Henderson hesitated. He stared at the grand stone Naval College that overlooked the Thames like a white-haired judge. The focus of his expectation had been on arriving, but now he was here, he felt unsure. He was in funds, though he had to repay Will’s investors, but with Sam gone he had not a single name nor address. He would have to make enquiries. Perhaps, he reasoned, he might visit the tavern off Old Street that Simmons had mentioned. The Rose, wasn’t it? Mallow Street? From memory, the investors were in the proximity of Old Street Bridge. It should be easy enough to find.
‘Welcome to London,’ he said to Fry, who was surveying the stretch of sailmakers, smithies, cutlers, chandlers and carpentry workshops. ‘You’ll stay out of trouble, I hope,’ Henderson charged him as he fitted his hat in place and tried to get used to the extra foot in height.
‘Where are you going, Captain?’
Henderson smiled. ‘Home, I hope.’
Fry hovered on deck, mumbling something about cousins in Marylebone as Henderson readied himself. Here it was. London. His London. Leaving the boy to his business and the ship to Clarkson’s care, he stowed a vicious flick knife with a serrated blade in his inside pocket and engaged a bargeman. He wanted to explore.
In a dream, Henderson alighted further west, at the City, and surrendered himself with only the vaguest notion of his course. St Paul’s was clearly visible beyond the rooftops, and as he set off towards town, London opened like a book – a familiar illustrated tale. The captain disappeared into her, one of thousands, well enough dressed, with just enough purpose. The capital swallowed such fellows at the rate of hundreds a week.
At first, the streets were thin and the company mixed.
‘Got a shilling?’ a woman called, the smell of gin on her breath. ‘A shilling if you want a good time?’
And then, suddenly, around a corner, there was a pristine church. Two gentlemen, starched and pressed within an inch of their lives and heavily armed with pistols, disappeared down an alleyway from which, Henderson feared, they would never emerge so clean.
He set his course north and west. It did not take long for the streets to become more regular and the buildings more stately. As he passed a lady outside a shop clutching a small box of purchases, he wondered what his mother’s life had been like. She must have known people – other women living in London – though he scarcely remembered callers and certainly no friends. It seemed that apart from her maternal duties, she had lived a solitary existence, for there were few places she would have been able to visit alone.
Enthused, he cut up the Strand and tried not to stare at the women. There was something elegant about English style, but, still, no woman could best Maria. The London ladies’ carefully matched gloves, scarves and hats felt like a form of manipulation – really, had some of these women taken into account the colour of their carriage when they dressed?
Entering the square at Covent Garden, his stomach turned over. Fly-posters for the Covent Garden Theatre were pasted over the walls; jumbled, tattered papers were everywhere. The paving stones were crammed with costermongers selling flowers and live birds, brushes and cutlery. Dimly lit under the colonnade, the shops were obscured by two men juggling knives and shouting showily in Italian. The atmosphere had the air of a social occasion and yet it was not the city he remembered. He had not yet, it seemed, come home.
Construction was underway and Henderson did not recognise the streets that led away from the market. Wooden scaffolding wobbled precariously over the facades. Things had changed in twenty years. Henderson stopped a gentleman, asked directions to Soho Square, and was waved northwards. ‘Walk towards Charing Cross. Then turn up Frith Street,’ the man instructed with a low bow. ‘Don’t go any other way.’
He was close now. Would the house still be there? The captain picked up his pace.
Frith Street was wider than he remembered. At the open door of one residence, it became plain it was a bawdy house and, now he came to notice, there were two such establishments at least. He was sure they had not been here when he was a child. Two slatterns slipped, giggling, into a carriage, and Henderson glimpsed a flash of a glass-eyed drunkard holding out his arms for one woman to the left and the other to the right.
And, suddenly, there it was. The familiar little brick-built house – only three storeys – facing straight onto the street. Just as he had left it. Henderson stopped opposite. There was a thin coating of mud on the stones. Looking up, there was no light in the windows. Overhead, a pigeon fluttered, landed on the roof and preened itself.
‘Well, I’ll be,’ Henderson breathed.
This had been worth the weeks on board, the risk of taking the journey. He smiled like a lunatic at the wrought iron at the windows and the carving over the dull black door below the fanlight. Number 22. With time suspended, he lifted the brass knocker and rapped twice. He had to see it properly – he had to go inside.
After a moment, there was the sound of scuffling and a maid opened up.
‘Sir.’ She curtseyed. ‘Yes? Sir?’
Henderson was unsure what to say. ‘Might I ask, please, who lives here?’ he managed.
‘Why, Mr and Mrs Elmore, sir.’
‘Are they in?’
The maid glanced over her shoulder. Then she shook her head. She considered for a second and then blurted, ‘There’s no one but me, sir. Cook’s gone to inspect the new bakehouse and the butler is on an errand.’ The girl closed her mouth with a snap.
The captain paused. ‘My name is Henderson,’ he said. ‘I used to live in this house when I was a boy. I’d very much like to see it again.’
The maid looked perturbed. ‘Oh, sir,’ she said. ‘That can’t be proper.’
Henderson did not argue. Instead, he reached into his pocket and extracted a shilling. ‘I beg your discretion,’ he insisted. ‘It was my family home.’
She hesitated, sizing him up, but he seemed like a gentleman, so she took the coin. ‘You’d best be quick,’ she said.
It smelled different. That was the first thing. It was clean and well kept, but it smelled of wood, he thought, and chicken stock from the kitchen. The front room was painted pale pink and contained a pianoforte. The hallway was papered pleasantly in cream and brown. There was a painting of the seashore mounted over a chiffonier. The shape, however, was familiar. And the light. It trickled downstairs from the cupola, leaving a familiar pattern of shadows that cut cleanly over the thin burgundy carpet. He recalled the rooms exactly like this, only larger and painted in shades of green. Henderson ran his hand over the carved banister and decided to go up.
‘Sir,’ the maid objected, following in his wake like a wraith.
On the first floor, upstairs in the hallway, he could have sworn there was a ghost, a whisper of his mother. Had she sat there sometimes, writing her journal? Perhaps she had been scribbling that absurd correspondence that his father had treasured, concerned with household accounts, James’s progress in mathematics and what was playing at the opera. She had signed each with her devotions. Yes. Henderson remembered, there had been a chair and a small table with a sloped writing box topped with dark leather – just the kind that Maria had with a brass lock and fitted inkwell. The paper was thick, creamy and came carefully cut to the size of his mother’s choosing, with sticks of sealing wax the colour of blood.
Ahead of him, the girl fussed, opening shutters and picking her mistress’s linen from the floor, but that hardly mattered. It was here. The centre of everything.
‘Home,’ Henderson whispered.
It was a strange and impossible sensation, like seeing two houses at once. The captain half expected to come across himself, eleven years of age and rattling down the stairs after a night spent on the lumpy mattress his mother had installed in the old nursery. Suddenly, he realised that the Bittersweet counted for nothing. He belonged here. In London. In a house such as this. It might not be his inheritance, but it certainly felt like his destiny. His legacy, perhaps. He had been torn away too soon. Perhaps the con
tents of the bar of chocolate and the profits of his lucky cargo might let him stay. Not here, of course, but somewhere similar. He had a chance to rediscover what he’d lost. A home. A sense of being English. And then there was Maria’s way. The lecture at the Royal Society and the blandishments that went with it. His views on the cocoa bean and its cultivation. Acceptance. Being part of the greatest city in the world and the great nation to which it belonged. He had gone astray, and it was time to put things right.
‘Well, well,’ the captain sighed, handing over another sixpence as he bounded downstairs two at a time and into the street, where he turned back in the direction of Charing Cross Road. He had been right to come back. London was still here, and he would be part of it. Somehow, the chocolate would manage it. This was where he belonged.
21
On the road to town
It took Sam Pearson a week to reach the city on foot. He had left his purse at home before the Bittersweet took off, so he had no other means to find his way to London. At first, his temper fired the journey. The first day he must have walked twenty-eight miles, easily, in fury at his treatment on the Bittersweet. But even as the injustice of his confinement wore off, he continued to hit the road hard. After all, the gentlemen of the Old Street Bridge Club required news. Rightfully, the shipment Henderson had sold belonged to them. As a result, Sam walked every hour he wasn’t sleeping and hitched a lift more than thirty miles from Bracknell to Collingwood in a single morning by sheer luck when he offered to help loading and unloading a wagon.
Coming towards London, he didn’t eat much. Closer to the city, contrarily, it got more difficult to find food and farmers were less likely to barter an hour or two’s work for some supper. No matter. Starting early, up at four before the sun, he headed for Old Street, with his feet aching and his stomach howling as the city grew up around him. Walking through Notting Hill, he was careful to stay north of Kensington, so he came in on the right road. Miles on, towards Mallow Street, as the bells sounded ten of the clock, every step felt like it was taking too long, until at last he arrived at the mud-spattered front door where he fumbled with the key he always kept in his pocket, and mounted the stairs.
In the dingy club room, Sam fell on the remnants of food on the table like the ravening pauper he was. He picked up a wedge of cheese and ate it in swift, efficient bites, downing porter from a pewter tankard, though it had gone flat. The bells sounded towards the docks. When he’d done, Sam Pearson settled to wait, his belly stretched like a drum, crumbs all down his semmit. The gentlemen wouldn’t arrive until late – that was their way. He worried what they might say, but Henderson’s treachery wasn’t Sam’s fault. He’d come to tell them, hadn’t he? Sam wondered fleetingly what they’d reckon to Will. It was Will who should be here. Sadness settled in his chest as he stretched out on the floorboards, his flash of red hair to one side. Outside, the sun was shining, and behind the shuttered window, Sam Pearson slept without dreaming.
*
He woke with a piercing pain in his leg, sharp as a crocodile’s tooth. A dense shadow hovered over him like a malignant presence. The shadow quickly brought down a poker once more, this time onto his knee. Sam screamed. He rolled over, but the injury stung and he couldn’t get to his feet from the shock of it.
‘It’s me, sir,’ he insisted. ‘It’s Sam.’ He cowered.
There was a hesitation.
The voice spoke. ‘You broke in. Get on your way, you filthy sack of bones.’
The voice belonged to a woman. Sam tried to focus. Was it a sprite? Some kind of evil banshee? Then his eyes adjusted and Mrs Wylie backed off, brandishing the poker.
‘I could fetch my husband,’ she warned. ‘Mr Wylie used to wrestle at Tyburn. He was All London Champion. He’d squash a piece of nothing like you as if you were a insect.’
Titus Wylie had never been inside the Old Street Bridge Club. One of the unwritten rules was that Mrs Wylie alone should undertake the responsibilities of readying the room. However, she was sure the seriousness of the situation might now merit his admission.
Sam put up his hand. He grabbed one of the chairs and hauled himself painfully onto his feet. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand. They are expecting me. The gentlemen.’
‘Pah!’ said Mrs Wylie. ‘I can smell you from here. Vagrant!’ she roared. ‘The idea that my gentlemen would be expecting a stinking scrap of a fellow like you—’
‘No. Ma’am, really they are. Look, they gave me a key.’ Sam reached into his pocket slowly, so as not to alarm the woman. He drew out the front-door key. ‘I’m waiting to attend their business.’
‘Waiting to pilfer whatever you can, more like.’
‘I ate what was left of the cheese. They feed you if you want, the gentlemen. I came a long way with news on an empty purse and I was hungry. Once when I was here, they gave me and my friend a whole pie. They don’t mind.’
Mrs Wylie’s eyes fell to the card table. What kind of business might a stinking homeless ne’er-do-well have to conduct with the players of bridge? Still, it appeared the boy did have a key. She decided to have a better look at him and, to this end, she edged towards the window and let loose the catch on the shutters. A stream of dusty afternoon light filtered through the filth-caked window. Sam squinted.
‘I ain’t seen you before,’ she said doubtfully.
‘I seen you,’ Sam assured her. ‘You serve over the road. I generally have a half at the Rose after I’ve done my business. You keep a fine cellar.’
Mrs Wylie lowered the poker and glanced at the basket she had left by the table. It contained a few bottles, a loaf of fresh bread, some pungent cheese and a ham.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I can’t have you thieving from my gentlemen. You’ll finish at the end of a rope, boy. Them giving’s different from you taking. Don’t you know that?’
‘I’ve eaten now,’ said Sam. ‘There’ll be no trouble.’
‘You’ve got news, did you say?’ Mrs Wylie enquired.
Sam nodded stoutly. ‘Yes’m,’ he said.
Mrs Wylie waited.
‘You do what you do for the gentlemen, and I do different, ma’am.’ Sam’s voice was steady. He limped slightly as he moved further into the body of the room and heaved himself into one of the chairs. ‘You got a good arm on you, I’ll say that.’
Mrs Wylie turned. She cleaned the glasses with a crumpled rag that hung at her waist, then she lined up the empty bottles and gathered the cards and fallen score sheets.
‘It’s fresh, this bread. Don’t touch it.’
On her way out, she picked up the chamber pot.
‘Do you want something hot for your knee?’ she asked. ‘I can do you a compress for tuppence. I’ll be back directly once I’ve got rid of the soil.’
Sam shook his head. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said.
*
It was dark when Sam woke next. The door opened with a creak and he was dozing in the chair.
‘Sam?’ Charlie Grant lit a candle. ‘Is that you? We expected you days ago.’
Sam tried to spring to his feet, but his injured knee had swollen and instead he hobbled.
‘What happened to you, boy?’
Sam looked sheepish. ‘It was the woman who provisions the place. She thought I had broken in.’
Grant chuckled and put his cane to one side. ‘A veritable Amazon, our Mrs Wylie,’ he said. ‘And she is curious now, no doubt. I’m sure Hayward might take a look at you. He studied medicine in his youth. Well – where’s Will? Is there news of the cargo?’
‘I come with news all right, sir, but I’m afraid it is not good.’
Grant put the candle to the fire, which was laid ready in the grate. He lit two oil lamps. ‘What matters is the goods,’ he observed. ‘Are the goods secure, Sam?’
Sam shook his head. ‘No, sir,’ he admitted.
Grant’s face froze. He turned. ‘None of it?’
‘Will Simmons died in Brazil, sir. The captain of the ship took every
thing. I tried to get him to land your cargo, but he wouldn’t. He took the shipment to a bond in Bristol. He paid the excise.’
Grant’s face scarcely moved, save one eyebrow, which arched. ‘He took everything?’ Grant paused menacingly, then folded into one of the wing-backed chairs by the fire. ‘Is the captain not aware that Will’s goods were backed by investors?’
Sam nodded. ‘I told him. He says he’ll pay you, sir – split the profits and all. But he’s a slippery bastard. When I told him the goods wasn’t his to make a decision on, he beat me and locked me in the hold. I got off as soon as I could. He docked at Bristol but claimed he was coming to London. He wants to see it, I heard them say. I don’t know how much he sold our beans for. He’s a bad ’un all right.’
‘Well, that will never do, Sam,’ Grant said bluntly. ‘For the goods most certainly are not his to sell. Did he mention anything else?’
‘Something else?’
‘A bar of chocolate that Will was carrying in addition to the cargo?’
Sam considered a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Only the beans, Mr Grant.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Name of Henderson, sir. It’s an odd ship – the Bittersweet – out of Brazil. Foreign-looking. He’s got a woman on board.’
Charlie Grant half shrugged. Women were largely immaterial.
‘A lady, I mean, sir.’
‘I see.’ Grant leaned forward. He ignored the sour smell emanating from Sam. The boy had clearly not washed in some time. ‘Tell me everything you know. Start at the beginning and leave out no detail.’
Sam nodded. His eyes fell to the bottle of port Mrs Wylie had left on the table. ‘Should we not wait for the others?’ he asked.
Grant’s face changed. The grip on the fox-headed ebony cane he favoured as a weapon tightened so that his knuckles turned white. Then he drew the stick slowly upwards and poked Sam where his leg was most swollen. The boy winced.
On Starlit Seas Page 22