London (138 page)

And she knew that he would.

“You may not find him, anyway,” she said at last.

It did not take him long. Though the Dogget boys had decided to avoid Hanover Square after the disaster of the day before, it was just after turning into Grosvenor Square that he caught sight of a blackened urchin with a sweep’s broom who, after one look at him, dropped the brush and began to run. The little fellow made off down Audley Street and dodged about, but Meredith was fit, and by Hay’s Mews he laid hold of him.

“Take me to your father,” he ordered, “or it’ll be the worse for you.”

So together they set off in the direction of Seven Dials.

They encountered the costermonger in Covent Garden, where the flower market was still in progress. He was standing by his barrow, with a cap on his head. As he often did when pushing the barrow, he wore a pair of leather gloves. His eyes just then had been resting on a rather pretty young girl selling at one of the stalls, but seeing Meredith and the boy advancing he turned without ceremony and enquired: “What’s up?”

“Your boy was stealing in a house yesterday,” the captain answered.

“Never,” the costermonger replied. “’E’d never do such a thing.”

“I think he would,” Meredith cheerfully countered. “But that isn’t why I’m here.”

“No, sir?” Dogget grinned. “You ain’t come for a fight I s’pose, ’ave you?”

“Not today. What I’d like to know is, how did you come to possess this boy? Was he born yours?”

“I dare say.” Dogget looked wary.

“Is that yes or no?”

“An’ ’oo for that matter, sir, might you be, an’ why are you askin’?”

“I’m Captain Meredith,” Jack replied pleasantly, “and I’ve reason to think this boy may have been given away by” – he lied smoothly – “a servant who was discharged from a certain house. That’s all I can say at present. But if the boy’s yours, we’ll say no more.”

And now Harry Dogget became very thoughtful indeed.

“I’ve been this boy’s father since ’e was a tiny baby,” he said at last. “Given ’im a good home. I can’t let ’im be taken off just anywhere.”

“Take a look at me, then,” the captain said.

“You look a reg’lar gentleman, I’ll allow,” Dogget agreed. Then he told Meredith exactly how he had found the baby, at Seven Dials.

“Then I must tell you,” Meredith explained, when he had heard it all, “that this is undoubtedly the missing child.”

“But Dad,” cried the little boy, in real distress. He had conceived no affection for the tall stranger and was now hopelessly confused.

“Shut your north and south,” the costermonger said kindly, “you little thief. You don’t know wotcha talkin’ about ’cos you wasn’t ’ardly born.”

The boy reluctantly kept quiet.

“But how d’you know it’s ’im?” Dogget enquired of the captain.

“Oh, the hands. And the hair,” Meredith explained. “Remarkable.”

Yes, the costermonger agreed, they were.

So, leaving his barrow with one of the stallholders he knew, Harry Dogget accompanied them back to Hanover Square, whistled when he saw the house, asked – “You mean he’ll live ’ere, not a servant, like, but one o’ the family?” – and being told yes, he shook his head in wonderment. He declined Meredith’s offer to go in but asked: “Can I come back tomorrow to see ’im? Just to make sure ’e’s all right.” Indeed, he was told, he could, and should.

Thus George, the former Lord Bocton and now the new Earl of St James, was restored to his home.

For Isaac Fleming, however, dawn had brought no such joy, but only a sense of hopeless failure.

If only it had not been for that forty pounds. The money weighed upon him crushingly. It was not just that he needed the money so much – that was bad enough. But whether he got it or not all depended upon this one cake. The result was that every time he thought of a design that might please her ladyship, the money hovered over him as if to say: “Is that all? For forty pounds?” He thought of a castle, a ship, even a lion except that he couldn’t make it. Yet each, within the hour, seemed trite, obvious, unremarkable. It’s no good, he thought. I’m not up to it. I lack the genius. It even came into his mind that perhaps Lady St James had been right when she told him that his earlier cakes had been failures.

“I should give this up,” he told his wife miserably. But he needed forty pounds.

By the time he woke up that day, he was in despair. The bill for the cobblestones was still there, unpaid. Even the modest shop on Fleet Street, he concluded, was too much for him. He’d have to move, he supposed, to some cheaper part of town. “I’m finished,” he murmured. He would like to have said it out loud, to wake his wife, but he did not do so. Instead he went sadly downstairs, to prepare the oven for baking the morning’s bread.

Just after he had put the first batch of bread in he stepped outside. Fleet Street was still quiet. There was not yet a cart moving. Eastwards, somewhere over Ludgate, the sun was sending a bright glow across the heavens. The high, wavy clouds in the pale blue sky were like the tresses of a woman’s hair. Towards Ludgate, high over the rooftops, he could see the splendid spire of Sir Christopher Wren’s St Bride’s with its tiers of octagons piled one above the other up heavenward.

St Bride’s, he thought. Just the right name for a church, if you were having a wedding.

And then he had a most wonderful idea.

The guests were all assembled: just two dozen of her very dearest and most particular fashionable friends.

They all knew, of course, how badly she had been treated by St James and were full of sympathy. They knew about Fleming the baker too, whose special cake, though it had not yet been brought in, was promised to be remarkable. One lady, more zealous for information than all the rest, had already slipped out to send a footman over to the baker’s shop to get the first description of what exactly Fleming had seen that day.

“Be sure to find out which eye was blacked: the left or the right,” she had ordered him. “I won’t be made to look a fool by getting it wrong.”

But even this drama, and the sudden wedding, food for such delicious speculation for weeks to come – even this was quite put in the shade by the latest revelation to emerge from number seventeen, Hanover Square – the discovery of the heir.

It was astonishing. An evil servant switching the child, it seemed, when the young wife had been practically out of her mind with worry and the discovery that the lost child was a sweep. It had to be true, it was agreed, because there was no conceivable reason why either the lady or her new husband should invent such a thing. They clamoured to see the boy, but were denied.

“Too much for him,” his mother told them. “I must protect him.”

Indeed, she had insisted, and Jack had agreed, that the urchin – who could scarcely speak in any language fit to hear, let alone read and write – must spend at least a year in seclusion with a tutor before he was fit to be seen.

“But to do all this at once, and then leave town,” one of the ladies complained. “Why, she has upstaged us all! I’m mad with jealousy.”

As for the new Mrs Meredith, who had nearly, though by no means completely got over the shock of the day before, her social triumph – which was to make her immortal for an entire season – was crowned by the arrival, carried by two footmen, of the wedding cake.

The idea that had come to Isaac Fleming the morning before was so simple, yet so striking, that it was – the people in the room knew it as soon as they saw it – an instant classic. It was not one cake but four, each a little smaller than the last, encased in hard white icing and arranged, one on top of another, in tiers supported by little wooden classical pillars, also coated with icing. It was, as near as a cake could be, an exact replica of the spire of Wren’s St Bride’s. No such cake had ever been seen before. No wedding would ever be complete again without one. The guests broke into applause.

And their hostess was so pleased that she very nearly remembered to pay the baker, the next day, before she left the country.

She might, however, have been a little less pleased by an interview which took place at the corner of the street, at the moment when the applause was breaking out. It was between Harry Dogget, and the new Earl of St James.

“Everything all right, then?” the elder genially enquired.

“It’s amazin’. But you have to be awfully clean and they make me wear shoes. In summer! That’s ’orrible.”

“Never mind.”

“They’re going to make me read an’ write.”

“Won’t do you no ’arm.”

The boy was thoughtful. “Just one thing, Dad.”

“What?”

“Well, ’bout a year ago, when me mum was drunk, she said something about me an’ Sep.”

“Oh, yes?”

“She told me you found Sep by Seven Dials.”

“Maybe I did.”

“Well, if it was him you found and not me, then what’m I doing here?”

“Fate,” said Harry Dogget cheerfully. He considered a moment. “See, it was you that went into the house and tried to steal a shilling, right?” Sam nodded. “So it was you they found.”

“But I’m your son, aren’t I?”

“’Course you are.”

“And Sep’s not.”

“Ah. Now that,” said Harry, with impeccable logic, “is something we don’t know. When I found him, I reckoned he was mine. They lost one like him, so they say. Come to think of it,” he added helpfully, “maybe he don’t really belong to neither of us. But it don’t signify now. What I do know is,” said Harry Dogget emphatically, “that you, my son, have just got a bit of a leg up in the world.”

“I’m a lord,” the boy confessed.

At this revelation his father laughed so hard that he had to hold on to a nearby railing.

“It don’t feel right,” the boy complained.

“Look,” his father said firmly. “Use your loaf. You want to live all your life in the bread and butter? Look at this ’ouse. ’Er ladyship says you’re ’er Bath bun. You’d better keep quiet and be glad of it. Don’t you want to be a lord?” he demanded.

“It ain’t so bad,” Sam admitted. “You should see the food. Not a bleeding oyster in sight.”

“Well, then,” his father declared. “Have a good life. If you get in trouble you know where to find me, but if you give this lot up I’ll take a strap to your backside till you’ll wish you was a lord again.”

“All right.” He paused. “Dad.”

“What?”

“Tell Sep he can have all my savings.”

His father nodded.

“Goodbye, Sam.” And the costermonger went off, whistling a merry tune.

It was the subject of fashionable mourning which lasted fully a day, when Mrs Meredith, formerly Lady St James, died in childbirth the following year. Her husband, though he married again, continued to act as guardian to the young Earl of St James, which obligation he carried out fully and faithfully, taking only a perfectly proper fee from the estate for his trouble. The young earl was very fond of him. Those who remembered the old earl, however, would remark that the son was a much more amusing fellow than his father.

Sep Dogget, who had indeed been born Lord Bocton, was happy as a fireman, and, as he never realized he was owed a legacy, never missed it.

But the greatest legacy, perhaps, was that of Isaac Fleming, whose invention brought him fame and wealth, and a fine, bow-fronted shop – though still in Fleet Street – and whose wedding cakes will continue as long as there are weddings.

LAVENDER HILL

1819

Soon, he thought, he would be in paradise.

As the Dover to London stagecoach came over the long, straight drag of Shooters Hill, the young man sitting up on the box had to wipe the dust from his spectacles twice. He was anxious not to miss anything. On his head was a large cloth cap with a peak; a woollen scarf flapped loosely round his neck. Eager, excited, eighteen-year-old Eugene Penny was making his first entry into London.

Just as they reached the end of Shooters Hill and saw the metropolis laid out below them, his expression changed first to one of surprise, and then, as they descended the slope and the afternoon suddenly grew darker, to one of horror.

“This is London?” he cried. And the coachman laughed.

If those who seek patterns in history were to look for a time when civilization moved beyond the glories of ancient Rome, then in the English-speaking world, they would surely have to choose the reign of King George III. His was a long reign which lasted, nominally – since the poor king, who suffered from porphyria, was declared mentally incapable for extensive periods – from 1760 to 1820; and it spanned two epic events.

Nothing could have been more Roman than the character of the thirteen American colonies who had proclaimed their independence from the British monarchy in 1776. Even those states which had begun as religious refuges had, by then, developed into societies not unlike those of the city states of independent farmers and merchants which formed the nucleus of the early power of Rome. Stoic General Washington with his patrician views, his country villa at Mount Vernon and his million acres of land behaved not unlike a Roman noble. The framers of the Constitution, with its elected Congress and its élite Senate, too were mostly men steeped in the classics. Most of the new American states even repeated the practice of the Roman republic with their massive use of slaves.

As for the great cataclysm of the French Revolution a dozen years later, it openly proclaimed itself to be Roman. Inspired by the Enlightenment – the triumph of classical reason over what was seen as the medieval tyranny and superstition of a Catholic monarchy – the revolutionaries quickly adopted every attribute of the ancient Roman age. The king’s subjects were called ‘citizens’ like Roman freemen. Liberty, equality and the brotherhood of man soon found their new champion in Napoleon who made his armies march under Roman eagles, who gave France and much of Europe a system of Roman law, and whose favoured artists, furniture makers and artisans developed the ‘Empire’ style, inspired in every detail by models of imperial Rome.

On the island of Britain, however, the re-emergence of the Roman world was more appropriately measured in pragmatic ways. Before the reign of George III, to be sure, the splendid classical squares of London and the Palladian country houses of the aristocracy had probably surpassed those of Roman Britain. During it, although admittedly such amenities as public baths and central heating still had to be introduced, the Roman feature that had done most to bring order to the barbarian world began at last to reappear: the system of roads.