Read Online Devil Water by Anya Seton - Free Book Online

lord?”
    “She is a grandchild of King Charles, as we are,” said James. “Though a Protestant, of course. I’ve been amazed myself at meeting so many new relatives since my arrival. But ‘tis not of that I wish to speak. Sit down, Charles.”
    The boy obeyed, and his brother sat opposite him and spoke earnestly. “I’m sorry you should find me singing a French song when you came in. There’ll be no more of that, nor of harking to the melancholy past at Saint Germain. I am an Englishman, and will so live in every way. How is it in the North, Charles? How is it at Dilston, which will be my dear home -- as it was my forefathers’?”
    Charles felt the wistfulness in the questions, and he tried to answer them, though he made a lame job of it, and ran down completely when it came to describing Sir Marmaduke and Cousin Maud.
    James nodded a little and said, “I see. We’ve none of us had happy boyhoods.” He stood up and, walking again to the garden window, gazed out into the darkness. He looked back at the years in France. There had been gaiety at times, picnics and hunting parties, the companionship of other young Jacobite exiles. There had been glittering ceremonies at Versailles where Louis XIV, le roi soleil, and Madame de Maintenon shed their benevolent but patronizing rays over the rightful King of England and his sorrowing, anxious mother. Yet now as James looked back at those years he saw them all bordered in black, the black of disappointment, of humiliations, and of homesickness. Not all the exiles felt that way; certainly Francis did not. Francis had not wanted to come home. Yet wherever Francis might find a gaming table or a horse to wager on he would be as content as his sardonic nature would allow.
    To James, it seemed now that every night of those years he had dreamed of home. Of London sometimes, more often of the surrounding English countryside where he had once snared rabbits, and ridden his pony, or played by the flowering hedge rows, or collected robins’ eggs in the happy years before his father died. Lately he had dreamed much of the North which he had never seen, and yet the moors and the wild mountains up there were in his blood, as they were his inheritance.
    Last year all the exiles had thought they would be going home. King James -- so wickedly called the “Pretender” by his enemies -- had at last persuaded King Louis to give him French ships for the invasion of England. The attempt had failed miserably. There had been bungling of orders, and stupidities, and then the young King had got the measles in Dunkirk and been too ill for action. More heartsickness then, at St. Germain, more anguish for the widowed Queen, who retired as usual to her frenzied prayers at the Convent of Chaillot.
    The whispers had begun again, whispers that there was a curse on all those of Stuart blood. That moaning ghosts were seen in the shadowy couloirs of St. Germain, that Satan was heard to laugh from under the shabby gilt chair which served as “throne” to the exiled King. Superstitions these were, of course. James had refused to listen to them; yet in the sickly atmosphere of that pathetic sham court he had himself suffered forebodings, and once thought to have seen the ghost of the old deposed King James.
    These ghosts had now been left behind, James thought, staring with relief into Dr. Radcliffe’s neat new garden, where the shrubs were as yet so small they could scarcely have hidden a cat.
    James sighed and, turning, said to Charles, “I shall be grateful as long as I live to Dr. Radcliffe. It was he, you know, through his great friend, the Duke of Ormond, who prevailed upon Queen Anne to give us permission to come home.”
    “I didn’t know,” said Charles. He added tentatively after a moment, “Did the Pretender -- that is, the king-over-the-water -- mind your leaving?”
    The Earl shook his head. “No. He is content to wait until Queen Anne dies, when he will certainly be called back here to