‘They parted,’ she said. ‘Everyone agrees on that.’
‘Because of the court case, when his income dried up?’
Paloma said, ‘He couldn’t keep her in the style he felt she was entitled to, so he asked her to leave, and she did, for a number of years.’
Estella smiled and shook her head. ‘And came back to nurse him when he was old? That’s a sentimental myth invented by the Victorians.’
Paloma said with a cry of disappointment. ‘Are you sure? You know it to be untrue?’
‘I’ve gone into this as deeply as I can. None of the contemporary reports of her death say anything about a reconciliation. I’ve looked at them all, in the Gentleman’s Magazine, the Universal Magazine and the Annual Register, you name it. The break-up devastated her. She returned to her place of birth, a village called Bishopstrow, just outside Warminster, and vowed she would never again sleep in a bed. And she kept to it. That’s how bitter — or heartbroken — she was. She took up residence in the hollowed-out trunk of a huge oak tree and slept on a bale of straw until her death in 1777. Even when she ventured out and visited friends, she’d insist on sleeping rough in some outhouse on straw.’
‘Poor soul,’ Paloma murmured. ‘I did hear this story, but I thought there was a happier ending.’
‘How long did she live like this?’ Diamond asked.
‘Thirty or forty years according to the obituaries. If true, that ties in with her relationship with the Beau breaking up sometime between 1737 and 1747, when he was in his prime — socially speaking.’
‘What year was the court case he lost?’
‘1757. Do the maths. She was living in the tree by then.’
‘And remained there,’ Paloma said, shaking her head in sympathy.
‘So we can’t blame the break-up on the litigation,’ Estella said. ‘It was something else, a personal issue, I guess. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?’
She fixed them in turn with eyes demanding agreement and Diamond made it appear that he, for one, had been there many times, wherever it was. No use being faint-hearted with this young woman.
‘For me as his latest biographer, it opened exciting new possibilities,’ she added. ‘Have another of the calamares. They’re moreish, aren’t they?’
‘In that case was he alone at the end?’ Diamond asked, trying not to sound as deflated as he felt. With Juliana ruled out, his best theory was kiboshed.
Estella shook her head. ‘He couldn’t have coped. He’d lived to a great age, but he was a wreck by then, in a wheelchair, suffering from gout and leg ulcers. He had intermittent fits and he didn’t have a tooth in his head.’
A scrap of consolation: the last part checked with the state of the Twerton skeleton.
‘Somebody must have acted as carer, then.’
‘Yes, he had a carer.’ Her eyes slid upwards. ‘If you could call her that.’
‘A woman?’
‘Her name emerged in George Scott’s correspondence, which only came to light a few years ago in the British Library archive.’
‘Scott? You mentioned him earlier, the man who administered the estate?’
‘Yes. He had all kinds of problems dealing with the creditors and the most persistent and unpleasant was a Mrs. Hill. She really got up his nose.’
‘He said this?’
‘Not in those words. He said it more eloquently, but his anger comes through in letters to a doctor friend written in the year of the Beau’s death. This is so crucial to my book that I can quote the exact words Scott used: “She was of such a fierce disposition that poor Nash had no small degree of punishment in living with this termagant woman. Solomon could not describe a worse.”’
‘Solomon?’
‘King Solomon. He famously mediated in a quarrel between two women.’
‘He definitely says Mrs. Hill was living with Nash?’
‘For the last twenty years of his life.’
‘Wow.’
‘Exactly my reaction, except I said something stronger when I read the letter. I don’t know what the readers around me in the BL thought.’
‘So this Mrs. Hill gave George Scott a hard time? Why?’
‘She was in possession of a bond for £250 given to her by Nash.’
‘Big money.’
‘Mega big.’
‘A bond being security for a debt?’
Estella nodded. ‘Nash had no business arranging a bond of that size. He colluded with her to obtain a court judgement for it.’
‘Who was pulling the strings here — Mrs. Hill?’
‘George Scott seemed to think so, and of course after Nash’s death the woman was fierce in her demands. He relates in another letter how he was having a conversation with the wife of Charles Young’s attorney when Mrs. Hill came in and created a scene. In his words, she “appeared in full character.” He goes on to say, “From such a tongue may I ever be delivered. She used me very cruelly.”’
Paloma said, ‘He sounds paranoid about this woman. What was she on about? She must have known there was no money left in the pot.’
‘She complained that Nash’s possessions had been “sold for nothing” and should never have been auctioned.’
‘Hell-bent on getting her £250,’ Diamond said. ‘Do you think she treated Nash the same way?’
‘Scott said so. It’s possible he was biased, but whatever she was like she’s gold dust for me. None of the early biographers knew she existed.’
‘Goldsmith must have known,’ Paloma said.
‘Goldsmith was discreet. He says at one point he could fill a book with anecdotes of the Beau’s amours, but he doesn’t.’
‘These days he would,’ Paloma said. ‘The first duty of a biographer is to dish the dirt.’
‘Cynical, Paloma,’ Estella said with mock reproach.
‘Do you want examples?’
‘Spare us that. We heard you.’
Diamond’s spirits had bounced back, his brain fizzing with new possibilities. ‘I want to know more about Mrs. Hill. What’s her first name?’
‘I’m still working on that,’ Estella said. ‘She’s elusive. If I can trace the court documents, I’ll find it.’
‘Any idea where she lived after Nash died?’
‘Somewhere in Bath, I expect, at least while she felt her claim ought to be met.’
‘You don’t know much else? Was there a Mr. Hill?’
‘There must have been at one stage, but I can’t believe he was still around if she’d moved in with the Beau in the 1740s. Have I got you interested?’
A pause, a glance between Diamond and Paloma and then he decided it was time to tell Estella about the skeleton.
She caught her breath a couple of times while he was going over the brain-banging facts. She took a gulp of wine and then another. Paloma reached for the bottle and refilled the glass.
When Diamond finished, Estella stared at him in awed silence.
Paloma said, ‘Bombshell, isn’t it?’
‘Nuclear,’ Estella said. ‘I’m going to have to rewrite my book.’
Another pause to absorb the prospect.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she said. ‘I’m not ungrateful. It’s a scoop. If this really is the Beau, I don’t know what the academic world is going to make of it.’
Stuff the academic world, Diamond thought.
‘Will it get into the media?’ she asked.
He vibrated his lips. ‘I don’t see how we can avoid it, much as I’d like to. They already plastered my picture over the front pages nose-to-nose with the skull, but they haven’t yet cottoned on to the fact that it could be Beau Nash. Someone is going to make the connection soon.’
‘I don’t bother with newspapers,’ Estella said. ‘I’m mentally stuck in the eighteenth century. Missed that picture altogether. What’s the evidence for this being him? The hat, the wig and the absence of teeth?’