London (106 page)

It was Meredith. And he was going to preach.

In fact, the Virginia Company was in trouble and the settlement was, so far, a disaster. Only a few shiploads of settlers had gone out; there were rumours of harsh conditions, Indian attacks, starvation; and the company was making a loss. To raise fresh funds, it had even run a national lottery. But the company needed a boost. So, whether the story of Pocahontas and Captain Smith were strictly true, or whether Smith and the Virginia Company had shrewdly invented it, the visit of this friendly, Christianized Indian princess and her English husband was a godsend that Sir Jacob and his friends were using for maximum effect.

The practice of paying a preacher to promote a good cause was common enough; the Virginia Company often employed chaplains. But today, with a crowd of five hundred before him Meredith had the big opportunity for which he had earnestly begged Sir Jacob; and he did not waste it.

The message he had prepared was twofold. The first part, the introduction, concerned Pocahontas; this was to intrigue the crowd. The second, the real purpose of the sermon, was an encouragement to settle in Virginia. He did not try to persuade them it was rich; he assumed they knew it was, and he deployed his several biblical texts accordingly. Finally, rising to a passionate climax, he concluded:

“Come then, and take possession of thy bride, Virginia, thy new-found land.”

It was exactly the kind of sermon the Virginia Company favoured. The instant the peroration – which had transfixed the listeners – came to an end, company servants were moving swiftly through the crowds with sheafs of handbills informing prospective settlers or investors how to apply at the company headquarters in Philpot Lane.

Julius, standing with his father, heard it all. He could see that Sir Jacob was highly satisfied, and he was glad, because he liked Meredith. After they had congratulated him, and his father had to go elsewhere on business, he felt too excited to return home directly.

Sir Jacob was still in an excellent temper when Julius returned home; and he smiled indulgently as his son approached him with a piece of news.

“Do you know, father, I saw the strangest thing.”

Julius had seen little of Martha Carpenter since she left the parish to marry Dogget. Occasionally she would come to visit her brother and his family, but that was all. As for her new family in Southwark, Julius knew nothing about them. So he had been curious when he saw the little group in Watling Street.

They, too, had come to see Pocahontas and, though Martha distrusted Meredith for once writing plays, they had stayed for the sermon. There was Dogget, five children, the eldest a year or two older than Julius, and an infant that was clearly Martha’s. Seeing that Martha recognized him, he went over politely to speak to her; and it was then that he made the discovery.

“The boatbuilder and two of his children have a white flash in their hair, father, just like us. But the strangest thing is their hands. Dogget and one of the children have a sort of webbing, between their fingers.” And then he stopped abruptly, for the change in his father was terrible to behold.

For a second, Sir Jacob looked as if he had been hit, and seemed to stagger. The boy wondered if his father was having a seizure. Sir Jacob recovered himself but, still more disconcerting, he stared at Julius with apparent loathing.

“What name? Dogget?” Sir Jacob knew nothing of the humble Doggets of Southwark, nor was there any way he could think of that such people could be connected with him.

Except, of course, for the foundling. Sir Jacob felt a cold wave of fear within him. The orphan; the gutter child. As he stared with loathing, it was not his son that he saw, but a horrifying vision – as though the ground under his feet had opened up to reveal a whole world of subterranean cellars, pits and passages, the dark corrupted ventricles of his own ancestry from which who knew what horrors might worm their way up into daylight to confront him. And no wonder then, forgetting the boy, that he muttered aloud: “The curse.”

Julius stared. What curse? What did his father mean?

But all Sir Jacob said, with a terrible force, was: “Do not go near those people. They are all accursed.”

Julius stared at his father. “Do you mean the Doggets, father, or Martha Carpenter’s family as well?”

And because Sir Jacob, himself, was afraid of the reason, he answered: “All of them.” He spoke with such finality that Julius did not dare ask any further questions.

The very next day, Sir Jacob began to make secret enquiries about the Southwark family.

Though the incident puzzled Julius, all thought of it was driven out of his head the following week by an event that brought him huge joy. It happened one morning, as he and his father were riding out of the city together to inspect the venture which, of all Sir Jacob’s many investments, was his proudest.

If people were determined to find fault with old London, then they would mention the lack of decent drinking water.

There was the Thames of course. But by the time the butchers had thrown their offal in, the tanners washed their hides, brewers, dyers and others tipped in their excess fluids and to this had been added the natural effluvium of a city of two hundred thousand bodies, the tidal river was less than sweet tasting. The Walbrook had practically vanished under houses; the Fleet stank. True, the old conduit from Whittington’s day still functioned and had been added to; but the supply was inadequate and even this, carried in pairs of pails hanging from yokes on their shoulders, had to be taken from house to house by water carriers whose cry, “Water, buy fresh water,” echoed every day in the streets.

But now all this was to be changed, and thanks to a single, remarkable man: Sir Hugh Myddelton.

An aristocrat, like Whittington and Gresham before him, from a prominent Welsh family, Sir Hugh Myddelton had made a large fortune in the Goldsmiths Company. He was also a man of boldness and vision. When he had offered to build the city a new water supply, the mayor and aldermen had been more than grateful, and Sir Jacob Ducket had been delighted to purchase a share in the enterprise.

The New River Company, as it was called, was a prodigious undertaking. Expertly surveyed by Myddelton himself, a canal was constructed to bring water from fresh springs some twenty miles to the north. Above the city was a reservoir, and inside the city walls the fresh water could be tapped directly into individual houses. Nothing like it had been seen in England before. So great had been the cost and difficulty of the venture that the king himself had stepped in, purchasing half the shares, and granting the company a monopoly when lesser rivals threatened to spring up. “You need a monopoly,” Sir Jacob had explained to Julius, “to make these huge investments possible.”

Nothing gave Sir Jacob more pleasure than to ride out of London with Julius and follow the course of this pet project up to the reservoir, from which there was a view of the distant city. They had just set out when they were detained by a cheerful cry. “Father! They told me I’d find you this way.” And Julius turned round to see, riding towards them, a tall dark figure, who carried himself with a proud, almost contemptuous elegance. It was his elder brother Henry.

It was three years since they had seen him. From Oxford, instead of returning to London, he had gone to Italy with a friend, studied there a year and spent another in Paris. In that time, he had changed from a sallow student to a man. Dressed in black, with the same silver flash in his hair, you could see at once that he was his father’s son. But as he joined them now, and the two men rode along the canal, exchanging news of London, Paris and the French and English courts, it was evident from their bearing and conversation that there was a subtle difference between them. If Sir Jacob was a gentleman, young Henry was an aristocrat; if the Puritan alderman was severe, the polished traveller was hard; if the father believed in order, the son believed in dominion.

As they went along, Julius could hardly take his eyes off him, and his heart swelled with pride to think that this family could be so fine. “Are you now returned for good?” he dared to ask, at last. To his delight, Henry gave him his strange sardonic smile. “Yes, little brother,” he promised. “I am.”

1620

On a star-filled night in July 1620, a crowd of some seventy people stood in a semicircle by the bank of the River Thames and waited for the dawn. Some of them were nervous, some excited; but as Martha gazed across the glinting water, she felt only a great rejoicing in the glory of the Lord.

For years, godly folk in London had spoken of this enterprise. But who could ever have dreamed that she would be part of it? Who could have foreseen the extraordinary change in the Dogget family? Or the unexpected attitude of the boy. Or, most wonderful of all, the recent but mystifying circumstances that had brought the family to the water’s edge this morning. She looked up at her husband and smiled. But John Dogget did not smile.

John Dogget loved his wife. When Jane Fleming had disappeared from the Globe twenty years before, Dogget had been deeply upset, but time had passed, and two years later he had married a lively girl, a waterman’s daughter, and had known great happiness until her sudden death. The months that followed, however, had been so miserable that when he married Martha he had scarcely known what he was doing.

He would never forget how he had brought her home on their wedding day. He had tried to prepare the house by the boatyard, but the family had always lived in cheerful chaos, and God knew what she had felt. Nor did their wedding night, though the essentials were duly accomplished, bring her, he suspected, much joy. He went to his work the next morning in a thoughtful and uncertain mood. But returned that evening to a transformation. The house was clean. The children’s clothes had been washed. On the table stood a large pie and a bowl of apples stewed with cloves; and from the grate there came the aroma of freshly cooked oatcakes. The family had not eaten so well in a year. That night, overcome with gratitude, he made love to her with tenderness and passion.

How quietly she had won the children over too. She never forced them to acknowledge her, just went about her work, but they quickly noticed that their home smelled fresh instead of stale, their clothes were mended, the larder stocked; an air of pleasant calm descended upon the house. Nor did she ever ask for help; but it was not long before the eight-year-old-girl wanted to cook with her, and a few days later the oldest boy, seeing Martha sweeping out the yard, took the broom from her and said: “I’ll do it.” The following week, as they were working on a boat, he remarked to his father: “She’s good.”

She still puzzled him. The Doggets were a merry family by nature: hardly a day went by without them finding something funny. But when they were laughing, he noticed that Martha would sit, quietly smiling, because she saw they were happy, but not laughing herself. He began to wonder whether she had seen the joke. And did she really like their sexual life? Certainly she became aroused, but if she always gently welcomed his advances, he couldn’t help noticing that she never took the initiative herself. Perhaps she felt it was ungodly. But when she asked him, after three months – “Am I a good wife?” – and he had answered, with real feeling – “None better” – she seemed so pleased that to introduce any hint of doubt seemed unkind.

And in due course they had a child.

The change had come so slowly that for a time he hardly noticed, but gradually he came to understand that something had happened to his family. Even in rowdy Southwark, the better sort of stallkeepers now gave him and his children a polite smile – something they had certainly never done before. Still more startling was the day when the parish beadle, speaking of some noisy drunkards, apologized to him for the disturbance to “godly people like yourselves”. But the true turning point had come one day when, pointing to a handsome young waterman and remarking to his ten-year-old daughter, “There’s a husband for you,” the girl had seriously replied: “Oh no, father, I want to marry a respectable man.” He supposed she was right. But something died in him that day.

He discovered something else, too. “I didn’t marry a woman,” he would wryly say. “I married a congregation.” It was not just the prayer meetings, though she went to those; but it seemed that there was an entire network of similar-minded people stretching across all the city wards and far beyond. It was almost like a huge guild to which she could turn for help. It came into play most strikingly on the one occasion when they quarrelled.

It was over the eldest boy. Though brought up to help in the boatyards, he showed no desire to follow his father’s trade. The slow work with his hands made him restless, and he announced that he wanted to go to sea as a fisherman. Dogget, knowing that the boatyard was a solid little business, expected Martha to support him; but after a day of prayer, she stated: “You should let him go. Our work is worship,” she reminded him. “So if a man hates his work, how can he worship God?”

“He should obey his father,” Dogget protested.

“God is his father,” she gently corrected. “Not you.”

He was so furious, he did not speak to her for days.

Yet a week later, he found himself with Martha at Billingsgate, being ushered into the large, red-bearded presence of no less a personage than the head of the Barnikel family, one of the most prominent men in the Fishmongers Company, who told him: “Found a good berth for your boy. Know the ship’s master well.” And before Dogget could stammer a reply: “Glad to help. Your wife’s good name goes before her.”

Now, as the sky grew lighter, those same words seemed to echo in his brain. His wife’s good name. But for that accursed good name, none of this would have happened. Yet what could he do? The wherry was coming to take them. And across the water, moored in the stream just below Wapping, he could see the trap into which he was being led.

That stout, three-masted ship called the
Mayflower
.

By noon, they had passed the Medway.

The
Mayflower
was a good little ship: a London vessel, a hundred and eighty tons, a quarter owned by Captain Jones who sailed her – another sign that she was sound. Frequently chartered by London merchants, she had spent much of her time shipping wine in the Mediterranean. Seaworthy, well stocked and with ample space, she was fully prepared to carry her passengers to the New World.