Toady, thought Charlotte, glowering at the cabinet wall.
‘The only way to tame a madman is by constant use of restraints,’ the doctor continued, in a lecturing tone. ‘I hear you have a chair of correction?’
The mention of the chair had a terrible effect on the king, who began thrashing about with his legs, trying to get off the bed.
‘At Kew, I believe,’ Colonel McMahon replied smoothly. ‘That was the last place it was used. It can be sent for, if you so desire.’
‘Indeed,’ agreed the doctor. ‘Have it sent for at once.’
‘Emily?’ the king called, rolling wildly from side to side on the bed. Desperation threaded his hoarse voice. Despite the chill of the room, the sheets were soaked with his perspiration, emitting a thin, sour smell. ‘Emily? Don’t let them take me to the chair, Emily … Emily?’
‘Hallucinating again, I see,’ said the doctor. ‘Well, that was to be expected, given his earlier episodes. I gather last time he thought his Chancellor of the Exchequer was … a pigeon?’
‘A peacock,’ Colonel McMahon corrected briskly. ‘But I fail to see why the species of bird—’
‘Interesting,’ said the doctor, advancing on the king. ‘Very interesting. You must recognise, Colonel, it helps to understand his mania in order to control it.’
‘Control or cure?’
There was a moment of fraught silence reeking with the stench of the king’s fear. Beneath it, Charlotte fancied she could detect the sickly sweet scent of treason. Treason smelt remarkably like the champagne on Colonel McMahon’s boots.
‘We’ll just have to see as we go on, shan’t we?’ said the doctor coyly.
Charlotte didn’t like the sound of that.
‘Get him cleaned up,’ ordered the doctor. Two more pairs of legs, previously stationary by the far wall, began moving. These were pedestrian sorts of legs, wearing heavy shoes and wool stockings. ‘And build up the fire. No need to freeze him to death.’
‘But the Willises—’ began Lord Henry, referring to the doctors who had served the king in his two prior illnesses.
‘The Willises aren’t in charge any longer. I am.’
‘I saved this for you.’ Charlotte heard the slosh of liquid as Lord Henry presented the doctor with a brimming chamber pot.
The doctor recoiled, his nostrils flaring. ‘And to what do I owe this honour?’
‘I had thought …’ Lord Henry made the mistake of gesticulating with the chamber pot and both gentlemen shied back. ‘Er, I had thought you might need it for your medical analysis.’
The doctor sniffed, remembered the stench, and thought better of it. ‘That is antiquated stuff,’ he said loftily, ‘poking about at stools and dabbling in urine. I am a man of modern science.’
‘So we’ve been told,’ drawled McMahon. ‘You came recommended most highly by Sir Francis Medmenham.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said the doctor. ‘Sir Francis. I had the care of his great-aunt. A fascinating case. She stripped naked, painted herself blue, called herself Boadicea, and attempted to invade Hadley-on-Thames.’
McMahon cut him neatly off before he could reminisce further about his brief brush with the Queen of the Britons. ‘That, I am relieved to say, does not appear to be His Majesty’s problem. How will you proceed with him?’
The soiled stockings prowled along the side of the bed. By dint of leaning sideways and cricking her neck, Charlotte was able to get her first look at more than the doctor’s legs. He looked like a Drury Lane caricature of a mad-doctor, in his old-fashioned black frock coat, shiny from wear, and his equally old-fashioned horsehair wig, which came down too low over his forehead, as though he had bought it too big for his head. A rumpled white stock, none too clean, appeared to have eaten his chin. To be fair, most of his patients probably couldn’t care the slightest about his appearance, unless they wanted him to paint himself blue and join in the fight against the invading Roman legions.
The edge of the frock coat moved and Charlotte hastily ducked her head again, attempting to impersonate a very large mouse.
The king whimpered weakly from the bed. Charlotte heard a rustling noise, as though the king were trying to bury himself in the bedclothes, away from the impudence of prying eyes. ‘We will start with a course of hot vinegar applied to the feet, to draw the humours down through his body,’ announced the doctor. ‘If the king continues restless, we will follow it with an emetic of tartar to purge the humours via the rectal corridor.’
‘And then?’ asked McMahon.
‘Blistering,’ said the doctor firmly. ‘Blistering of the arms, legs, and head, combined with a preparation of musk and quinine to be taken internally.’
McMahon gave it his nod of approval. ‘All sounds quite sound to me. I will relay your recommendations to His Royal Highness. In the meantime, I see no reason you should not begin treatment.’
‘Excellent.’ The doctor rubbed his hands together, undoubtedly in glee at having obtained a royal patron. ‘I must return briefly to St Luke’s, to leave instructions for my patients there, but my men know what to do. With your leave, gentlemen, I would have them begin with the vinegar at once.’
‘I trust you will return as quickly as possible.’ From McMahon’s lips, the words had all the force of a direct order from the Prince of Wales. ‘I must return to His Highness. In the meantime, we leave His Majesty under Lord Henry’s capable supervision.’
Lord Henry didn’t look best pleased at being delegated to stay. Charlotte could see him shift his weight from one shoe to the other as though he were squirming. ‘I say, doesn’t vinegar have a powerful tang?’
‘All part of its healing powers,’ said the doctor soothingly. ‘The forceful aroma rises through the nostrils into the brain, driving down the evil humours, while the application of heat to the soles of the feet allows the humours to puddle in blisters, which then may be safely drained.’
‘Modern science is, indeed, a wonderful thing,’ said Colonel McMahon sagely.
It was easy for him to be sanguine; he wasn’t going to have to smell it in progress. Charlotte, however, was beginning to fear that she would. The bed was between her and the door. And all attention was very much centred on the bed. Next time, she would have to pick a hiding place nearer the door. Not that she intended there to be a next time for this sort of escapade, but just in case.
With much noisy clumping against the floorboards, Lord Henry ushered McMahon and the doctor out of the room. That would have been all very well and good but for the two attendants who had been left behind to begin the dreaded vinegar treatment. The king sounded even more unhappy about it than Charlotte. From beyond her hiding place, she could hear the sounds of the fire being vigorously stoked. Her corner by the wall began to feel uncomfortably warm.
‘There, now, Your Majesty,’ one was saying, in a thick St Giles accent. ‘We’ll soon have this over with. You got the vinegar, Billy?’
Billy, it appeared, had not got the vinegar or, as he preferred to put it, the bleeding vinegar. A long discussion ensued. Charlotte crouched in her hiding place, hands braced against the floor, wondering just how long it would be until Lord Henry came back and if he were really quite stupid enough to believe that she had accidentally wandered in while looking for a book and fallen asleep beneath the cabinetry.
‘Doctor said to apply the bleeding vinegar before he got back,’ said the one who wasn’t Billy. ‘We’d better get it.’
‘Should we leave ’im, do you think?’ Billy asked in hesitating tones.
The other emitted a coarse chuckle. ‘He ain’t going anywhere, is he? Come on.’
The floor vibrated again, and was still. Poking her head up like a turtle out of its shell, Charlotte peered over the edge of the cabinet.
All the doors were ajar, and the fire was hissing and crackling, but the room was empty of human habitation save for the helpless form of the king. Charlotte couldn’t believe her luck. However, there was no guarantee that her luck would hold. The do
ctor’s assistants might be back at any moment.
Stumbling on limbs gone numb, Charlotte squeezed herself willy-nilly out of her corner, catching at the edge of the cabinet to keep from tripping over the hem of her own dress. With her right leg all pins and needles, she lurched towards the door in a lopsided lope until the thready sound of the king’s voice brought her up short.
‘Emily?’ They had rolled the king onto his back, and his rheumy eyes gazed pleadingly up at Charlotte. Tears leaked helplessly down the withered cheeks. ‘Do … not … leave … me …’
‘I must,’ Charlotte whispered. ‘I will fetch help. I promise.’
As he continued to call piteously for his Emily, Charlotte fled through the connecting door into the library, not slowing her pace until she had achieved the hall beyond. She would go to the queen; that much of her promise, at least, she could keep. But what help could there be for the king if the prince himself ordered it otherwise?
Stumbling on her skirts in her haste, Charlotte scrambled back up the great marble stairs to the queen’s chambers, where she breathlessly poured out her report to the queen and princesses.
Princess Sophia inveighed heavily against her older brother. ‘Does he really fancy, because he is the rising sun, anything he says is to be swallowed whole? How dare he treat the dear angel so! And not even to do it in person – but by proxy! It is too beastly.’
‘It is beastly, but it may be necessary, Sophie,’ said Princess Mary tiredly. ‘They did the same last time, you remember, with the restraints and the blistering. And it brought him back, didn’t it?’
‘Yes, last time,’ said Princess Sophia mutinously. ‘But what do we know of this new doctor? For all we know, he could be an utter charlatan. Much anyone here would care.’
That last was clearly intended for her mama.
‘Lady Charlotte,’ said the queen, ignoring her turbulent daughter. ‘I believe I may have another commission for you.’
‘Why exactly do you want me to go to a madhouse with you?’ asked Henrietta forty-five minutes later, adjusting the ribbons on her bonnet as the carriage racketed down Clerkenwell Road towards Dr Simmons and his hospital. ‘Not that I mind, but it does seem an odd way to spend an afternoon.’
‘It’s not a madhouse, exactly,’ hedged Charlotte. ‘More of a mad hospital.’ Without thinking, she scrubbed her gloved hands together like Lady Macbeth. Beneath the kid, she fancied she could still smell the reek of the king’s sickroom on her skin, that acrid stench of sweat and despair.
‘Isn’t that the same thing by a different name?’
‘I just like the sound of it better,’ Charlotte confessed. ‘It sounds less …’
‘Mad?’ Henrietta supplied. From beneath the brim of her bonnet, she peered keenly at Charlotte. ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with—’
‘No!’ With more dignity, she added, ‘I’m not asking you to check me in, if that’s what you mean. Going mad for love went out of fashion several centuries ago.’
‘I’m not implying that you’re going mad,’ Henrietta began carefully. ‘But you have had something of a, well …’
‘Shock?’ With as much conviction as she could muster, Charlotte said, ‘That’s all done with. It’s over. Finished.’
Fiddling with the buttons on her glove, Henrietta said with false nonchalance, ‘Stwyth informed me that you had a caller this morning.’
‘Stwyth told you?’ Charlotte wasn’t sure who she was more irritated with, Robert for calling or Stwyth for tattling. On closer consideration, Robert. Definitely Robert.
‘Well, I am technically your chaperone,’ pointed out Henrietta. ‘I need to know these things.’
The notion of Henrietta, dear though she might be, monitoring her meetings made Charlotte’s shoulders tense in automatic negation. After all the years of whispering and giggling in the corners of ballrooms, conducting emergency hair repairs and pinning up hems that had come down, to have one act as an authority over the other just felt wrong. Charlotte was perfectly content to let Henrietta enjoy her new position as a young matron, but not if it meant an alteration in the way that Henrietta treated her. Was this what had sent Penelope storming out onto the balcony with Freddy Staines?
‘What about being my friend?’ asked Charlotte quietly.
‘Even more reason to know!’ exclaimed Henrietta expansively. Her voice dropped a little, betraying a deep vein of genuine hurt. ‘I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me yourself.’
Charlotte took refuge in the scenery, although she couldn’t have said with any honesty what they were passing. ‘There was nothing to tell. Nothing worth telling, that is. Honestly. If there had been, I would have told you.’
‘He didn’t—’ Henrietta began hopefully.
‘Apologise?’ filled in Charlotte. ‘No.’
‘Oh,’ said her best friend, her voice full of disappointment.
Henrietta’s disappointment was nothing compared with her own. It would be too tempting to let herself believe that Robert had come because he couldn’t stay away, that the strange note in his voice had been a sign of repressed emotion, that his concern about Medmenham was a sign that he still wanted her for himself.
This, thought Charlotte despairingly, was the problem with the world outside the cover of a book. She couldn’t craft Robert’s dialogue for him, putting the words she wanted to say into his lips. She couldn’t control the direction of his emotions. All she could do was attempt to discipline her own.
Reaching out, Charlotte squeezed Henrietta’s hand. ‘I’m fine. Really. It’s the king who is in difficulties.’
‘The king?’ Henrietta’s voice dropped to a whisper and she darted a glance at the panel that separated them from the coachman. ‘He’s not …’
It was every subject’s worst nightmare, that the king should go mad again. Memories of the regency crisis of sixteen years before still ran strong. If the king should go mad, the government would be in disarray, with the prince fighting the king’s ministers for power, Parliament drawn into warring factions over a Regency bill, and no one to conduct the basic matters of state. It had already happened twice before.
Charlotte nodded. ‘The king has been secluded by the Prince of Wales’s orders. The queen is frantic.’
‘I should think so! Her poor Majesty.’
‘The Prince of Wales even appointed a new physician. Her Majesty wants me to speak with him and see if he can be persuaded to report to her on the king’s condition.’
‘Of course he must!’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Charlotte. ‘During the king’s first illness, one of his doctors refused to speak either to Her Majesty or her ladies. It might be like that again.’
‘It’s monstrous!’
‘Welcome to life at Court,’ said Charlotte wryly. ‘Grandmama claims it was the same in her day, with the king and Prince of Wales always feuding – only then, it was a different king and a different Prince of Wales. And no one was going mad. At least, not in the literal sense.’
‘It will be madness if the prince is allowed to filch the throne,’ said Henrietta darkly. Henrietta’s family were all stalwart Tories, staunchly opposed to the Prince of Wales and his party. Lord Uppington had been instrumental in blocking the prince’s last Regency bill, in 1788. As for Lady Uppington, her views about the prince didn’t bear repeating in polite company, the mildest of them involving the phrase ‘bloated bunch-backed toad.’
Henrietta’s own feelings towards the prince were scarcely milder. ‘Can’t you just see it already? The first thing he’ll do is clamour for an increased income, the selfish toad. And what will become of the war with France?’
‘He did ask the king to let him go fight,’ Charlotte pointed out in the interest of fairness.
‘Merely because he fancies himself in uniform,’ Henrietta sniffed. ‘He’s entirely at the mercy of that dreadful Charles James Fox, and we all know where his sympathies lie. Jacobin to the core!’
‘Let’s not bor
row trouble yet,’ said Charlotte soothingly. ‘The king has recovered each time before. It was jarring to see it for myself, but by all accounts it was equally awful each other time, and yet His Majesty has always pulled through.’
‘Hmm,’ said Henrietta. ‘I hope you’re right.’
‘I hope so, too.’ Charlotte righted her bonnet as the carriage rolled to the halt in a paved courtyard, set slightly back from the road. ‘That’s what we’re here to find out. I do hope Dr Simmons will consent to speak to us.’
‘Oh, he’ll speak to us,’ said Henrietta, sailing out of the carriage like an entire cavalry charge rolled into one blue muslin dress. ‘Hello! You! Over there!’
Two men, wearing identical uniforms of dark brown wool, halted at Henrietta’s halloo. One carried a bucket and mop, the other seemed to just be along for a chat. They must, Charlotte assumed, be orderlies of some sort, employed by the hospital.
‘Where can we find Dr Simmons?’ Henrietta demanded.
Between her imperious tone and her pearl earbobs, Henrietta was clearly a lady of quality. The orderlies immediately snapped to.
‘I’ll just fetch him for you, shall I, miss?’ said one, and disappeared around the side of the building, leaving his companion to mind the two ladies.
Charlotte noticed that he made no move to invite them into the building. Because the sights in there wouldn’t be fit for their eyes? She wasn’t sure she wanted to think too deeply about that.
From the outside, all seemed neat and tidy enough – as long as one ignored the bars on all the windows. But there was an unfortunate smell hanging about the place. It wasn’t any one odour one could identify, but a combination of unpleasant scents, not unlike the king’s bedchamber that morning, compounded of sweat and fear and unwashed bodies and strange medicinal compounds. From one of the windows came a series of sharp, shrill cries.
‘Won’t be a moment, miss,’ the orderly said to Henrietta just a little too loudly, in a clear attempt to draw her attention away from the rhythmic shrieking. ‘The doctor’s like as not out in the garden. Won’t be a tick.’