London - Edward Rutherfurd [459]
The first step towards this distant goal was the improvement of his present shop; and the way to do that, without a doubt, was to alter the façade. First, he had to change his sign. For although most ordinary shops still had the old, hanging sign outside their doors, just as in medieval times, the smart new purveyors of goods were writing their names on neat boards over the windows, sometimes even in gold. And secondly, he needed a bow window.
The bow window was a very intelligent idea for a retailer. Not only did it look elegant; not only, by coming discreetly forward into the street did it seem to offer itself to the passerby, in a friendly sort of way, inviting him to pause and come in; but in the simplest and most practical terms, its extra footage allowed the shopkeeper to increase the size of the window display substantially. “You see it well before you reach it, too,” Isaac would point out. “So you also see it longer.” That very day, therefore, he had finally taken the decision. The modest bakery shop in Fleet Street was to have a fine new bow-front put in. No expense spared.
“Can we afford it?” his wife asked a little nervously.
“Oh I think so,” he answered cheerfully, his narrow, concave face positively glowing at the prospect. “Remember. I’ve thirty pounds due, from the Countess of St James.”
Piccadilly was not only home to London’s finest shop. At five o’clock that afternoon, a litter carried by two runners, and containing the elegant person of Lady St James, joined a hundred others and numerous emblazoned carriages as it passed through the gateway and into the colonnaded courtyard of a huge, stone Palladian mansion which stood back, in proud, Roman seclusion, from the northern side of the street across from Fortnum’s. This was Burlington House.
The fashionable squares of the West End contained some very large houses, but there were still some aristocrats, mostly dukes, who were so massively rich that they could afford small palaces of their own. One of these was Lord Burlington. And though the Burlingtons, for many years, had preferred their other, exquisite Italian villa out at the western village of Chiswick, the huge Piccadilly house was still used from time to time for social gatherings.
Everyone, of course, was there. Nobles, politicians and, this being Burlington House, home of aristocratic patronage, a sprinkling of men from the world of arts and letters: Fielding, whose novel Tom Jones had given such amusement last year, was there with his blind half-brother John, both good company; Joshua Reynolds the painter; even Garrick, the actor. It was the rule with great assemblies to pack as many people of note into one place as possible – and Burlington House could probably have accommodated five thousand and still had room for a spare hundred or two by the staircase. Lady St James moved elegantly from group to group, saying a few words here and there, making sure that she was seen. But all the time, her eyes were secretly looking only for him. He had said he would be there.
He was.
When Lady St James came close to Captain Jack Meredith, before their affair had started, she used to find that she blushed like a child. It had been disconcerting. Or finding herself in a group of people, of whom he was one, all her elegance – which she had worn for so long now that it belonged to her as much as her arms and legs – would suddenly drop from her like an unfastened dress; and she would stand there, as awkward as some gawky girl, wondering if anyone had noticed.
Nowadays, as she approached him, it was different.
It was, first, a fluttering of the heart; then a tiny trembling which even the perfect arrangement of her dress and her tightly drawn coiffure could not quite disguise. Then a tingling warmth. It began in her breasts whose tops were so deliciously exposed, it gathered together somewhere in the centre of her body and then, in a great, hot river, rushed downwards bringing so great a burst of life to her whole being that it was almost terrible.
His embroidered coat was