London - Edward Rutherfurd [473]
“It’s Fleming, my lady,” he tried to begin again, then, getting confused, he held out his bill.
He had copied it out again that morning in his best copperplate; now, however, he suddenly saw that, while he was standing, holding it in his hand, his sweating palms had made the ink run and so it was a poor, soggy thing that he now proffered in his inky fingers. Lady St James instantly recoiled.
“Please, my lady,” he blurted out, and took a step towards her.
The coachman’s whip cracked just beside his ear. It did not actually touch him. The coachman could have flicked a fly off his nose without leaving a mark if he’d wanted to. But it sounded like a pistol, and it gave him such a fright that he lurched forward, slipped on the cobbles, and began to fall. Reaching up, without thinking what he was doing, his inky hand closed on something soft which came away in his fingers as he went down.
It was the end of Lady St James’s silk scarf. A second later he found himself looking up into her uncovered face, and gasped.
Lady St James, finding herself exposed, did not try to cover her bruised and swollen face. She scorned even to run past the baker. Instead she decided to give him a piece of her mind.
“How dare you accost me, you vulgar little tradesman? Are you trying to dun me in the street? You rogue. Your bill is infamous anyway. No one of my party would touch your cakes. You may be sure you will never sell them to anyone in society again. As for your conduct here, if I even hear from you once more I’ll have you arrested for assault. I have witnesses.” She indicated the footman, who nodded vigorously. “I think,” she called back to the coachman, as she sailed forward into the house, “that he may have blacked my eye.” At which the coachman grinned, and gave Fleming a cut across the legs with his whip that made the poor baker howl.
Sadly he stumbled down to Piccadilly. He had been whipped and humiliated. His custom was destroyed, his hopes of a bow window dashed. And he was down thirty pounds. As he dragged himself past the great houses and elegant shops of Piccadilly, the whole fashionable world seemed to be mocking him. By Fortnum and Mason he sat down and wept.
And how the devil was he going to pay for those cobblestones?
A starlight night on the water. It might have been Venice. Like a gondola, the boat passed softly up the darkened Thames. The only sounds were the faint splash of the boatman’s oars dipping in the water, and the tiny rattle of glass in the lamp that swung over the prow.
But who was the tall figure who lay back so elegantly in the passenger seat? He wore a three-cornered hat, a domino – the black hooded cloak in the Italian fashion – and a white mask over his face which, in the darkness, gave him a phantom-like appearance, blank and mysterious. A gentleman going to a Venetian ball? A lover on his way to some secret assignation? An assassin? A figure of death? Perhaps all these.
It was much in fashion, and had been for a generation, this Venetian masquerade. Half the parties in London seemed to demand a disguise, from the great balls where fantastic costumes were de rigueur, to the ordinary nights at the theatre where, scanning the boxes, one might see a score of ladies and gentlemen wearing masks. For what was life, to the fashionable world, without theatre and artifice and, best of all, a frisson of mystery?
Leaving the houses of Bankside behind, the boat passed slowly round the great curve of the river. On the right, the familiar old buildings of Whitehall Palace loomed along the bank. As Westminster itself came in sight, however, a less familiar shape appeared.
During the last sixteen hundred years, London had always had to make do with a single, crowded old bridge as its only road across the river. Recently, however, spanning the Thames in a few graceful arches, another had appeared. It had only been completed this year – to the fury of the Westminster watermen and the owner of the old horseferry – and the costs had so far overrun the estimates