Blood Royal: A Novel

This change of front affected all their movements. As soon as term was ended, Dick went up to London to take up the duties and emoluments of his office. But that was not all. By Gillespie’s advice – Gillespie seemed to take an almost fraternal interest now in the affairs of the family – Mrs. Plantagenet and the children moved to London, too, to be with Dick in his lodgings. Gillespie thought Miss Plantagenet’s musical taste so remarkable, he said, that she ought to be intown, where sound instruction could be got in singing; and he was so full of this point that Maud consented to give up her own work at Chiddingwick and take a place as daily governess in London instead, going out in the afternoon to a famous vocalist. Gillespie believed they ought all to be removed as far as possible from the blighting memory of their father’s degradation; and he attached so much importance to this matter that he came down once or twice to Chiddingwick himself during the Christmas vacation, in order to see them all safely removed to Pimlico.

It was wonderful, Dick thought, what a brotherly interest that good fellow always took in all that concerned them; yet when he said so to Maud, that unconscionable young woman only blushed and looked down with a self-conscious air that was very unusual to her. But there! girls are so queer: though Gillespie had been so kind, Maud never once said a word, as one might naturally have expected, about how nice he had been to them. For his part, Dick thought her almost positively ungrateful.

CHAPTER XVII. IN SEARCH OF AN ANCESTOR

Dick’s first year at the Pipe-roll was anything but a lazy one. Opulence in the shape of two hundred and fifty a year came to him with the encumbrance of plenty to do for it. He had the office routine to learn, and rolls and tallies to decipher, and endless household difficulties of his own to meet, and all the children’s schooling and other arrangements to look after, It was still a struggle. But by dint of hard work and pinching, with Maud’s able assistance, things came straight in the end somehow. Dick got a pupil or two in his spare time – happier men than himself, who were going up under luckier auspices to Oxford; for, though Dick put the best face upon it, still, it was a pull leaving that beloved University without a degree. However, the year wore on, as most years wear on, good, bad, or indifferent; and Mary Tudor, too, left her place at Chiddingwick Rectory, and got another one, better paid, with nice people in Westminster. She was a constant Sunday visitor at the Plantagenets’ rooms; and so, in vacation, was Archie Gillespie, whose unfailing devotion to his college friend struck Dick every day as something truly remarkable. Brothers are so dense. Maud smiled at him often. If he had paid a quarter the attention to any other girl that Archie paid her, how instantly she would have perceived it! But Dick – dear Dick – never seemed to suspect that Archie could come for anything else on earth except to talk over the affairs of the family with him. And yet men consider women the inferior creatures!

Much of Dick’s spare time, however – for, being a very busy man, of course he had often spare time on his hands, amounting frequently to as much as half an hour together – was spent in a curious yet congenial occupation – the laborious hunting-up of the Plantagenet pedigree. A certain insane desire to connect his family with the old Royal House of England pursued Dick through life, and made him look upon this purely useless and ornamental object as though it were a matter of the gravest practical importance. Maud felt its gravity, too, quite as much as her brother; it was an almost inevitable result, indeed, of their peculiar upbringing.

Every man has, necessarily, what the French call, well, ‘the defects of his qualities’ – faults which are either the correlatives or the excess of his particular virtues. Now, the Plantagenets had preserved their strong sense of self-respect and many other valuable personal characteristics under trying circumstances, by dint of this self-same family pride. It was almost necessary, therefore, that when Dick found himself in a position to prove, as he thought, the goodness of his claim to represent in our day the old Plantagenet stock, he should prosecute the research after the missing links with all the innate energy of his active nature.

Mary Tudor, indeed, whose practical common-sense was of a different order, sometimes regretted that Dick should waste so much valuable time on so unimportant an object; to her it seemed a pity that a man whose days were mainly spent in poring over dusty documents in the public service should devote a large part of his evenings as well to poring over other equally dusty documents for a personal and purely sentimental purpose.

‘What good will it do you, Dick, even if you do find out you’re the rightful heir to the throne of England?’ she asked him more than once. ‘Parliament won’t repeal the Acts of Union with Scotland and Ireland, and get rid of the Settlement, to make you King and Maud and Nellie Princesses of the blood royal.’

Dick admitted that was so; but, still, her frivolity shocked him.

‘It’s a noble inheritance!’ he said, with a touch of romance in his voice. ‘Surely, Mary, you wouldn’t wish me to remain insensible, like a log, to the proud distinction of so unique an ancestry! They were such men, those old Plantagenets! Look at Henry II., for example, who founded our House for most practical purposes; there was a wonderful organizer for you! And Edward I. – what a statesman! so far before his age! and the Black Prince – and Edward III. – and Henry V., what strategists! It isn’t merely that they were kings, mind you; I don’t care about that; since I came to know what really makes a man great, I haven’t attached so much importance to the mere fact of their position. But just see what workers the old Plantagenets were in themselves, and how much they did for the building-up of England – and, indeed, of all Britain, if it comes to that, for wasn’t Scotch independence itself a direct result of the national opposition to Edward Plantagenet’s premature policy of unification? When I think of all those things I feel a glow of pride; I realize to myself what a grand heritage it is to be the descendant and representative of such early giants; for there were giants in those days, and no man could then be King unless he had at least a strenuous personality – oftenest, too, unless he were also a real live statesman. Our ancestors themselves knew all that very well; and when one of our line fell short of his ancestral standard, like Edward II. and Richard II., he went soon to the wall, and made way for a stronger. It’s not about them I care, nor about mere puling devotees like poor Henry III.; it’s my descent from men like those great early organizers, and thinkers, and rulers, who built up the administrative and judicial system we all still live under.’

When he talked like that, Maud thought it was really beautiful. She wondered how Mary could ever be insensible to the romantic charms of such old descent. But there! Mary wasn’t a Plantagenet – only a mere Welsh Tudor; and though she was a dear good girl, and as sweet as they’re made, how could you expect her to enter fully into the feelings of the real old family? As for Archie Gillespie, he said to Mary more than once:

‘Let Dick go his own way, Miss Tudor; it gives him pleasure. He thinks some mysterious good is going to come out of it all for him and his, if he can fill in the missing links in the Plantagenet pedigree. Of course, that’s pure moonshine. Still, we must always remember it was the Plantagonet pedigree that gave our Dick his first interest in English history, and so made him what he is; and anything deserves respect which could keep Edmund Plantagenet’s children from degenerating, as they would have degenerated, from their father’s example, without this inspiriting idea of noblesse oblige: an idea which has made Dick and Maud – I mean, Miss Plantagenet – hold their heads high through life in spite of their poverty. It can do Dick no harm now to pursue a little farther this innocent hobby; it will give him a better insight into the by-ways and alleys of early English history; and if he can really establish the Plantagenet pedigree throughout, it may serve to call attention to him as a sound historical researcher. Fortunately, he knows what evidence is; and he won’t go wrong, therefore, by making heedless assumptions and incredible skips and jumps, like half our genealogists.’

So Dick persevered for fully twelve months in his eager attempt, by hook and by crook, to trace his own family up to Lionel of Clarence, upon whom Mr. Plantagenet himself had early fixed – at pure haphazard – as the special transmitter of the Plantagenet blood to the later branches of the House, himself included. The longer Dick worked at it, too, the more confident he became of ultimate success. Step by step turned out right. He had brought the thing down, he told Mary, to a moral certainty; only one link now remained to complete the entire pedigree. That’s always the way, it may be mentioned parenthetically, with your doubtful genealogy; there’s only one link missing – but, unfortunately, that’s the link on proof of which the whole chain is dependent. And very naturally, too: for this is how the thing works out. You track your own genealogy, let us say, back to a person named Plantagenet, who lived some time in the sixteenth century, and with whom you are really and undoubtedly connected by an unbroken and traceable ancestral series. Then you track the family tree of Lionel of Clarence forward, in the opposite direction, to a real and historical Plantagenet who ‘flourished,’ as the books say, near the end of the fifteenth century. After that you say: ‘If my ancestor, the sixteenth-century Plantagenet, turns out to be the son of Lionel’s descendant in the fifteenth century – as is extremely probable – why, then, it’s all made out – I’m descended direct from Lionel of Clarence; and in any case, don’t you see, there’s only one link missing!’ Wise genealogists usually abstain on purpose from the attempt to hunt up that fatal missing link; they know right well that the safest plan is to assume identity, while efforts at proving it are frequently disastrous. But Dick was still young, and not perhaps overwise; so once he had brought down the matter to a question of a solitary missing link, he couldn’t rest night or day till he had finally settled it.

One evening he returned home from the office to Maud, overflowing with a new and most important discovery.

‘Well, the thing’s all but proved, at last!’ he cried in a triumphant voice, as he kissed her warmly; ‘at least, that is to say, I’ve found a valuable clue that will decide the matter finally one way or the other. I’ve discovered a conveyance of the sixteenth century, dated 1533 – here’s a verbatim copy of it – which describes Thomas Plantagenet, our great-great-grandfather’s grandfather, as being really the son of Giles Plantagenet, the missing-link man, who is said in it to have owned a house – and this, you will see, is the new and important point – at Framlingham, in Suffolk. He seems to have been some sort of a petty tradesman.

Where Giles first came from, we had till now no means of knowing. But after this clue, all we’ve got to do next is just to hunt up the local records at Framlingliam and find out that this Giles Plantagenet, already known to us, was the son of that Geoffrey Plantagenet of Richmond, in Yorkshire, whom I showed long ago to have been the last traceable descendant of Lionel of Clarence, and concerning whom Lysons says, without a shadow of authority, decissit sine prole– he died without issue.’

‘It seems rather a leap, though, for those days, doesn’t it,’ Mary put in timidly, for she dreaded the effect of a disappointment upon Dick’s nervous nature, ‘from Richmond to Framlingham? I thought people rarely went then much beyond their own county.’

‘That was true, no doubt, for the middle and lower classes,’ Dick answered with a faint tinge of Plantagenet pride in his voice; ‘but hardly even then, I should say, for people of such distinction as Geoffrey Plantagenet. Gentlemen of high rank, and members of the peerage and the Royal Family, had manors, you know, in many different counties, and moved on from one to another from time to time, or left them about by will to various sons and daughters. We mustn’t judge such great folk by the common analogies of ordinary people.’

‘Still, Dick,’ Maud interposed, a little startled herself, ‘even if Mary’s objection doesn’t hold good, it does seem a little odd, doesn’t it, that Giles Plantagenet should be a petty tradesman at Framlingham, if he was really the son of such a man as Geoffrey, whom we know to have been a county gentleman of distinction in Yorkshire?’

‘I don’t think so at all,’ Dick answered with a little surprise. ‘In those days, you see, Maud, when there was no middle class, people went up and down easily. Attainder was so common, and loss of estates such an every-day occurrence, that the vicissitudes of families must often have been much more rapid and startling than nowadays. Moreover, it’s no use arguing beforehand about a plain question of fact. It was so, or it wasn’t. I shall soon find out which. The records are almost sure to be preserved at Framlingham, because it was the seat of the Howards; and I shall go down there next Bank Holiday and settle the question. After that, I’ll publish the result of my search; and then nobody will ever be able to say in future we made a false pretence of being real royal Plantagenets.’

He spoke so confidently that he really frightened poor Mary. She couldn’t help thinking what a terrible shock it would be to him if by any chance he should turn out after all to be mistaken, and if Giles Plantagenet should prove to be other than the son of Geoffrey.

So real did this danger appear to her, indeed, that as Bank Holiday approached, and Dick talked more and more certainly of his visit to Framling-ham, she spoke quite seriously on the matter to Maud.

‘Do you know, dear,’ she said, taking her friend’s hand, ‘if I could have got away for the day, I’d go right down to Framlingham with him, though it seems to me a dreadful waste of money for so useless a purpose.’ At that, Maud’s eyes flashed; poor dear Mary! she never would understand the feelings of a Plantagenet. ‘What I feel is this,’ Mary went on, all unheeding: ‘I’m obliged to stop at home that day with the children; but I wish I could go: for if by any chance it should happen to turn out that’ Dick was mistaken after all, and Giles Plantagenet wasn’t the son of Geoffrey, I’m afraid the shock would quite unman him for the moment, and I hardly know what he might be tempted to do in the first keen sense of intense disappointment.’

Maud’s lip curled slightly. Nursery governess as she was, the old dancing-master’s daughter had all the pride of a Duchess – and why not, indeed, since she was a Princess of the blood royal?

‘Oh, that wouldn’t make any difference, dear,’ she answered confidently. ‘We are Plantagenets, don’t you see? And if we don’t happen to be descended from that particular man Geoffrey, we must be descended through some other member of the Plantagenet family. My poor father was sure of it; and it’s always been known in Yorkshire for many generations.’

However, Mary was so urgent, and so afraid of the consequences of a sudden disappointment – for she knew Dick’s nature, and loved him dearly – that at last Maud consented to accompany her brother on his projected trip, and guard him against the results of an impossible failure.

Bank Holiday came in due time – a lovely summer day; and Dick and Maud went down together by cheap train to Framlingham. The banks by the side of the rail were thick with flowers. They reached there early in the day, and Dick called upon the Rector at once, sending in his card with name and address at the Pipe-rolls. As he expected, that introduction amply sufficed him. Nor was he disappointed about the preservation of the Framlingham records. The church possessed a singularly perfect collection of baptismal and marriage entries from the beginning of the fifteenth century onward. In less than half an hour Dick was thick in their midst, turning over the dusty leaves of those worn old books with all the eagerness and enthusiasm of a born genealogist.

Maud sat with him for awhile in the gloom of that dimly-lighted chancel; but after half an hour or more of hunting page by page, her patience began to give out, and she proposed to stroll away towards the castle ruins, and return a little later to see how Dick progressed with his quest after ancestors. Dick acquiesced readily enough, and Maud went off by herself down the leafy lane that leads straight to the castle.

For some time she amused herself in the deep hollow of the moat, and waited round the great circuit of the frowning rampart. It was a splendid ruin, she thought, the finest she had seen. Then she mounted the broken wall, and looked out upon the wide plain, and admired the beautiful view of the church and village. A flag floated from the tower, as if in honour of Dick’s presence. At last, as lunch-time approached, she lounged back lazily to Dick. They had brought their own bread and cheese and a few sandwiches with them, and she had picked out mentally a cool spot under the spreading chestnuts, which seemed to her the very place in which to make their impromptu picnic. So she opened the church door in very good spirits, for the fresh country air had exhilarated her like champagne after so long a spell of that dusty London; and she went straight to the chancel, where she had left poor Dick an hour before among his tattered registers.

As she drew near, a sudden terror rushed over her unexpectedly. What on earth could this mean? Dick was gazing at the books with an ashen-white face, and with eyes that fairly started out of their sockets for staring. He raised his head and looked at her. He couldn’t speak for horror. With one hand he beckoned his sister mysteriously to his side; then he moistened his lips at last and pointed with one accusing finger to the entries.

‘Look there, Maud,’ he faltered with a painful effort; and Maud looked where he bid her.

It was a mongrel entry, half Latin, half English: ‘Die 14 Junii, anno 1498, Giles, the son of Richard Plantagenet, cobbler, and of Joan, uxoris eius, huius parochiæ.’

Maud glanced at the words herself with a certain vague sense of terror.

‘But perhaps,’ she cried, ‘after all, this Richard Plantagenet himself was of royal ancestry.’

Dick shook his head with a terrible, a despondent shake. He knew when he was beaten.

‘Oh no,’ he answered aloud, though he could hardly frame the words. ‘I know what I say. I’ve found out all about this Richard Plantagenet, Maud. He was the ancestor of the other people – the false Plantagenets, don’t you know, the Sheffield family who left the money. He never was a true Plantagenet in any way at all. It was only a nickname. He acted the parts of the Plantagenet kings, one after the other, in a masque or pageant, and was known from that time by pure fun as Richard Plantagenet. But that was in London; and we didn’t know till now he was ever settled at Framlingham.

‘And must we be descended from him, Dick?’ She asked it piteously, pleadingly.

‘Oh, Maud – yes, we must. There’s no other way out of it. I’ve worked up the whole thing so thoroughly now – to my own destruction. I know all about him. His real name was Muggins; and that’s our real name, too; and this book – this horrid book gives all the facts necessary to prove our descent from him; and the Sheffield people’s, too, who are really our cousins.’

He said it with utter despondency. The truth was wrenched out of him. Maud clasped her white hands and looked hard at poor Dick. This disillusion was just as terrible for her as for him.

‘You’re quite, quite sure?’ she murmured once more in a voice of pure agony.

‘Yes, quite, quite sure,’ Dick answered with a tremor, but with manful persistence. ‘There can’t be a doubt of it. I knew everything about this wretched creature before, except that he was a Framlingham man; and there are entries here in the book – you can see them for yourself – that leave no shadow of doubt anywhere about the fellow’s identity. Maud, Maud, it’s been all a foolish, foolish dream! We are not – we never were – real royal Plantagenets!’

Maud looked down at the ground and burst into hot tears.

‘Then I’ll never marry Archie,’ she cried. ‘Never, never, never! I’ll never ask him to take a mere nobody from Chiddingwick. My pride wouldn’t allow it – my pride would stand in the way – for I’m as proud as before, Dick, though I’m not a Plantagenet!’

CHAPTER XVIII. GOOD OUT OF EVIL

That journey back to town was one of the most terrible things Maud had ever yet known in her poor little life. Dick leaned back disconsolate in one corner of the carriage, and she in the opposite one. Neither spoke a single word; neither needed to speak, for each knew without speech what the other was thinking of. Every now and again Dick would catch some fresh shade of expression coursing like a wave over Maud’s unhappy face, and recognise in it the very idea that a moment before had been passing through his own troubled mind. It was pitiable to see them. Their whole scheme of life had suddenly and utterly broken down before them; their sense of self-respect was deeply wounded – nay, even their bare identity was all but gone, for the belief that they were in very truth descendants of the royal Plantagenets had become as it were an integral part of their personality, and woven itself intimately into all their life and thought and practice. They ceased to be themselves in ceasing to be potential princes and princesses.

For the Great Plantagenet Delusion which Edmund Plantagenet had started, and only half or a quarter believed in himself, became to his children from youth upward, and especially to Maud and Dick, a sort of family religion. It was a theory on which they based almost everything that was best and truest within them; a moral power for good, urging them always on to do credit to the great House from which they firmly and unquestioningly believed themselves to be sprung. Probably the moral impulse was there first by nature; probably, too, they inherited it, not from poor, drunken, do-nothing Edmund Plantagenet himself, through whom ostensibly they should have derived their Plantagenet character, but from that good and patient nobody, their hard-working mother. But none of these things ever occurred at all to Maud or Dick; to them it had always been a prime article of faith that noblesse oblige, and that their lives must be noble in order to come up to a preconceived Plantagenet standard of action. So the blow was a crushing one. It was as though all the ground of their being had been cut away from beneath their feet. They had fancied themselves so long the children of kings, with a moral obligation upon them to behave – well, as the children of kings are little given to behaving; and they had found out now they were mere ordinary mortals, with only the same inherent and universal reasons for right and high action as the common herd of us. It was a sad comedown – for a royal Plantagenet.

The revulsion was terrible. And Maud, who was in some ways the prouder of the two, and to whom, as to most of her sex, the extrinsic reason for holding up her head in the midst of poverty and disgrace had ever been stronger and more cogent than the intrinsic one, felt it much the more keenly. To women, the social side of things is always uppermost. They journeyed home in a constant turmoil of unrelieved wretchedness; they were not, they had never been, royal Plantagenots. Just like all the rest of the world – mere ordinary people! And they who had been sustained, under privations and shame, by the reflection that, if every man had his right, Dick would have been sitting that day on the divided throne of half these islands! Descendants, after all, of a cobbler and a dancing-master! No Black Prince at all in their lineage – no Henry, no Edward, no Richard, no Lionel! Cour-de-Lion a pale shade – Lackland himself taken away from them! And how everybody would laugh when they came to know the truth! Though that was a small matter. It was no minor thing like this, but the downfall of a faith, the ruin, of a principle, the break-up of a rule in life, that really counted!

There you have the Nemesis of every false idea, every unreal belief: when once it finally collapses, as collapse it needs must before the searching light of truth, it leaves us for awhile feeble, uncertain, rudderless. So Dick felt that afternoon; so he felt for many a weary week of reconstruction afterwards.

At last they reached home.‘Twas a terrible home-coming. As they crept up the steps, poor dispossessed souls, they heard voices within – Mrs. Plantagenet’s, and Gillespie’s, and the children’s, and Mary Tudor’s.

Dick opened the door in dead silence and entered. He was pale as a ghost. Maud walked statelily behind him, scarcely able to raise her eyes to Archie Gillespie’s face, but still proud at heart as ever. Dick sank down into a chair, the very picture of misery. Maud dropped into another without doing more than just stretch out one cold hand to Archie. Mrs. Plantagenet surveyed them both with a motherly glance.