London - Edward Rutherfurd [482]
And now Harry Dogget became very thoughtful indeed.
“I’ve been this boy’s father since ’e was a tiny baby,” he said at last. “Given ’im a good home. I can’t let ’im be taken off just anywhere.”
“Take a look at me, then,” the captain said.
“You look a reg’lar gentleman, I’ll allow,” Dogget agreed. Then he told Meredith exactly how he had found the baby, at Seven Dials.
“Then I must tell you,” Meredith explained, when he had heard it all, “that this is undoubtedly the missing child.”
“But Dad,” cried the little boy, in real distress. He had conceived no affection for the tall stranger and was now hopelessly confused.
“Shut your north and south,” the costermonger said kindly, “you little thief. You don’t know wotcha talkin’ about ’cos you wasn’t ’ardly born.”
The boy reluctantly kept quiet.
“But how d’you know it’s ’im?” Dogget enquired of the captain.
“Oh, the hands. And the hair,” Meredith explained. “Remarkable.”
Yes, the costermonger agreed, they were.
So, leaving his barrow with one of the stallholders he knew, Harry Dogget accompanied them back to Hanover Square, whistled when he saw the house, asked – “You mean he’ll live ’ere, not a servant, like, but one o’ the family?” – and being told yes, he shook his head in wonderment. He declined Meredith’s offer to go in but asked: “Can I come back tomorrow to see ’im? Just to make sure ’e’s all right.” Indeed, he was told, he could, and should.
Thus George, the former Lord Bocton and now the new Earl of St James, was restored to his home.
For Isaac Fleming, however, dawn had brought no such joy, but only a sense of hopeless failure.
If only it had not been for that forty pounds. The money weighed upon him crushingly. It was not just that he needed the money so much – that was bad enough. But whether he got it or not all depended upon this one cake. The result was that every time he thought of a design that might please her ladyship, the money hovered over him as if to say: “Is that all? For forty pounds?” He thought of a castle, a ship, even a lion except that he couldn’t make it. Yet each, within the hour, seemed trite, obvious, unremarkable. It’s no good, he thought. I’m not up to it. I lack the genius. It even came into his mind that perhaps Lady St James had been right when she told him that his earlier cakes had been failures.
“I should give this up,” he told his wife miserably. But he needed forty pounds.
By the time he woke up that day, he was in despair. The bill for the cobblestones was still there, unpaid. Even the modest shop on Fleet Street, he concluded, was too much for him. He’d have to move, he supposed, to some cheaper part of town. “I’m finished,” he murmured. He would like to have said it out loud, to wake his wife, but he did not do so. Instead he went sadly downstairs, to prepare the oven for baking the morning’s bread.
Just after he had put the first batch of bread in he stepped outside. Fleet Street was still quiet. There was not yet a cart moving. Eastwards, somewhere over Ludgate, the sun was sending a bright glow across the heavens. The high, wavy clouds in the pale blue sky were like the tresses of a woman’s hair. Towards Ludgate, high over the rooftops, he could see the splendid spire of Sir Christopher Wren’s St Bride’s with its tiers of octagons piled one above the other up heavenward.
St Bride’s, he thought. Just the right name for a church, if you were having a wedding.
And then he had a most wonderful idea.
The guests were all assembled: just two dozen of her very dearest and most particular fashionable friends.
They all knew, of course, how badly she had been treated by St James and were full of sympathy. They knew about Fleming the baker too, whose special cake, though it had not yet been brought in, was promised to be remarkable. One lady, more zealous for information than all the