London - Edward Rutherfurd [508]
Sometimes, when the weather was warm, and if their mother was well, Horatio would go with Lucy to the river. She would not allow him to come in the boat in case she and Silas encountered a body, but he would sit in the sun by one of the riverside boathouses, or, if the water was low, wander on the mud flats, where there were always other children mudlarking. Though he could never keep up with them when they rushed to inspect a new find, he would often meet Lucy with a happy smile and show her some small treasure he had discovered in the grey old mud.
Every night, as she held him in her arms, he would promise: “One day I’ll be strong. Then you shall rest at home and I’ll go out to work for us all.”
She would rock him gently and sing to him, always ending with his favourite, the song that the lavender-seller had taught her, singing it over and over, very softly, until he was asleep.
It was a pity that Silas did not like him. His heavy, angry eye would rest upon the boy and he would say: “He’s sickly, like your mother.”
“He grows stronger!” she would protest. Silas would shrug. “He’ll never pull an oar.”
Now, Lucy changed places with Silas, and he took the big oars, rowing with slow, heavy strokes towards the Tower of London while she sat in the stern, aware only of the corpse being drawn along below the surface just behind her.
“Your brother will die,” Silas remarked suddenly. “You know that, don’t you?”
“He will live!” she cried defiantly. “And pull a better oar than you.”
For a time, Silas said nothing, but as they drew level with the little steeple of All Hallows church above the grim old Tower he gruffly declared: “Don’t love him too much. He will die.”
When Zachary Carpenter rose to speak nobody in the hushed hall in St Pancras would ever have guessed that he was convinced he was wasting his time. After all, he had spent half a lifetime agitating for reform and got nowhere. Nonetheless he addressed the crowd with his usual eloquence. His theme was a good one; he had perfected it in the last few years.
“Do you not acknowledge,” he cried, “that this nation is being fed upon by bloodsuckers? What are the king, his Parliament and their many friends? They are eaters of taxes. They feed upon your flesh. I can give you proof positive of the rottenness of this kingdom. Do you want proof?”
The crowd in the hall said that they did.
“Go down to the Mall, then!” Carpenter cried. “Go to the Mall, look down to the end of it, and tell me what you see. I will tell you what you see: not just brick and mortar, not just stone, and tower, turret and pinnacle. You see a scandal, my friends, rising up to mock you. There is your proof.” He was speaking, of course, of the building of Buckingham Palace.
Of all the many embarrassments which the Prince Regent, now king, had inflicted upon England, none – not his debts, not his roaming wife, not even his strange coronation – could begin to rival the ongoing scandal of Buckingham Palace. Originally an aristocrat’s house bought by the royal family, George IV had decided to convert it to a new palace. His friend Nash, the architect, had been called in and Parliament, very unwillingly, had voted two hundred thousand pounds which had soon been spent. The radicals protested, Parliament protested, even the loyal Duke of Wellington exploded with rage. The king went blithely on. By now the expense was a staggering seven hundred thousand pounds.
To Carpenter Buckingham Palace was a safe bet. He only had to point out to his audience that such outrages would continue until there was reform, and his case was made. Yet was there any point? Nothing ever changed. Last