Turning the Stones (25 page)

As I mull over that journey, I recall how vexed Eliza seemed to be throughout. Was it just the discomfort of the road? She was very terse in Coventry, but then again, Coventry was a disagreeable, gloomy place with houses canted closely overhead, their foreheads almost touching, as though they were trying to hold one another up. There was a tumultuous yard at the Dolphin Inn, churning with horses, vehicles and travellers. I negotiated ineptly for a night’s accommodation, then fought off all comers for the remnants of a greasy bacon supper, which I conveyed to our damp-walled chamber. Eliza said little while we dined, or afterwards. Thoughts were thickening upon her, I could see.

She stood at the warped window with her back to me, her shoulders huffy. I sent down for a sixpenny pint of hock to cheer our spirits. Eliza settled on the bed with a magazine and made a show of reading while she sipped the acidy wine. I remarked the rot that was eating away a corner of the ceiling and she grunted in reply from behind the shield of her periodical.

I asked her then about Barfield. I said, ‘There is no plan to meet him in London, is there?’

She threw the magazine aside and said, ‘Will you stop mewling about Barfield, for heaven’s sake.’ She pulled the eiderdown up to her chin. ‘It has got cold. These walls are awfully flawed. Perhaps you might be able to do something about the fire.’ She flung herself on her side, again with her back to me.

I encouraged the fire with the few nuggets of coal remaining. As I was folding Eliza’s clothes, I unearthed from one of her pockets a familiar creased piece of paper, a note for two guineas to be drawn on the bank of Hill & Vezey. It had been a gift from Johnny, doubtless at the behest of their mother, on the occasion of Eliza’s sixteenth birthday. She had been carrying it around for years. How pitiful it was that this withered promissory was all that she really had of her brother.

As I climbed into bed, I was struck by the feeling that these scenes were preordained. There was a compelling sense of inevitability about the Dolphin Inn, the terrible wine, and Eliza’s turning away.

*

As we ground on, the highway altered for the worse. The wheels slipped under hissing rain as the
Sprinter
strained against a strong headwind that seemed to be trying to blow us back to Chester. One was left in the murk of the coach’s interior with one’s own thoughts.

I understood that the wellspring for Mrs Waterland’s outburst at Eliza was the state of the economy at Sedge Court. Anyone could tell that we were in an unsteady condition. I did not wish a new and unpredictable mistress in the house, but I
could not comprehend why Johnny did not marry and save the estate. He had reached the age of thirty years without bothering to rake in a moneyed bride. Was not London awash in them? In fact there were many things I did not understand about our recession and the master’s inability to pay his debts. The mistress had told Baron von Boxhagen that Mr Waterland had invested in canals. They were being dug everywhere now. Surely something must come of such perceptive speculation. And what about the houses in Chester that Johnny had persuaded the master to buy? I had overheard Mrs Edmunds asking Mr Otty the same question and he had replied, ‘The Chester houses? Mayhappen they are mightily encumbered with mortgages or we would have seen them turned into brass by now.’ What had become of Johnny’s once bountiful schemes?

*

At each change of horses we managed a glimpse of sky before we were shut up again with a new intake of passengers. Most of them were zealous carpers. The miles unrolled to complaints about deficient friends and servants, perverse weather, shoddy harpsichords, bad butchery, and the perfidy of paper-stainers. Scraps of woodland rushed past the windows. Presently someone claimed to recognise parts of Buckinghamshire. Then we were tipped into the yard of another inn, and our used-up leaders taken away.

At the Highgate turnpike we were stuck for aeons in a traffic jam. Eliza wiped at the window and moaned, ‘Will we never arrive?’ The turnpike was mobbed by every kind of wheeled conveyance as well as travellers on foot and horseback, but once we were through, the congestion eased and we began a long descent to London down a dirty lane.

Presently hedgerows gave way to buildings closely clustered and an astonishing press of people. I expected our last dash to be made with an air of triumph, blasts of the horn trumpeting the
Sprinter
’s achievement – the scores of miles and dozens of horses vanquished. But so thick was the throng, our coach was only able to slouch towards its terminus, a bedraggled lumberer, drained of its sprinterness.

We alighted into a sea of nagging paupers –
spare any change, madam, a penny, madam
 – who looked as if they would slit your throat for a farthing. The guard was obliged to dislodge a ball-faced boy from the hem of Eliza’s petticoat and he knocked aside a toothless crone who could no more lift a mist than the portmanteau she was scrabbling at. She was one of a horde fighting to carry our luggage. At my request the guard whistled up a lad with a lantern on a pole, who deployed it to get by the beggars and the yelping dogs as though he were hacking through undergrowth.

Five minutes later we were in a hackney carriage feeling its way on to the Oxford Road. The instant our driver paused to give way, a screaming bung-eyed baby reared up at one of the windows, assisted by some unseen agent, while at the other, a skeletal figure dragged shrieking fingernails on the glaze. In spite of these apparitions, I felt a rush of excitement, for I sensed the mighty engine of this great town turning on its gears and one felt somehow joined to an epic enterprise simply by being there. This gust of energy lifted me up and away from the grubby little feeling of dread that had hung over me on the long journey down.

We arrived in a matter of minutes at a narrow street in Soho and halted before a townhouse, barely two windows wide,
but very tall and haughty with a pinched air about it. Under the wavering light of a street lantern, I hammered on the door. It was opened by a footman who seemed pleased with himself. Flicking the sides of his frock away to reveal red plush breeches, he conveyed our luggage into an entrance hall whose outmoded wainscoting was slightly illuminated by a single candle in a sconce. To our right a cramped flight of stairs built around a narrow well ascended into darkness. My first impression was that Arthur Paine was not likely to run through Sir Joseph Felling’s fortune in a hurry. There was a sense of skimping about the house – and we had not even reached the parlour.

A butler leaning heavily on a walking stick made a delayed appearance, limping from the shadows behind the staircase, and led us in a time-consuming procession to the far reaches of the hall. After a struggle with the door handle, he at last breached his master’s study, as the chamber proved to be, and waved us in. Mr Paine rose bareheaded in a damask gown from behind a large table, looking startled to see us, and then, collecting himself, he came to take Eliza’s hand and offered me a bow. He apologised for his informality, explaining that he had scorched his best wig while studying close to a lamp. He ordered Samuels, the butler, to send up tea. With a disgruntled expression, Eliza assessed her surroundings. The dozens of prints infesting the walls and the muddle of papers and books gave to Mr Paine’s study an air of dogged profusion.

Eliza said with a pout, ‘The house does not look very commodious, Cousin. I hope we may be fitted in.’

Mr Paine grimaced. ‘I am sorry that Poland Street is not what it was. The address was fashionable when my late mother
bought the place thirty or forty years ago, but now we have been rather left in the lurch. The quality has moved west, you see.’

Eliza poked at one of the baffling apparatuses strewn about the table, a scioptic projector, according to Mr Paine, and announced that she was hungry enough to eat a horse and chase the rider. I was sent below to command her supper.

Despite its modest dimensions, the house managed to accommodate a servants’ staircase at its rear, which I descended on vertiginous steps. The kitchen was bathed in blue smoke produced from the pipe of an ample woman seated before the hearth, who introduced herself as the housekeeper, Mrs Jellicoat. At her back a less lardy, younger woman laboured over a concoction boiling loudly on the hob. The footman loomed out of the haze with a tray holding the tea equipage and winked at me. Mrs Jellicoat wheezed, ‘Granger will fuck you as soon as look at you, so keep on your toes, lady’s maid.’ Granger laughed like a drain and swaggered towards the stairs.

*

After supper we were settled in an apartment on the first floor that had been used formerly by Cousin Arthur’s mother, Lady Paine. Some trace of her lingered still in the stuffy chambers, a suggestion of stale lavender water and unwashed hair. Of Mr Paine’s wife there was not a trace and I wondered if it were true that she and her husband lived apart, as I had heard.

I was to sleep in the dressing room. Having tucked Eliza into her bed, I locked the door against the footman and padded to the window. I raised the sash and leaned out, wondering if I might glimpse the famous Thames. But I could see only countless buildings with fuming chimneys. The air smelled of
cinders and it was difficult to see into the distance. The town was enveloped in a dark haze.

I lay awake listening to noises rising from the street. Cats yowling, dogs howling. A horrible grinding sound of something being dragged. An argument, a song. The hollow roll of endless traffic. It was excitement, too, that kept me from sleep. I was afraid of London and the uncertainties it harboured, but my arrival there also put me within striking distance of the foundling hospital. I had not given up the possibility that I might find out who my parents were and where I had come from. It was a hope that I had hugged close to my chest all the way from Chester.

The Paine Townhouse, Soho, London
April, 1766

The morning is well advanced by the time breakfast is served in Mr Paine’s house. ‘In town we rise late,’ the kitchen wench informed me flatly when I tried to obtain hot water from her at seven on that first morning. I was itching to go abroad. I tended to my tasks, unpacking, smoothing, folding, airing, and drafted a letter for Eliza to send to her mother confirming our safe arrival. After cooling my heels upstairs for another hour, I descended to the hall and hung about like a dog waiting for its walk. It says a great deal about the tight bonds of propriety that in spite of my fizzing curiosity I felt unable to open the front door of the house and step out to see what I could see. The restrictions by which virtuous women must live are designed to shield us from vicissitudes or at least to mitigate their effects on us, but we must exist at the same time in a quarantine. I had always interpreted that quarantine as security, and yet I found myself chafing like a captive in Mr Paine’s hall – I, who had always bridled so well.

Eventually, from the parlour came the bossy chimes of a clock reminding the world that it ought to be getting on and at last Eliza and I were brought out by Mr Paine to accompany him to his peruke-maker. I had not proceeded five yards along the street when I had every kind of fright for my life. Coaches
and hackneys and pedestrians alike seemed determined to bowl us over and we had constantly to step smartly out of their way. Mr Paine paid the hurly-burly no heed and we strode on, Eliza and I keeping our alarm and amazement to ourselves. We turned into a wider street flanked by large dwellings that might once have been grand but were fallen to lodging houses and rookeries. Numbers of raggedy irregular individuals were crying their wares of second-hand clothes, old bottles and nails and cracked pots, which they had set out on the stones along with their squalling children. ‘You see,’ Mr Paine said, steering us away, ‘how the world so fatally degrades and breaks down.’

We edged along a squalid thoroughfare, which looked as though it might provide a convenient ambuscade for cutpurses or footpads, but Mr Paine seemed impervious to the potential for danger, his mind being so immersed in knotty thoughts, I presume, that he could not fully take in what lay before him. That is a kind of protection in its way, for he passed men with unquiet eyes as if they did not exist and they, having been rendered invisible, lost their power to threaten. Perhaps this is a common tactic for avoiding trouble in the metropolis, because I noticed that a beplumed young man, crossing in high heels and a showy coat towards a tavern, seemed deaf to the insults that his Frenchified dress attracted from fellows clustered about outside a print shop, where we had stopped so that I could buy a plan of London.

Perhaps I would ask Johnny if he could indicate on the plan where he lived. He had recently moved house, apparently, and no one seemed able to say what his new address was. I had begun to form the idea that Johnny was untruthful about his circumstances – which gave me a sense of dismay.

As Mr Paine led us towards Piccadilly, where his perukemaker kept a shop, I was greatly diverted by the sights around me. It was clear even to a novice visitor that London could easily mince one’s soul without giving a hoot, so enormously absorbed is it in its own interests, but at the same time there was something exhilarating about the indifference of those humming streets. There was a freedom in them that made one feel anything was possible and that one could do anything.

We came eventually to a wide, racing thoroughfare beset by speeding conveyances and men on horseback, all of whom seemed to be dashing to an emergency. You have already followed me along this route on a later occasion. There was the peruke-maker’s establishment across the road in a range of shops with bowed windows. There was the White Bear Inn.

While Mr Paine was having his wig fitted, Eliza, who rarely exhibits any interest in
la mode
, as I am sure you know by now, decided to inspect a pair of sleeves displayed next door in the window of a mantua-maker’s establishment. ‘I might wear them when I go out with Johnny,’ she said, and bit her lip. So: they had been in communication. But I knew better than to enquire after details at that moment. Eliza is never forthcoming when she feels she has been caught out. Instead, I asked to be shown the sleeves. The mantua-maker spread them upon the counter. They were dove-grey satin embroidered with silver thread. As she bent her sleek head over them, I caught the fragrance of her hair powder – oranges or perhaps bergamot.