Chapter One #2
‘We could have kept the papers locked away. A few decades, I suggested.’ He smiles at John.
‘You might have had it typeset, son. Imagine that. As an old man, you’d have been able to complete the story by putting Lord Byron’s memoir to press.
Such a thing would make us.’ John doesn’t reply.
The Murrays are a dynasty already. There’s no question that Young John will follow his father into the business, but he’ll be damned if they say he’s a bookseller.
He’ll call out any fellow out who tries.
‘Was it the . . . ’ Anne’s voice lingers. She can’t say the word but both men at the table know what she’s asking.
Murray sighs. ‘The sodomy, dear? It’s illegal of course but hardly unknown in the upper echelons.
’ Many aristocrats view the practice as a right of passage on the Grand Tour.
Although as one of Murray’s naval associates, an Admiral, remarked the week before, ‘not with one’s wife’. That was the rub. Annabella.
‘The women will never fully recover, I shouldn’t think.
Their reputations, I mean,’ Murray adds, and John and his mother know to whom he is referring; Annabella, yes, but also Byron’s half-sister, Mrs Leigh with whom it’s rumoured he fathered a daughter.
And that’s not to mention the women he engaged in a string of love affairs that left illegitimate children and broken hearts in the great poet’s wake, from Britain all the way to the Adriatic.
John excuses himself after the meal and climbs the stairs to his bedroom, relishing the feeling in his belly.
For he has a secret. He closes the door and pulls an oak chest from underneath his bed, opening the iron catch and lifting the lid with a sense of ceremony.
This is an historic moment, as his father would say.
He peers. He rummages in the empty box as if what he’s looking for might have disappeared into its very fabric.
It’s not here. His copy. The one he made over five nights, sitting at his father’s desk, ink on his fingers and eyes heavy with exhaustion.
His heart pounds and his mind races. Does his father know?
Had he removed it? Or was it one of the staff?
Worse, one of the five visiting gentlemen?
John’s cheeks burn. He’s told nobody what he’s done.
He runs through the last two days in his mind, the tension in the house, the meeting of the four o’clock friends, cut short yesterday when he accompanied Belle Brodie fifteen minutes west by foot, to see her safely home.
‘You look tired, Mr Murray,’ she teased him as they cut in the direction of Panton Street, along St James’s Square. ‘Were you up late, reading?’
‘And writing,’ he’d admitted, with a satisfying sting of secret pride.
But she can’t have known, surely. Not from that one remark.
Miss Brodie wasn’t accorded sight of Byron’s notebook.
It was only shared amongst the great man’s close friends, a few of them women, admittedly.
Mrs Shelley read it. Lady Caroline Lamb too.
Could Miss Brodie have surmised John making the illicit copy? It doesn’t seem possible.
Earlier that afternoon Belle Brodie finally enjoined her staff to pack.
Jamie Duffin, her handsome coachman, had been in her service since before her Edinburgh days, and knows better than to ask questions, but the maid, Janet, is not so well appraised of her requirements.
She hasn’t fitted into the household and now quarrelsome, presses the mistress, which both Cook and Jamie know is a dire error.
‘But where are we going?’ she demands.
‘We?’ thinks Belle, archly.
Janet will not be going, though it would benefit her to have someone along.
If she dressed up Cook, she wonders, might the old lady pass as an aunt for the sake of respectable appearance on this journey?
She dismisses this notion swiftly. Helpful as it might be to appear to have a chaperone, the ruse would never succeed, for as soon as the old woman opened her mouth she’d betray herself.
Cook hails from a mile east of Panton Street, close to the hub of the city. That mile makes all the difference.
‘Just pack my things, would you?’ Belle snaps at Janey, as, sitting at her desk, she scribbles a final note to the landlord, giving a month’s notice on the house.
She seals a half-sovereign inside, closing the little package with red wax embossed with a stamp in the shape of a rose, to which she took a fancy when she first arrived in London.
The Brodie coat of arms with three stars on a shield belongs to Belle’s brother, but she wanted to have a mark of her own.
Belle is fond of roses, blousy and sweet.
She has her linens prepared with rosewater made to her own recipe with a tiny splash of jasmine oil and a drip of cumin. Her signature scent this last while.
The pile of letters on her desk were dispatched an hour ago.
As soon as she knew that it was indeed tonight that she’d leave.
These were to her lawyer and her banker and also a couple addressed to friends.
Next, she has Jamie arrange for the furniture to be sent to auction, thinking that she may regret letting go her gorgeous old Chippendale desk, but she can hardly drag it with her on the boat.
‘See to it that they put a good reserve on that,’ she instructs.
Then she pays off Cook and says the old woman may stay in the house for a fortnight while she finds another position.
She writes a reference saying that excellent dumplings and pies have emanated from the kitchen.
Last of all, she pays off Janet less generously and tells her to leave at once.
She sends a note by message boy to Ina Pleitch at 50 Albemarle Street, the upstairs maid, who has been in Belle’s pay for some months now.
I’m leaving. If you wish it, I have a position. You might be my ladies’ maid.
Ina arrives at the kitchen door not even an hour later with a single, scrappy leather bag that looks half-eaten by red rot.
The boot boy read the note to her, for she never learned her letters.
‘I told Mrs Murray I’d been called home,’ she admits.
The lie feels especially shameful for Anne Murray gave the girl an extra sixpence for her trouble.
By the time it’s getting dark everything is arranged; an admirable feat.
To Belle’s neighbours it seems that Miss Brodie must always have lived in London, even though she arrived scarcely two years before.
Belle has that quality about her, of always seeming to belong.
Well, she thinks, Jamie will have to do by way of chaperone.
Ina doesn’t count but she’ll come at least. She’s a tidy girl and an extra pair of hands.
The carriage is brought round and the trunks loaded.
Jamie hands Belle up and waits. She’s wearing her green dress – velvet, for travelling in.
A matching hat with a gold rosette. Jamie’s hair is greying which makes him look distinguished.
Belle frequently buys him livery. Not the kind festooned in ribbons and brocade favoured by the Mayfair set but something ‘more Beau Brummell’, as she terms it.
A well-made suit in a neutral shade and smart brown boots.
Above everything else, Belle Brodie values discretion.
She likes that even now he doesn’t ask her destination.
‘Dover,’ she says at the last possible moment.
That, of course, is only the beginning of her journey.
From Dover she’ll make for Dieppe. Calais is too obvious and besides Belle is a Scottish lass and Dieppe has a long association with her hometown.
There’s a Rue D’Ecosse there, she’s heard.
But truly, she knows that she’s making for the capital.
She glances at her trunk where she has secreted the manuscript that Ina purloined on her instructions earlier in the day. And now, it’s time to be off.
Yes, she thinks, as if a town crier has made the announcement. Belle Brodie is going to Paris.