London - Edward Rutherfurd [488]
“This,” Carpenter thundered, “is an iniquity.”
Zachary Carpenter was a well-known figure. By trade he was a furniture maker, and a good one. Having served his apprenticeship with the firm of Chippendale he had briefly worked as a journeyman for Sheraton, but then set up on his own, specializing in the miniature domestic writing desks known as davenports. Like many cabinet-makers, he operated in the great parish of St Pancras, where he had a workshop with three journeymen and two apprentices; and, like many craftsmen and small employers, he was a fervid radical.
“It’s in the blood,” he would say. For though the details were vague, the family tradition of Gideon Carpenter’s career as a Roundhead still remained. Zachary’s own father had been a religious reformer. Zachary had vivid memories of being dragged out of bed when a boy and taken to the great hall up in Moorfields where old John Wesley himself was still preaching his message of pure and simple Christianity. But the subject of religion had never interested him much: Zachary sought purity, but he wanted to find it in the institutions of men.
He was eighteen when the French Revolution, with its promise of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, had broken out, and twenty-one when Tom Paine’s mighty tract The Rights of Man, with its demand for ‘One Man One Vote’ was published. Within a week of reading it, he had joined the London Corresponding Society, whose tracts and meetings were soon providing a network for radicals all over England. By the age of twenty-five, he was gaining note as a speaker. He had been speaking ever since.
“And isn’t this parish just an example,” he cried out, “of the great injustice done in every constituency in Britain, where free men may not vote and members of Parliament are chosen, not by the people but by a clutch of aristocrats and their creatures? It is time for this infamy to end. It is time for the people to rule.” After this incitement to revolution, he turned and went inside, to wild applause.
Something was certainly peculiar about the scene. Fitzroy Square, designed by the Adams brothers, lay in the parish’s most fashionable, south-western corner. Odder still was the presence, clearly visible at Carpenter’s shoulder, of the owner of the house, who had been nodding in warm agreement all the time. Oddest of all was the fact that this person was that epitome of aristocracy, the noble Earl of St James himself.
It was seventy years now since Sam had become an earl. Indeed, as the years of his childhood passed he had gradually forgotten his early years in Seven Dials. Vague whispers, little flashes of memory would come to him sometimes, but he had been told so firmly and so often by his stepfather Meredith that he had been rescued and returned to the state that was properly his, that he came to believe it. By the time he was a young man he had actually forgotten about Sep, and if now and then he had been discreetly observed by a costermonger, he had not even been aware of it. As for his life since he came of age – the Earl of St James had been too busy enjoying himself to think of anything else. He was enjoying himself now, supporting his radical friend Carpenter.
As the two men, the rich aristocrat and the homespun tradesman, entered the room arm in arm, Lord St James’s expression turned to irritation as he saw two men waiting for them.
“What the devil are you doing here, Bocton?” he exclaimed sharply, addressing the suaver of the two men.
Though the paternity of Lord Bocton was not in the slightest doubt, one would never have thought it to see him and his father together. The old earl adopted the dress of the more flamboyant young bloods of the next generation, who were known as the Regency bucks. Instead of breeches and stockings he wore tight trousers secured under the instep. He favoured a cutaway tailcoat, brightly coloured