London (153 page)

“Oh,” she said. “That’s nice.” Lucy did not know he had a family. Even twenty years ago, when he already had four daughters, Silas had never seen fit to mention the fact. If he had felt any interest in Lucy’s father or in her, that interest did not extend to allowing them even to imagine they had any claim on his own children. He had taken care never to let Lucy discover any of her other relations who might have given away his secret.

“And this house,” Lucy gestured around. “This is all yours?”

“Maybe.”

“You must be rich.”

“Some people think I am. I get by.”

It was, of course, a lie. By the time Lucy’s mother had died, Silas had already finished with the Bermondsey heap. But he had built three more in west London. Soon after that, he found he could do even better by building heaps and then selling them to others to exploit. The hugest heaps he had sold for tens of thousands of pounds. Waste, then as subsequently, was big business. By the time he retired, Silas had sold ten heaps, and was a very rich man indeed.

“So why are you here?” he said.

She explained very straightforwardly that she was going to have a baby. Why had she let it happen? There had been two men before now who had wanted to marry her. But though she had liked at least one of them, she had resisted. For they were both as poor as she: simple labourers like her father. A single accident and they could be crippled, or gone. And what then? Destitution: the same sort of life, for her children, that she and Horatio had known. She did not want that, and no better alternative had offered. So why had she allowed it to happen with her friend? Perhaps because she loved him. Perhaps because he was a clerk with a little education, the sort of man she might have hoped for. Perhaps because time was passing – she was over thirty now. And perhaps, too, because he had shown her affection.

“Your husband. What’s he do?”

She explained she had no husband.

“You mean you’ve a man who won’t marry you?”

“He’s married, Silas,” she said.

Then Silas, forgetting for a moment that he was the respectable old Guv’nor now, made a grimace of disgust and spat. “You were always a fool. So what do you want?”

“Help,” she said simply, and waited.

Silas Dogget considered. It was ten years since he moved to Blackheath, though he’d had quite a decent house down in Lambeth before that. To most people he was a rich and respectable old man. Some knew he had made his money in dust heaps, but not many. Once he had started building and selling them, he had managed to make his participation almost invisible. As for his dark years as a dredger – not a soul in Blackheath knew, nor did he intend that they should.

Of his daughters, only Charlotte could really remember the dingy lodgings in Southwark when he came home stinking from the boat. Sometimes, alone, she would shudder at the memory before pushing it from her mind. The middle girls, by the age of ten, were attending a little private school for young ladies; Mary Anne had been taught by a governess. They had still been in Lambeth when Charlotte reached a marriageable age and Silas had not really done much to bring her out into the local society because he wasn’t quite sure how to do it. But none of the girls could be said to have suffered from their lowly background. Few men trouble themselves unduly about the origins of a rich young woman’s fortune. Even with their plain looks, the eldest three Dogget girls had all found good husbands; and pretty Mary Anne had had her pick. During a twenty-year period, therefore, not only had Silas moved from rags to riches, but his entire family had evolved from the squalor of the backstreets to a middle-class respectability and a protected affluence that, in the case of the Pennys and the Bulls, might even lead to the higher reaches of society. Such transformations had always been known; but nowadays, in the vast, ever-expanding commercial world of the British Empire, they were becoming quite commonplace.

Having risen so far, the Guv’nor had no intention of being dragged down by the embarrassment of Lucy. He wished he had never troubled himself with her. At the time, she had seemed useful and he had been helping his kith and kin. But now he could see it had been a mistake. What should he do with her, though? He supposed if he gave her a small amount each month, on condition she stayed away from his family and kept her mouth shut, she would probably go quietly enough. But one thing he could not tolerate.

“Let’s hope the child dies,” he said. “But if not, you must give it up. We’ll find an orphanage or something.” To have a poor and unwanted relation was one thing; but to have a fallen woman polluting what was now the respectable Dogget family name was another. He would not have it, not even if she threatened to expose him.

“But I wanted help to bring the baby up,” she told him.

“It must go. Have you no shame?”

“No, Silas,” she said sadly. “I haven’t much now.” And then – she had not meant to but she could not help herself: “Oh, Silas, won’t you take pity on me? Let me have the child. Can’t you see? It’s all I’ll ever have.” She had lost Horatio when she was a child and never had anyone since. “It is hard for a woman to live all her life and have no one to love,” she cried softly.

Silas watched her impassively. She was an even bigger fool than he had thought. Walking over to a table in one corner where there was pen and ink, he wrote down a name and address on a piece of paper. “This is my lawyer,” he said, giving it to her. “Go to see him when you’re ready to get rid of the child. He’ll be told what to do. That’s the help you’ll get from me.”

Then he turned round, went out and locked the door behind him. Several minutes passed before the butler reappeared, took her out by the tradesmen’s entrance, gave her two shillings to get herself home, and sent her on her way.

The butler did not forget his orders that on no account was she ever to be admitted to the house again.

THE CUTTY SARK

1889

On the stage below, the colourful chorus of gondoliers was working its way, faster and faster, towards a brilliant crescendo. The audience – men in evening coats and white ties, women with frizzed hair and silk taffeta bustle dresses – were enjoying every moment. Nancy and her mother had taken a private box. While her mother sat behind, Nancy was leaning forward excitedly, her hand holding a fan, rested upon the parapet.

His hand was only an inch away from hers. She pretended not to notice. But she wondered: was it coming closer? Would they touch?

There were three levels of entertainment in late Victorian London. At the apex was the opera at Covent Garden. For the poor, there was the music hall, that wonderful mixture of song, dance and burlesque – the precursor to vaudeville – that was now spreading into theatres in even the meanest suburbs. But between these two in the last decade a new spectacle had appeared. The operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan were full of easy tunes, and charming comedy; yet Sullivan’s music was often worthy of opera and Gilbert’s lyrics, for verbal brilliance and satire, had no equal.
The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado
– every year a new production had taken London, and soon would take New York, by storm. This was the year of
The Gondoliers
. Queen Victoria had loved it.

It could not be said that there was anything very remarkable about Miss Nancy Dogget of Boston, Mass. Her complexion, certainly, was good. Her golden hair was parted in the middle and modestly drawn back in a way that was perhaps a little childish for her twenty-one years. But her china-blue eyes were truly remarkable. As for the man who was sharing the evening so attentively at her side, he seemed everything that a man could be. Warm, charming, educated; he had a fine house and a lovely old estate in Kent. At thirty he was old enough to be a man of the world, but young enough for the girls back home to envy her. And then of course, as her mother had announced when she had first discovered him: “My dear, he’s an earl!”

Not that family grandeur could be anything new to a girl from Boston. In the words of the rhyme:

This is good old Boston
Home of the bean and the cod:
Where Lowells talk only to Cabots
And Cabots talk only to God.

The old Boston families – Cabots, Hubbards, Gorhams, Lorings – not only knew exactly whom their ancestors had married but also, with a grim satisfaction, what the family had thought of them at the time. The Doggets were as old as most. They had come over with Harvard. It was rumoured they had even embarked on the
Mayflower
, “then jumped ship”, a few unkind friends would remember. Their trust funds went down into the bedrock. And if from time to time, one of the family was born with webbed fingers, it caused no great concern: not even their greatest admirers claimed that the old East Coast families were renowned for their beauty.

Mr Gorham Dogget was a true Bostonian. He had been to Harvard; he spoke out of the side of his mouth; he had married a girl from a rich old New York family. But he was also adventurous. Investing in the railroads that had opened up the great Midwestern plains, he had trebled his already solid fortune. In recent years he had also been spending time in London. Though the United States was expanding mightily, the City of London with its vast imperial trade was still the financial capital of the world. American bankers like Morgan and Peabody spent most of their careers there and raised the money for huge projects like the American railroads. His visits to London in this connection had given Gorham Dogget several ideas for further projects.

Like other Americans made richer than ever before by the new industrial age, Gorham Dogget had also discovered the pleasures of Europe. Like English aristocrats in the previous century, they made the Grand Tour: and what better place to base oneself than London? The Doggets had already spent a month in France and another in Italy, where Nancy had made many sketches and acquired a smattering of those languages. Some fine paintings had also been bought. This was now the third time that mother and daughter had stayed, enjoying London’s social life, while Mr Dogget returned briefly to Boston. But it was not only paintings and culture that could be acquired in Europe.

“Do you think St James would be a good husband?” Nancy had asked her mother. She had learned already that even their wives often referred to aristocrats by their titles in this way. “That would make me a countess.”

“You should think of the man, not his title,” her mother reminded her.

“But you do not object that he is a lord,” Nancy gently remarked, and saw her mother blush.

“I think he is a good man,” Mrs Dogget replied, “and I’m sure your father will like him.”

“He hasn’t made any declaration yet,” Nancy said a little sadly. “He may not be interested anyway.”

But as the finale of
The Gondoliers
had just reached its climax, the Earl of St James allowed his hand to brush against hers very lightly.

She would have been surprised to see him an hour later.

The first-floor parlour in the house by Regent’s Park was used by the present earl as a library and office. Unlike his forebears, he had an intellectual and artistic turn of mind. His books were well chosen; he even had a small picture collection. Sitting at a French bureau, he was gazing rather sadly at the figure opposite him.

“Well, old girl,” he sighed. “I suppose I shall have to marry Miss Dogget.” He looked up and his eye caught a delicate little picture of the Thames he had bought recently. “The only person who can save me is Barnikel.” He smiled ruefully. “Don’t you think that’s funny?” But it was always difficult to guess what Muriel thought.

The previous earl had married twice. From the first marriage, only Lady Muriel survived; from the second, the present earl who was fifteen years younger. Yet looking at the slim, handsome peer and his half-sister, it was hard to believe they were even related. Lady Muriel de Quette was so fat she could scarcely squeeze into the big leather armchair in the library. She seldom spoke. She did not ride or walk or read. But she ate continuously. At present she was consuming a large box of chocolates.

“Mind you, she’s a nice little thing.” The earl shook his head and sighed again. “We’d still have been all right, you know, if it hadn’t been for grandfather.”

Lady Muriel pushed another chocolate into her mouth.

When cautious, conservative Lord Bocton finally got his hands on his father’s money soon after the Great Reform Act, he had put most of the family fortune into agricultural land, but even the vast extravagance of his son George, the present earl’s father, would not have destroyed the family’s wealth if it had not been for the railway. When Mr Gorham Dogget invested in the railroads that opened up the American mid-west, he sealed the doom of many English gentlemen. The huge quantities of cheap grain that came from the American plains caused grain prices to tumble and with them the value of much agricultural land. When the present earl inherited, he had been forced to sell twenty thousand acres, at poor prices, to pay off his father’s debts. The big London house, and the old Bocton manor remained, but there was little income. Soon one, perhaps both of these would have to go. If Lord St James was going to find an heiress, therefore, he knew he had better do it soon. Not that he was setting out to deceive anyone about his financial condition. He was not a fraud. But a lord who was still clinging on to a fine London house and an ancestral estate looked a lot more eligible, and dignified, than a lord – even an earl – who had neither.

Getting up and reaching into his waistcoat pocket for his keys, Lord St James moved over to a closet door, which he unlocked. Inside the closet was a small safe which he carefully opened, drawing out several leather boxes. While his sister watched impassively, he brought these over to the bureau and laid them out, lovingly lifting the lids to reveal the sparkling contents. “We’ve still got these, old girl,” he said.

The St James family jewels were extremely fine. The ruby necklace in particular was noteworthy and it was widely known that whoever became the Countess of St James would get to wear it. For the earl, however, they were also a lifeline. Though he liked women and had enjoyed two long affairs, he liked his freedom and only felt compelled to marry from a sense of family duty. Without an heir, the earldom of St James would become extinct. Yet if he failed in his quest, the sale of Bocton and the jewellery would still, he calculated, provide him with enough income to live as the private cultivated gentleman which, in truth, he would rather have been. “I’d always look after you, old girl, of course,” he would promise Lady Muriel on these occasions. There was no chance, he knew, of her getting married.