Tuppenny Times

by Beryl Kingston

  The smell of charred wood and dampness clogged the entire house. ‘Shall we ever get away from this fire?’ she said, sniffing the foul air. ‘’Tis on my hair, my skin, I know not what-all … We smell like gypsies. Oh, I never …’

  ‘The worst of it is over,’ he said, trying to put an arm around her to console her. It was a new experience for him to be comforting her. He’d wiped away a good many tears in his time, usually after seductions, and they’d all been easy enough. But he had always thought Nan too strong for tears, strong in will and mind and as determined as any man. So it was surprising and touching that she should be showing weakness now, and showing it in such a peculiar way, in quick nervous speech and jabbing darts of staccato irritability that was most unlike her usual forthright anger.

  ‘Don’t try consoling,’ she said, shaking his hand from her arm. ‘’Ten’t my style. We must decide what is to be done. There en’t time for …’

  ‘In the morning,’ he said, ‘while you attend to the stamping, I shall call in the undertakers and the builders and hire men to clean. You shan’t know the place by breakfast time.’ It really was the most extraordinary sensation to be taking charge of her like this.

  ‘Mrs Pennington is to go,’ she said, frowning at the garden.

  ‘She will.’

  ‘The boys can go to work. ’Tis high time. Idleness is bad for boys. Johnnie grows selfish with it. D’ye know what he said to me?’

  ‘No, my love. What was it he said to you?’

  But when she started to tell him, she found she had forgotten and no matter how hard she strained her mind to remember, it remained an obstinate blank. ‘He said … He said … Ah! What was it we spoke of?’

  ‘’Tis no matter. You will remember in the morning.’

  ‘’Twas a waste of time talking to Sir Osmond,’ she said abruptly. ‘Like picking up jelly with your fingers, so ’twas.’

  ‘What did he say of my commission?’ It was a daring question to ask, but perhaps the moment was right for it now.

  ‘We did not speak of it. He smiles. He denies knowledge. He speaks of nothing, I tell ’ee. Nothing.’

  He was very disappointed, but he couldn’t complain. Not now.

  ‘I shall rent a new house,’ she said, straightening her spine. ‘First thing in the morning. That’s what I’ll do. A fine new house. We can’t stay here in this filth.’

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Nan’s smart two-horse chaise cantered into Bury St Edmund’s a few yards ahead of the London stage-coach. Thiss and Nan were cock a’ hoop, for they’d been racing the larger vehicle for the last ten miles and two gentlemen riding outside had actually been laying bets against their success.

  It had been an exhilarating journey, in marvellously fine weather and with frequent stops for refreshment, so it was only right and proper that they should end with a triumph. Cheyne Row and that evil-smelling house and Mrs Pennington’s hysteria and Mr Dibkins’ terrifying body were all left far behind. She had escaped.

  The morning had started so badly, with the kitchen awash with water and Mr Dibkin’s body still horrifyingly obvious even covered by a sheet and all the dirt and damage looking worse by daylight. Nan took her entire household to breakfast at Mr Quirk’s coffee house beside the river, except Mrs Pennington of course, and while they were eating she told them her plans.

  ‘I shall rent another house,’ she said, ‘while Number 10 is being repaired. We shall all move there so soon as ’tis arranged. Meantime I should be obliged if you would clean what you can. Mrs Pennington may leave when she wishes, for the boys will not be in the house,’

  ‘Are we to assume that our schooling is now over, Mama?’ Johnnie asked.

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ she said. ‘Now you’ve to learn a trade. Arithmetic is all very well, my son, but it won’t butter no parsnips, as you will very soon discover. So soon as you’re breakfasted we shall go down to the Strand and I will introduce you to the manager there and you will start work. You’ll begin with the stamping, which is a tedious business but you’d best know about it.’

  He looked straight at her with that infuriatingly blank stare of his but he didn’t complain or argue.

  ‘Could I work in the warehouse, Mama?’ Billy asked. Those vast stacks of paper in rooms full of shelves had fascinated him ever since she bought the shop, but he’d never been allowed to explore them.

  ‘Stamping first, warehouse next,’ she promised.

  ‘I shall stay at Goosegogs for a day or two,’ Calverley said. ‘Make that my headquarters, eh. Somewhere dependable, whilst you’re a-changing the world.’

  So they all went their various ways. By nine o’clock she had rented a most prestigious house in Cheyne Walk, Mr Teshmaker was examining the agreement, the boys had finished their very first stamping, and she and Annie were being driven back to their damaged house. And quite suddenly, she knew that she didn’t want to see the place again. Not that day. She couldn’t abide it.

  ‘We will go on a jaunt,’ she said to her daughter, and even as she spoke she knew where she wanted to go. ‘I’ve a mind to visit Bury St Edmunds and buy a shop there. I was born in a village close by and I en’t seen the place in years. Are the horses fit for it, Thiss, what think ’ee?’

  ‘We’ll give ’em a run,’ Thiss said cheerfully.

  And here they were.

  ‘St Edmund’sbury!’ the coachman called to his passengers as he reined in his horses before the entrance to the Angel Inn. ‘St Edmund’sbury. Centre of the universe, so the inhabitants would have us believe, and this ’ere is the centre of the town.’

  This ’ere was the long slanting square she remembered from her childhood, built on the side of a hill just above the ruins of an old abbey and with a fine prospect of distant woods and fields, now mistily blue in the declining light of late afternoon. It was an elegant place, surrounded on three sides by fine houses, some newly built, others re-faced in the new style, and it was full of elegant people taking an afternoon stroll and meeting and greeting each other with the slow, burring speech she remembered with sudden affection.

  I shall do well in this place, she thought to herself. It had just the right sort of style. And how peaceful it was after the rush and scramble of the City. People and horses moved at a reasonable pace here, and there were no pushing crowds, even up by the Corn Exchange and Moyses Hall where the streets were many and narrow.

  The inn immediately before her was five stories tall and very grand, with a balcony above the front door and a courtyard big enough to accommodate several stage-coaches all at once beside a number of smaller private carriages. Now the cobbled space was thronged with liveried servants struggling to unload bag and baggage, and ostlers uncoupling the sweating horses.

  ‘We will settle into our rooms,’ she told Annie,’ and then we will take a short promenade before dinner. The sooner I start my search for a suitable shop the better.’

  She found six possibilities before the end of that first walk around the town, and by the time they returned to the square she had seen and dismissed two of them and made appointments to view the others the very next morning.

  ‘How wise we were to come here,’ she said to Annie as the two of them set off down the steep slope of Abbeygate Street towards Angel Hill. ‘I declare I feel quite myself again. I’ve worked up quite an appetite.’

  Annie was just admitting that she too was ready for her dinner, when they emerged into the square again. Immediately opposite them was the high stone wall of the ancient abbey and an impressive gateway, its carved stone smudged and blackened but not displeasing in such a setting. She could see a public garden just inside its tall archway and the green of its lawns and the red and gold of its flowerbeds were a pleasing splash of colour in the brown square. ‘’Tis a romantic place, Mama,’ she said. ‘I could imagine just such a gateway in one of the new novels.’ She was an avid reader of the new novels.

  Her mother’s taste was a good deal more practical. ‘I prefer a nice co
mfortable hotel like the Angel. Or new assembly rooms, like those. Look there.’

  The southern end of the square was dominated by a single building clearly labelled ATHENAEUM in bold block letters above its central pediment. Its balance was splendidly maintained despite the slope of the ground on which it stood, with six tall windows on either side of a columned porch and the raised balcony that stood above it, and an unobtrusive roof partly obscured by a stone parapet. ‘Now there’s an assembly room to be proud of, I’ll warrant,’ she said, ‘and well placed what’s more.’

  She turned her head and glanced idly at the northern end of the square where a line of fine houses glowed in the evening sunlight. They were built of pale yellow brick with high sash-windows painted white and a doric arch around their imposing front doors. And she noticed that the largest of them was being offered for sale. ‘Now that’s the sort of building I like,’ she said to her daughter. ‘I’ve a mind to view it, so I have. What think ’ee?’

  She viewed it next morning after she’d bought the shop in Abbeygate Street, and it was even better inside. ‘The window frames are set back a good four inches,’ the agent explained to her proudly, ‘to prevent fire, you see, ma’am. A most wise precaution I have always thought. And I think you will agree that this is a most spacious room. A room with ton, is’t not so?’

  The room he was ushering them into was the drawing-room, which occupied the entire width of the first floor and had a fine view of the square. It was indeed a splendid room, decorated in duck-egg blue with elaborate mouldings on the ceiling picked out in gold, and two gold-and-white double doors with painted panels. But it was the little room at the top of the stairs that really caught her attention.

  ‘A water closet,’ the agent said. ‘So convenient, don’t you think, and the very latest thing. The water is pumped into the cistern so,’ giving a rather energetic demonstration, ‘and then you pull this handle up and down several times so, and down it all comes and the pan is flushed quite clean, do you see?’ And so it was, with a stream of water positively swirling round the rim of that odd-shaped blue-patterned chamber pot on its awkward thick stem. But the wooden seat looked sturdy enough, stretching from one side of the little room to the other and there was a window for ventilation, which was a deal more than there’d ever been in the old-fashioned closets with their dreadful, smelly close-stools.

  ‘My heart alive,’ she said. ‘That’s an invention an’ no mistake. Would we could have had such a thing when I was young. Annie, my dear, I’ve a mind to buy this house. Show me the rest of it, sir.’

  So the bed-chambers were examined and the servants rooms in the attic and the housekeeper’s parlour and the butler’s pantry and the kitchen, which was behind the dining-room on the ground floor and had its own pump for fresh water and the latest iron range with two ovens for bread and pastries and another separate oven, all on its own, for roasting meat. ‘Imagine that,’ Nan said, much impressed. ‘No more basting over that great hot spit, eh?’ Oh, it was a very fine house.

  ‘’Tis just the sort of place for a lady like yourself, ma’am, if I may make so bold as to say so,’ the agent said hopefully.

  ‘It is,’ she agreed, ‘and if we can agree upon the price, I will buy it.’

  Which, after some haggling during which the agent came off considerably worse than he’d expected, they could and she did.

  ‘I have always envied the rich their country houses,’ she confessed to Annie, after dinner that evening, ‘and now I have one of my own, so I have. We will spend the summer here and winter in London. Bessie can keep house for us here and we’ll hire a new housekeeper for Cheyne Walk. Think how healthy ’twill be for her little ones, and for you too, my dear. I have long thought the smoke of London a parlous bad thing for your weak chest. The boys can come down and join us too when they en’t working. Oh, what a fine thing ’twas that we came here!’ She was bristling with excitement. It was as if the fire had burned away the last of the old Nan, the old hard-working, penny-pinching Nan, and released a new woman, full of energy and enthusiasm, and with the money to indulge herself.

  That night after Annie had retired, she wrote a long letter to Calverley.

  ‘I have bought me a country seat here in Bury, for I tell you Calverley ’twas like homecoming to arrive in this place and the property to hand as if the Fates intended it. ’Tis a new house with all the latest devices for pleasant living. I propose to stay here for a day or two for there is much to do. Thiss and Annie will stay here with me. I know I may safely leave care of my London affairs with Billy and Johnnie. What good fortune to have two sons to run the business, with Mr Teshmaker to oversee them, of course. Let me know when Cheyne Walk is ready for occupation.

  Your own most loving, Nan.’

  Then she wrote to the boys.

  Calverley was not pleased. Deuce take the woman, he thought, whatever possessed her to do such a thing? I don’t want a house out in the sticks even if she does. But there was no doubt about her wealth now, and that at least was a comfort. To be able to rent a house in Cheyne Walk and buy another all on the same day was uncommon impressive. I do believe I shall marry her after all, he thought, infuriating though she is. And in the meantime he would live at the club and spend a few days of well-deserved leisure before his next trip to York for Mr Chaplin. I shall have two bottles of port with my dinner tonight, he decided, for if he couldn’t afford it, Nan certainly could.

  Two bottles of the very best were being carried into the smoking-room as he strolled downstairs.

  ‘Who’s the lucky feller?’ he asked the wine waiter.

  ‘Colonel Leigh,’ came the surprising answer. ‘Come to talk horses with Mr Marshall.’

  ‘Colonel Leigh?’

  ‘Racing manager to the Prince of Wales,’ the waiter said importantly. He was quite awe-struck at the honour of this unexpected visit.

  But Calverley had shot off to find the club secretary and arrange an introduction. ‘My cousin, sir,’ he explained. ‘We have corresponded from time to time, but never met. I should make myself known now the gentleman is in Goosegogs.’

  So the introduction was made. ‘Colonel Leigh sir, pray allow me to present Mr Leigh late of the Duke of Clarence’s Light Dragoons, a relation of yours, I do believe. The only man I ever knew who fought a duel over the honour of his horse.’

  ‘Meet at last, eh,’ the Colonel said turning his florid face to acknowledge his relation. He was an impressive-looking man, being both tall and portly, as Calverley knew, for he’d seen him from a distance on several occasions. He was exquisitely dressed in a well-cut brown cloth coat, corduroy waistcoat, splendid leather boots and old-fashioned knee breeches, and he carried a gold-topped cane like so many of the carelessly wealthy did these days. ‘I trust you won.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Calverley confessed modestly.

  ‘Can’t think of a better reason for a duel upon me soul,’ the Colonel said. ‘Horses being my line of country.’

  ‘Pray allow me to presume upon our relationship and offer you dinner sir.’

  ‘Obliged,’ the Colonel agreed.

  So they dined together and talked about horses and Mr Chaplin’s coach fleet and the Prince of Wales’ racing stable. And afterwards they drank wine together sitting in Goosegogs’ highbacked chairs beside the bow window and talked about the war.

  ‘Heard the news, have you sir?’ the Colonel asked. ‘Boney’s a-bullyin’ again, so he is. Now ’tis the Portuguese. They ain’t to trade with us, so his lordship says. If you ever heard the like.’

  ‘I trust they will resist him, sir,’ Calverley said, gulping his port and admiring two pretty young women who were passing in their carriage.

  ‘At their peril, I fear sir. He has an army ready to march through Spain and attack ’em.’

  ‘They should send out the Clarence’s to prevent him, damme.’

  ‘Sir Arthur Wellesley is commissioned to lead just such an endeavour. I wonder you ain’t heard.’

  ‘Well,
as to that,’ Calverley said quickly sensing some criticism. ‘Since I parted company with the Clarence’s I’ve been kept too busy. Out of touch, I fear sir. Oh yes, I’ve been kept pretty busy. The Easter family needed my help d’ye see, to say nothing of all the work I do for Mr Chaplin. Big newsagent hereabouts, related to Sir Osmond Easter of Ippark.’

  ‘Can’t say I know the feller. Bit of a recluse, I daresay? Does he come up for the season?’

  ‘On rare occasions I believe,’ Calverley guessed. ‘Ain’t never seen the feller, although we correspond of course.’ He was wading deeper and deeper into falsehood and the knowledge alarmed him and excited him.

  But the colonel was losing interest. ‘Thought the newsagent was run by a female,’ he said helping himself to more port.

  ‘Well as to that,’ Calverley said with triumphant modesty, ‘I think I may safely say that I am A. Easter – Newsagent, just at the moment, for the lady is away at her country seat.’

  ‘Are ye now?’ the Colonel said. ‘Deuce take it, is that the time? I must be off, sir. I will see you at White’s perhaps?’

  ‘White’s don’t take kindly to those of us engaged in trade,’ Calverley said. He’d never dared to think of White’s, but this fortunate meeting was too good to waste.

  ‘You need a sponsor,’ the Colonel said, smiling at his distant cousin. ‘I will see what I can do, considerin’ you are a friend of the Easters.’

  ‘Obliged to ’ee sir,’ Calverley said rising to his feet as the illustrious gentleman began to walk away.

  ‘Your servant, sir.’

  ‘And yours sir,’ Calverley replied, taut with excitement. White’s! he was thinking. White’s! Oh, he really had arrived.

  The next morning reality returned and it all seemed very unlikely that the Prince’s racing manager would concern himself with the affairs of such a distant and unimportant relation. But the gentleman was as good as his word. Two days later a letter arrived from White’s with the request that Calverley Leigh Esq. would be so kind as to present himself for selection to membership of the club.