London (158 page)

At the wharf it did not take Barnikel long to explain. Sadly the old mariner told him how, trying to outstrip the
Cutty Sark
, he had got caught in a storm, lost a mast and had to put in to a South American port for a refit. “We were ahead of her once,” he said defensively. And glancing across to where the sleek, three-masted
Cutty Sark
lay quietly at her moorings he sighed. “I know it now if I didn’t before: no vessel afloat will ever catch that one.”

“She’s ruined me,” the earl said bleakly, and left.

There was really nothing left for him to do now, he reflected as the cab took him slowly home. The Regent’s Park house would have to go of course. It was far too expensive. The thought of sharing a smaller house with Lady Muriel was not a happy one, however. Perhaps, he reflected, he should go to live in France. The English pound went a long way on the Continent and many an English gentleman was able to keep up appearances in France or Italy when they might have been severely embarrassed back at home.

In a grim but thoughtful mood he arrived back at the house, to be greeted with the news, unusual but not unwelcome, that his half-sister had gone out. “She didn’t say when she was returning, my lord,” the butler added.

Glad of some time to be alone with his thoughts, St James went upstairs to his library, and sat down in the big armchair.

It was some minutes before he noticed something odd. The door to the closet where the safe was had been left ajar. He got up slowly and went to close it. But as he did so, with a frown of surprise, he noticed that the safe was open. It was also empty.

“The jewels!” he cried. How had a thief got in? He was rushing to summon the butler when he saw his keys on the library table. Beside them was a single sheet of white paper on which, scrawled in his sister’s large and childish hand, were just three words: I HAVE GONE.

With a howl of bitter rage, the poor Earl of St James cursed them all. He damned Mabel, and Nancy, and Gorham Dogget, and Barnikel.

“And damn you, too!” he cried. “You cursed
Cutty Sark
!”

It was just as well that the earl did not witness the scene which took place when Barnikel returned to his wife Charlotte at Camberwell that evening. After she had fed him, and made him his favourite grog, and sat him very comfortably down by the fireside, and affectionately stroked his hoary old beard, she remarked: “I’m sorry it didn’t go better, but there’s one compensation.”

“What’s that?”

“We made a tidy bit of money.”

“How do you mean?”

“I put a bet on the race. Well, I had our son do it for me.”

“You bet on me? Like St James?”

“No, dear. I bet on the
Cutty Sark
.”

“You bet against your own husband, woman?”

“Well, somebody had to. I knew you couldn’t win. The
Cutty Sark
had too much sail.” She smiled. “We made a thousand pounds!”

After a long pause, Captain Barnikel started to laugh into his grog. “You’re as bad as your old Guv’nor sometimes!” he chuckled.

“I hope,” she said, “I am.”

The arrangement agreed between Esther Silversleeves and Lucy was very simple. As soon as they had both recovered their composure, Esther found that she could think with a clarity she had not known she possessed.

“You are sure the girl knows nothing?” she asked Lucy.

“Nothing at all,” Lucy promised.

“Then tell her that you found me through an agency,” Esther ordered. “But you must tell her that since my own maiden name happened to be the same as yours, I do not think it appropriate that she should be a Dogget. She will have to change it.” She considered. “Let her be Ducket. That will do.”

Lucy was perfectly agreeable to this. But if she had any misunderstanding about the arrangement, it was entirely dispelled when Esther declared with a vehemence that was quite frightening: “If ever, however, there is any word, any
hint
about any relationship to my father or about . . . the past, then she will be out on the street within the hour, and without a reference. Those are my conditions.” Only after Lucy had promised her faithfully they should be met, did Esther’s manner relent again. “By the way, what is her name?” she asked.

“Jenny.”

So early in February 1890 Jenny Ducket, as she was now called, came to train as a housemaid for Mrs Silversleeves.

The spring of 1890 should have been a time of unparalleled joy in the household of Edward and Mary Anne Bull. In late March, Edward announced a breathtaking piece of news.

“The Earl of St James is selling his Bocton estate in Kent,” he told the assembled family at dinner. “And I am buying it, lock, stock and barrel! We could move in tomorrow.” He smiled at them all. “There’s a deer park and a fine view. I think you’ll like it.” And then with a grin at his son. “As you’ve become such a gentleman, I should think it will suit you rather well.”

“Us too!” cried two of his daughters. Eligible young men liked girls whose fathers had a place in the country. Only Violet did not trouble to give more than a vague smile of approval.

In recent weeks, Violet had taken to going to lectures. At first her mother had insisted upon accompanying her, but after three or four long and tedious afternoons at the Royal Academy or some place associated with the university, she had given up and allowed the girl to go to these dull but respectable affairs on her own. The only thing she wondered was where this was intended to lead. “I suspect,” she confided to Edward, “she’s up to something.”

In the first week of April Violet came into her room one evening and closed the door behind her.

“Mother,” she said calmly, “I think there’s something you should know.”

“If this is to do with university. . .” Mary Anne began wearily.

“It isn’t.” She paused. “I’m going to marry Colonel Meredith.” And then she had the impudence to smile.

For perhaps a minute Mary Anne was not able to speak. “But . . . you can’t!” she stuttered at last.

“Yes, I can.”

“You aren’t of age. Your father would forbid it.”

“I’m nearly of age. Anyway, I could always elope if you force me to. There’s nothing, actually, that anyone could do about it.”

“But you hardly know him! How. . . .”

“I went to the poetry reading at Hatchards, mother. The one you didn’t go to. I’ve been seeing him at least two days a week ever since.”

“The lectures. . . .”

“Exactly. Though we do go to lectures, or galleries. Concerts too.”

“But you should be marrying a young man! Why, even university would be better than this.”

“He is the most educated and the most interesting man I shall ever meet in my life.”

“He’s done this behind our back. He has never dared come to see your father.”

“He will. Tomorrow.”

“Your father will turn him out of the house.”

“I doubt it. Colonel Meredith is rich and a gentleman. Papa will be quite glad to have me off his hands. If not,” Violet added coolly, “I’ll make a scandal. He’d hate that.”

“But, child,” Mary Anne wailed. “Think of his age. It’s unnatural. A man of that age. . . .”

“I love him! We are passionately in love.”

At the word “passionately”, Mary Anne gave a little involuntary start, then, suddenly feeling very ill she looked at the girl, full in the face. “Surely,” her voice was husky, “you don’t mean. . . .”

“I shouldn’t tell you if it were so,” the girl said blandly. “But after all, mother, one thing is certain anyway.
You
can’t have him.”

THE SUFFRAGETTE

1908

Young Henry Meredith was weeping. He had just been soundly beaten. The fact that Mr Silversleeves, housemaster and teacher of mathematics, was a relation had not made any difference. Nor was his punishment unusual. The cane, the birch and the strap were liberally used in England, America and many other countries. The reason for his punishment hardly mattered. While Eton and one or two other schools might promote a more individualist ethos, Charterhouse was one of the broad swathe of public schools whose principal mission was to knock the nonsense out of their charges. They often failed, but they did their best, and Silversleeves was only doing his duty, as both he and young Meredith knew.

There was also another possible reason for the boy’s misery. He was ravenously hungry.

The Charterhouse school had started in 1614, some seventy years after the last monks had been ejected from the site by Henry VIII. More recently, the school had moved to a new location, thirty miles south-west of London. It was a fine old school and parents paid good money to send their sons there. Yet strangely, they either did not know or did not think it mattered that, once there, the children they undoubtedly loved were given almost nothing to eat. Thick slices of bread thinly buttered, stew or gruel in tiny amounts, cabbage boiled until it was bleached, wads of almost inedible suet pudding – this was the fare of privileged schoolboys. “Mustn’t spoil them. Boys should be brought up hard.” The survivors would rule the empire. Had it not been for hampers sent by his mother, Meredith could almost have starved.

But as he returned to his hard bench in the classroom and the desk scored deep with the names of earlier sufferers, it was neither the electric pain nor the hunger pangs that caused Henry Meredith to choke back the tears. It was the article that an older boy had showed him in a newspaper that morning.

As the trap passed through the park gates at Bocton that autumn day, Violet still found it strange to think that her mother would not be there. Mary Anne had died the previous year and, of the four Dogget sisters, only Esther Silversleeves was left now.

The drive was long, and Violet nervously clutched her six-year-old daughter’s hand the whole way down. There was no going back now. I’ll hold my head high, she promised herself and gripped the child’s hand tighter as she saw her father waiting for them in front of the house.

What made it worse was that old Edward Bull had been so good to them. Because Meredith had remained so strong and slim, she had supposed he would live to a great age. He had fathered their two sons and, when just over seventy, their little daughter Helen. So when he had suddenly died three years ago she had been taken by surprise. A massive heart attack, half a day when he could not speak, a tender look, a squeeze of her hand, and he was gone, leaving less money than she had thought. They were not exactly poor, but to keep up an appropriate household and educate the children she had found that her income was a little stretched. She had been grateful when her father had stepped in to pay for the children’s schools.

For two whole hours while he walked them round the deer park and played with his granddaughter in the old walled garden Edward Bull said nothing. Only when Helen had been removed by the housekeeper and they were alone in the library did he take a folded newspaper, drop it down on the sofa beside her and remark:

“I see you’ve been talking to the Prime Minister.”

Violet waited to see whether this was the prelude to an explosion.

The subject on which she had accosted the great man was not new. Since the Great Reform Act of 1832, democracy had been marching slowly forward. Two more Acts had enfranchised first the middle, then the better-off working class. Some two thirds of all adult men in Britain could now vote – but no women.

A respectable group of ladies known as Suffragists had been quietly protesting against this injustice for forty years, but got nowhere. Five years ago a new group led by the fiery Mrs Pankhurst had appeared on the scene. “Suffragettes” these new crusaders were soon dubbed. Their motto was Deeds Not Words and they lived up to it. They began to sport their own colours – purple, white and green – on sashes, banners and posters. They held public meetings and interrupted parliamentary elections. And, with unpardonable bad manners, Edward Bull thought, they had taken to accosting politicians in the street.

A week before, two respectable-looking Edwardian ladies, wearing the large, wide-brimmed hats decorated with feathers that were fashionable and looking as if they had just come from shopping in Piccadilly, waited quietly outside the Prime Minister’s residence at 10, Downing Street. As Mr Asquith emerged, to the delight of
The Times
journalist and the photographer who had been tipped off, the two women fell into step on each side of him and stayed with him all the way down Whitehall, politely enquiring what he was doing about votes for women, until he was able to escape into the sanctuary of the Houses of Parliament. One of them was identified in the newspaper the next day as Violet.

“You’re lucky you weren’t arrested,” Bull said gently.

Edward Bull had mellowed since he came to Bocton. His sons ran the brewery now and he enjoyed the life of a country squire. He had even discovered in the manorial records that the estate had once belonged to a family called Bull. “Nothing to do with us, of course,” he had cheerfully remarked. He did not even get angry when Violet had announced her sympathy for the suffragettes, though his own attitudes had remained entirely unchanged. “Medical science has discovered that women’s brains are smaller,” he triumphantly informed her. Women should grace the home, he felt – and not only most men, but many women agreed. A women’s organisation against the franchise had been formed. Mrs Ward, a prominent novelist, wrote in a similar vein. Women would be polluted by politics. Chivalry would die. It was a curious feature of late Victorian and Edwardian life that, partly because of a revival of Arthurian knightly literature, and partly because increasing affluence was bringing leisure to larger numbers of women, even middle-class women were imagining themselves to be as delicate and pampered as eighteenth-century ladies of fashion – an idea that would have greatly puzzled their ancestors.

“This is all because I wouldn’t let you go to university,” her father concluded.

“No, papa.” Why could he never take her seriously? “Is it right that a woman can be a mayor, a nurse, a doctor, a teacher – or a good mother for that matter – yet be denied a vote? Why, things were better in the Middle Ages! Did you know that women could join the London guilds then?”