The System of the World

Billingsgate Dock
A BIT LATER

“IT IS A WONDER,” exclaimed Johann von Hacklheber, wrapping an arm tight round Caroline’s waist, and lifting her off the brink of the wharf, “how many people will do favors for one who is expected to be the next Queen of England.” He was ankle-deep in Thames-water on Billingsgate Stair; severed fish-heads nuzzled his boot and ogled Caroline’s bum as he toddled round and got in position to set her into the waiting longboat. She had her arm round his neck very tight, as if meaning to shut him up by stuffing one of her breasts into his mouth. He did not complain, but only gripped her buttock that much tighter through her breeches. All of these mutual gropings could be excused on grounds that the Princess must not be allowed to fall into the cold stew of fish-innards that was Billingsgate Dock. It was a chancy maneuver; the night was dark and the steps slick. Johann thought he was being decorous enough. But the thirty or so men who had brought Caroline here, in a royal progress of coaches, sedan-chairs, and out-riders, were having none of it. They were all drunk as lords. As a matter of fact, to judge by the escutcheons gilded onto their carriage-doors, most of them were lords. There was no aspect of the scene on the stairs that was not suggestive, to them, of something.

“I smell fish!” one of them shouted. And there were a hundred other remarks, most of them a good deal more direct and to the point.

“Gentlemen!” Johann shouted, once Caroline was in the longboat, and her tit was out of his gob. “We are at Billingsgate, it is true; but this does not mean you must try to out-do the fishwives in execration. They are not here now. Return in the day-time and woo them then.”

“I say, who are these fishwives?” exclaimed someone, so intoxicated that his tongue was swishing around in his mouth like a mop in a bucket. “He makes them sound like very merry wenches indeed.” He snorted a great draught of that bracing fish-market atmosphere into his nostrils. “And I do fancy their perfume.”

Johann was getting it from both directions now. “You are too cynical, love,” said Caroline from the longboat, “and now you see I am pouting like a great big fish. They are gallant, nothing more. They do not even believe I am a Princess! They think I am a whore who came for Dr. Waterhouse.”

“They know perfectly well who you are,” said Johann. He offered a bow, sarcastically obsequious, to the men of the Kit-Cat Clubb, who stood above them at the top of the stairs, all spread out in a tableau, but difficult to make out in the dark-like a group portrait of themselves gone almost black from tobacco-smoke.

The bow was returned many-fold, but Johann saw none of it, as he had turned to vault over the gunwale into the longboat. Caroline was waving to them-somehow even that made them think of indecent things and spew libidinous ravings up and down the dock.

“We truly are safe from exposure now,” Johann muttered. “For those men, when they are sober, shall be ashamed to relate this story, and no one would believe it if they did.”

The longboat was unnecessarily large for its present mission, viz. to ferry a Baron and a Princess to a ship in the Pool. It had five oars on a side, and ten stout sailors to swing them. As such it could quickly out-distance a waterman’s boat, or most other craft that might try to pursue them. Johann and Caroline sat up in the bow to stay clear of the rowers.

“I am glad you had the wit to come here directly,” Johann said.

“Not so directly, for I was made to be the object of several toasts in the Kit-Cat Clubb,” she said.

Indeed, the toasting was not over yet. Enough time had elapsed, since it had become evident that she was going to depart by water, for the following to have been improvised by one of the crowd of domesticated poets who went round with Kit-Cats.

Off the sea came Aphrodite,

To the Greeks whose lust was mighty.

Soft of wit and firm of P-,

Romans worshipped foam-borne Venus.

’Pon the River dark as wine,

Rides Britons’ love-queen, Caroline.

“That is lovely,” Johann said. “It appears that Dr. Waterhouse shall have some explaining to do, at his Clubb.”

“As shall I,” Caroline said, “to my husband.”

From Billingsgate a lone wag was chanting

May her Womb

Be Popery’s Tomb

But pray the German

Keeps his sperm in.

He was immediately shouted down by indignant, even scandalized Kit-Cats. Really! Some chaps knew no bounds! Someone drew a sword halfway, and made a great show of having to be restrained, all the while glancing river-wards to be sure his gallantry was being noted by Caroline. But the longboat had been swallowed by shadow, from their point of view. The sword-fight fizzled. The Kit-Cat Caravan began to mount up: and so the last they saw of the Clubb were scintillations of cut-crystal stirrup-cups and of the silver trays on which they were brought around, faint as gleaming of fish-scales on the black waters that lapped at Billingsgate Stairs.

“I pray that we are vanishing from their ken as much as they from ours,” Johann said. “We are going downriver some miles to make rendezvous with a sloop that rides at anchor before Greenwich. If we board the sloop quickly and get underway without delay, perhaps no one shall know that your royal highness is aboard.”

“It is all a great farce,” was Princess Caroline’s verdict. In the darkness she could not see Johann collapsing, but she could see the air coming out of him. “I am sorry,” she said.

“On the contrary. La belle dame sans merci is a role that becomes you-’twill serve you well when you are Queen, and Greenwich is one of your country houses.”

“I am being without mercy to myself,” Caroline said, “not just to you. It was stupid for me to have come to England.”

“On the contrary-you were not safe, in Hanover, from that assassin.”

“That assassin, who followed me to London without the least difficulty,” Caroline said, “and might be preying on Eliza at this very moment.”

“She is my mother, you do not need to remind me,” Johann said. “But she knew you as a little child. When has she ever held back from letting you know her mind? If she felt, or if I did, that your being in London was unwise, we would have said so.”

“But I am entitled to form my own views. I say that I stayed too long.”

“Naturally it will seem so, when we are departing in such haste-it would be better if you had left a week ago, in leisurely fashion. But we could not have anticipated any of this then.”

“How long has it been since Sophie’s funeral? Six weeks. By the time we are back in Hanover, make it seven or eight weeks.”

“That is not such a terribly long time for a grief-stricken Princess to be absent from Court.”

“From Court and from Husband.”

“Husband has other ways of sating himself.”

“I wonder about that,” said. “After what happened that night, can he have kept Henrietta Braithwaite as maitresse-en-titre? Or will he have sent her packing, and acquired a new one? Or-?”

“Or what?”

“Or will he be looking forward to the return of his long-absent wife? His letters, lately, have been more interesting.”

“More interesting than what? Or than who? Stay, you need not answer, we have gone into a place where angels fear to tread.”

“It is a place where you went, knowingly and willingly, when you wooed a married Princess.”

Johann was silent.

“There, you see? Now again I am la belle dame sans merci. I hope you fancy her.”

“That I do,” Johann said, “stupid plodding knight-errant that I am.”

“Brave magnificent shining knight,” Caroline said, “who needs to keep his visor closed, when he is whingeing.”

That was the end of conversation for a while. The row down the Thames was long. Caroline struggled against drowsiness, and fought the urge to nestle up against Johann. Some of the time, negotiating the crowded Pool was a bit like running through a forest in the dark. At other times, watchmen on anchored ships mistook them for mudlarks, and shone lanterns at them, and aimed threats and blunderbusses their way. But as they rounded the bend before Rotherhithe and swept down along the Isle of Dogs, the ships became fewer and larger. Though the oarsmen were tired, the boat picked up speed, as it could now run down the current on a straighter course. Now that they had broken free from the noise and clutter of the city, they perceived small matters that before would have been lost among other impressions: bonfires being kindled upon hilltops, and riders galloping down the streets that flanked the river to right and left. It was impossible not to phant’sy that the fires and the riders alike bore strange information out of the city, into the country and down the river to the sea. Signal-fires on Channel cliffs might even speed news to the Continent this night. But what the news consisted of, and whether it be true or false, could not be known to the refugees on the longboat.

The transfer to the sloop went quickly, as Johann had hoped. The anchor was taken up and sails raised to catch what feeble breeze there was. Thus began a strange night-journey down the river, which to Caroline was a continuation of the longboat-passage, with everything spread out on a larger field: for queues of bonfires continued to grow across the countryside, radiating outwards from the city, and not a minute went by that her ears did not collect the faint report of galloping hooves on the post-road. In the end she only lulled herself to sleep by telling herself that this sloop, gliding silently down the dark river bearing a mysterious passenger, must be as sinister and disturbing to the riders on those horses, and the watchers on the hilltops, as they were to her; and perhaps with good reason, since (as she still had to remind herself) she intended to rule the country some day.