Blood's Game by Angus Donald

Author:Angus Donald [Donald, Angus]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction
Published: 2017-10-04T23:00:00+00:00

Wednesday 3 May, 1671

Robert Westbury looked down the length of the long table in the servants’ hall and noted the tall figure of Holcroft Blood sitting at the far end, placidly eating a bowl of soup. Perhaps surprisingly, their paths had rarely crossed in the past six months: Holcroft no longer slept in the pages’ dormitory, he was quartered with the other clerks in a suite of rooms on the far side of the courtyard and he usually ate in the clerks’ hall or alone in the kitchens. Today, it being Albert St John’s birthday, Holcroft had condescended to join them in the servants’ hall at Albert’s request to partake of their meagre feast. Westbury may not have spoken to Holcroft more than once or twice but he had seen the boy many times around the Cockpit and about the palace and he was hardly unaware of his activities.

As he watched the tall boy in the black coat sucking up soup from his spoon like a starving peasant, he was a little shocked by how strong his hatred was for the confidential clerk: his cuts and bruises from the fight outside the gate had healed long ago and he had suffered no discernible loss in status in the household as a result of the fracas. But the very sight of Holcroft set his teeth on edge. The awkward clod had no social graces whatsoever; his family, so far as Westbury could gather, were a set of penniless rogues and ne’er-do-wells. He seemed to care nothing for any other living human being except that pretty-boy soldier Churchill and yet the duke treated him as if he were the son of God himself, making him privy to all his papers, allowing him to speak up at meetings with his superiors.

Westbury had been in the duke’s service more than three years now and he had never been shown the marks of favour that Holcroft had been given from the very first day. Westbury ran the pages’ dormitory efficiently, keeping order among the boys, making sure they did not disturb the household with their high spirits and that there was always one of them at least to attend to the duke’s needs day or night. And his reward was to be ignored, passed over, treated like a mere child. He would be sixteen this year – a grown man – and he had nothing to show for his three years of fetching and carrying. He had not received any significant gratuities or gifts of any kind; he had not been appointed to any remunerative post within the workings of White Hall. The post of assistant cellerer to the King had been vacant for some months, was within the gift of the duke and, despite the many broad hints dropped by Westbury in Buckingham’s presence about his knowledge of fine wines, garnered at his father the Earl of Westbury’s lavish board, the post had gone to the son of a tavern-keeper who had obliged the duke in his youth in some obscure way during the civil wars of the last generation.

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