgive me if I
don't believe it's going to make a jot of difference to any of
us.’

 
The first day in March when the wind came easterly was the
signal to begin the great wash at Morland Place. It was an
event which lasted several days, turned the whole house
upside down, and involved every member of the household —
except for Ned and James, who disappeared to the stables at
the first glimpse of a wash-tub, returning at intervals only to
consume such picnic meals as Barnard had found time to
prepare in between the spring-cleaning of his own kitchens
and pantries.

All the curtains and hangings were taken down and
washed, upholstery was cleaned, and every scrap of household
linen dragged out from every cupboard to be inspected,
laundered and counted. Furniture had to be moved so that
the carpets could be taken up and beaten, and cleaned with a
vile-smelling compound which was made according to an
ancient Moriand recipe, mixed up in a huge tub outside the
house, and downwind. The air was full of the smell of soap
and soda and bran and starch; no-one and nothing was in its
accustomed place; extraordinary meals were consumed in
unexpected places; and the house took on the air of a
mediaeval tournament tent, every window and baluster hung
with banners.

Lost needles, beads and buttons appeared from the creases in upholstery and from behind sopha-cushions, and Héloïse's
good scissors turned up at last, wedged between the lowboy
and the wall beside the fire, where they must have slipped
months ago. There were a few casualties, only to be expected,
James said, in a campaign of such magnitude: Monsieur
Barnard found a decaying
blancmanger
at the back of a shelf
in one of the pantries, and bellowed so savagely at the nearest
kitchen-maid that she stepped back hastily and cut her shin
on a bucket; and one of the men slipped while taking down
the curtains from the Butts Bed and pulled the rail half off
and sprained his wrist.

The dogs did what they could to add to the chaos by racing
round the house in a pack, eyes gleaming, tongues lolling, up
the great staircase, along the passage, down the backstairs,
across the hall, and round again; with Héloïse's spaniel Castor,
which James had bought her for her last birthday, bringing
up the rear, one long ear turned foolishly inside-out over
his curly head. Only grey-muzzled Kithra refused to join in
the game. He was always to be found near Héloïse and Nicholas,
lying down with his head on his paws, but keeping an eye
on the boy in case he should wander into danger. The old dog
took almost as much interest in the youngest Morland as his
parents did.

At the moment Héloïse and Mathilde were in one of the
bachelor rooms, which had been turned into a temporary
linen-closet, examining sheets for signs of wear, and dividing
them into piles: wash, mend, and past all help.

‘
I do not think it will be worth mending this one,' Héloïse
said, gazing down a white slope towards Mathilde. 'It is worn
so thin in the middle.'

‘
The rag pile, then?' Mathilde said hopefully. Héloïse some
times found it difficult to forget habits of thrift learned long
ago, in harder times.

‘But I wonder,' she hesitated now. 'Perhaps if we turned it sides-to-middle and hemmed it —'

‘
Mrs Thomson is very short of cleaning-rags, Madame,'
Mathilde said helpfully. 'Here, let me fold it for the rag pile.'
And she took it away before her guardian could change her
mind again.

Héloïse smiled at her indulgently. 'The mending pile is now
smaller than the rag pile,' she observed.

lust as well,' Mathilde said briskly. 'The servants have
plenty to do, without mending sheets as well.' She had just
had her twenty-second birthday, and Héloïse thought she had
grown very handsome, with her fine, upright figure, and her
burnished hair twisted in a soft coil at the back of her head. It
was a pity, she thought, that she had not found anyone she
liked well enough to marry. It was not that she had lacked
suitors. After John Skelwith had quit the scene, Ned Mickle
thwaite had been disposed to pay her attention for a while;
then there had been that nice young officer, Nicholson, who
had seemed very smitten indeed; and lately Tom Keating had
been more than merely polite, though that was an attachment
Héloïse would not have wished to encourage.

But though Mathilde accepted attention with every appear
ance of pleasure, it was evident that she was not more attached
to one beau than another, and they soon fell away for lack
of encouragement. It began to look as though she meant
to stay single, and Héloïse was sorry for it, though there was
no doubt that she made herself very useful about the house,
and was a pleasant companion, too. Héloïse wondered some
times whether she had been mistaken about Mathilde's feel
ings for John Skelwith. Perhaps she really had favoured him,
and was still heart-sore at losing him. Héloïse had asked
Edward what he thought — for he spent a good deal of time
with Mathilde, one way and another, and Héloïse thought she
might have unburdened her heart to him on the subject —
but he had only shaken his head and said he didn't think so,
though afterwards he looked thoughtful.

Mathilde, however, didn't seem unhappy. On the contrary,
she sang about her work, looked cheerful, and did whatever
she did with energy, whether it was shopping with Patience
Keating, dancing at the Assembly Rooms with the officers
from Fulford, riding out with Edward or playing chess with
him in the evenings.

Héloïse had had plenty of other things to worry about in
the past three years. One of them was sitting on the floor beside
Kithra at this moment, playing patiently and absorbedly
with two toy soldiers which James had carved for him out of beech-wood. Nicholas had a great capacity for amusing
himself, and could play for hours with one simple thing, even
a stone or a leaf which had interested him. Héloïse remem
bered Jemima saying that James had been like that when he
was a little boy — but as the middle one of the family,
separated by a number of years from his siblings on either side,
he had been obliged to find his own company sufficient.

Every few moments Héloïse glanced up from her work at
the child she had had such labour to bring into the world, and
felt the familiar pang of love and anxiety. He had been frail
from the beginning, of course. She remembered the day of his christening, when Jenny had run in to announce that Baby was
ill: that moment had heralded an endless series of ailments.
In the early months of his life he had had difficulties with
his breathing and with his digestion. There had been one
dreadful period when everything he ate came straight back,
and Héloïse held him on her lap hour after hour, his legs
drawn up to his belly, his face purple, and his mouth open in
a soundless wail, because he couldn't draw enough breath to
scream protest at his hunger and pain.

He passed out of that phase at last, but he was still prone to catch any illness that was about. The whooping-cough almost killed him when he was eighteen months old, and the chicken
pox when he was two-and-a-half; intermittent bouts of sickness and diarrhoea kept his mother and nurse from relaxing
in between times, and if nothing else happened, he was as
likely as not to be suffering from a cold.

Lucy, in her occasional, terse letters, tried to comfort
Héloïse by pointing out that he must be extremely tough to
have survived all these illnesses, but they were not words to
calm a mother's anxieties. She rather feared that sooner or
later one ailment would prove to be the last straw for Nicholas's
frail constitution. She knew that James, though he never
spoke of it, believed they would not raise him. He was every
thing that was tender and affectionate to the boy, but there was something in the way he hugged him sometimes, some
thing guarded in the way he talked of future plans, which told
Héloïse that he didn't expect Nicholas to be there to share
them.

The boy still looked rather odd. His limbs were spindly and
weak, and his head seemed too large for his body, and too
long for itself, giving him a high, bony forehead that made
him look like a worried old man. His hair was still very thin,
hardly more than a sparse auburn down over the fragile skull,
and his face looked curiously unfinished, as though the clay of
him were still wet and waiting to be moulded. There was
nothing you could put your finger on, she thought, but he
looked in some indefinable way misshapen — not grossly so,
simply a little odd.

Physically, Héloïse thought with an aching heart, he was
not very prepossessing, poor little boy; but he had a loving
nature, and when he came to Héloïse's knee and held up his
arms to be hugged, the smile he gave her made her love him
more even than she had loved Sophie. He adored his father,
too: the first word he had learned to say was 'Papa', and he
would sometimes sit with Kithra under the table in the great
hall for hours on end, waiting for his father to come home.
Kithra was his close companion and nursemaid. When he was
at the crawling stage, the hound prevented him from straying
very far, fetching him back like a gun-dog retrieving a
pheasant; and it was by pulling on Kithra's tail that Nicholas
had first learnt to stand up, and to walk.