London (154 page)

Having completed his inspection, he locked the jewels up in the safe and turned to his sister again. “It’s curious, isn’t it?” he remarked. “If Nancy Dogget were English, she probably wouldn’t be an heiress at all.” Though Gorham Dogget had a son as well as a daughter, he had always made it clear they would share his fortune equally; but among the old families of England such an arrangement remained almost unknown. Great estates went to the eldest son; married daughters often got nothing, unmarried daughters were usually supported during their lifetime by family trusts or expected to live at home. Lady Muriel herself had only what her half-brother chose to give her. “So,” the earl came back to his theme, “I’ll have to keep her warm until the new year, and then – it’ll depend on Barnikel.”

The reason the earl was not hurrying his courtship of Nancy lay some ten thousand miles away on the high seas: and her name was the
Charlotte Rose
.

The tea run of the sailing ships from China was over. It was the opening of the Suez Canal twenty years ago, and the consequent short cut to the Far East through the Mediterranean, that had finished it. The steamships with their huge cargoes, plodding along regardless of wind, could beat the sailing vessels on that route now. But the glorious days of the clippers were not yet past, for they now carried wool from Australia. The finest fleece, loaded at Sydney in Australia’s spring – which was autumn in the northern hemisphere – was raced back to London for the January wool sales. Blown by the roaring forties the sailing clippers drove eastwards across the dangerous Antarctic waters of the southern Pacific, rounded South America’s Cape Horn, and picked up the trade winds to fly up the Atlantic. On this run no steamship could catch them. A year before he died, the last earl had invested in a quarter share of a new clipper, even swifter than the
Charlotte
, which Barnikel had christened the
Charlotte Rose
. And on this the old sea captain, who should have retired years ago, was making brilliant runs each year: his average time from Australia in the last three years had been eighty days. In addition to the commercial profits of the voyage, there was the betting. Each of the finest clippers had its particular characteristics, each captain his own strengths and weaknesses. People could study the form. Huge wagers were made. And few larger or more daring than the wager placed some months ago by the financially embarrassed Earl of St James.

It was perfectly logical. The odds he had got were excellent: seven-to-one. The amount he had bet was one year’s income. If he lost, it would not make a great difference: unless he married, he’d be forced to sell up anyway. If he won, on the other hand, he’d have another five years of living in style before facing a crisis again – and who knew what might turn up during that time? In six weeks from now, if the
Charlotte Rose
got back from Australia first, Lord St James would have no further need to marry Nancy Dogget. His intention therefore – since he had no wish to hurt her – was to keep her interested without committing himself too far, so that he could either advance quickly or retire with grace when the time came.

“The
Charlotte Rose
has had a refit. There’s only one vessel afloat that could beat her, and if he spreads all his canvas, Barnikel’s sure he can outrun her too,” he assured his sister. “So there it is, old girl.” He grinned. “We’ve just got to beat the
Cutty Sark
!”

There had been times lately when Mary Anne had wondered whether she and her daughter Violet could remain in the same house. Neither her three sons, nor Violet’s two sisters had given her such trouble. But it was the effect Violet was having on her father’s temper that was worst of all.

“You’re like your father,” she complained to the girl. “There’s never any compromise with you. Everything’s always either black or white!” According to Bull, however, the trouble was that Violet was too like her mother. A rebel. “But I was never unreasonable,” Mary Anne would retort.

Violet had always been irritating. Mary Anne remembered the time when she had found her as a little girl trying on her clothes. The child had been soundly smacked for that, of course. A few years ago when Violet was sixteen, Mary Anne had noticed that she was getting really too close to her father. She would fuss over him, bring him his pipe, try to go about with him. Bull seemed rather to enjoy this, but Mary Anne had taken her daughter to one side and told her firmly: “I am his wife; you are his daughter and just a child. Please behave accordingly.”

But the real trouble lay with her education. Like most girls of her class, she had a governess – a scholarly woman who told them Violet was gifted and who had taken her far beyond the standard required. “You should have seen what she was up to and put a stop to it,” Bull had complained bitterly to Mary Anne when he dismissed the poor governess that autumn. It was certainly the governess’s fault that the girl had got the foolish idea that she should go to university.

The idea, of course, was preposterous. Until forty years ago the possibility did not even exist. Though there were small women’s colleges attached to Oxford and Cambridge, only a handful of women attended them and they were still not accepted as full members of the university. Thinking the girl could not really be serious her mother had remarked: “Your father would never allow you to live away like that, unchaperoned.” But Violet had immediately objected: “I could stay at home and go to university in London.”

As her mother soon discovered, she was right. The University of London was a curious affair. Started just before Queen Victoria came to the throne, as a place where religious dissenters, still denied access to Oxford and Cambridge, could study, it was a progressive institution. Its buildings were scattered; there was no requirement that students live in university colleges; and for several decades now, it had allowed women to take degrees. But what sort of woman would do such a thing? Mary Anne had no idea. Her eldest son Richard had been to Oxford. He had gone up as a gentleman of course and had told her proudly that he had never read a book while he was there. When she asked him about the women undergraduates he had only said: “Bluestockings, mother. We avoided them.” And he had pulled a face. Others she asked were just as discouraging. Besides, what would Violet do with all this knowledge? Become a teacher, or a governess? This was not at all the thing the Bulls had in mind.

Edward Bull had done even better than he had hoped. His greatest stroke of luck had come in the fifties when Britain fought its brief and unsatisfactory war with Russia in the Crimea during which he had been awarded the government contract to supply the army with drink. If everyone else remembered the Crimean War for the nursing activities of Florence Nightingale and the heroic charge of the Light Brigade, Edward Bull remembered the war because it had made him a very rich man. It was Edward who lived in the big house on Blackheath now; like other rich brewers at this time, he was almost ready to make himself a gentleman. And the daughter of a gentleman had only one destiny: to be a lady of leisure. “She may employ an educated woman as a governess I suppose,” Edward remarked, “but she certainly can’t become one.” So Mary Anne, herself the daughter of Silas the dredger, discouraged her own daughter from getting any higher education because it might make the rising family look too middle class.

“You’re not plain,” she assured the girl. “You’ll find a husband. But men don’t like women to be too intelligent, you know; and if you are, you must learn to conceal it.”

Yet Violet had still been obstinate. Unlike the other Bull children, who all had fair hair and blue eyes, Violet’s wide-spaced eyes were hazel and her brown hair had a white flash in it. “I’ve no wish to marry a man who’s afraid of intelligent women!” she retorted. For the last two months, she had been impossible. There was not the smallest possibility of Edward Bull giving way, nor the least chance that Violet would back down. The atmosphere in the house had been like a perpetual thunderstorm. Most irritating of all had been Violet’s attitude to her. “I know you wouldn’t understand,” she would tell Mary Anne with a note of contempt in her voice. “You’re perfectly happy doing whatever papa says. You’ve never wanted anything else in your life.”

And how, her mother thought to herself, would you know? Her thirty years of marriage to Edward had not been so bad. He could be obstinate and overbearing of course; but most men were. If sometimes she might have wished for something more – that his friends’ senses of humour were a little lighter, that at least one of them had read a book – she kept it to herself. If perhaps there had been moments when she felt like screaming with boredom and frustration, those moments had passed. Marriage was about not screaming; and the rewards of marriage – the comfort, the children – had been blessings indeed. So if I could get through it, Mary Anne thought grimly, then so can she. “Life isn’t the way you think it should be,” she told the girl bluntly. “And the sooner you realize it the better.”

Thank God there was at least one piece of neutral territory where, by unspoken agreement, these hostilities ceased. Every Wednesday afternoon without fail Mary Anne and Violet got on the train into London and, taking a hansom cab, rattled over to Piccadilly. That broad street had kept its fashionable eighteenth-century character. New mansions, fronting the street, were taking the place of the grand old palaces of the former age, though Burlington House – it was the Royal Academy now – remained in splendour behind its walled courtyard. Fortnum and Mason was still there. And a few doors further down, the sanctuary where even Violet would forget their differences.

On a cold December afternoon three weeks before Christmas, Mary Anne and Violet made their usual expedition. They had not let the weather deter them, and just as they were crossing Westminster Bridge, with the House of Parliament and the high tower of Big Ben looming above them, it started to snow. Passing up Whitehall and skirting the edge of Trafalgar Square, it was not long before they reached Piccadilly and the best bookshop in Victorian London, Hatchards of Piccadilly. Indeed, it was more than a bookshop: it was almost a club. There were benches outside where servants could rest while their employers browsed inside. There was a snug little parlour at the back, where regular customers could chat and read the paper in front of the fire. Royalty came to Hatchards; the grand old Duke of Wellington had loved it; the political rivals, Gladstone and Disraeli, both went there; Mary Anne had once even found Oscar Wilde, who sent his plays to Hatchards for their opinion, standing just beside her, and had received a charming smile.

For both Mary Anne and her daughter Hatchards was a place of escape. Edward had no particular objection to Mary Anne reading; her most prized possessions were the sets of Dickens and of Thackeray she had purchased there. A friendly assistant had encouraged her to try Tennyson’s poems too, and she was quite in love with the splendour of his verses now. As for Violet, she used to buy works of a philosophical nature, from Plato to such modern British thinkers as Ruskin; which Mary Anne, with some misgivings, used to conceal among her own books in case Edward should see them.

Today, however, they were searching for Christmas presents; and Mary Anne had just found a book on shooting which she thought might amuse her eldest son, when she became aware that a tall figure across the table was quietly observing her. As she glanced up to see who it was, he turned towards an assistant who was approaching him.

“I have the book you wanted, Colonel Meredith,” the assistant said.

It was unfair. How could a man of her own age look so devastatingly handsome? His hair, clipped rather short, was still auburn; the greying temples only improved him. The lines around his eyes were those of a man who, she imagined, had seen much of the world in all kinds of weather. His body looked lean and hard. There was a hint that when the circumstances demanded it he could be dangerous. With his long silky moustache he was every inch a distinguished colonel; yet there was something else, a gentleness and an intelligence that suggested he was more than a military man.

“Mrs Bull? Is it Mrs Bull?” he enquired, as he came over to her. Mary Anne tried to nod but to her horror succeeded only in blushing. “I don’t suppose you could possibly remember me.”

“But, yes!” She found her voice, realized that Violet was coming over. “You were going to India. To shoot tigers.” What sort of nonsense was she babbling?

“You are quite unchanged.” He really seemed to mean it.

“I? Oh! Hardly. My daughter Violet. Colonel Meredith. Did you shoot any?”

“Tigers?” He smiled, then looked at them both. “Many.”

It seemed Colonel Meredith had only been back in England a few months. Thirty years of travel had taken him to many lands. The staff at Hatchards knew him because very shortly a book of his own was to come out:
Love Poems, translated from the Persian
. He had a house in west London, large enough to keep his collections. He had never married. But perhaps, next Wednesday, she would like to come to tea?

“Oh, yes!” she said to her own and her daughter’s astonishment. “Yes!”

As the dinner hour grew ever later, the Victorian English had taken up the Oriental custom of afternoon tea. It was simple, ensured a brief visit, and could be offered with propriety by ladies and by bachelor gentlemen.

The next Wednesday, a little after four o’clock, Mary Anne Bull, accompanied by Violet, arrived at Colonel Meredith’s house in Holland Park. Mary Anne had wondered whether she ought to go, but told herself it would have been rude to change her mind; so she had taken Violet, somewhat under protest, to act, as she put it, “as my chaperone”.

There were in London two particular suburbs where gentlemen of ample means and artistic tastes were apt to live. One, lying just above Regent’s Park, on land that had once belonged to the old crusading order of the Knights of St John, was St John’s Wood. The other was Holland Park. Passing along the southern edge of Hyde Park, past the little palace of Kensington where Queen Victoria had been brought up, one soon came to it. The focus was the fine old mansion and park owned by the Lords Holland. Around this, in pleasant tree-lined streets, were handsome houses where a gentleman might live quietly yet be only a ten-minute carriage drive from Mayfair.