This Thing Of Darkness (29 page)

As they whirled under the giant chandelier that dominated the centre of the ballroom, a fat drop of hot wax fell from the wrought iron and splattered on to the upper slope of her breast, at the place where it disappeared into the V of her dress. Miss O’Brien did not react; there was no indication that she had even noticed. FitzRoy watched the hot liquid congeal instantly against her cool, white skin, and knew at once it was an image that would never leave him.

 

FitzRoy’s carriage, curtains drawn, made staccato progress up the Strand. Jemmy, once more attired in his alarming pink coat (he had refused point-blank to leave Walthamstow unless permitted to wear it), peered in wide-eyed astonishment through the narrow ruler of light at the street outside. A scene of wonder revealed itself. Two giant boots, all of eight feet tall, were trying to negotiate their way past a seven-foot hat. Three enormous tin canisters with human feet, each marked ‘Warren’s Blacking - 30 Strand’, walked alongside the carriage in single file. A man carrying a vast pair of teeth on a long pole met Jemmy’s eye and glared at him. There were men with picture placards advertising single-exhibit museums - a stuffed crocodile here, a civet cat there - dioramas of the Emperor Napoleon’s funeral, and paddle-steamer crossings to Rotterdam. There were milkmaids, grape-sellers, cane-chair menders, butchers’ and bakers’ carts and men offering hunting prints from upturned umbrellas. Towering above the whole seething, shouting, yelling mass was a monstrous four-storey advertisement for Lardner’s blacking factory, comprising a number of enormous three-dimensional plaster models of hessian boots, Oriental slippers, and inverted blacking bottles suspended over boot-jacks.

‘Goliath’s boots! Goliath’s hat!’ shouted Jemmy excitedly. ‘They kill Goliath, bring his boots and hat!’

‘No, Jemmy,’ laughed FitzRoy. ‘It’s called “advertising”. They want you to buy their hats, or their boots, so they build big ones to attract your attention. The Strand is London’s main shopping street. One cannot escape it, these days.’

Jemmy’s astonishment gave way, at least partly, to confusion.

‘Big teeth! Very big teeth!’ he said hopefully.

‘Another advertisement,’ FitzRoy reassured him.

York and Fuegia were peering between the frame and the curtain now, both wriggling uncomfortably in their Sunday best, a demure pair of pantalettes poking out beneath Fuegia’s Christian frock.

‘I suppose they have not seen the city before,’ said FitzRoy to Bennet.

‘Well, no sir. They came up from Plymouth to Walthamstow by inside stage. I was wondering, sir, but should you permit it - might I take them up to London for the day, before they go home?’

‘Oh
yes please
, Capp’en Fitz’oy!
Yes please!’
begged Jemmy, his gaze now distracted by the extravagant window displays of a row of clothes shops.

‘I don’t know, Jemmy. There is jeopardy in travel, these days.’

‘There are police in London now, sir. It’s safer in town than out in the countryside, and safer than when I was a lad.’

‘Of course, Mr Bennet - I had forgotten that you are a Londoner.’

‘In my notion it’s safer than Tierra del Fuego too, sir.’

‘
Yes please,
Capp’en Fitz’oy!’

FitzRoy found himself outvoted. ‘Very well, Jemmy. You may all travel up to London with Mr Bennet. On a different day.’

They emerged from the chaos of the Strand into the wide empty space of Trafalgar Square, that eternally unfinished building site so brutally carved out of the teeming city. Then west along Pall Mall to St James’s Palace, the home of the Royal Family, a mere stone’s throw away from another great building site, the New King’s Palace that George IV had ordered to be constructed in Green Park. A phalanx of red-jacketed soldiery had been posted outside St James’s to protect His Majesty from any rioting mobs, but their presence was largely superfluous. King Billy, after all, had celebrated his accession by throwing a party for the poor of Windsor, all three thousand of them. Earlier in the summer he had eschewed the tiresome job of swearing in privy councillors and had climbed out of a palace window instead, preferring to take a stroll down Pall Mall alone; he had eventually been rescued from the attentions of an adoring crowd by the members of White’s, just as a prostitute was about to kiss him on the lips. This was one monarch who was safe from having his throat cut in the night.

Coxswain Bennet was left in a palace anteroom, where Fanny Rice-Trevor had been waiting for them. Today she wore a satin dress shot with gold and a train of black velvet. Together they were escorted to the state apartments and into the presence of the King and Queen.

‘Your Majesty. Your Royal Highness.’

FitzRoy acknowledged both in turn and introduced his party, who bowed and curtsied, according to sex. The three Fuegians having been carefully schooled in the correct etiquette, even York managed a little bow, sensing perhaps that it would not do to antagonize the most powerful man in the world; Jemmy, meanwhile, performed the most extravagant of scrapes, reaching almost to the ground.

‘How do? Come in, come in.’

All signs of protocol absent, King William beckoned them to a little table, surrounded by Louis XIV chairs, where tea and fancy biscuits had been laid out. His Majesty proved to be a plump, florid man in his mid-sixties, his immensely high forehead surmounted by a ridge of white hair standing neatly to attention. Although squeezed into a formal crimson dress uniform, his manner was informal and jocular in the extreme. Queen Adelaide, a small, round, quiet German with sad eyes, was already seated. The royal couple, it was said, had little to do with each other outside their official duties.

‘D’ye take tea? A cup of tea for my friends here. That’s a splendid coat, young man.’

Jemmy preened. ‘Thank you, Your Majesty.’

‘Tell me, how d’ye like London?’

‘London is best city in the world! Better than Rio. One day I will build city like London in my own country.’

‘Capital, capital! Tell me about your own country.’

‘My country is good country. It is called Woollya. Plenty of trees. There is no devil in my land. Plenty of guanaco. My people hunt many guanaco. No guanaco in York’s country.’

‘Guanaco?’

‘It is a type of llama, Your Majesty,’ explained FitzRoy.

And so, for the next half-hour, the King continued to question Jemmy Button
-
rather intelligently, FitzRoy considered. York sat in inscrutable silence while Fuegia beamed enchantingly at Queen Adelaide, who occasionally prompted the little girl with a supplementary question.

‘They do you credit, Commander. They do you prodigious credit. They are uncommonly well conducted.’

‘Your Majesty is most kind. I have taken the liberty of bringing Your Majesty and Your Royal Highness a chart of Tierra del Fuego, prepared from the survey expedition commanded by Captain King. It is the first one off the Navy’s copper press, sir.’

‘Capital, Commander, capital!’

FitzRoy unrolled the chart and spread it before the King and Queen, pointing out Woollya, Desolate Bay and York Minster, the homes of the three Fuegians.

‘And these blank spaces
-
I dare say you’ll fill them in when you take these three back in the
Beagle
?’

FitzRoy seized his chance. ‘No sir. The Admiralty has decided to prosecute no further surveys of the area. Although I understand that the French have sent an expedition to that quarter under the direction of the naturalist Captain du Petit Thouars.’

‘The French? The devil take ’em. What are those damned fools in the Admiralty playing at?’

‘I understand there are economic limitations, Your Majesty.’

‘Economic limitations be hanged. We can’t be outdone by the French. What about all those uncles of yours? Do not the dukes Grafton and Richmond interest themselves about you?’

‘Unfortunately, sir, I have had to request a year’s leave from the Service to enable me to keep my faith with the natives using my own means. I hope to see our friends here become useful as interpreters, sir, and to be the means of establishing a friendly disposition towards Englishmen on the part of their countrymen.’

‘Absolutely. Any fool can see that’s a capital idea.’

Fanny looked across at her brother, a worried expression stealing across her face. He was taking an enormous risk, manipulating the conversation like this.

‘We can’t have good men like you lost to the Service, Commander. You leave their lordships to me. Economic limitations, indeed!’

His Majesty levered his portly frame from his chair, grunting with the exertion involved, indicating that the interview was over. Queen Adelaide, meanwhile, left the room for a moment, then returned with one of her own bonnets, a gold ring and a small purse of coins, which she gave to Fuegia Basket. She tied the bonnet under the little girl’s chin and slipped the ring on to her finger. ‘The money is for you, my dear, to buy travelling clothes.’

‘What must you say, Fuegia?’

‘Thank you, Your Royal Highness.’

The ring alone, FitzRoy realized, was valuable enough to keep a working man’s family in food for a year.

 

Bennet rose before dawn, in the little room that discreetly separated Fuegia Basket’s quarters from York Minster’s, and woke the three Fuegians. Jemmy donned his pink coat and Fuegia her new bonnet, from which she utterly refused to be parted. They assembled in the shivering half-dark of the schoolyard, where they boarded Wilson’s carriage, which the clergyman had kindly donated for the day. They took the road for Islington, a cold grey light at their backs. Half-lit brick kilns, orchards, cow-yards, tea-gardens and tenter grounds rattled past, allotments rising as islands from sodden, misty fields. On either side of Hackney village there were bare strawberry allotments, where early-risen women with rough clay pipes in their mouths were potting runners from the summer’s exhausted plants.

At first, theirs had been the only carriage on the road, but as they neared Islington the traffic thickened. Milkmaids from the outlying farms took to the road, bowed under the weight of their heavy iron churns. Boys with sticks drove massive herds of cattle and pigs uncomprehendingly forward into the maw of the metropolis, to feed the insatiable appetites of the one and a half million citizens who teemed and sweated in the cramped lattice of streets and alleyways. After Islington, where the new tenements lining the Lower Road disgorged an anthill of clerks, the City Road, St John’s Street and the Angel Terrace heading downhill towards Battlebridge became a veritable swarm of commuters, mounting their inexorable morning assault on London. No one, it seemed, had occasion to pause, even for a few seconds: passers-by grabbed buns and biscuits from pastry shops en route, tossing their pennies through the open doorway. Floating serenely above the jostling river of humanity in their opulent carriage, Bennet and his three charges felt as if they were being carried shoulder-high into the very heart of the city. They could see London below them now, drifts of yellow smog lining its alleys like mucus, the ever-present kites soaring and wheeling high above.

At Battlebridge came the first of the city’s great sights.

‘A mountain!’ exclaimed Jemmy.

‘A mountain of rubbish,’ clarified Bennet, inviting them to look again. It was indeed a mighty triangular summit of ordure, cinders and rags, its secondary hillocks of horse-bones swarming with ravenous pigs. Cinder-sifters and scavengers combed the upper slopes, ragged panting children and women with short pipes and muscled forearms, more wretched than their Hackney sisters, with strawboard gaiters and torn bonnet-boxes for pinafores.

‘All of London’s rubbish, all her waste, is piled up here,’ said Bennet, by way of explanation.

‘What for do they want rubbish?’ asked Jemmy.

‘Tin canisters are re-usable as luggage clamps, old shoes go for Prussian blue dye. Everything is re-usable.’

‘These are low people,’ said Jemmy. ‘Not gentlemen.’

‘That they are not, Jemmy. All of this is to be flattened, they say, to make way for a great cross, in memory of His Late Majesty King George IV. Take it all in, for you will never see its like again.’

At the top of Tottenham Court Road they had to queue for their second turnpike. ‘This area,’ explained Bennet, ‘belongs to Captain FitzRoy’s family. Not to the captain himself, but to his family. It’s called Fitzrovia.’ Grand terraces and squares rose behind allotments and smallholdings to the west.

‘If it belongs to capp’en’s family, it belong to capp‘en.’

‘Not quite, Jemmy. It doesn’t really work like that.’

‘All family not live together?’

‘They don’t live here at all.’

Jemmy subsided into his seat, completely baffled.

‘I love Capp’en Sisser,’ offered Fuegia.

At the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, the rush-hour traffic finally congealed. A hundred stationary horses tossed their heads and blew steam from their nostrils, while the drivers bellowed greetings and friendly obscenities at each other. Bennet invited the Fuegians to step down from the carriage, and arranged to rendezvous with their driver at the same spot that evening. They pressed through the crowds and turned right into Oxford Street.

After his years of exile in the Southern Ocean and the many long, quiet months in Walthamstow, even James Bennet, a Londoner, was momentarily stunned by the sudden assault on his senses that ensued. It was as if they had stepped not into a main thoroughfare but into the middle of Bartholomew Fair. The street seethed with activity. The rattle of coachwheels competed with the buzz of flies. There were German bands clashing with bagpipes, who clashed in turn with Italian mechanical organs mounted on carts. Dustmen rang their bells. News vendors blew their tin horns and bragged of ‘Bloody News!’ and ‘Horrible Murder!’, their headlines screaming loudest of all. One side of the street was plastered with song-sheets, as if some unseen authority were orchestrating the cacophony.