London - Edward Rutherfurd [458]
Isaac Fleming’s present ambitions were not large, but they were precise. He wanted a bow-fronted shop.
In his grandfather’s day, when the family was still in haberdashery, such things did not exist. After the fire, terraced, brick-built shops had begun to replace the wooden stalls of old London, but they were mostly quite simple affairs – a plain counter, the goods on racks, a sanded wood floor. More recently things had begun to change.
As a boy, Isaac would often walk out of Ludgate along Fleet Street to where, just after the ancient church of St Clement Danes, it widened into the broader carriageway that passed the old Savoy and was known as the Strand. He liked the Strand: it was a fashionable sort of place containing such delights as the Grecian Coffee House, the New Church Chop House and other haunts where lawyers and gentlemen gathered. What really took his fancy though, was a single, narrow shop into which he ventured every time he passed: Twining’s Tea Shop. It sold only tea, but how beautifully, how elegantly it did so. Great painted jars were set in the window; inside, the barrels were all ornately labelled; on the counter, as well as weights and measures were several beautifully inlaid tea-caddies. It wasn’t just a shop, it was a work of art.
“I want a shop like that, when I grow up,” he would tell his father.
Since, a few years later, he had begged to be apprenticed to a humble baker, it had seemed to Isaac’s father that he was unlikely to have need for such an elegant shop, but he had reckoned without the boy’s initiative. Within a year of setting up his own little establishment beside the Old Cheshire Cheese tavern in Fleet Street, young Isaac had taken to making cakes. He did it very well. Within a few years the takings from the cakes were more than half those from the daily bread. “Your only mistake,” his father warned him, “is that you put so much into the cakes that they’re hardly profitable.”
“I need to make a name first,” Isaac replied. “Then I can raise my prices.” One day, he hoped, he’d be able to move along the street that crucial quarter-mile that would take him next to Twining’s in the Strand. “That’s where I’ll get customers,” he would say, “like Lady St James.”
Secretly he had an even greater hope. It was a dream really – though before my son takes over from me, he promised himself, I will do it. He would dispense with the bread altogether and make nothing but cakes. And he would move to Piccadilly.
Piccadilly was fashion itself. The name, originally, had been a joke, because the merchant who had bought up the land had made his fortune supplying ‘picadils’ – ruff collars – to the Elizabethan and Stuart court. But it was no joke now. Lying between the court of St James and Pall Mall to the south, and the fine new developments like Grosvenor and Hanover Square to the north, Piccadilly could not fail to be a place for the best society. And it was there, just by the little market at St James church, that there stood a shop so splendid, so utterly magnificent, so entirely surpassing anything else in London, that before it Isaac Fleming could only bow the head. If Twining’s Tea Shop was his model, this was his inspiration; if Twining’s was a church, then this was the Holy City itself, beyond mere human aspiration.
Fortnum and Mason. The two friends had set up the shop in 1707 when Fortnum, a footman in the royal household, had retired from service. It was astonishing what you could buy there: all manner of groceries, strange delicacies – Harts Horn, curious pieces, exotic candies – imported through the East India Company. But most amazing of all were the store fittings: magnificently dressed windows, brilliant lights, tables arranged as if one had entered a fashionable drawing-room in an aristocratic town house. It must, Isaac knew, have cost a fortune. The scale of the thing was quite beyond his reach. But one day he would dwell within sight of it and his own more modest window of cakes would be seen by the same illustrious folk who visited Fortnum’s. It was a dream; but