London - Edward Rutherfurd [511]
“Oh, do stop!” she cried to the coachman. “Let’s help those children. They look so tired.”
To her great relief, a moment later, Lucy found herself and Horatio perched beside the kind lady. When she heard where they were going she cried out: “Why, that’s just where I live! It’s an enchanting place.”
“And you mean to walk all the way back to St Pancras?” she enquired, after Lucy had answered her question about their expedition. “That seems a very long way,” she remarked, eyeing Horatio’s legs. “Mind you have a good rest at Lavender Hill first.”
Lavender Hill after noon. The August sun shone down with its great, broad heat. All around, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of lavender bushes had turned the slopes into a vast, bluish haze, over which there hovered the continuous, droning buzz of the numberless bees. The scent was overpowering.
Lucy had been half afraid, as she unwrapped their food, that the bees might bother them. But it seemed they were far too busy attending to the lavender. To keep the sun off, she put the napkin over Horatio’s head.
And there the two children stayed, for an hour, then another, too contented to move, drinking in the warm, sweet, hazy air as if it were a magical elixir that would give them new life. No wonder the lady had said the place was enchanted. As Lucy sat in the lavender, under the blue afternoon sky, it was as if she had entered a dream.
“Sing me the lavender song,” Horatio murmured sleepily. Then, after she did, “You’ll never leave me, will you Lucy?”
“Of course not. Never!”
He dozed for some time after that. “I think I’m getting stronger, Lucy,” he said when he awoke.
“I know you are.”
“Let us go home to mother, now,” he said happily, “and take her some lavender.”
When they reached the edge of the field, they were quite astonished to find the pony trap waiting for them in the lane.
“The lady gave orders that I’m to take you home,” the coachman explained. “Up you get now.”
On the way back, the two children sang to each other all the songs they could think of. And especially the lavender song, again and again.
It was the good fortune of reformers like Zachary Carpenter that 1830 turned out to be a cataclysmic year. In Europe, the political order which had been re-established after the mighty upheaval of the French Revolution and the career of Napoleon was by no means stable. The churning forces of democracy unleashed by the French were still active just beneath the surface; and now, in one country after another, eruptions began to occur.
In England, the boom market of recent years had suddenly halted; the harvest of the previous summer had been a disaster; and Wellington’s revision of the Corn Laws had not been nearly enough to meet the case – the price of bread had soared. Then in June the king died, his extravagant London palace still unfinished, and was succeeded by his brother, a bluff sailor who became William IV. And in July, came the news from France. After over a decade under the putrid rule of the restored royal regime, the French had had enough. They revolted. Within days, it was all over and a new liberal monarchy had been set up. As always, Europe looked to France. Signs quickly appeared of more revolts in Italy, Poland and Germany. It was at this point that, as if on cue, the riots in England began.
In fact the Swing Riots, which so terrified England that August, did not touch the cities. Named after one Captain Swing (the gentleman, it later turned out, never existed) they broke out in the south and east where the high prices of basic food that year had hit especially hard. The rioters were blaming everything: the government; agricultural machinery; the landowners. Week after week the trouble broke out, first in one place, then another, with great gangs roaming from village to village.
For Carpenter, however, the year brought growing excitement.