London (131 page)

“Do so many babies die?” the countess had asked. She knew vaguely that they did, but had never troubled her mind about the matter before.

“Why indeed, my lady,” the girl had replied. “Scores every day, in London.” Even the rich were at risk: any fever could carry off an infant. As for the poor in their crowded, insanitary tenements, hardly one newborn baby in three lived to the age of six. Abandoned babies, dead or dying, were a sadly common sight. This information, together with certain other enquiries she had made, gave Lady St James the basis for her plan.

All she had needed, next, was an accomplice. That had not been difficult to find. The shabby, green-eyed woman she had finally selected in a dark corner of Covent Garden had no idea who the strange lady wrapped in a cloak might be, but the payment of five pounds, together with the promise of another ten when the business was completed, had been more than enough to secure her cooperation, with no questions asked.

The servants at Hanover Square had been astonished when suddenly, two days after his lordship had gone, her ladyship had suddenly become anxious.

The child was sick, she announced. The wet-nurse was at fault. The girl was dismissed. Goat’s milk must be found. “None may come near the child,” my ladyship insisted, “but myself.” Nobody had ever seen her like this. They offered to call the nurse, the doctor. She seemed to consider it, but decided: “I trust no one.” Then, one terrible dawn, there was a scream. Her ladyship, distracted, rushed downstairs, carrying the baby, wrapped in a shawl. She gave orders: the fast post-chaise must be ready within the hour. She was going to Bocton. To Bocton, if you please, which she never liked, and at this hour of the morning! She would take no one with her but the coachman and a groom.

“Country air,” she cried. “The baby needs air. Give him country air,” she insisted, “and he will be well.” Then she rushed out into the square with the baby – who would dare stop her? – and disappeared for nearly an hour.

What a mad drive that was. Clattering over London Bridge, through Southwark, out on the old Kent road that leads up to high bare Blackheath and the long drag of Shooter’s Hill; the groom riding postilion, half-terrified of highwaymen; hour after hour they went, only stopping to change horses at Dartford and later at Rochester. How her ladyship drove them on, would not even leave the carriage when the horses were changed but told them to bring her a chamber pot. It was dusk already, that March day, when they came at last to the ridge and the wooded park of Bocton, where the astonished housekeeper had to hurry to make up the chamber to which her ladyship, holding the child close to her, immediately retired.

And it was a most astonished doctor from Rochester, summoned the next morning, who announced:

“This child has been dead a whole day at least.”

But Lady St James, it seemed, was far gone by then, insisting distractedly that, now it had country air, the baby would be well, and the doctor had wisely taken the little corpse away with him.

Ten days later, when Lord St James returned from the north, it was to find that his heir was safely buried in the little churchyard by the deer park at Bocton and that his wife was practically out of her mind with grief – so much so that for a time he had feared she might go mad.

This was the dark memory that assailed her ladyship as she sat alone in her chamber at Hanover Square, nearly eight years later, with her hair so perfectly coiffed.

For her real child, whom she had exchanged for the dead one during her early morning disappearance, she felt nothing. When the woman from Covent Garden had asked her what to do with it, she had hissed: “Do what you like. So long as I never see it again.” Nor had she. I did not kill the child, she told herself. She just hoped that it was dead.

But that was long ago. And hush, her ladiesmaid has entered the room, to help her ladyship into that gorgeous dress, so that she can go out.

Isaac Fleming could afford to be happy. His account to Lady St James was for no less than thirty pounds; since the huge order of cakes he had sent her had been, he knew, of the finest quality, he hoped that it would lead to a profitable business. Like many who have not had the good fortune to serve a truly fashionable clientele, Isaac Fleming was under the impression that the aristocracy always paid their bills.

“Perhaps,” he told his family, “she will recommend us to her friends.”

Isaac Fleming’s present ambitions were not large, but they were precise. He wanted a bow-fronted shop.

In his grandfather’s day, when the family was still in haberdashery, such things did not exist. After the fire, terraced, brick-built shops had begun to replace the wooden stalls of old London, but they were mostly quite simple affairs – a plain counter, the goods on racks, a sanded wood floor. More recently things had begun to change.

As a boy, Isaac would often walk out of Ludgate along Fleet Street to where, just after the ancient church of St Clement Danes, it widened into the broader carriageway that passed the old Savoy and was known as the Strand. He liked the Strand: it was a fashionable sort of place containing such delights as the Grecian Coffee House, the New Church Chop House and other haunts where lawyers and gentlemen gathered. What really took his fancy though, was a single, narrow shop into which he ventured every time he passed: Twining’s Tea Shop. It sold only tea, but how beautifully, how elegantly it did so. Great painted jars were set in the window; inside, the barrels were all ornately labelled; on the counter, as well as weights and measures were several beautifully inlaid tea-caddies. It wasn’t just a shop, it was a work of art.

“I want a shop like that, when I grow up,” he would tell his father.

Since, a few years later, he had begged to be apprenticed to a humble baker, it had seemed to Isaac’s father that he was unlikely to have need for such an elegant shop, but he had reckoned without the boy’s initiative. Within a year of setting up his own little establishment beside the Old Cheshire Cheese tavern in Fleet Street, young Isaac had taken to making cakes. He did it very well. Within a few years the takings from the cakes were more than half those from the daily bread. “Your only mistake,” his father warned him, “is that you put so much into the cakes that they’re hardly profitable.”

“I need to make a name first,” Isaac replied. “Then I can raise my prices.” One day, he hoped, he’d be able to move along the street that crucial quarter-mile that would take him next to Twining’s in the Strand. “That’s where I’ll get customers,” he would say, “like Lady St James.”

Secretly he had an even greater hope. It was a dream really – though before my son takes over from me, he promised himself, I will do it. He would dispense with the bread altogether and make nothing but cakes. And he would move to Piccadilly.

Piccadilly was fashion itself. The name, originally, had been a joke, because the merchant who had bought up the land had made his fortune supplying ‘picadils’ – ruff collars – to the Elizabethan and Stuart court. But it was no joke now. Lying between the court of St James and Pall Mall to the south, and the fine new developments like Grosvenor and Hanover Square to the north, Piccadilly could not fail to be a place for the best society. And it was there, just by the little market at St James church, that there stood a shop so splendid, so utterly magnificent, so entirely surpassing anything else in London, that before it Isaac Fleming could only bow the head. If Twining’s Tea Shop was his model, this was his inspiration; if Twining’s was a church, then this was the Holy City itself, beyond mere human aspiration.

Fortnum and Mason. The two friends had set up the shop in 1707 when Fortnum, a footman in the royal household, had retired from service. It was astonishing what you could buy there: all manner of groceries, strange delicacies – Harts Horn, curious pieces, exotic candies – imported through the East India Company. But most amazing of all were the store fittings: magnificently dressed windows, brilliant lights, tables arranged as if one had entered a fashionable drawing-room in an aristocratic town house. It must, Isaac knew, have cost a fortune. The scale of the thing was quite beyond his reach. But one day he would dwell within sight of it and his own more modest window of cakes would be seen by the same illustrious folk who visited Fortnum’s. It was a dream; but it might, just, be attainable.

The first step towards this distant goal was the improvement of his present shop; and the way to do that, without a doubt, was to alter the façade. First, he had to change his sign. For although most ordinary shops still had the old, hanging sign outside their doors, just as in medieval times, the smart new purveyors of goods were writing their names on neat boards over the windows, sometimes even in gold. And secondly, he needed a bow window.

The bow window was a very intelligent idea for a retailer. Not only did it look elegant; not only, by coming discreetly forward into the street did it seem to offer itself to the passerby, in a friendly sort of way, inviting him to pause and come in; but in the simplest and most practical terms, its extra footage allowed the shopkeeper to increase the size of the window display substantially. “You see it well before you reach it, too,” Isaac would point out. “So you also see it longer.” That very day, therefore, he had finally taken the decision. The modest bakery shop in Fleet Street was to have a fine new bow-front put in. No expense spared.

“Can we afford it?” his wife asked a little nervously.

“Oh I think so,” he answered cheerfully, his narrow, concave face positively glowing at the prospect. “Remember. I’ve thirty pounds due, from the Countess of St James.”

Piccadilly was not only home to London’s finest shop. At five o’clock that afternoon, a litter carried by two runners, and containing the elegant person of Lady St James, joined a hundred others and numerous emblazoned carriages as it passed through the gateway and into the colonnaded courtyard of a huge, stone Palladian mansion which stood back, in proud, Roman seclusion, from the northern side of the street across from Fortnum’s. This was Burlington House.

The fashionable squares of the West End contained some very large houses, but there were still some aristocrats, mostly dukes, who were so massively rich that they could afford small palaces of their own. One of these was Lord Burlington. And though the Burlingtons, for many years, had preferred their other, exquisite Italian villa out at the western village of Chiswick, the huge Piccadilly house was still used from time to time for social gatherings.

Everyone, of course, was there. Nobles, politicians and, this being Burlington House, home of aristocratic patronage, a sprinkling of men from the world of arts and letters: Fielding, whose novel
Tom Jones
had given such amusement last year, was there with his blind half-brother John, both good company; Joshua Reynolds the painter; even Garrick, the actor. It was the rule with great assemblies to pack as many people of note into one place as possible – and Burlington House could probably have accommodated five thousand and still had room for a spare hundred or two by the staircase. Lady St James moved elegantly from group to group, saying a few words here and there, making sure that she was seen. But all the time, her eyes were secretly looking only for him. He had said he would be there.

He was.

When Lady St James came close to Captain Jack Meredith, before their affair had started, she used to find that she blushed like a child. It had been disconcerting. Or finding herself in a group of people, of whom he was one, all her elegance – which she had worn for so long now that it belonged to her as much as her arms and legs – would suddenly drop from her like an unfastened dress; and she would stand there, as awkward as some gawky girl, wondering if anyone had noticed.

Nowadays, as she approached him, it was different.

It was, first, a fluttering of the heart; then a tiny trembling which even the perfect arrangement of her dress and her tightly drawn coiffure could not quite disguise. Then a tingling warmth. It began in her breasts whose tops were so deliciously exposed, it gathered together somewhere in the centre of her body and then, in a great, hot river, rushed downwards bringing so great a burst of life to her whole being that it was almost terrible.

His embroidered coat was the colour of burgundy; she knew at once, before he looked at her, that it would suit his brown eyes. He was, momentarily, standing alone, his tall, lean form turned towards one of the great windows in the huge room. Aware of her presence as she drew close, he was careful not to face her at once, and as he half turned his head and smiled, as he might at any other woman, she noticed the handsome, manly line that creased his cheek. A fleck of powder from his wig had fallen on his cuff.

They stood, a little apart, aware only of each other’s presence; they spoke quietly, so as not to attract attention.

“You will come?”

“At eight. You are sure he will not be there?”

“Certain. He is at the House of Lords now. Then he goes out to supper and cards.” She sighed. “He never changes.”

“Plays for damnably low stakes as well,” Meredith remarked. “I’ve never got more than five pounds off him at the club.”

“At eight then?”

“Of course.”

She made him a little nod of her head and moved on as though she had hardly deigned to notice him. But her heart was secretly dancing.

It was oysters for supper over at Seven Dials. Harry Dogget surveyed the gaggle of children before him. They all looked like street urchins, which they were. The two seven-year-old boys, Sam and Sep, were both barefoot and smoking long pipes; but it was common enough for children to smoke in Georgian London.

“Oysters? Again?”

The children nodded and somewhat nervously indicated the stairs. Dogget cast up his eyes. They all knew what this meant. As if in answer, there was a muffled bang from the room above; and then the floorboards announced, with several irregular but apparently heartfelt creaks, the imminent arrival of Mrs Dogget or, as Harry appropriately called her, “my Trouble and Strife”.

Harry Dogget sighed. But still, he thought, things might have been a lot worse. At least the children were shaping up well, even if, truth be told, he couldn’t be sure exactly how many of them there were. One thing though, he reassured himself, as a thud announced that Mrs Dogget was about to attempt the stairs: