London - Edward Rutherfurd [461]
“Balls!” his children would cry.
“No,” he would respond, serious as a preacher. “They are the little spikes what is used by the makers of shoes for the piercing of holes in the leather. Right?”
“Cobblers!” the children would happily shout.
And so as Mrs Dogget staggered down the stairs, Harry muttered: “Here’s ‘Trouble and Strife’.” He meant his wife.
She was flushed bright red already, as she reached her waiting family; but it was not through any exertion. The trouble with Mrs Dogget was Aristotle – in other words, the bottle. And the contents of the bottle was Needle and Pin.
And that meant gin.
Mother’s ruin, they also called it, but it was more like family ruin. For God knows how many a family in London had suffered because of it. The trouble was that the clear spirit was so cheap to produce, and when Dutch King William had introduced this drink, so popular in his native Holland, the poorer classes in the towns had soon become so addicted that, by now, it was the greatest curse of the times. “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence,” the saying was; and Mrs Dogget, alas, spent more than tuppence on many a day. “A little bit of comfort,” she would call it, whenever she began, and there was nothing, it seemed, you could do to stop her.
She was a small, round woman. The drink had made her eyes puffy, but through the two slits remaining, it was clear that she could see well enough. Harry Dogget accosted her firmly, but not unkindly.
“Oysters again?” The catch in the Thames Estuary had become so huge that oysters were one of the cheapest items on the market stalls.
“Needle and pin,” one of the elder children remarked.
“But I gave you a shilling this morning,” Dogget pointed out. “You can’t have drunk all that, old girl.”
And now, fighting red though she was, Mrs Dogget looked genuinely puzzled.
“I didn’t spend but tuppence,” she muttered, frowning.
“So who had it then?” he demanded, while all the children shook their heads.
Though, had he looked more closely, he might have detected a faint smile of complicity pass between the two seven-year-olds. For Sam and Sep knew very well. And they had no intention of telling anyone.
Seven Dials was a funny sort of place. Seven streets, none important, had apparently decided to meet there. At the centre of the intersection, a Doric pillar of stone with a railing round it, on top of which pillar was a clock, rather remarkable for having seven identical faces, one pointing at each little street. Lying as it did, just east of Covent Garden, where there was now a daily flower market, and only a five-minute walk from Piccadilly, it ought by rights to have been a respectable location. But the seven streets lacked the moral character of their neighbours and preferred instead to lapse, all together, into a common sink of genial depravity.
If you wanted to find the cheapest gin, you came to Seven Dials. Gin Lane, some called the area. If you wanted female company, not too bad-looking and quite likely not diseased, go down to the clock and you’d encounter a dozen women on the way, not so much regular prostitutes as the wives of working men, ready to earn a little on the side. And if, by chance, you wanted your pockets picked, why you could walk down any one of the seven streets and someone would be sure to oblige you.
But to Sam and Sep, Seven Dials was a friendly place. They had been born there after all, in a courtyard tenement not a minute from the Dials. Everybody knew them. And even those whose tempers might be uncertain, or habits dangerous, were unlikely ever to trouble Sam and Sep. After all, their father was Harry Dogget: a man of some importance.
There had always been street-sellers in London – the men and women with basket or barrow who hawked their goods from door to door; but nowadays there were more than ever. The reasons were simple enough: an ever-growing population; and the increasing conversion of the