Tesco Book Club

Prologue

London, 1711

The noise could be heard streets away. There were bursts of music and drifts of laughter and talk, louder when the revellers spilled into the courtyard. Every few minutes new shrieks of merriment echoed on the night air. It was the French ambassador’s masquerade ball.

The embassy on the Strand blazed with candlelight. Every window along the façade was bright, and the courtyard was lined with a hundred flaring torches. More lights burned a corridor down to the river, where boats pulled up at a landing stage to unload groups of guests. Everybody was in costume: carnival figures, Russian princes, Chinese merchants, butterflies and bears, fairies and goblins, piping shepherds. Cases of wine were opened, supper was carried out in silver dishes, and the maskers danced on. Scattered groups lingered in the courtyard talking to one another in English or French, often a mixture of the two. More laughing, yet more talk; an endless movement of carriages.

A little priest left the embassy and made his way towards a hackney cab waiting outside the gates. As he walked away, a pair of masked ladies turned to greet him.

“Good night, Father.”

The priest bowed and stepped into his cab.

Across the courtyard, two figures called out to the driver, and then ran haphazardly towards the carriage, with much laughter and stumbling. They were dressed in the long silk gowns and black hoods of the domino costumes common among the masquerade guests; the robes almost entirely obscured the men’s forms in dark folds. One man’s hood began to slip as he ran, and he pulled it back up clumsily, calling to his friend to slow down.

“Leave your damned hood behind!” the friend called back, a

French accent inflecting his words. He ran up to the priest’s carriage. “Father, will you be so kind . . .” he began, “my friend and I—”

Not waiting for a response, the Frenchman opened the door to step in, while the other fellow swept a low bow to a passing lady and gave a final pull to the costume. Then he too ran up to the carriage and scrambled inside as it drove away.

Behind them, the noise and light of the party continued unabated.

The priest smiled warily at the hooded men. He saw that they were both laughing, still out of breath. It had reassured him to hear one of them speaking in an accent—they were probably Catholics. The cab turned into the street and began to clatter across the cobbles.

After a moment’s silence, he spoke. “Where are you travelling to, gentlemen?”

Neither of the men answered.

The carriage took a turn to the right. They were now on a road that was covered in straw to muffle the sound of horses’ hooves, and the cab was suddenly much quieter. This street was empty and dark; the lamps had all guttered many hours before. He could hear the men’s breathing, quick and rough, but he could not see their faces at all. They were no longer laughing. The darkness pressed on his eyes like a blindfold. He began to feel afraid. What if that Frenchman knew who he was?

He tried to stay calm, hearing his voice echoing in the intense blackness of the carriage as he repeated his question, “Where are you going to?”

Still there was no answer. His throat tightened. Perhaps they had not jumped into his carriage by chance. How easy it would have been for two figures in domino robes to stand unnoticed in the busy courtyard, waiting for him. He had taken little care tonight to be guarded about his visit.

“For God’s sake, who are you?” he cried aloud. “What do you want?”

Neither sound nor movement from the two strangers. Suddenly the priest heard a rustle of fabric and a shuffle of feet. He shrank away, but felt the wall of the carriage against his back. He opened his mouth to call out, when a hand came out of the darkness to silence him.

He was struck violently on to the floor, and the back of his skull cracked against the seat. He felt a wave of dizziness; one of the men was upon him, pinning his body down. There was a rattling movement above as the other man closed the window shades. He knew that it was not necessary; nobody would see them on this deserted street. The gesture made him feel that a shade had fallen down upon his life.

He struggled free from the arm that stifled him. “You are too late,” he cried. “Others already know.” It was a gamble; the slimmest of chances.

There was a fraction of a pause.

“He lies,” came a new voice at last. An English accent, well-bred.

Before the priest could say more, he felt the cold edge of a steel blade pressed hard against his throat.

He struggled to retain a sense of what was happening. Again he opened his mouth, but as he did so he felt a prick of the knife going in like a needle. His throat felt suddenly loose, though a moment before it had been taut with fear, and his blood poured out as warm and soft as silk. He felt his skin and clothes become hot and sticky as it soaked into the fabric. The men remained silent, waiting while his life ebbed away. He could struggle no more. Already he was weak, his limbs heavy; even now he could barely frame clear thoughts; his mind was dim. He tried to hold fast to life, but the blackness closed in. It was ove

Chapter One

“In tasks so bold, can little Men engage”

The worst of country life was that the houses were always cold. Alexander sat as close to the fire as he could manage without blocking his parents’ access to its modest heat. He suspected that his mother, at least, was suffering, but that she stayed further back to allow him most of the warmth. Outside it was either snowing or raining; Alexander could not be sure which. It had been dark since three o’clock. They had dined at noon; tea had been brought in at four, and there were still another three hours before bed. His father had not allowed him to go to his chamber to write, because the fire had been overlooked during the afternoon and had burned out. He had not finished twenty lines of verse since Christmas, nearly a month ago.

The Georgics was open in his lap, and he had been reading the same poem for two hours. Virgil was all very well when Alexander was feeling that he, too, might write a poem as good as the Aeneid, but tonight Virgil’s youthful verses reproached him. Will it always be like this if I obey my father? he asked himself. He heard his mother cough, and guessed that she was about to break in upon his thoughts.

“Sir Anthony Englefield asks you to pay him a visit,” she said, holding out a letter. “He offers to send his carriage. I think that you should go, Alexander. Are not Teresa and Martha Blount presently at Whiteknights?”

He made no reply. But his heart leapt at the sound of Teresa’s name, and he looked up, knowing that he was blushing. The Miss Blounts were both about Alexander’s age. Their family seat, Mapledurham, was an estate on the other side of the Thames, but the girls visited their grandfather Sir Anthony Englefield at

Whiteknights several times each year. Like Alexander and his family, the Blounts were Roman Catholics.

“I do not attend to the details of the Miss Blounts’ arrange¬ments,” he said, in as careless a tone as he could manage.

“But you have not seen Sir Anthony since the beginning of December, Alexander,” his mother replied. “Your health is enough restored. And you must make yourself pleasing to women,” she added.

If only she knew how much he wanted to please Teresa, Alexander thought. But he said instead, “I think that Sir Anthony might have written the letter to me.”

Alexander’s spirits rose excitedly, even as he began to feel nervous. It was always thus. Teresa loved to tease him, but she did so with a sly smile that made him like her even more. Not wanting to appear too eager to reply to Sir Anthony’s invitation, however, Alexander turned to his father, who was reading a newspaper. “What news from town?” he asked.

“A priest has been murdered, and the body left in Shoreditch,” came the reply.

Alexander felt a surge of alarm. Shoreditch! Poor Catholics still worshipped there secretly, in chapels above the taverns.

“Murdered?” Alexander echoed. “A priest?”

His father would never allow him back to town now. He had paid one short visit eighteen months previously, after his first poems had been published, and had longed to return ever since. But the capital would always be haunted by the persecutions his father had once seen. Alexander’s parents had been driven out when the Ten-Mile Act had been passed forbidding papists to live within daily reach of the city. Years had gone by since then, and Catholics were returning to London, but Alexander’s father was immovable. His son would not live in town. Alexander knew that the place had changed—for three glorious weeks he had seen it with his own eyes. But supposing he were to disobey his parents’ strictures, only to find himself in danger?

He reached for the paper and began to read the story.

“This man was not a priest, sir!” he exclaimed. “Indeed he may not have been a Catholic at all. It says here that he was dressed in ecclesiastical costume to attend the French ambassador’s masquerade. A ticket for the ball was found in his pocket.” He looked up with a smile. “So you see,” he finished, “the murderers made a mistake.”

Alexander’s father gave a mirthless laugh. “If the men thought the fellow was a Catholic priest, it hardly matters if he was not,” he replied shortly. “The town is a dangerous place. I was sorry to see you so eager to visit last year.”

Alexander felt the protest rise within him. “I was there but three weeks, sir,” he burst out, “and staying in Westminster with my friend Charles Jervas!” His father knew perfectly well that Jervas was a Protestant, and that Alexander’s contact with Catholics had been confined to the few wealthy families who kept houses in Westminster and St. James’s. There had been no secret masses in alehouse garrets—indeed there had been no talk of religion at all. “Queen Anne is a Stuart! You have said yourself that we have nothing to fear while she is on the throne.”

The older man’s face remained grave. “I was not sanguine while you were there, Alexander,” he said. “I should be disappointed to learn that you have thoughts of returning.”

His parents rose for prayers, and Alexander was obliged to join them. His father darkened the room, old habit prompting him to make sure that they could not be seen. As he watched his father’s bent head and the quiet movement of his lips, Alexander felt a pang of remorse. Had not his parents once been banished from their old home like vagrants, forced to leave the city where they had lived respectably? Now Alexander, scorning what his parents had suffered, was demanding to return to the place of so much misery. Ashamed, he bent his head, trying to feel the piety that he knew was proper.

After their worship was over, Alexander asked his father if he would leave the candles burning downstairs so that he could sit up by the fire to work.

“Late hours will make you ill,” his father replied, and waited until Alexander had gathered his books, following him up the stairs to his bedroom.

Alexander said good-night and closed the door of his chamber, pushing a rug against the space at the bottom to mask the light of his candle. His father had been right—it was freezing cold, but he must finish ten lines before the end of the night. He pulled a blanket over his shoulders, spread another across his knees, and set to work. He wrote for an hour, ignoring the headache and sore throat that had begun to nag. It was not hard to do so. After so many years, the symptoms seemed like old, familiar foes, urging him to greater efforts, reminding him that his time was short.

He had been fourteen when he became ill. The sickness fell across his memory like a curtain, shrouding the weeks, and then months of pain that followed in suffocating darkness. At first the doctors had thought that he would not survive, but slowly he began to get better, the recovery more agonizing to him than the blank days and nights of feverish coma that preceded it. His clearest memory was of a morning when at last he had been able to stand up from his bed and walk to the window. Outside, the first marks of autumn were just beginning to rust the landscape, and he had been sad to find that he had missed a whole summer. His parents had come into the room, the physician following behind them. They had sat him down upon the bed and the doctor had told him the news. Though he had survived the illness, it would cripple his growth. His back would become hunched, until eventually he would be unable to move. The physician could not say when it would occur—perhaps by the time he was thirty, later if he was lucky.

And, as it turned out, he was lucky. At twenty-three, his back was bent, but if he stood up straight it was barely noticeable. He was not tall, but his face was handsome, he thought. And he was quick and funny. When he was in good health, he knew that he could be very charming.

An image of Teresa came to his mind, running across the lawn on a summer afternoon long ago. He had been completely well again after the sickness, restored to his old self, and she was fifteen or sixteen—it was before her father died. She had taken him by the hands, starting to tell a story about the convent school in Paris where she had been living. How lovely she had been then; how lovely she still was. As soon as his poems became famous, Alexander would claim her, and he believed that she would receive him once more with open arms. But he looked again at the pages on his desk. Still no closer to a finished poem. He needed a new subject, something that would give his talents their proper range. In his heart he knew that he would never find it in Binfield. Somehow, anyhow, he must get to London.

Two days later, Sir Anthony’s carriage took him to Whiteknights. As he drew up outside the old house, Alexander saw that it was Martha Blount, and not Teresa, who had waited to greet him. He stepped down, and she came towards him, smiling and blushing.

“My dear Martha,” he said, taking her by the hands. “You look very well.”

“Alexander!” she exclaimed. “We knew that you were coming to see us today, but you are here so soon! My grandfather is abroad seeing to a tenant.” She pushed aside a lock of hair that had fallen across her face, but it slipped again, and she pulled it up with a little laugh. It was a gesture that Alexander had seen her make since she was a young girl.

Martha led him through the great entrance hall into a morning room where she had been working. As he took a seat beside her, Alexander found himself almost glad that the elder sister was absent. Martha’s morning gown was covered in little threads from her needlework, which she had not noticed. Teresa would have picked them off instantly. He was determined not to ask where Teresa was, and spoil this moment that he and Martha had together.

“A cold day for Sir Anthony to venture out,” he observed. But he could not help himself, and after a little pause he asked, “Is your sister also out?”

Martha’s face fell for an instant as she answered, “She is writing letters in her sitting-room, and probably does not know that you are arrived.” Before he could speak again she composed herself, and smiled. “Shall we find her?” she asked, putting her sewing to one side.

When they entered the upstairs parlour, Teresa was reading a letter at her table by the window. The pale sunlight fell upon her face and on the delicate folds of her silk dress. On the desk was a little vase with a few snowdrops and narcissi, which Alexander guessed must have come from the hothouse. The curve of Teresa’s arm rested beside the flowers, and the dark curls of her hair fell forward loosely as she bent over the pages.