London - Edward Rutherfurd [514]
Bocton gazed at him in astonishment. “Is he?”
A moment later, walking stiffly by in the company of several other elderly peers, they caught sight of the old Earl of St James, whom Bocton now approached.
“Did you know, father, that George was standing for a rotten borough?”
“That’s right, Bocton. I bought it for him.”
“You did not tell me.”
“Didn’t I? Must have slipped my mind.”
“I shall look forward to walking through the Aye lobby with him. Father and son,” Bocton remarked drily.
The fact that a man was standing for a rotten borough, of course, was no indication that he supported the system. There were plenty of Whigs who had got into Parliament via rotten boroughs who were committed, as a matter of principle, to voting their own seats out of existence.
“Really?” The old earl shrugged. “I’ve no idea which way he’ll vote.”
For a moment Carpenter thought he had misheard. “He’ll vote for reform like you and me, my lord,” he coaxed the cross old man. “That’s why you put him there.”
“Oh.” Did the old earl look a little vague, now? Had he lost the thread of what they were saying, or was this just another little game to annoy his son? He stared at Carpenter. “What sort of odds can one get on this election?” he suddenly demanded. “Who’s making a book? Any idea?”
“No, my lord.”
“I suppose I’d better go and find out.” The earl paused. “I don’t think,” he remarked with a frown, “that I’ve been to the races for some time.”
September fog, thick and brown, smothered the river. Had the boat been going round in circles? Were they opposite Blackfriars, or down by the Tower, or out in the reaches by Wapping? Used as she was by now to the river, she had no idea; and when, after an hour, she asked Silas, he only grunted.
How he expected to find anything in this brown miasma, she could not imagine; yet still, from time to time, he would give her an instruction: “Pull to port. Hold her steady.” So that she could only wonder what he knew in the opaque, undivided firmament of water and fog, that other men did not.
As the boat drifted, Lucy’s thoughts drifted also. For a time, after he had found the gold, Horatio had seemed to be better. At Christmas, he and Lucy had prepared a splendid feast for their mother, and he had even sung his family a carol he had learned. But in January he began to cough up phlegm, and in the first week of February he was so racked by a raging fever that at times Lucy wondered if his frail body could stand it. The infection that had taken over his lungs was as thick and evil as the London fog. For two months he had sat at home, his chest wrapped up in shawls. Sometimes his mother would try hot compresses to draw the infection, and he would thank her with tears of pain in his eyes. But only in May had the evil presence seemed to withdraw, for the time being at least, leaving him weak all through the warm months of summer; and now, with the chill and fog of September beginning again, she trembled to think of the sickness’s awful return.
“Keep away from him, or you’ll catch it,” Silas would say.
“He must get away from this place,” she repeated, though Silas gave her no encouragement.
She could see Silas well enough as he sat a few feet from her, and as he rested his chest thoughtfully on the oars it seemed to her that even he might be thinking of calling it a day. They seldom exchanged more than a few words but, sitting alone in the fog, Silas for some reason decided to be more companionable.
“You’ve got pluck. I’ll give you that. Out here in this fog and you never complain.”
“It’s nothing,” she said. And then, encouraged by this unusual turn of conversation she ventured: “How can you tell how to find things, Silas? Even in this?”
“I don’t know, really,” he confessed. “Always could.”
“Were you on the river as a child?”
He nodded.
“And your father?”
“Waterman. Whole family on the river. Except my sister,” he added thoughtfully. “She hated it.”
Lucy’s heart missed a beat. He