London - Edward Rutherfurd [483]
“Be sure to find out which eye was blacked: the left or the right,” she had ordered him. “I won’t be made to look a fool by getting it wrong.”
But even this drama, and the sudden wedding, food for such delicious speculation for weeks to come – even this was quite put in the shade by the latest revelation to emerge from number seventeen, Hanover Square – the discovery of the heir.
It was astonishing. An evil servant switching the child, it seemed, when the young wife had been practically out of her mind with worry and the discovery that the lost child was a sweep. It had to be true, it was agreed, because there was no conceivable reason why either the lady or her new husband should invent such a thing. They clamoured to see the boy, but were denied.
“Too much for him,” his mother told them. “I must protect him.”
Indeed, she had insisted, and Jack had agreed, that the urchin – who could scarcely speak in any language fit to hear, let alone read and write – must spend at least a year in seclusion with a tutor before he was fit to be seen.
“But to do all this at once, and then leave town,” one of the ladies complained. “Why, she has upstaged us all! I’m mad with jealousy.”
As for the new Mrs Meredith, who had nearly, though by no means completely got over the shock of the day before, her social triumph – which was to make her immortal for an entire season – was crowned by the arrival, carried by two footmen, of the wedding cake.
The idea that had come to Isaac Fleming the morning before was so simple, yet so striking, that it was – the people in the room knew it as soon as they saw it – an instant classic. It was not one cake but four, each a little smaller than the last, encased in hard white icing and arranged, one on top of another, in tiers supported by little wooden classical pillars, also coated with icing. It was, as near as a cake could be, an exact replica of the spire of Wren’s St Bride’s. No such cake had ever been seen before. No wedding would ever be complete again without one. The guests broke into applause.
And their hostess was so pleased that she very nearly remembered to pay the baker, the next day, before she left the country.
She might, however, have been a little less pleased by an interview which took place at the corner of the street, at the moment when the applause was breaking out. It was between Harry Dogget, and the new Earl of St James.
“Everything all right, then?” the elder genially enquired.
“It’s amazin’. But you have to be awfully clean and they make me wear shoes. In summer! That’s ’orrible.”
“Never mind.”
“They’re going to make me read an’ write.”
“Won’t do you no ’arm.”
The boy was thoughtful. “Just one thing, Dad.”
“What?”
“Well, ’bout a year ago, when me mum was drunk, she said something about me an’ Sep.”
“Oh, yes?”
“She told me you found Sep by Seven Dials.”
“Maybe I did.”
“Well, if it was him you found and not me, then what’m I doing here?”
“Fate,” said Harry Dogget cheerfully. He considered a moment. “See, it was you that went into the house and tried to steal a shilling, right?” Sam nodded. “So it was you they found.”
“But I’m your son, aren’t I?”
“’Course you are.”
“And Sep’s not.”
“Ah. Now that,” said Harry, with impeccable logic, “is something we don’t know. When I found him, I reckoned he was mine. They lost one like him, so they say. Come to think of it,” he added helpfully, “maybe he don’t really belong to neither of us. But it don’t signify now. What I do know is,” said Harry Dogget emphatically, “that you, my son, have just got a bit of a leg up in the world.”
“I’m a lord,” the boy confessed.
At this revelation his father laughed so hard that he had to hold on to a nearby railing.
“It don’t feel right,” the boy complained.
“Look,” his father said firmly. “Use your loaf. You want to live all your life in the bread and butter? Look at this ’ouse. ’Er ladyship says you’re ’er Bath bun. You’d better keep quiet