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.
In Roman times roads had crossed the island like an iron framework. Then, neglected and overgrown, they had mostly been forgotten. Through the long centuries of the dark ages to the modern Stuarts and early Hanoverians, the roads of England were little more than prehistoric tracks and rutted Saxon lanes. In the case of the old Kent road from Dover and Canterbury along which young Eugene Penny had just travelled, the Roman road had remained in use, but its metalled surface lay buried so deep that even it appeared as nothing more than a cart track.
All that had now changed. The turnpike roads of the late eighteenth century were owned by private trusts and joint stock companies and run for profit, but with such success that within a generation they had covered much of
the country. Sometimes they followed a straight Roman route, more often a curving Saxon path. Their surfaces were nothing like as sophisticated as those of the ancient world, but smooth and hard enough to permit a carriage to maintain a brisk and constant pace. Journeys that once took a day or two were now accomplished in hours. Entrepreneurs with fleets of express coaches rushed both mail and people out from London coaching inns to the furthest parts of the country. Suddenly the swelling capital was accessible to every town in the kingdom. It was, truly, both the return of Rome and the beginning of the modern age.
Yet the prospect that now greeted young Eugene’s eyes was not at all what he had expected.
The metropolis of London had continued to grow during George III’s reign, but it had done so mainly north of the River Thames. On the south bank, Southwark had grown, but only in a modest fashion. West of Southwark, though lines of houses were growing along the roads that led to Westminster Bridge, the great parish of Lambeth was still mainly orchard, market garden and field, with a scattering of timber yards along the waterfront; while further upriver, the old villages of Battersea and Clapham had only suffered the addition of some handsome villas and gardens belonging to prosperous merchants and gentlemen. Below Southwark, the riverside areas of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe were turning dingy with acres of crumpled brick housing; yet even this soon gave way to open marshland. Further downstream, the village of Greenwich with its huge white palaces was hardly altered at all.
But across the Thames, northwards, westwards, eastwards, the mighty city was spreading like a leviathan. Or so Eugene had heard. For he now encountered a problem which neither Stuart nor Tudor, nor even Roman had ever known. The city was invisible.
“That, sir,” the coachman said, “is a London fog.”
It lay over the city like a dark grey pall. Judging by its hazy edges, it seemed to Eugene that the great cloud of dirt was spreading outwards; and indeed as they came down the old Kent road it came out to meet them. By the time they entered Southwark borough, the sky was dark and the houses were becoming indistinct in an oily, greenish, mist through which their lights could only signal with an orange glow. By the time they reached the High Street, the coach had slowed and Eugene could not even see the heads of the leading horses. When they turned into the courtyard of the George Inn for all he knew he could have been entering the gateway to hell itself.
The boat made a soft, grating sound as it emerged from the fog and came to rest on the mud below the stairs on the river’s northern bank. One of the men climbed out and turned round to take his leave of the other who remained in the boat, his strange tall hat slouched on his head, his gnarled hands resting on the oars.
“Goodbye Silas,” the standing figure said softly.
The other, for a moment, made no response; when he did, his voice was deep as the river, thick as the fog that shrouded it. “What’ll you call her?”
“The baby? Lucy.” His wife had chosen the name. He liked it.
“So you don’t want to join me, Will?”
“I don’t like what you do.”
“You ain’t getting rich yourself, are you?”
“I know.”
Silas spat between his feet, and began to shove off. “You’ll never go nowhere,” he grunted, and a moment later he and his dirty old boat were swallowed up in the mist.
But I still wouldn’t care to go where you’re surely going, William Dogget thought, as he started to make his way home.
Penny’s instructions from his father had been specific: as soon as he arrived in London, he was to go at once to the house of his godfather, Jeremy Fleming. But, judging that the fog made this impossible at present, Eugene decided to spend the night at the inn. He was cheerful enough. This inconvenience, he told himself, would only delay the start of his new life by a few hours.
What Eugene did not yet realize was that the fog which covered London was an integral part of the new life he was seeking. For no sooner had England resumed the standards of its Roman past than it had forged ahead into the great expansion called the Industrial Revolution.
It is often supposed that Britain’s Industrial Revolution was a matter of huge factories manned by armies of the oppressed; and it is true that in the north and Midlands big iron foundries, steam-powered cotton mills, and coal mines which sent children underground did exist. But in reality, the Industrial Revolution was led by England’s traditional woollen cloth trade and followed by cheap manufactured cottons. Though mechanical spinning and weaving made vast expansion possible, this manufacturing was mostly carried out by small masters with modest works and sweatshops. But they all used coal: and the volume of smoke and soot from the city’s now myriad fires became so great that in the right atmospheric conditions its dark vapours settled like a blanket, trapping even more fumes below; and then, as a mist arose, thickened into this choking, impenetrable horror in which men muffled their faces and a thief could walk beside you a hundred paces unseen. So was born the ‘pea-souper’, or London fog.
In the warm glow of the George’s main parlour, Eugene could forget about the evil presence of the fog outside. The innkeeper brought him a steak and kidney pie and a bottle of porter, as dark beer was often called, and chatted to him from time to time. Eugene looked eagerly at the faces around him. Being a coaching inn, there were all kinds of travellers there – coachmen in their heavy coats, merchants, a brace of lawyers, a clergyman, a gentleman returning to the country, together with numerous locals, mostly shopkeepers.
It was about nine o’clock that the curious figure entered. He came in alone and ordered a tankard of porter, carrying it silently to a corner of the room where he sat by himself. There was a momentary hush as he entered. The smooth surface of conversation seemed to open, and people edged away from him; then it closed as quickly as possible in his wake. He was somewhat shorter than most men, but very heavy-set and he moved with a surly slowness. His big, heavy coat was of an indeterminate colour; and on his head he wore a high, black and shapeless woollen hat folded into a rim which touched his thick, black eyebrows. His eyes were big and angry; under them, the skin gathered into dark rings. The overall effect was one of deepset menace. And whether it was the pallor of his skin, or the strange, webbed hand which held the tankard, it seemed to Eugene as if this apparition had emerged from the depths of the dark and foggy river itself.
“Who is that?” he enquired of the innkeeper.
“That?” the man replied, with a look of disgust. “He is called Silas Dogget.”
“What does he do?” Penny asked.
“You don’t want to know,” the other answered, and would say no more.
Not long afterwards, Eugene retired to bed, glad to think that with any luck he would never see Silas Dogget again.
It looked as if a riot might begin.
The wind had got up at dawn and blown the London fog away; only a tiny residue of grime over the city was left to mark its passing. The day was bright with a tingling breeze, and the fair weather no doubt encouraged the crowd of four hundred people who were gathered in front of the handsome house in Fitzroy Square to hear the figure standing in the open upstairs window proclaim his shocking message.
“Do we believe,” he cried out, “in the Brotherhood of Man?” The crowd signified, with a roar, that it did. “Do you acknowledge –” this last word, said with particular emphasis, was Zachary Carpenter’s trademark as an orator – “I say, do you acknowledge that every man born has rights? Isn’t that common sense? Aren’t these the Rights of Man?” As a murmur of recognition greeted this, he positively exploded: “And do those inalienable rights not include,” he hammered the next words out like a drumbeat: “No taxation without re-pre-sent-a-tion?” And his small stout body and large round head fairly bounced.
It might seem strange that these doctrines which came straight from the writings of Tom Paine, the great propagandist of the American Revolution, should be proclaimed in a London street. Yet medieval Englishmen had said much the same thi
ng in the days of Wat Tyler’s revolt and plenty of men nowadays possessed grandfathers who could remember old Levellers from the days of England’s Civil War. The free House of Commons, the Puritans, the Roundheads, the now independent Americans and the radical English were all different streams that had branched out from the same old river of freedom. King George III might have been furious with the Americans for breaking away, but many of his ordinary subjects had read Paine and sympathized with the plucky colonists.
“Did I make a mistake,” Zachary now asked the crowd, “or did Parliament abolish slavery?”
The crowd assured him that this was correct. Slavery had been outlawed within England since 1772, and, thanks to the efforts of reformers like the great William Wilberforce, the slave trade had more recently been forbidden even in Britain’s far-flung possessions overseas.
“Are you or are you not free-born Englishmen?”
The crowd let him know, with another roar, that they were as English as roast beef.
“Then why is it,” he cried, “that here, in this parish of St Pancras, we are treated no better than slaves? Why are free men trampled by a tyranny? Do you acknowledge that this is so?”
They did. They did with a bellow that shook Fitzroy Square.
Carpenter’s accusation was absolutely true. Even now, the old controversy over who should control the parish vestry, which had so infuriated Gideon Carpenter back in the days of King Charles, had still not been settled. Although the ancient area of the twenty-five city wards was still ruled by the mayor, aldermen and the now largely ornamental guilds, the vast and spreading metropolis outside had no central authority. Peace was preserved, streets paved, the sick and the poor were provided for by the parish. The parish built and organized. And of course to pay for it, the parish also taxed.
The parish of St Pancras was huge. Its base extended westwards from Holborn for over a mile; but from this base it swept up through city streets, then suburbs, then open field and sprawling village all the way to the hills of Hampstead and Highgate four miles to the north. Within this great domain now lived some sixty thousand souls, who were ruled by the parish vestry.
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