The World From Rough Stones

by Malcom Macdonald

  Within moments it had faded. A great swath of earthshadow had risen up the sky and snuffed out the clouds, leaving the night to its blues and grays and violets, unrelieved.

  "It was worth a day's journey just to see that," she said as he helped her back into the coach.

  And when they were aboard and moving again through the gathering dark he said: "What was that all about?"

  "Oh," she said. "A wild goose chase." And she told him of the man she had seen nosing around their workings the day before the fire, and how the following day she had traced him down to the Royal Oak and what Nancy had told her there.

  "So what did you go in there for?" he asked, nodding back toward the inn.

  "To see if I could get any letters or messages waiting for him." She laughed. "I think they thought I was an escaped lunatic. Anyway I got out unharmed."

  He sighed, imitating despair. "Escaped lunatic is about the mark!"

  "I know," she said quickly. "I couldn't get out fast enough. I suddenly thought—suppose they're love letters and this Mr. Dow has no connection with us or with fires."

  She was still thinking it as she hugged the two letters between her bodice and corset while the coach fought its way on through the twilight rush hour, down to Holborn, and into the City. Every street was lit by gaslights, most already burning; the lamplighters were out on their rounds, kindling the few that remained dark. The sudden demand on the gas main and its many branches was causing reverberations in pressure throughout the network, and one could see, as it were, waves of dim light and flaring light pass up and down the streets.

  "What's that dreadful smell?" she asked at the bottom of Holborn Hill.

  "That's the same fairly clean little stream we went over at Battle Bridge—the River Fleet, augmented by the outfall of I don't know how many thousand houses." He looked down Farringdon Street toward the Thames. "Runs under there," he said. "I think they're renewing the arches lower down. Once upon a time you know there was a covered market all the way down the middle there. It's had to go to make room for traffic. Everything in this city gets sacrificed to traffic in the end."

  "Is there a lot of profit in sewers?" she asked as they began the ascent of Skinner Street. "They always say where there's muck, there's brass. And if cities go on growing, they'll all need sewers."

  "Worth remembering," he said.

  When they reached the hillcrest, he nudged her and pointed to their right. "Look! Newgate Gaol. That's one of the hanging places—down Old Bailey, outside the debtors' prison."

  She looked at the dark, gaunt walls, so colossal in the gathering gloom, and shuddered. "You know it all well," she said.

  "Aye," he agreed. "I've been this way once or twice in my time. Keep looking out that side and you'll see the back of Saint Paul's in a moment."

  When they reached the gap, where Newgate Street becomes Cheapside, she looked up and then up still farther, much higher than she had expected. It was massive! Towering over the city. Far and away the largest building she had ever seen in her life—indeed she still did not believe that mere stones could be mortared one upon another and raised to such dimensions. "Eay!" she said with bated breath. "Did ye ever see the size of that! I want to go there. I want to see that when the sun's up."

  He laughed. "You'll see it. You can't help it. St. Paul's rides above the whole city. Much too big."

  And so it was from that moment on—down Poultry to the Bank of England, Mansion House…"that's the Lord Mayor of London's house," he told her…the burned-out ruin of the Royal Exchange, on down the new King William Street, past the Monument…"that's the very spot where the Great Fire ended"…to London Bridge. And all the way it was "Eee, can we go back and see that by day?…Can we go inside?…Do they let you walk over it?" from Nora.

  Up in Lancashire, she had thought of London as a place much like Manchester or Leeds except that it was bigger and dirtier and more dangerous and the people spoke faster and cheated you quicker. How different was the reality! St. Paul's… Mansion House and the Lord Mayor…the Bank of England…Old Bailey… there were names to conjure with! They stirred in her the same emotions she had felt on Christmas Eve, when the ensign and that other young fellow had recited those poems and when everyone had sung "Rule Britannia."

  London Bridge was at first a disappointment. "Where's all the houses?" Nora asked. "I thought it was all covered with houses."

  "That was old London bridge." He pointed downriver. "It used to stand there. Not long ago, either. A terrible ramshackle affair that was. It got so bad, there were two spans people didn't dare cross. This one should last a lot longer."

  From the middle of the bridge, they could look a fair distance both upstream and down before the river twisted out of sight. Downstream lay the night, full, dark, and cloudless, with a promise of frost. The west-facing walls of the buildings glimmered palely as they caught the last of the twilight; above them, like four slightly glowing onions, loomed the corners of the White Tower, in the Tower of London. From the dark hulks of ships and the tall riverside warehouses came the fitful gleam of lanterns and gas flares as stevedores and masters fought to beat the tide.

  Upstream, against the last lowering of the day, the river was a pale highway between two fairylands. A million gaslights and oil lamps twinkled in streets and from windows, tracing out the human cobwebs and giving a new, nighttime form to the hills and plains of the City and Westminster. Now, even more than by day, you could see those teeming streets and sense the myriad activities to which their buildings gave a home. How wonderful, she thought, to be a soaring bird and wing one's way among the palaces and theatres and houses and slums, to see it all. Yet even as she pictured it, she knew it was not what she wanted; not really. She wanted to take part in that unending motley. She wanted the choice of it.

  "I wish I'd brought my telescope," she said.

  He laughed.

  After her flights of fancy the Tabard was, to say the least, a disappointment. At the top of Wellington Street, opposite the Town Hall, they turned left through a dilapidated gateway into a very uneven open court. The driver had to make wild detours right and left to avoid potholes and short ditches, all filled with putrid water. And as for the Inn at the bottom of the courtyard—if you piled several dozen labourers' hovels on top of and beside one another, every which way, all of different materials and sizes and styles, and bound the whole lot together with a rolling, wooden balcony, as a drunkard might bind a parcel with string, you would arrive at a somewhat tidier version of The Tabard. It was a building that had gone on growing through the centuries, almost independent of the will of man—a sort of architectural tumour, a malignance of timber and plaster. Somewhere within its ramshackle, broken-backed, accretion of rooms and halls, corridors and stairs, you felt there might still lurk a company of archers fresh from the crusades or a frightened rump of Tyler's rebels.

  Yet it was quite clearly a popular place. When they were halfway down the court, an empty stage passed them, going out.

  And when they arrived at the apron of the inn, four more stage coaches were either then disgorging their passengers or had just done so.

  "What an inn!" Nora said.

  "Oh—d'ye not like it?" he asked facetiously. "Our family has always used it. For centuries don'tcha know. Been coming here."

  "I believe you too. Centuries!"

  But now that they were among the lights and amid the bustle, the whole aspect of the place was more cheerful. Porters scurried back and forth carrying bags and trunks from the apron to the rooms. Men and women, warm in friendships newly struck upon their journey, "after-you'd" and "my-dear-good-fellowed" and laughed their ways indoors to tap room, dining room, and bars. Serving girls brought pots of ale to the coachmen, who swaggered before the usual admiring crowds of ostlers and barefoot stable-lads. The horses just stood, morose and exhausted by their long haul, knowing they must drag the empty coach and the unsteady coachman a mile or two yet before they reached their several stables. Dogs sniffed with
impunity among their leaden hooves and between the carriage wheels for anything that might satisfy hunger, slake thirst, rouse lust, or perhaps just raise a memory. It was a rich, warm world of welcome reaching out to them with its bustle of bodies, its chorus of voices, of the fall of hooves and the grind of iron tyres on cobbles, and its mingled odours of dinner, fire, beer, straw, horses, and putrescence. It was a microcosm of all that Nora had seen and sensed from London Bridge.

  "I'm going to like it," she said.

  Before they had even pulled to a halt, the landlord came striding toward the

  coach. He threw open the door, folded down the steps, and handed Nora down. "Mrs. Stevenson, madam…and you Mr. Stevenson, sir! Right welcome. You had a pleasing journey I hope?"

  "Oh yes!" Nora said. "And such a drive! From the depot to here! It's so big!"

  "I'm Cornelius. Thomas Cornelius, landlord." They shook hands all round. "Yes, it's not often, as you may imagine, we have the honour of entertaining guests from the north. I hope you will find yourselves well pleased here and will feel able to tell your friends." There was little need for them to reply. Cornelius went on like a machine. "We are famous, you know. We've been serving guests and visitors to London since long before all your Yorkshires and Lancashires fell out with one another."

  "I can believe it," John said.

  "You don't have to, sir. Come and look." And he led them adroitly among the pools that mottled the yard to the farther wall, where he pointed up to a faded legend painted on the crumbling plaster. Even next day, they had difficulty deciphering it. "There!" he said and read it for them. "It says 'This is the Inne where Sir Jeffry Chaucer and the nine and twenty Pilgrims lay in their journey to Canterbury, anno 1383.' There!"

  "Four hundred and fifty-seven years!" Nora said, looking around the yard and finding it very believable.

  "You're better at sums than I am!" Cornelius joked.

  "That's a fine confession for a landlord," John told him, and then added: "Mrs. Stevenson's better than Cocker."

  Cornelius, leading them back to the apron, whose light made the pools and ditches easier to discern, bobbed his head forward and looked at her with humorous fear. "I must remember that before I write your bill!" Then he turned to John. "You know Cocker's books were all printed just around the corner? Funny you mentioning him."

  "I didn't know that."

  "Yes. In Tooley Street. Oh yes, there's a lot of history around here for people who have the time to find it." After a pause he asked, "Do you have a local interest? Not as I wish to pry but if there's anything in which I may help? I'm well known here, you understand."

  He took them indoors and led them through a warren of twisting corridors between leaning walls and beneath once-straight ceilings built in an age of dwarfs. Where lights flickered dimly, they were gloomy; where there were no lights, they were dark and beset with projecting crutches of timber or low-slung beams.

  "You might be able to help at that," John answered as he dodged among these obstacles. "My interest in the neighbourhood is the Greenwich Railway Company's depot next door." Cornelius stopped and looked at him sharply. "I'm a railroad contractor by trade," John explained.

  The landlord shook his head dubiously and resumed his walk. "You're entering some politics there. It's not just the Greenwich, you know. It's the Croydon railway, too. And it'll soon be the Brighton, on top of it all. There'll be some jolly fighting up on those arches these next few years! But you've come to the right place here, you know. What? I should think so! D'ye know George Roberts?"

  "I've not had that honour."

  Cornelius stopped again and pulled out his watch. "What's it now? Just turned seven. In an hour or so, we should be able to rectify this…this gap in your experience, sir. George Roberts is one of the company's engineers, the Croydon company that is. Comes here every night after work for an hour or two. Easily introduce you if you like?"

  "Aye," John said. "I'd welcome that."

  "This is—or rather these are—your rooms." He paused, like a showman, pointing at the door. "Rooms do I say? It is a suite. The best of the house. Exactly as your letter commanded!"

  He threw wide the door and gestured them before him into a large, panelled chamber measuring about fifteen feet deep by twenty wide and with a ceiling twelve foot high. The floor, of polished oak, gleamed darkly in the soft light of four oil lamps, newly lighted. In the middle stood their luggage, ready to be unpacked.

  Cornelius drew a heavy drape over the window and crossed the room to open its inner door, which faced the door they came in by. "Your bedroom," he said. "If it gets chill, you can send for the fire to be lit." He indicated a large, oak-panelled fireplace with a tapestry hung above it.

  The room was the same size as the parlour they had first entered. It, too, had a gothic latticed window, in the same wall as the parlour. Cornelius drew the drape over this. The bedroom was richly furnished with a stout four-poster bed. An ancient linen chest stood at its foot, and a wardrobe, two chests of drawers, a night commode made to look like a chair, and a washstand were variously disposed against the walls.

  "You may ring for hot water and shaving water," Cornelius said, pulling a bell rope by the bed. He watched them eagerly, looking and hoping to see their approval. John caught Nora's eye and raised his eyebrows at her. She nodded warmly back.

  "I think we may call it highly satisfactory, Mr. Cornelius," he told him.

  The landlord beamed. "It is the best," he said. "And this room, you know, is unique; there is none other like it in London."

  A maid knocked and entered. "You can unpack now, Sarah." Cornelius told her. "But first, just open the other door there, over the passage." When the girl obeyed, the landlord turned back to them. "There now—what d'ye see? Eh? Look at that and tell me."

  "That's a long oak plank," John said, noticing that it made a single run from their bedroom, through the parlour, across the passage and into the dark of the far room.

  "Forty-five foot!" Cornelius said. John whistled. "But the whole floor, you see is continuous. Not just that one plank. This was once a single room, forty five foot long. A hall. And its name? Bless me if it's not 'The Pilgrims' Hall!' Yes! This, Mr. Stevenson, sir—and you, Mrs. Stevenson—this is the very room, the very room, where Sir Geoffrey Chaucer, not to mention the Wife of Bath, the Miller, the Clerk, the Knight, the Merchant, Franklyn, Dyer…and all the other merry pilgrims—where they lay and regaled each other with their tales." He sighed and looked around, as if long familiarity with the room had still not dulled the wonder of it. "In this very room," he said in reverentially hushed voice, "you might say that English literature was born. Yes—the craft of English letters first saw light of day here."

  After he had gone to see to their dinner, Nora said to the maid: "Your master has a love of writing, Sarah."

  But Sarah gave a little laugh, half affectionate, half mocking. "Until last year Mr. Cornelius was telling people that Geoffrey Chaucer was leader of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and it was his capture by the heathen Saracens as caused the Crusades! That's Mr. C and literature, bless him!" John and Nora laughed, hoping to hear more. They were not disappointed. "He got all that off a Mr. Saunders who came here last summer. It was Mr. Saunders who discovered all that about these three rooms being originally one big hall. Until then, they all said the Pilgrims' Hall was burned down in the big Southwark fire."

  "Still," John said, "he tells it well."

  "Mr. Cornelius does everything well, sir. He's the best landlord that ever owned this place," she said. Then, having finished their unpacking, she gave them both a knowing smile and left them to wash before dinner.

  "Strange girl for a maid at an inn," he said. "She's had some education, that one."

  When their dinner had been cleared, John said he supposed he might as well go and meet this engineer George Roberts; and Nora, itching to unseal the two envelopes still hidden in her bodice, supposed she would read a little more from London Sketches and go to sleep.


  Just as he kissed her goodnight and told her not to wait up, they were startled by a maniacal scream and an even more maniacal cackle of laughter from somewhere outside their window. John quickly crossed the room and flung the casement wide; but the street was silent and, as far as they could tell by the dim light that struggled feebly from the small and curtained windows, deserted.

  George Roberts was a short, powerful, good-humoured man with a gift for telling stories and imitating people. Within moments of their introduction, he was talking to John as if they'd known each other, and had sat drinking at this particular table every Tuesday, for years. He was keen to hear about the drifting and tunnelling at Summit and was quick to realize that John, too, was the through-and-through professional.

  "You'll be disgusted at this depot next door," he said. "What did you think to Euston?"