The Speckled Monster (4 page)

 

To shouts of laughter and approval, everyone drank. Once each year, the company met to cast ballots on the subject of beauty. Those ladies voted London's fairest of the fair had their names inscribed with a diamond on a drinking glass. Then they reigned as “Venuses of the Feast,” the celebrated subjects of the club's toasts for the entire ensuing year.

These earthly goddesses were never present. Instead, their absent eyes, lips, and lovely cheeks, their wit and Whiggish politics, were put forward as excuses for the men to drink deep among an exclusively male and increasingly raucous company. The Kit-Catters spent at least as much time celebrating Bacchus, god of wine, as they did praising Venus and her capricious son Cupid.

Charles Montagu, Lord Halifax and king of the quick rhyme, took a turn:

 

From across the table, the earl of Kingston eyed Halifax lazily. “I know of one lady,” he said, “who outshines your whole list like Romeo's Juliet, trooping among crows.”

Next to him, Thomas, Lord Wharton, banged down his bowl of wine. “Name her, my Lord Lady-Love,” he challenged. “Or do you mean to keep her to yourself until you can make a small rearrangement to Caesar:
I saw, I conquered, I came?
”

Amid jeers and groans of laughter, Kingston smiled. Unlike Wharton—who, it was rumored, had proved devil enough to take his pleasure with a woman on an altar—Kingston groomed a reputation as an elegant and envied rake. His friends did not feel the need to lock up their wives and daughters when he came to call.

“He's luring us into folly, more like it,” roared Dr. Garth. “Meaning to make laughingstocks of us by linking us to some draggle-tailed Drury Lane drab.”

No amount of catcalling, however, could get Kingston to reveal the lady's name. In the end, his fellows rejected his nomination.

“On what grounds?” demanded the earl.

“No one else has ever seen the lady,” shot back Lord Halifax.

“Then you shall see her!” cried Kingston.

Moments later, several footmen scurried into the street and swarmed onto the earl's coach, which sped away. Emerging at the bottom of the lane, the coachman turned his back on the foul open sewer of the Fleet Ditch to the east and clattered west down the thoroughfare of the Strand. A hundred years earlier, when Queen Elizabeth ruled the land and Shakespeare ruled the stage, great lords had lined this street with their palaces that bore their names. As the wealthy had drifted westward in search of ever-receding quiet and sweet country air, though, the old mansions had dwindled, some falling down, some divided, most replaced by shops. Now, though the Strand might be narrow and crowded by the standards of Louis XIV's Paris, it was nonetheless one of the most extravagant shopping boulevards in Europe. Bay windows curved into the street, teasing passersby with fragrant and fragile luxuries from all over the globe: silk stockings and silver, fringed gloves and feathered fans, linens, lace, china, and the newfangled curiosity of tea.

The earl's servants ignored it all. Trotting through the chaos of Charing Cross, the coach turned down Pall Mall and up St. James's cutting across to the quiet splendor of Arlington Street. At last, it drew to a stop at a palatial town house perched on the eastern edge of the Park.

The footmen in their liveried finery were admitted without fanfare, but once inside, their message produced a flare of French displeasure from Madame Dupont: a tavern was at no time any place for a lady, and by the time they managed to deliver her, it would be full night.

The earl's message, however, was not a request; it was a command. Under Madame Dupont's disapproving eyes, maids hurried to pull a flounced petticoat down over the lady's shift and cage her torso in a satin brocade bodice stiff with slivers of whalebone. At her waist, their fingers flew as they attached the matching gown that swept down around the floor in a heavy three-quarter circle, leaving a gap in front for the embroidery and lace of the petticoat to show. The long train they fastened up behind in a voluptuous bustle. They dressed her hair into a high tower topped with pleated lace that fell down her neck in a long cascade, and they pinned diamonds deep into the curls, where they winked and glimmered with coy grace.

Ensconced like a silken sugarplum in the earl's gilt coach, she peered out at the wonders of London crowding around her as the company sped back the way they had come. Carrying wax-dipped torches, footmen jogged in a long train on either side, so that the coach seemed to float through the gloom within its own magical globe of golden light. Through this halo flowed a parade of workers swarming home, shopkeepers shuttering windows, peddlers hawking the last of their pears and nuts from hand-carts. Herds of bullocks and sheep trotted toward slaughter, and heavy trundling wagons carted coal. She glimpsed pickpockets, ballad singers, and pockmarked beggars missing eyes and limbs; she saw swords drawn, fists bunched, and mouths twisted into leers. Once in a while, she glimpsed the icy disdain of another fine lady in a coach and six.

The earl's coach never slowed until it drew up to the sign of the Cat and Fiddle. A footman lifted her safely over the filth of the street to the threshold of the tavern. She was announced, the doors were thrown open, and firelight heavy with the scents of red wine, roast meat, and men doused in musk and civet spilled across her satin slippers.

Silence settled through the room as Kingston took her by the hand and presented her to the astonished company. Tiny and fine-boned as a wren, with dark hair and dark eyes that sparkled with precocious intelligence, she was indeed beautiful, but the Lady Mary Pierrepont, Kingston's eldest daughter, was also a little girl: ten, at a guess, and surely no more than twelve.

 

Two years earlier, on New Year's Day in 1699, Lady Mary's grandmother Pierrepont had died. With her grandson set to inherit the earldom of Kingston, she left her fortune to her granddaughters. The proud heiress of the Evelyns of West Dean, she bequeathed the bulk of her fortune to seven-year-old Lady Evelyn, who had been destined for it since her christening. To docile little Lady Frances, she left the handsome sum of £1,000 toward a dowry. To Lady Mary, quite contrary, she left nothing at all.

Her grandmother's death, though, gave Lady Mary something far more valuable than cash: escape to her father's famously magnificent household. While Lady Evelyn was shuttled off alone to priggish Aunt Cheyne's, presumably to learn the finer points of being an Evelyn, even if only by first name, the other three children stayed together. Like tides drifting after the moon, they began following the seasonal pull of their father. Instead of shuttling between their grandmother's house in West Dean and Aunt Cheyne's in Chelsea, they now spent summers up north at Kingston's grand country estate of Thoresby House—an architectural cousin of Hampton Court and Chatsworth—on the edge of Robin Hood's old haunt of Sherwood Forest, outside Nottingham. From the Christmas holidays through the daffodil-fringed days of spring and early summer, they lived in his town house at the edge of the park, in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods west of London.

As a result, Lady Mary danced through her father's field of vision more frequently than before, at an age when she might have seemed both a pretty toy and a partner in mischief; from then on, she lived within easy reach of his whims.

That same year, the Kit-Cat Club had first skittered through London gossip. Its fame as a stronghold of Whig loyalties, however, was forged in the shadow of catastrophe, a year and a half later.

 

Queen Mary's death had left King William a childless widower, due to be succeeded by his wife's younger sister, Princess Anne. Following her marriage to Prince George of Denmark, Anne had at first seemed bountifully, blessedly, mind-bogglingly fertile, but by 1700, after seventeen pregnancies, only one sickly child remained alive. On this son, William, duke of Gloucester, the Whigs had pinned all their hopes for the future of the Stuart dynasty.

On June 24 of that year, Gloucester's eleventh birthday party was drawing to a close amid the sparkle of fireworks and the snap of military parades at Windsor Castle, when he felt a flush of heat and complained of a headache, sore throat, and chills. Two days later, the velvety purple rash of hemorrhagic smallpox crept across his skin. Three days after that, he was dead.

His mother was inconsolable. The Whigs, with cold political judgment unclouded by personal sorrow, were just plain stunned. Rampaging through a child's birthday party, smallpox had once again swatted its way into the councils of the great, to shift the course of history.

In smaller towns, smallpox was an all-or-nothing terror: there were either no cases, or a full-blown epidemic. But with half a million souls thronging together along the banks of the Thames, London was large enough for smallpox to fester as an ever-present threat. For the most part, the disease stalked through the city's overcrowded, unsanitary tenements, plucking at the children of the poor. Every so often, though, it would throw its head back and roar, storming through the streets to fell young and old, rich and poor, alike. In 1694, Queen Mary had been one of 1,683 dead and upwards of 10,000 ill; in 1700, smallpox was not quite that strong, but it was strong enough: the child duke of Gloucester was one of a thousand dead.

To the Whigs who had put him in line for the throne, Gloucester was the one who mattered most. In their eyes, he had been the last acceptable heir to the House of Stuart.

In the weeks following Gloucester's death, rumors muttered that King William would bring his dead wife's half-brother James, Prince of Wales, back from his long exile in France. A Roman Catholic who idolized the absolute monarchy of the French Sun King, Louis XIV, the exiled prince was nobody's notion of an ideal heir, but in King William's eyes, he was family. To the Whigs, he spelled disaster. Twelve years earlier, they had ousted the prince's petulant fool of a father, King James II, from the throne in a brief and nearly bloodless coup d'état dubbed the Glorious Revolution. Passing over the prince, they had handed the throne to the more promising—and Protestant—couple, William of Orange (the ousted king's nephew) and Mary (the ousted king's eldest daughter). The prince, feared the Whigs, had spent those twelve years honing his grudges against them to glinting hatred. Suddenly, thanks to smallpox, the once glorious revolutionaries had everything to lose. All across London, Whigs of all walks of life huddled together in taverns like the Cat and Fiddle, in coffeehouses and drawing rooms, to take comfort in each other's company and debate what might best be done about the succession.

After a year of wrangling, on June 12, 1701, Parliament passed the Act of Settlement, debarring the Prince of Wales—and all other Roman Catholics—from the throne. As previously arranged, Mary's younger sister Anne would succeed King William. After Anne, Parliament proclaimed it would toss the crown high over France and send it spinning toward Germany, to the tidy town of Hanover and the waiting head of the dowager electress Sophia.

The granddaughter of England's first Stuart monarch, old King James I, Sophia was Protestant, willing to share power with Parliament, and trailed by robust male heirs in two succeeding generations: both Protestant, and both named George. Furthermore, Sophia and the first of these Georges had already survived smallpox. Apparently, the House of Hanover had escaped not only their Stuart cousins' weakness for the Roman religion, but their well-known susceptibility to smallpox.

In London, as both smallpox and the storm it had brewed up over the succession melted away, men who had drawn together against the growing dark found they still liked each other in the clear light of day. Their numbers swollen, their loyalties cemented, the Kit-Catters kept meeting, but released from dread, their debates circled back to the delicious subjects of wine, women, and song.

 

So it was that Lady Mary's entrance into the Cat and Fiddle caught Lord Halifax open mouthed and midpoem on the wonders of yet another famous beauty, who just happened to be the elder sister of one of Lady Mary's friends. Shining with delight, Lady Mary stepped into the silence and spoke:

 

Across the room, he raised one eyebrow, and took up her verse, raising his glass once more and picking up where she had left off:

 

He gestured first to the lady's husband and then turned to Lady Mary with the great teasing flourish of a full court bow, as if she were the dead queen come again.

That was fine: it gave her more time to think. By the time Halifax rose again, she had him. She nodded first to him and then curtsied to Sir Godfrey Kneller, the court portrait painter. Last spring, she and her friend had been to Sir Godfrey's studio to watch him paint the lady in question; Lady Mary had seen Lord Halifax there. She looked around the men gathered around her, leaning in to catch her words, and felt her heart swoop up to the ceiling with joy:

 

Kingston was staring at Lady Mary as if a pet monkey had spouted Shakespeare. Glancing from daughter to father and back, the company regained its gallantry. The roar of approval was deafening as the men declared her the undisputed queen of the Kit-Cat Club.

Fêted and petted, fed candies and sips of wine, she was whirled from one member to another. Halifax claimed her first and presented her to Sir Godfrey. She met Will Congreve, whose new comedy,
The Way of the World,
was the latest rage on the stage; he handed her on to Dr. Garth and the poet Arthur Mainwaring. Her father's closest friend, Charles Howard, earl of Carlisle, was there, along with John Vanbrugh, the playwright who also played architect with enough panache to design Carlisle's opulent palace, Castle Howard. She tried not to look shocked by the hotheaded republican Charles Spencer, who insisted she call him plain “Mr.” rather than “Lord” (though within a year he would succeed without protest to his father's earldom of Sunderland). Toward the back, she met a young member of Parliament named Robert Walpole. One day, he would transform the position of first lord of the treasury into the recognizably modern office of the prime minister; now he just focused his slightly scruffy charm on making Lady Mary laugh.