“ ‘They call you Mrs. Fitzherbert,’ I told her.
“ ‘Do they?’ Maria said. ‘How very odd. It’s divorce Catholics don’t recognize, not death.’
“I built the safe house in Putney one year after the year they did not even bother to dissolve our marriage. It’s an out-of-the-way sort of place, and the house itself is not much different from its neighbors. As you see it backs on the river. We came ashore in rowboats now, dugouts. We were probably seen. But ordinary people don’t much gossip about the great. They don’t know anything to say. As for the rest, the ruling classes, they know it all but are discreet. They talk behind our backs but only amongst themselves.
“We lived on and off here several years. We were very happy.
“A prince’s credit is long, but it is not infinite. There were debts. There are always debts. It’s empty now, but once this house was furnished like a palace. I did not buy, I commissioned. The greatest cabinetmakers worked for us, the greatest sculptors, the finest painters. One room was floored and walled and ceilinged entirely in delft. Josiah Wedgwood made our plates and pottery following Maria’s sketches. Dick Sheridan wrote comedies using plots I myself suggested. I discovered a young woman in Bath, Jane Austen, and commissioned her to write novels for us. We gave her a general idea of the subject matter and the tone we were interested in and she fleshed out the rest. We sat on the finest furniture to be had in Europe and read aloud to each other. Delightful, delightful.
“Only our bedroom would have seemed eccentric. It was fitted out, as you may have guessed, like a dairy. The mattress and pillows were stuffed with ordinary hay, which we changed daily. I even had lovely little Chippendale milking stools made for us. Well. It was all delightful.
“And expensive. The bills mounted, though I was able to stall my creditors for a time on the basis of my great expectations. Then, suddenly, all together all at once it seemed, they began to hound me, coming not to Buckingham House but directly to Putney. Even Miss Austen, though I must say that of them all she was the shyest and seemed quite embarrassed to be here.
“I was not even sent for this time. I arranged for the meeting and went to the ministers myself.
“ ‘The King is not improved,’ the Chancellor of the Exchequer said.
“ ‘Isn’t it time you began to cast about for a suitable consort?’ the Lord Chancellor asked.
“ ‘You’re Prince Royal now. You may yet be Prince Regent before you’re King,’ the PM said.
“ ‘What is your view, counselor?’ asked the Lord Privy Seal.
“ ‘Oh my view,’ he said. ‘Hi wouldn’t ’ave no proper view now, would hi? My view’s strickly the law. The law’s what hi go by. It wants a hagreement.’ This from the Custom’s Office solicitor.
“ ‘What does?’ the Prime Minister asked.
“ ‘Why the law does, your honor. It wants a hagreement. What we call a tort, a contrack.’
“ ‘But isn’t a tort…’ I started to ask.
“ ‘It’s like this, i’n’t it? Law’s a hagreement entered into voluntarily by two parties. Hi except ’ighway robbery and murder and such because that hain’t law so much has what we call broken law. Now the Prince ’ere comes to us game as you please hand wants us to push some bill through Parliament to pay off ’is debts. Now if we was to do hit hit might be what we call a favor but hit wouldn’t be law. Not proper law. Dere’s no quo for the quid, if you gavver my meanin’. It wants a hagreement. Now, if ’e was to marry…’
“They did not get their agreement.
“The creditors came. They came with bailiffs and bum-bailiffs, with beadles and tipstaffs, with sheriffs and constabulary, process servers, catchpolls and Bow Street runners. I could see the Lord Chancellor and the solicitor off by themselves in a carriage parked behind a string of removal vans.
“To give them their due, the creditors seemed almost as shy as Miss Austen and, with the removal men, went quietly about their work. Silently the delft room was dismantled. Silently the Wedgwood was collected, the furniture. Sheridan was there and tried to make me a gift of the plays I’d commissioned. There was consultation among the constabulary and process servers who then sent one of the runners out to speak to the Lord Chancellor’s carriage. When the man returned, he whispered something to a policeman who came over to Sheridan who then turned to me and shrugged helplessly.
“ ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Sheridan said.
“ ‘It’s all right, Dick,’ I told him, and handed over his manuscripts. ‘We’ve read the plays. They’re wonderful plays. We’ll remember them always.’
“ ‘Oh we will, Richard. We will,’ Maria said.
“ ‘As for the rest of you,’ I called, ‘one day I shall be King. I’ll not forget what you’ve done to us this day. You, draper, and you, cabinetmaker, can forget all about your By Appointment to His Majesty crest. All of you can.’
“For reply they looked down listlessly at their feet and seemed to shuffle apologetically.
“For some reason they didn’t enter the bedroom and left it intact.
“ ‘They’ve left us all we really need, sweetheart,’ I told Maria.
“ ‘Oh yes,’ she said and we went there and I sucked at her dry breasts and somehow they were moist now and what I sipped tasted like tears.
“Well,” King George said. “It was the following year. This would have been thirty-three years ago. It was my birthday. I wouldn’t be Regent for eighteen more years, King for another twenty-eight. It was my birthday. The house was furnished now with some of Maria’s things from Pangbourne; the rest came from her house in Richmond. There were crosses on the walls. It was my birthday. We had always exchanged gifts. Though I was still in debt — princes and good time Charlies are never out of it it seems — I was not borrowing so much now since being humiliated by the creditors. I had given her some small thing, I don’t even remember now what it was. She looked at me for a moment and went over to her writing desk, where she sat down and appeared to write something out. It couldn’t have taken her more than a minute. When she had done she handed it to me. I looked at it and laughed.
“ ‘What’s this then?’ I said.
“ ‘A check.’
“ ‘Well I see it’s a check. Is that the sort of gift you’d give me on my birthday? A check?’
“ ‘Did you read it?’
“ ‘No.’
“ ‘Read it.’
“ ‘It’s for five hundred fifteen pounds, eight shillings.’
“‘Yes.’
“ ‘What an odd sum. Five hundred fifteen pounds, eight shillings. Maria, is this the amount you think will bring me out of debt? Darling, I owe thousands.’
“ ‘I know that.’
“ ‘Maria, I don’t want your money for a gift.’
“ ‘It isn’t a gift. I did not get you a gift.’
“‘What is it then?’
“ ‘The price you paid to have this house built.’
“ ‘You’re giving me my own house? Oh, darling, that’s very sweet but really I can’t…’
“ ‘He said I’d have to ask you for the title. He said if you don’t have it or it’s not handy you could write something down on a paper making it over to me.’