London - Edward Rutherfurd [491]
“You have a grandson to consider as well as a son, sir,” he said with reproach. At the mention of his grandson the earl’s eyes softened a little. Young George was a very different matter. But he was not going to spoil his fun. “Are you not in any case, father, a little old to trouble yourself with such a move?” Lord Bocton went on.
“Not at all,” his father genially declared. “I shall live to be a hundred. You’ll be over seventy then.” He glanced out of the window. “No riot,” he observed. “All’s quiet, Bocton. You can go home now.” And putting his arm through Carpenter’s, the sporting old rogue led him off.
When they were well away from the house Lord Bocton turned to his lugubrious companion.
“What do you think, Mr Silversleeves?”
Silversleeves shook his head. “An interesting case, my lord,” he agreed, before pausing regretfully. “Though I cannot …” he almost said “in conscience” but thought better of it, “I cannot yet do what you propose.”
“But there is hope?”
“Oh yes, my lord.” Silversleeves considered professionally. “His sense of responsibility: diminishing, without a doubt. Believes he’ll live to be a hundred: delusion. Spending all his money: incapacity. His radical notions – that, sir, I take to be the kernel of it – that is what will ripen into madness.” He sighed. “I’ve seen it time and again, my lord: a man gets an idea, it grows, finally it gets him. From enthusiasm to obsession; from obsession to lunacy. It’s just a question of being patient.”
“So you’ll be able to lock him up?” Bocton asked bluntly.
“Oh, I’m sure of it, my lord. Sooner or later.”
“Sooner, I hope,” Lord Bocton remarked. “I count on you.”
For Mr Cornelius Silversleeves was the deputy superintendent of the great Bethlehem Hospital, recently moved to a vast new premises in Southwark. Or, in the common vernacular, Bedlam.
Penny was lucky in his godfather. Jeremy Fleming lived in a pleasant, narrow old house off Fleet Street only a short walk from where his grandfather’s cake shop had been. A widower whose children had married and left home, his concave face creased into a smile of delight at the thought of having company and he assured Eugene he might live in his house for as long as he pleased. He was also sanguine about Eugene’s prospects of working in the financial world; for in his lifetime as a highly respectable clerk in the Bank of England he had acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the City.
The first day, Fleming showed Eugene the Tower and St Paul’s. The second day they visited Westminster and the West End. On the third day he informed Eugene: “Today we begin your education.” And at nine o’clock sharp they set off in a hired pony and trap, clattered over London Bridge and made their way out to Greenwich.
“If you want to understand the City,” Fleming explained, as they looked out from the slope above Greenwich, “you need to come here first.”
The scene before Eugene was certainly very different to the one that had greeted him three days before. There was a bracing easterly wind, an open blue sky; the distant city was so clear it might have been a painting and the great curve of the river lay gleaming below. But it was to a series of other patches of water, like huge ponds near the river that Fleming now directed his attention.
“London dock over there at Wapping; there’s Surrey dock over on the left; West India directly opposite; East India further off.” His face broke into a happy smile. “The docks, Eugene: aren’t they grand?”
In the last twenty years the river, which had scarcely changed since Tudor times, had been transformed. The Pool of London below the Tower had become so crowded that something had had to be done. First one, then another huge dock and canal system was cut in the marshlands along the river; quays and roadways were built; and the gigantic system of London’s docklands had begun. It was necessary. Eugene’s head was soon swimming as Fleming related the volumes of trade flowing in from Britain’s ever-growing