Matters began to improve a little when the spring arrived, for that season brought chill winds and sharp showers and a renewed threat of invasion, with British frigates prowling the Channel and spies returning with reports of huge troop movements in Boulogne.
‘’Tis all good for trade,’ Nan said, reading the latest reports in The Times. But not good enough. What with the property tax and the rising cost of paper, her profits were still only marginal, and there were more debts to pay off than she could bear to think about. ‘Would there were more papers for me to sell.’
And suddenly, one blustery March morning, there were.
She and Thiss arrived in Printing House Square to find the young Mr Walter tousled with excitement.
‘My dear Mrs Easter,’ he said, rushing to assist her from the pony-cart. ‘Come in! Come in! The steam press is arrived. Oh, what a day this has been! I cannot tell you how thrilling.’ His hair was standing on end and he was shaking with agitation. ‘’Tis the very latest, a Koenig and Bauer. ’Twill print two thousand sheets in an hour. Think of it! What a difference, eh? Two thousand, and yesterday we could only manage a mere two hundred and fifty. I could double the size of the paper. There is quite enough news to fill such an increase. I shall send out correspondents to all the major cities in the country. Oh, I cannot tell you what this will mean.’
Nan already knew exactly what it would mean, and exactly what she intended to do about it. Her trade could increase tenfold with such production. But with a little daring her profits could increase even further. Now at least there was a chance to change her fortunes. She followed Mr Walter into the print-room, gathering her wits and her energies.
The new machine was squatting in the middle of the room like some ungainly black beast, smelling of oil. It was enormous and uncompromising and modern, and it made the wooden hand-press look tatty and old-fashioned. Nan was very impressed by it. There was no question about the change and power it would bring. Two thousand papers in an hour were even more than she’d been calculating for. The mere thought of it excited her.
‘When would you start to print with this machine?’ she asked.
‘Next Monday, Mrs Easter. Next Monday. Just think of it.’ He plunged both hands into his hair and tugged at it, as though he were trying to lift himself off the ground in his rapture.
‘How many copies do you intend to print?’
The question sobered him. ‘Well now, as to that,’ he said. ‘I intend to double my numbers to five hundred at first, and see how they sell. Then I shall gradually increase, if there is demand.’
She had forseen his caution. ‘How if I were to offer to buy all two thousand copies every day starting on Monday?’
He was instantly interested. ‘Could you withstand such a loss?’
She had no intention of making a loss. ‘If you will grant me sole rights to buy your papers,’ she said, ‘and we can fix an adequate price for ’em, I will take two thousand copies every day, and more when there is news to warrant it.’
‘You have the means to distribute?’
‘’Course,’ she said, cheerfully, ignoring Thiss’ surprise. ‘Is’t a bargain?’
‘How of the price?’
‘35 per cent of the cover price, which I would advise you to maintain,’ she said at once, having considered that beforehand too.
Mr Walter took a notebook from the pocket of his jacket and a pencil from behind his ear, and did a few rapid calculations, using the side of his shining machine as an easel. ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding with satisfaction. ‘I do believe we have a bargain.’
They had, and it turned out to be an extremely profitable one.
‘Drive straight to the shop,’ Nan instructed when they left Printing House Square. ‘Matthew will need to bestir himself this morning and take this batch to be stamped. We have other matters to attend to.’
‘You take the cake, mum,’ Thiss said. ‘Blessed if yer don’t. Where we goin’ ter store all that lot? Two thousand copies mum, ’tis a mortal pile a’ paper.’
‘Aha!’ his mistress said, face ablaze with devilment, ‘I know just the place. I’ve had my eye on un for weeks, so I have, just biding the moment. ’Tis at the other end of the Strand and just a few doors from Somerset House, which will be handy for stamping, you’ll allow, and on top of that ’tis right bang opposite the Bull and Mouth. Just think of all the trade a-rolling in through those doors! And no mere shop neither! Hasten you up! We’ve work to do.’
Half an hour later, when they’d collected Mr Teshmaker and given poor Matthew his new instructions, they struggled back along the crowded Strand to their new premises, and Thiss could see what she meant by no mere shop. The ground floor of this building was more like four shops rolled into one, and above them four further storeys gave ample room for storage and offices and reading-rooms and a great deal more besides. He stared up at it in amazement at her daring.
‘You’d need a fortune ter rent a place like that,’ he said.
‘A fortune,’ she told him, jumping out of the cart, ‘is what I intend to make, Mr Thistlethwaite. And to make a fortune, you spend one. I mean to have a shop in every main thoroughfare, where the world and his wife may come and buy. I tell you, Thiss, the old days are over. There will be no more wandering the streets hoping to sell the odd paper or two. Now we shall deliver to the door or sell over the counter and we shall sell thousands. Thousands, I tell you.’ Her face was glowing with excitement, her wide mouth spread in a smile of triumph. ‘I been a-waiting for this for a mighty long time. Now drive me to Mr Tewson’s bank.’
Mr Tewson was horrified by her plans. ‘But you have no capital, Mrs Easter,’ he pointed out. ‘This loan you require is preposterous.’
‘This loan I require,’ she said firmly, ‘will earn you a prodigious return, Mr Tewson. I am willing to pay you over the odds.’
‘How far over the odds, as you put it, if I may make so bold as to inquire?’
I have hooked my fish, Nan thought. She could almost see the calculations going on behind the banker’s bland expression.
‘Two per cent,’ she said. It was a deal too much but she was so certain of success.
So the loan was granted.
Six new shops were rented in as many days, and twelve assistants hired to man them, and a fleet of carts acquired and painted in her green-and-gold livery ready to carry the papers from place to place. The new headquarters were furnished and decorated, with shelves in the storehouse and chairs in the reading-room, and the green-and-yellow sign painted boldly above all four doors.
And Mr Walter’s first two thousand arrived from his new steam press, bailed and stamped and ready for sale on the day the famous spy L’Ami sent word that Napoleon had ordered his ships to break through the British blockade.
It was terrifying news, for it meant that the long-dreaded invasion could happen at any time. By patrolling the Channel and Spanish coast, Nelson and the British fleet had kept all French and Spanish men o’ war pinned in harbour for the past two years, but as everybody knew there were many harbours and it took constant watchfulness. If the French Admiral Ganteaume really had been ordered out of Brest with his twenty-one ships of the line and heaven only knows how many frigates, and Admiral Villeneuve were to break out of Toulon, with all his enormous fleet, they could be sailing up the Channel within days. And then Napoleon, who had been waiting malevolently at Boulogne for so long with his sixty thousand highly-trained troops and great guns and the flat-bottomed boats to carry them across, would most certainly invade, just as he’d been threatening for years. It was the most alarming news since the war began, and it sold Nan’s entire purchase within half an hour of its delivery to her shops.
During the next few weeks the rumours intensified. In April news came through that Admiral Villeneuve had indeed broken out of Toulon and that a huge French fleet was now assembling in the West Indies. Fifty ships of the line, hundreds of frigates, more than even Nelson could withstand. The numbers increased with the
panic. Soon the Morning Chronicle was reporting, ‘Nobody in England can sleep in peace at night.’ And all along the south coast the troops were on constant alert.
It was the most anxious summer anyone could remember, and as anxiety is always frantic for the latest information, Nan’s newspaper shops were besieged, morning and evening. The Times was the most popular and frequently read of all the news-sheets in London, a fact which Mr Walter’s competitors were not slow to appreciate. Soon his revolutionary presses were followed by others at the Morning Chronicle, the Morning Post, the Observer and even the Daily Advertiser. Other, lesser news-shops began to appear too, but they were never serious rivals to Nan, since she held the monopoly on The Times and very quickly bought up first options on all the other major newspapers too, so that her competitors had to come to her warehouse for supplies and pay her price, whatever it was. And it was often very high indeed.
Despite the panic all around her, Nan was too busy to be afraid. By the end of June she had fifteen more shops, by the end of July twenty-two, and her sales had increased by far more than the tenfold she had originally estimated. ‘If Boney comes,’ she said to Calverley when he got back from the Horncastle Fair, ‘he will find me a rich woman, so he will.’
It was just like her, Calverley thought, to say ‘if Boney comes’ when everybody else was saying ‘when’. ‘There’s a great demand for horses too, I can tell ’ee,’ he said. ‘Prices were up by more than a quarter at Horncastle Fair.’
‘Did you get what you went for?’
‘Aye. I did.’
‘And extra pay to boot, I’ll wager.’
‘Aye. I did.’
It was a rich life, despite the panic.
But then a new rumour began that Lord Nelson had sailed after Villeneuve to the West Indies and that the Channel was undefended. So even when the Channel grew choppy with storms, the fear of invasion was still acute. People living along the exposed south coast felt vulnerable without the certainty that their hero was protecting them.
‘If only them pesky Frenchies would stand and fight,’ Thiss said, echoing the general sentiment. ‘Lord Nelson ‘ud soon show ’em what’s what if it come to a battle.’
‘Cowards,’ Mrs Pennington said, narrowing her little eyes malevolently. ‘Cowards to a man. They may be good at terrorizing women and children. That I don’t doubt. That I will allow. But when it comes to blood and steel, that’s quite another story.’ And she gave such a derisive sniff that her long nose looked as though it was going to explode.
And then in August Nelson suddenly returned to England. ‘Which,’ as Mr Walter pointed out both privately to his friends and publicly in editorials, ‘he would hardly have done had there been any immediate danger.’ He spent a month at Merton with Lady Hamilton and their little daughter, and made frequent visits to London, where he was cheered wherever he went. And then equally suddenly he was gone again. London was full of rumours that the French fleet had gathered in Cadiz and that Nelson, who had sailed from Portsmouth in his flag ship Victory, was off to join the British fleet which was lying in wait for their enemies just off the Spanish shore.
And after that, as was the way once a fleet was at sea, there was no news at all. The armies defending the coast remained on alert. The famous spy L’Ami sent no reports. And there was only speculation to sell newspapers. But by then the mixture of excitement and fear was so intense, that the mere words ‘Invasion’ or ‘Nelson’ or ‘British Fleet’ in bold black print on a poster was enough to empty the shop of news-sheets.
And finally on November 5th, news did come. And thrilling, heart-rending, marvellous, terrible news it was.
Nan could see that something important had happened the minute she set foot inside Printing House Square, for the place was in an uproar, with apprentices in tears and the printers, who were usually the most phlegmatic of men, actually running from place to place.
Mr Walter stood in the middle of the storm, looking more dishevelled than she’d ever seen him, with one pocket hanging from his jacket by a thread and ink stains spotting his cravat and his hair standing on end.
‘There has been a battle, at last,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Off Cape Trafalgar, a glorious victory, the French and Spanish fleets quite overwhelmed, most of their ships captured, a glorious victory. But dearly bought, I fear, oh most dearly bought. Poor Lord Nelson is dead. The great, gallant Nelson. I had it post haste from the Admiralty at four o’clock this morning from dispatches brought by a lieutenant from the schooner Pickle. Arrived at the Admiralty at one in the morning so he did, and the First Lord in bed. They have sent to Windsor to tell the King. Oh, glorious, terrible news.’
Such longed-for success and such awful tragedy, all at one and the same time, was too much to endure. Nan was struck dumb by it. How could such a hero be dead? It was unthinkable.
‘We are all safe from invasion now,’ Mr Walter said in an attempt to comfort. ‘Without a fleet Napoleon would never dare to cross the Channel.’
‘Lord Nelson dead!’ Nan grieved, trying to comprehend it. She stood beside Mr Walter’s packing table and read his editorial idly, for want of something better to do, since a copy of that morning’s paper lay open just underneath her fingers. ‘We know not whether we should mourn or rejoice. The country has gained the most splendid and decisive victory that has ever graced the annals of England: but it has been dearly purchased. The great and gallant Nelson is no more.’ And as she read the words, she realized how such news would sell. ‘Print you treble the number this morning,’ she instructed. ‘I will take all of ’em.’
They sold so well that soon, to her great annoyance, pirate copies of The Times were being run off and sold on the streets. And the next day when all flags were flying at half mast and every window in the City of London was draped in purple and black, Mr Walter printed the full text of Admiral Collingwood’s heart-broken dispatch, and the demand was even greater. For as the Chronicle said, ‘If ever there was a hero who merited the honour of a public funeral, it is the pious, the noble and the gallant NELSON, the darling of the British Navy whose death has plunged a whole nation into the deepest grief.’
‘Since the new printing machines came to London, there en’t a single piece of news that en’t made me rich,’ Nan confided to her old friend Sophie. ‘And the more terrible the news the greater the profit on it.’
‘’Tis the saddest world,’ Sophie said mournfully. ‘How we shall fare without Lord Nelson I cannot imagine.’
‘His funeral procession will pass right underneath my windows in the Strand,’ Nan said, practical as ever. ‘Would you care to join me there, my dear? ’Twill be an uncommon fine spectacle.’
And so it was. The column of mourners was so long that the head of it had reached St Paul’s before the end set out from Whitehall. There was the Prince of Wales in a fine, sober chariot and scores of noblemen looking suitably sad, and ministers and admirals and generals a-plenty, important as peacocks in their dazzling uniforms. And in the middle of it all a plain black funeral car escorted by two lines of ordinary sailors, in tarred hats and sailcloth trousers and stained striped shirts, walking with the swaggering roll of the seafaring man, some scarred, some weeping and all immensely proud.
Nan took her entire household to the Strand to watch the procession, even poor, batty old Mr Dibkins, ‘It being history, the like of which you en’t never likely to see again’, and Thiss held little Pollyanna up on the window sill to see it all, and Bessie wept tears of pride, clinging to Annie’s arm, and Billy and Johnnie watched awestruck.
But Nan was thinking how extraordinary it was that this great victory and this great man’s death had made her a rich woman. For she was. A very rich woman. And only a few months ago she’d been scrimping and saving. Her accounts had now become so complicated that she had handed them over in their entirety to Mr Teshmaker, but his weekly reports showed that her profits were increasing by the day. And this funeral would increase them even further. A rich woman. A very rich woma
n.
Standing beside her, Calverley Leigh was thinking much the same thing. He had noticed the expensive cloth of her new coat, and how many new gowns she’d had made that summer, and what a splendid necklace she wore about her throat, pearls and diamonds, no less. And it occurred to him that he might, he just might, be standing right beside the rich heiress he’d been hoping to find for so long. How if his dear Nan turned out to be his rich wife too? ’Twas a tempting idea in all conscience.
She turned and smiled at him, and the diamonds at her throat were brighter than her eyes.
Chapter Thirty-one
Whether or not he had found his rich wife, there was no doubt that travelling the country as an agent for Mr Chaplin was very much to Calverley’s liking. Although he missed the easy companionship of the regiment there were plenty of new friends among coachmen and horse traders. And on top of that there was the added pleasure of a return to the chase.
There were pretty girls a-plenty in every town he visited, and he was far enough from Nan and Chelsea to flirt without fear of discovery, to stay just long enough to achieve a conquest should he desire it, and still be able to escape the clinging that so often followed. So he rapidly established himself as a Romeo again. He might have lost the first, fresh charm of his youth but he was still deucedly handsome, damme if he wasn’t, and a dog with the ladies, whether they were his delicious new light o’ loves or his old passionate Nan.
He and his old passionate Nan had settled into an easy life as established lovers that suited them both rather well. His frequent travelling kept them apart just long enough to give their relationship an edge and prevent them from getting bored with each other, and her increasing wealth gave them the creature comforts they both enjoyed.
In that first winter, she bought him into one of the lesser gentlemen’s clubs, Goosegogs in Jermyn Street, where he soon felt marvellously at home. It was one of the smaller and less prestigious establishments and not to be compared with White’s or Watier’s where the dandies and the gentlemen of quality foregathered, but the atmosphere was just right for him, raffish and mocking and light-hearted. A man could drink himself speechless if he wished or sit up all night at the gaming table or brag without fear of correction or tell risqué stories or give the eye to the young women in the street outside. And the port was excellent.
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