“Won’t that make everyone take up arms against him?”
“They would be massacred in France.”
“They’ll think they’re going to be massacred here, if he calls in the army.”
“When an heir is born, they will submit,” she said stubbornly.
He spread his hands. “Maybe. Or maybe it will be the last straw.”
She was not in the least afraid. “We’ll have to go to St. James’s Palace. They can bar the gates there, and we can defend her and the baby prince. But anyway, we’re going to tea.”
HAYCROFT AND JOHNSON GOLDSMITHS, LONDON, SPRING 1688
Alderman Jeremiah Johnson was a big man, dressed in a jacket of double-breasted dark navy wool with pairs of ostentatious gold buttons straining across his chest. He sat in a grand chair behind a broad desk covered with papers, freighted with silver pieces of equipment: a heavy paperknife, a set of goldsmith’s scales as if he were taking in coin at his desk, a silver tinderbox and sealing wax, his own silver seal, a large silver tray for his letters, a substantial silver box for deeds.
“Now then, Doctor?” Jeremiah Johnson said with pleasure. “Not often you find the time to visit me in the City. Did you get here without trouble? I have my lads on the front and back doors and even a few keeping watch in the streets. We close early every day now.”
“I came by the backways. Half of London is boarded up.”
“It’ll go on like this until she gives birth,” the Alderman predicted. “But the Lord Mayor himself said to me: soon as a boy is born and we put a roasted ox and free ale in every borough, they’ll all be royalists again.”
“I suppose so,” Rob said. “I came about a grave matter in my own family.”
“Aye, Julia sent me a message, that you weren’t best pleased.”
“It’s not a question of my pleasure, sir.”
“She says that you like the lad?”
“It’s not that. You remember that when I asked for Julia’s hand in marriage I told you that I had been married… that is, I had gone through a ceremony… you remember?”
The Alderman steepled his fingers over his broad belly and regarded Rob as he might look at an unreliable debtor. “I remember you told me that you had gone through a form of marriage with a strange woman overseas, in Venice, in the English church in Venice, when she was neither English nor Protestant, and there were no family witnesses.”
“You remember very well, then.”
“And she abandoned you on your wrongful arrest, came to England, stayed with your mother and sister under the pretext of being your wife, converted to the Church of England, and had the good fortune to marry a gentleman of an old and highly regarded family.”
Again, Rob nodded in silence.
“Who accepted her?”
“Yes.”
“As your agreement with her was no marriage.”
“Yes.”
“He remembered her in his will? And named her as his widow?”
“Yes.”
“So what is your difficulty, with Hester’s marriage, into that very same, highly regarded family?”
“Matthew is the stepson of Sir James Avery, not his son.”
“His stepfather acknowledged him with a considerable legacy.”
Rob leaned towards the desk, rested his hands on the deeply polished surface. “Alderman Johnson, even if Matthew had been adopted by the Averys, we could not allow Hester to marry him, we have no idea who his father is…”