London - Edward Rutherfurd [506]
“How can I make it better?” Lucy cried.
“More rest. Less worry.” The woman shrugged. She gave the girl a kindly pat.
A month went by and, apart from a few small attacks, her mother carried on well enough. But then, one morning, she was struck again and could not go to work; and then Lucy raised the subject.
“Let me work for Uncle Silas, mother. He is kind,” she pointed out, “to offer so much.”
“Kind? Silas?” Her mother shook her head in disgust. “To think of you doing what he does . . .”
“I think I should not mind.”
“Never, Lucy, while I have breath,” her mother cried. “Do not even think of it again.”
Eugene Penny decided to bring matters to a conclusion in September of 1827. Meredith’s Bank had come out of the crisis rather well. Lord St James had been repaid his money and remembered the young clerk with some admiration. Meredith was in his debt. Word even filtered back to Hamish Forsyth that the twenty-five-year-old Penny was considered a fellow with a future. He had now nearly two thousand pounds of his own – a substantial amount when an ordinary Bank of England clerk made around a hundred a year. The time was approaching when other City firms might start approaching him with offers of a position, perhaps a lucrative one. But he also knew that the way to impress Hamish Forsyth was to show consistency.
One Monday morning he faced Meredith in the parlour. “I have good news,” he told him. “I am glad to tell you that I am to marry the only daughter of Mr Hamish Forsyth of Lloyd’s. She comes into his entire fortune, you know.”
“My dear Penny!” Meredith, genuinely delighted, was about to call his family in, but Eugene stopped him.
“There is something else, Meredith. I think you may agree that I have earned a junior partnership here. My position as Forsyth’s son-in-law also makes it appropriate. Indeed, if you don’t, I’m sure Forsyth will feel I should look elsewhere.”
“My dear Eugene!” It did not take Meredith long to calculate Forsyth’s probable fortune, nor to admit that Penny had indeed made himself valuable to the firm, “I was thinking just the very same thing,” the banker replied.
Penny had no sooner drunk the glass of sherry that Meredith pressed upon him than he walked straight across to Lloyd’s.
“Mr Forsyth,” he said boldly, “I have been made a partner in Meredith’s. I have come to ask for Mary’s hand.’
“A partner?” the Scot enquired. “That is definite?” Eugene nodded. “Well, then, I suppose ye’re right. It is time.” He paused thoughtfully, and took a pinch of snuff.
“Have you a ring?”
“I mean to buy one today.”
“Aye, well. A ring’s a necessity. But if you will take my advice, do not get anything too expensive. I can take you to a man who will let you have something perfectly” – sniff – “reasonable.”
The Pennys’ first child was a healthy boy; and a second was already on the way when Mary said she would like to live outside the metropolis. So she was delighted when Eugene told her he had found a house in Clapham.
His choice of a village on the Thames’s southern bank was sensible. Even Hamish Forsyth agreed about that. “The southern bank’s the place to be,” he nodded. Three new bridges – Waterloo, Southwark and Vauxhall – had made it far more accessible and the open fields by Lambeth were being laid out in handsome streets so that the carriage drive out to the villas of the well-to-do in Battersea and Clapham seemed likely to pass through quite a fashionable suburb. At Clapham itself, around the ancient common, there were a number of handsome houses. The church in the centre was a gracious classical edifice. And though Forsyth felt that the six-bedroom house Penny found was larger than strictly necessary, he seemed mollified when Eugene pointed out that their family would be growing.
“It’ll save you the cost of moving later,” Forsyth conceded. And to celebrate the event he even bought the couple a fine set of Wedgwood china. “Wedgwood keeps the same patterns,” he pointed out. “If you should break a piece, it can be replaced without losing the value of the set.