Die I Will Not (30 page)

After Hewitt's examination at the Old Bailey, Lewis Durant had been discharged. At Thorogood's urging, he retreated to the house in Camden Town to escape the journalists, and Penelope wrote another letter to her father to convey the news of his son's deliverance. It was a hard letter to write. Lewis hadn't said much since his release; he studied the Thorogoods and their happy, noisy family as if they were creatures from another world. But the ordeal was over—an official gentleman had quietly given Buckler the word that the pending charges for seditious libel would also be dropped.

At breakfast, Penelope sat at her brother's side, making sure his plate was filled and trying not to be too obvious in her solicitude. She saw that he was tired to the bone and wary of everyone. She tried to explain this to Sarah, who had developed an instant fascination for her new uncle, but the child couldn't seem to stop staring. Lewis seemed most comfortable with Buckler, whom he had thanked after the trial with a few brief but obviously sincere words. Now he responded as Buckler addressed the occasional remark to him about books they had both read, neither participating in the general discussion about the trial and its outcome.

They were lingering over their coffee cups as Thorogood read aloud from the papers when the maid announced Mr. Chase. “Bring him in,” said Thorogood, waving a genial hand, “and set a place for him.”

“He is with a lady, sir,” said the maid.

Thorogood went to meet his guests and returned leading Mary Leach's governess, Miss Elliot, and John Chase into the room. Taking in the many pairs of eyes fixed on her, the governess seemed ready to sink, but Thorogood escorted her to Hope, who welcomed her kindly.

Chase said, “Miss Elliot has come to bring you something, Mrs. Wolfe.”

Blushing, the governess added, “I am sorry I didn't give it to you before, ma'am. My late mistress entrusted it to me. Only I wasn't sure—” She broke off in confusion.

Chase came to her rescue. “Miss Elliot saw the reports about Mr. Sandford and Collatinus. She feared Mrs. Leach had been taken in by a nest of vipers.”

“I…I didn't know what to do,” stammered the governess.

“I'm sure you did what you thought was right,” said Hope, handing her a cup of tea.

“Now that Mr. Durant has been freed, there can be no reason, and I don't want it in my possession, I assure you. Oh, I didn't read it. It is wrapped up just as poor Mrs. Leach left it.”

“Nell's memoirs,” said Buckler.

Chase nodded gravely. “That's right. Mrs. Leach burned every scrap of paper in her desk before she went to face Hewitt, but she couldn't destroy the manuscript. It didn't belong to her really, and she didn't know whether it might be needed as evidence.”

“The memoirs belong to Lewis.” Without looking at him, Penelope groped for his arm under the tablecloth and gave it a small pressure. It felt like iron under her fingers.

Hesitantly, Miss Elliot passed the wrapped package to Sophia Thorogood, who set it in front of Lewis' plate. He didn't touch it.

“You can decide later what you wish done with your mother's memoirs,” said Buckler, watching Lewis' face. “No need to make a hasty decision. I've no doubt there will be plenty of interest in the manuscript from the Prince Regent's people and others.”

“The Regent? Ha!” cried Thorogood. “
A most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality…
”

Miss Elliot turned a shocked face to him, but Buckler grinned at his friend. “If you're going to spout Shakespeare at breakfast, Zeke, how about ‘
there's no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune
'?”

Amid general laughter, Lewis said to Buckler eagerly, “Sir, what if I were to make a fair copy of my mother's memoirs and send it to the newspapers?” When Penelope stiffened in alarm, he added, “These men deserve nothing less, Mrs. Wolfe.”

“I quite agree with you, Lewis,” replied Buckler, lifting his coffee cup to his lips. “However, when all's said and done, you may prefer to honor your mother's memory in another way.”

***

After the gathering broke up, Lewis retired to his room with Nell's manuscript, and John Chase left to escort Miss Elliot back to the Adelphi, where she was still caring for Mary's orphaned children. Penelope and Hope promised to visit the children, who in future would make their home with Leach's cousin. Removing her husband, who seemed inclined to engage Buckler in boastful reminiscing over the glories of the case, Hope went off to attend to her housekeeping. So, as once before, Penelope and Buckler found themselves alone in the Thorogoods' entrance hall.

She slipped her hand in his. “I spoke to Mr. Chase and Mr. Thorogood yesterday but never had a chance to thank you.”

“We did it together.”

“That's true, but you were truly magnificent in court. You and Mr. Chase have restored my brother to me. I can learn to know him—because of you.”

His fingers tightened on hers. “I've already told you I would do anything for you. Repeating myself will grow tedious for us both. What will you do now?”

“I must wait for word from my father, and I want to establish a home for Sarah and Lewis. I will return to my writing and help Lewis to some profession; perhaps he may teach again if he wishes. My father will assist us until we can manage better on our own.”

The words came out of their own accord. “What about us, Penelope?” Then Buckler looked more closely at her pale face. He saw that it would take time for her to come to terms with her altered circumstances—and he could have bitten out his unruly tongue.

But she gave him the direct response he would always expect from her. “We must be the dearest of friends, you and I and Mr. Chase, all three together. There is no other way. Jeremy is still my husband.”

He nodded. Undoubtedly, he was a fool. In a more romantic day, he could have worshipped her from afar and written verses to her beauty. Upon her rejection, he could have renewed his oath of fealty, reveled in his lovesickness, and dedicated himself to deeds of valor for her sake.
Alas, we live in unimaginative times,
he thought, mocking himself and feeling better in the process
.
He leaned forward to kiss her briefly on the lips. “You do know that Wolfe asked me to look after you and Sarah, and I shall do just that. Don't try to stop me, ma'am.”

Penelope smiled in exasperation. “How very like Jeremy.” Suddenly she kissed him back, her lips lingering on his as his heart thumped an instant response. “I wouldn't dream of trying to stop you, Mr. Buckler,” she said.

Author's Note

This novel began with a story I read in
Seven Editors
by Harold Herd. In the chapter “The Strange Case of the Murdered Editor,” Herd writes, “Imagine that one night the editor of a London morning newspaper is murdered in his office by a masked man and that the next day neither his own journal nor any other paper makes any reference to the crime.” Well, I started to imagine how such a crime
could
have unfolded. I emphasize the “could” because to create this story I tampered with the historical timeline by creating a fictional version of the mysterious attack on the journalist and moving this event back in time twenty years. I thought this alteration justified for two reasons: the event is obscure—I doubt you will find it mentioned in many sources—and it may even have been apocryphal, in which case I felt free to re-imagine the tale.

Citing Wilfrid Hindle's
The Morning Post: 1772-1937
, Herd repeats a story from late 1832 or early 1833 when the
Post
's outspoken Tory editor Nicholas Byrne was assassinated in response to a reactionary article (something to do with the editor's opposition to the new Reform Act). Hindle had discovered a report of November 2, 1872—forty years after the supposed murder—in which Byrne's encounter with the masked man is described. As in my version, Byrne followed the assailant into the street, but he, or in my case
she
, fled. Herd concludes that Byrne did not die in the initial attack, the death not being reported until June 27, 1833, when the journalist expired after “an illness of many months.” Or so says a curiously uninformative
Morning Post
announcement
,
which contained no mention of an inquest or funeral
.

In
Gossip of the Century
, Julia C. Byrne, Nicholas Byrne's daughter-in-law, describes an 1820 incident during Queen Caroline's divorce trial in the House of Lords when public feeling ran high in her favor. The mob attacked the pro-George
Morning Post
, breaking windows and smashing everything in sight, causing the editor Byrne to fear for his life—he brushed through this incident only to later lose his life to the masked man (perhaps). Harold Herd trots out other oddities of the case of the murdered journalist, such as that Julia C. Byrne recounts this mob violence against the
Post
but doesn't mention a word about her father-in-law being stabbed!

According to Herd, the early nineteenth-century
Morning Post
(in my version, the fictional
London Daily Intelligencer
) expressed a “slavish” admiration for the Prince Regent, later George IV. Indeed, a sycophantic poem, written under the pseudonym “Rosa Matilda”—in which the author apostrophized the Prince of Wales as an “Adonis”—was responsible for provoking Leigh Hunt's famously scathing riposte that opens this novel. For Hunt's temerity, he and his brother were found guilty of seditious libel, paid stiff fines, and spent several years in prison.

Once I started my own digging, I learned so many improbable and startling facts about the slain editor's family circle that I was for a long time puzzled as to how to accommodate them, though, of course, these details are merely the basis for a murder plot of pure invention. First, Nicholas Byrne's wife was Charlotte Dacre, whose poetry I quote at the beginning of each section. Byrne and Dacre conducted a liaison for some years, and Dacre bore him three children before their eventual marriage in 1815. Dacre was also a Gothic novelist, author of, among other works,
Zofloya or The Moor
,
a reviewer opining of this particular novel that the author had been
“
afflicted with the dismal malady of maggots in the brain
.”
In addition to her literary pursuits, Dacre was Leigh Hunt's journalistic foe “Rosa Matilda,” proving to me at least that a female Collatinus does not stretch the bounds of possibility. As a side note, the practice of adopting the pseudonym of a Roman patriot for political letters was common in both England and colonial America. Often these names are repeated, so it's difficult to tell who's who. I believe there may have been a Collatinus or two, but my Collatinus is fictional.

There's more to this complex web of interrelationship. It turns out that Charlotte Dacre's father was a man called John King, a Jewish moneylender or “cent-per-cent,” a cultured man and gentleman upstart. My character Horatio Rex is based on the colorful figure of John King: he was falsely accused of assaulting two women; he was a printer, who renounced his radicalism to escape prosecution; he may have betrayed his fellow Jacobins as a government spy; he lived high and engaged in shady financial dealings; he was “married” for forty years to an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, the Countess of Lanesborough. In my portrayal of Rex, I am particularly indebted to Todd M. Endelman's essay “The Checkered History of ‘Jew' King: A Study in Anglo-Jewish History” and to a fascinating pamphlet written by King himself entitled “Mr. King's Apology; or a Reply to his Calumniators.”

I must add that, remarkably, John King and the Prince Regent shared a mistress, Mary “Perdita” Robinson, the celebrated actress and author with whom the Prince fell in love after seeing her perform in Shakespeare's
The Winter's Tale
. The Prince of Wales became her “Florizel,” a nickname that rather inspires derision. According to Paula Byrne (no relation to Nicholas Byrne) in
Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson
, King and Mary Robinson enjoyed a passionate correspondence, which he later published in 1781—hardly very chivalrous of him, but it seems she owed him money. In her turn, Robinson blackmailed her lover's father George III to obtain a financial settlement after the Prince of Wales tired of her charms. The king paid this demand to ensure the return of compromising letters his son had written to his inamorata! And, by the way, Robinson also wrote poems, which were published in the newspapers under various pseudonyms, penned her memoirs, and produced a feminist work called “A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination.”

Now for the Prince Regent and his hated wife Caroline. Leaving for the Continent in 1814, she shocked all Europe by frolicking with her Italian servant Bartolomeo Pergami and only returned to England after her husband had ascended the throne. I had known that George IV tried and failed to divorce his wife, and I remembered the story about her banging on the door of Westminster Abbey while he was being crowned—she died a broken woman soon after. However, I didn't know that George and Caroline had engaged in a preliminary skirmish in the spring of 1813, airing their dirty laundry in the press. But the whole business is there to read in the newspapers of the day. In one incident, an effigy of the “perjurer” Lady Douglas, who had testified against Caroline in the Delicate Investigation, was carried through the streets and burned before an enthusiastic crowd. At this time Caroline had a useful friend in the lawyer Henry Brougham, who had also defended Leigh Hunt and later defended Caroline herself during her divorce proceedings. Brougham was responsible for drafting the Princess' letter to the Regent that initiated the 1813 press war.

I don't think I have been
too
unjust in my portrayal of the Prince Regent. He really did send an underling (his secretary Colonel McMahon) to bribe and browbeat the press into submission, and he was terribly unpopular—deservedly so, in my view. One more delicious tidbit: he reportedly had a habit of getting on his knees to blubber over women who had rejected his advances. There's also a story that he dramatically stabbed himself to get the Catholic Maria Fitzherbert to agree to an illegal marriage with him. But in the end, he abandoned her to marry Caroline so that his obscene debts would be settled.

The magistrate Nathaniel Conant participated in the 1806 Delicate Investigation and then headed a similar investigation in 1813. According to Lady Anne Hamilton, Caroline's lady-in-waiting, “Conant, the poor Marlborough-street magistrate, who procured the attested evidence for impeachment, was created Sir Nathaniel, with an increase of a
thousand pounds
a year, as chief of all the police offices.” Admittedly, Lady Anne was a Caroline partisan, but it's true enough that Conant was invested as a knight in 1813 and became Chief Magistrate of Bow Street this same year. His 1822 obituary in
The Gentleman's Magazine
has the following somewhat suggestive statement: “He possessed a very clear understanding and promptness in decision, which, added to a great mildness of disposition and manner, peculiarly fitted him for the situation he held, and were evinced on many trying occasions, when he was intrusted with the particular confidence of the government.”

Finally, I found references to a solicitor and confidential agent of the Prince, whose name kept cropping up in the Caroline inquiries. This man—and I won't name him because, as far as I know, he is perfectly blameless—helped interview witnesses, including the laundress who deposed that the Princess' linen showed signs she had miscarried a bastard child. From this historical footnote, I developed my concept of the “Prince's Man.”

March 7, 2014