The Speckled Monster Read Online Free Page A

Wiltshire downs. For her health, she was trotted out from the rambling Jacobean manor house of West Dean and up into the downs to take the air in demure and ladylike fashion. Up there, though, she ignored the rules of the polite world that lurked in her grandmother’s house below. To the end of her days, she remembered racing as fast as her small legs would carry her, straining to reach the great golden bauble of the sun and pluck it from the sky before it set in the west.
    Mary Pierrepont had been christened in London, in St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, in May 1689, just one month after the coronation of William and Mary in Westminster. The infant was named in honor of her mother, who bore the same first and last names. Her first name was also a nod to the new queen, whose rise to power the baby’s family had backed.
    The honorific “Lady” was fastened to her first name before she reached the age of two, when her father, Evelyn Pierrepont, succeeded not one but two childless older brothers dying young, to become the fifth earl of Kingston; his vast estates amounted to his own petty kingdom.
    When Lady Mary was three and a half, her exhausted mother died from complications following the birth of her fourth child within three years and eight months. Along with her two younger sisters, Lady Evelyn and Lady Frances, and her new baby brother, William, Viscount Newark, Lady Mary was bundled into the country, into the cold care of their father’s mother.
    Only a few memories flared up from the dim years between the death of Lady Mary’s mother and that of her forbidding grandmother, when she was nine. Of her quest to catch the setting sun, she later wrote: “A fine thing truly, if it could be caught,” adding with an adult sigh, “but experience soon shows it to be impossible.” Her childhood self admitted no such defeat. When the sun lay out of reach, she chased the distant lumbering spire of Salisbury Cathedral, though the faster she moved, the faster it, too, ran away from her. Let other children play with shells and smooth stones, baby dolls and hobbyhorses: Lady Mary was born with a stubborn yearning for seemingly impossible glory.
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    Several years later, to the hollow clop of horse hooves, the grind and spatter of coach wheels bouncing from pavement to muck, and the shouts of coachmen yelling for passersby to give way, a crowd of young men drifted like a bright perfumed flurry of confetti into a small tavern under the sign of the Cat and Fiddle. It stood in Sheer Lane off the Strand, just north and west of the Temple Bar, the stone gateway that once marked the western boundary of the single square mile that was the ancient City of London proper.
    The flashier men amid this crowd wore knee-length coats, breeches, and waistcoats (or vests) of jewel-colored velvet trimmed with gold buttons, silver lace, and fur. Long and luxuriously curled wigs framed their faces, while high, boxy heels displayed ankles and calves wrapped in silk hose. Battles had long since been won with gunpowder, but they still wore swords, and most of them still knew how to use them. They were followed about by as many bowing servants as they could afford; for a few, this amounted to a small private army.
    To suppose these men nothing more than an impotent flock of over-bred, empty-headed peacocks, however, would be a serious mistake. They were ferociously talented and even more ferociously ambitious. One day soon, they would run Britain; already, they could be dangerous. They could also be charming and extraordinarily witty.
    The proprietor of the place, Mr. Christopher Cat, was pouring wine and passing platters heaped with the savory mutton pies, flavored with thyme, nutmeg, and onion, succulent with butter and currants, that made his establishment famous. This excellent man had long since christened his even more excellent pies with his nickname, Kit Cat. Now, the name of both man and meat pie was