London (149 page)

And already it was declared to be a triumph. People from all over England had flocked to see it. French, Germans, Italians, travellers from America and even the Far East had come, not just in their thousands but their millions to see its wonders. Nor were these only people of the better sort. On most days, ordinary folk could come in for only a shilling.

Harriet had not been to the Great Exhibition before, although it had been open since May. Her three sisters had seen it, but she had waited until she could go with her husband. She took his arm contentedly. She had been lucky in Penny. Her older sisters, Charlotte and Esther, had been over thirty when they were married, both to ambitious, younger men. They seemed happy enough. And then there was her younger sister, Mary Anne. But Mary Anne, of course, was different.

Harriet had been twenty-three when she met Penny and though he was two years younger she had been attracted at once by the bespectacled young man with his cautious, quiet, determined manner. His father, the banker, had made handsome provision for all his children in several trusts, but young Penny had ambitions of his own, in insurance. If her elder sisters had been married for their fortunes, Penny had not needed Harriet’s. It was just that it would never have occurred to him to marry a woman without a fortune, and she liked this about him too.

If the Crystal Palace itself was impressive, its contents, they soon discovered, were breathtaking. Every country of note in the entire world had a section. There was a stuffed elephant bearing a magnificent jewelled howdah from India; the fabulous Koh-i-noor diamond was on display, illumined by gaslight, too. From the United States came agricultural machinery including a cotton gin, Colonel Colt’s revolvers and a missionary floating church that went up and down the River Delaware. From Russia’s Tsar, magnificent sable furs; there was a Turkish pavilion, porcelain from China, all manner of useful goods from Canada and Australia, mineral specimens from South Africa. From France came a remarkable envelope-folding machine used by de la Rue and a fountain flowing delightfully with eau-de-Cologne. Berlin sent scientific instruments, lace-making machines. . . . But these were only a tiny handful of the wonders, artistic and manufactured, that continued acre after acre in the huge palace of glass.

Largest of all however, nearly half the space, was the exhibit of Britain herself. Carriages, engines, textile manufactures, the new electroplate system, clocks, furniture of the newly ornate style that would be known as Victorian, Wedgwood pottery; even, for the historically curious, a recreation by Mr Pugin, the brilliant architect and designer, of an entire medieval court – though when this was discovered to contain a popish crucifix amongst the decoration, it was felt to be un-English and rather disapproved of. Despite this one unfortunate lapse, the message of the exhibition could not be missed: Britain was prosperous, led all the world in manufacture, and was head of the greatest empire under the sun.

Apart from the loss of its American colonies seventy years before, the British Empire had never stopped expanding. Canada, the West Indies, great tracts of Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand were all under her sway, so that it was literally true that over the empire the sun never set. But this was no Oriental despotism. True, the British navy dominated the seas. True, also, some local resistance to the spread of her trade and enlightenment had been sharply put down. Yet Britain’s military might on land was actually tiny. The more sophisticated dominions, for all practical purposes, were growing towards a form of self-governing affiliation; the rest of the empire remained what it had always been – a patchwork of colonies run by traders, settlers, some scattered garrisons and a few, usually well-intentioned administrators who believed in a Protestant God and in trade. For commerce was the key. It was not tribute, but raw materials – especially the all-important cotton – that flowed back to Britain where they were manufactured and re-exported world-wide. It was commerce, encouraged by invention, that was raising its people to affluence and bringing civilization to the most distant quarters of the globe.

For two and a half hours Harriet and her husband toured the exhibits arm in arm, and only when they finally emerged back into the sunny open spaces of Hyde Park did they glance up at the sky and then look at each other, with a mixture of amusement and trepidation.

“I wonder what’s happened to Mary Anne?” said Penny.

Esther Silversleeves and her husband were early as they walked across London Bridge. Mr Arnold Silversleeves was a very respectable man. He was tall, taller even than his father who had presided over the Bedlam. His nose was large and long and he had never been known – though he was quite without malice – to see a joke. But he was already a partner in the firm of Grinder and Watson Engineers, where, apart from his undoubted competence, it was recognized that he had mathematical abilities that were close to genius. His affection for his wife and children was simple and straightforward; though if his life contained a real passion, then it was for cast iron. He had taken his wife to the Great Exhibition once, to show her the machines, but three times, before that, to watch the Crystal Palace being built and to explain to her the principles of its engineering.

He had a most curious way of walking. He would take ten or twenty paces at one speed, then stop for no obvious reason, then proceed, usually at a much brisker pace before quite suddenly changing to a slower speed or simply stopping again. Only his wife, through the long practice of obedience, could ever keep pace with him. It was in this manner, therefore, that they reached the southern end of the bridge and a few moments later entered the large shed-like building where their transport awaited them.

Arnold Silversleeves smiled. It was painted green, except for its brasswork, which was gleaming. Behind it were half a dozen chocolate-brown carriages. It hissed and it steamed contentedly and, occasionally let out a cheerful sort of snort. On the platform beside it, two uniformed guards in peaked caps looked as proud as if they were on guard at Buckingham Palace. The London and Greenwich Railway (the first London line, Terminus London Bridge, opened just as Queen Victoria’s reign was about to begin) was so pleased with itself that the engines seemed positively to puff with pride.

As well they might: for if the age of Queen Victoria was one of huge progress, that was because it was the age of steam.

Though the first steam engine had been invented back in the days of George III, the introduction of steam power had been surprisingly gradual. The steam-powered engines of the textile works up in the north, primitive steamships, a locomotive for hauling coal in collieries, even a steam press for printing
The Times
of London had all been used since the days of the Regent; but then, with Queen Victoria, came the first passenger railway.

The expansion was amazing. Within a dozen years, there were railway companies competing with each other all round London. Euston Station had opened up the Midlands and the north. Three years ago, Silversleeves and his company had been busily engaged in building a great terminal across the river from Westminster, called Waterloo, from which trains ran to the south and west. If the stagecoaches could carry ten passengers along the turnpikes at, perhaps, eight miles an hour, the carriages rattling along the iron tracks behind a steam locomotive could take a hundred people at forty miles an hour. It was the steam trains that had brought people from far and wide to the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace. Without the new trains, most of those from the provinces could not possibly have come.

It had also had one other unforeseen effect. Railway trains required a railway timetable; but, despite the gradual adoption of Greenwich Mean Time on the world’s oceans, the provincial cities of England were still keeping their own local time just as they had in the days of the Stuarts. Trying to publish train schedules in such conditions was confusing; and so recently the provinces had begun for the first time to adopt a standard London time. The steam locomotive was bringing order to the kingdom.

Silversleeves loved order; order meant happiness, and progress. “And it’s all a question of engineering,” he assured his wife. Even the poorest folk could benefit. The new railway lines from Euston had destroyed whole areas of rookeries and slum tenements. “These people will all be rehoused,” he would explain. He even predicted that one day many of the ordinary folk, those who did not have to live directly beside their work, would be housed in clean new settlements outside the city and be shipped in each day by rail. Still more remarkable were his ideas for the centre of London. With the ever increasing population, the horse-drawn omnibuses – hundreds of them nowadays – and the thousands of cabs and carriages, the whole area from Westminster to the centre of the old city was jammed solid for several hours every weekday. It could take an hour to get from Whitehall to the Bank of England. “But we can solve that by running trains underground,” he assured her. “From one end of London to the other in minutes. It’s just a question of air vents and disposing of smoke so that people don’t suffocate.”

He had a solution for the smelly old Thames, too. “A new sewer system!” he told his family enthusiastically. Only last year, on his own initiative, he had made a personal study of the problem, diving down, notebook in hand, into the endless labyrinth of drains, sewers, subterranean water channels and cesspits under old London every spare day he could find. He had memorized the entire system, hundreds of miles of it, and flushed with this remarkable if malodorous achievement, had designed an entirely new system which he had pressed upon the city authorities, so far without success.

The railway from London Bridge ran on high brick arches that cut, like a giant aqueduct across the roofline of the huddled dwellings of Southwark towards the green spaces of Greenwich and Blackheath, affording an excellent view across the area as one went along. Esther had just listened to her husband’s plans for the sewers once again, and thought what a visionary he was when, glancing out of the window, she chanced to catch sight of a spectacle which made her interrupt:

“Oh, Arnold! Do look! I think it’s Mary Anne!”

For several seconds after the Earl of St James had unrolled the designs on Captain Jonas Barnikel’s dining-room table, the worthy mariner did not speak. Young Meredith, who was representing his father, watched with interest. Then, Barnikel stroked his great red beard and delivered his opinion: “It’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life,” he said gruffly.

“You can beat the Americans in this,” St James declared. “I’m betting on it.”

The designs were for a sailing ship. Though steamships were steadily claiming a share of the traffic of the seas, the overwhelming majority of the world’s trade, in the year of the Great Exhibition, was still carried by sail. And of all the sailing ships, the swiftest, the more elegant and romantic was that greyhound of the seas, the clipper. The lovely lines of the designs before them suggested that this vessel might be the fastest clipper ever built.

It was the Americans who had changed everything when, only two years ago, their famously swift cotton clippers had been allowed to enter the English tea trade. Leaving London with a variety of cargoes, the ships would catch the north-east trade winds down the Atlantic, round the southern tip of Africa, and let the great roaring forties blow them to the Far East to unload their cargo. Then, in high summer, they would arrive at the Chinese ports of Shanghai or Foochow, anchor amongst the junks and sampans, and await the first batches of tea-leaves of the year’s new crop. As soon as they had it, then what a commotion there would be as the ships were towed out, all flags flying, the other ships firing salutes, for the great race home. Back they would come on the southeast trade winds; lookouts would spot the first ships from the Kent coast; crowds would race down past the Tower to the London docks. And in the last two years the American clippers had come in so far ahead of the English vessels that it was humiliating.

Competition was the spur. London’s mariners were not going to accept defeat. Already they were busy commissioning new vessels designed to be swifter than anything seen before. Two to three hundred feet long, sleek and sturdy as the old Norse ships that were their ancestors, but carrying a forest of sails on their three tall masts – some, with thirty-four sails, would carry thirty thousand square feet of canvas and more – the new class of clippers would be able to sail a thousand miles, fully laden, in three days and complete the entire voyage from China in a hundred or less. They were being built, mostly, in Scotland. And this new ship before Barnikel now was to replace his present one in as little as a year.

“So, what shall we call her?” the earl asked him. “You choose.”

“We’ll call her the
Charlotte
,” Barnikel replied.

For God knows, he thought, he owed all this to her. True, he was a first-rate sailor, and as good a skipper as he knew, but it was marrying the Guv’nor’s eldest daughter that had allowed him to buy a share in a vessel and make himself a captain in the first place. The pleasant Georgian house and garden they occupied in Camberwell Grove, on the genteel wooded slopes that gazed down on the crowded docklands of Deptford, had been purchased with Charlotte’s money. I’d still be living down there, like as not, if it wasn’t for her, he would acknowledge to himself; and though he was making a fortune of his own now, it gave him pleasure to think that when, in a short while, he took his plain wife and their children across the high ground to Blackheath, he’d be able to tell his old father-in-law: “The earl and I have just named the clipper after Charlotte.”

Jonas Barnikel would own a fifth of the
Charlotte
; Meredith the banker, who had sent his son today, another fifth; and the sporting Earl of St James who, like his grandfather, would bet on anything, three fifths. The earl’s statement that he would bet on the new clipper was not made lightly either. Huge wagers were placed every year on which of the tea vessels would be first home. The earl therefore intended to have his money three ways: he would own most of the vessel, also the cargo and bet on the race as well. It was five years since he and Jonas Barnikel had made each other’s acquaintance and they trusted each other entirely.