1882: a Blandy butler
Private papers
(Note to self: must remember to post that letter to His Grace—er, the former Duke, now reduced to these colonial climes—but where did I put the stamps? Ah, well, later.)
Oh, dash it all, as a Blandy myself—yes, the Blandys, you know, of Henley extraction, though one doesn’t trumpet it here among these sunburnt shopkeepers—I’ve been pondering, in my superior way, this tiresome old tale of Cousin Mary, or whatever relation she was, hanged for poisoning poor old Francis back in ’52. The moralists, those dreary parsons and penny-a-liners, would have it as a cautionary fablette—dutiful daughter seduced by some Scots fortune-hunter, Cranstoun or whatever his name was, into tipping arsenic into Papa’s gruel. Ghastly business, quite the rage in the broadsheets, “The Henley Poisoning” and all that rot. But I say, I say—I, who served the Duke for nigh on forty years, polishing silver and overhearing real secrets in the withdrawing rooms—closer inspection reveals Mary wasn’t the villainess at all, no indeed! Or was she? One forgets; the memory plays tricks after all these years Down Under, playing “uncle” to these lesser Mallards, bless their woolly hearts.
No, no, it was Francis himself, that provincial solicitor-chap—Blandy senior, mark you—who cooked his own goose, so to speak, with his puffed-up fibs about a £10,000 estate for little Mary. Common enough among attorneys in those days, peculation and sharp practice, bien sûr, but oh, how it ballooned! Attracted the eye of no less than William Henry, Prince of Wales—yes, royalty! Some whispers (which I’ve heard from unimpeachable sources, naturally) suggest the Prince thought of Mary for one of his household retainers, which explains why Francis couldn’t possibly recant his tall tale without admitting he’d gulled the Crown. Fatal silence, that—led straight to Cranstoun’s pursuit, the desperate younger son with debts up to his sporran, assuming the fortune real. Francis bleats too late against the match; can’t confess poverty without disgrace, can’t approve without beggaring the girl. Tangled web, what? Though I suppose Mary did stir the powder in, poor lovesick fool—didn’t she? One loses track; these colonial skies muddle the brain.
When Francis sickened—1751, wasn’t it?—the coroner and the mob pounced on Mary like terriers on a rat: woman in the kitchen, witchery with powders, mad love for the Scot. Easy mark! But the deeper truth—and mind you, as a Blandy, I’m privy to depths others can’t fathom—is Francis poisoned himself with his own whopping lie. Swallowed whole, couldn’t digest it, eh? Noteworthy, too, how our line fizzled after: no male heir, no cousins piping up—extinguished by design, some say, to hush further prying into Francis’s princely letters (in a ledger, since burned—I saw the ashes, or heard of them, at any rate). “The Blandy Inheritance”, more like: silence, shame, erasure! Though really, was there a Prince at all? Memory’s a fickle jade; perhaps I’ve conflated it with that tea-party at the Castle. No matter—servants like me knew the real story, bowing and scraping while the gentry blundered.
Still, one muses intellectually—superiorly, if I may say—on the irony: Mary swings, family vanishes, yet here I am, remnant of the line, lording it as “Uncle” over Sydney’s second-raters. The Duke would approve, I fancy—or disapprove? Dash it, where’s my pipe? Mustn’t let these thoughts scatter; they’re gold for a tale, if only I could recall the sequence properly.
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