London - Edward Rutherfurd [520]
“I thought you were too cautious a man for such an undertaking,” Eugene said.
“Very true. But I so admired the way that you had led your life, Penny, I said to myself: ‘There, see what you might have done, Jeremy Fleming, but for your want of courage.’ And I thought to myself: ‘Everyone wants beer.’ But they did not want mine. And then I lost caution and pressed on.” He shook his head and smiled sadly. “Lost all I had, you see.”
“I did not know! You never told me.” And, Penny thought, I never asked. “How do you live?” he went on.
“My children are kind. They are good children. Better than I deserve, Penny. They give me what they can. I do not starve.”
“Your house?”
“I live in a smaller place now. Nearby.”
“You shall come to supper with us this very day,” Penny cried. “You shall come to stay.”
And from that time Mr Jeremy Fleming’s rent was paid, and a new suit made for him at least once a year, and he came often to the house at Clapham where, at Mary’s special request, he became an extra godfather to her children.
“You are good to him,” she said sometimes with approval to her husband.
Eugene would only polish his spectacles, shake his head and say: “But very late, Mary. To my shame.”
Yet all the same, as he took his walks with her on warm summer evenings, it seemed to him that most things had worked out for the best, up there by Lavender Hill.
THE CRYSTAL PALACE
1851
Everything had been carefully planned. By three o’clock precisely the whole family would gather at the big house up on Blackheath – for, as any of his four daughters or their husbands could tell you, it didn’t do to be late for the Guv’nor. Besides, it was the dear old man’s birthday. Unthinkable to be late for that.
But the August day was still young. Her husband had calculated that they could afford two hours and forty minutes of pleasure; so it was with some excitement that Harriet Penny and he approached the huge structure that flashed and glittered before them like some magical palace from a fairy tale.
Nothing like it had ever been seen before. Almost seventy feet high (even a great elm tree had been left growing inside) and four times the length of St Paul’s, the monumental edifice stretched over six hundred yards along the southern edge of Hyde Park. And, most astonishing of all, it was almost entirely made of iron and of glass.
The gigantic hall of the Great Exhibition of 1851 – the Crystal Palace, as it was immediately called – was a triumph of British engineering. Designed exactly like a vast prefabricated greenhouse, its nine hundred square feet of glass, mass-produced in standard units, and thousands of cast-iron girders and pillars created nearly a million square feet of floor-space, yet had been built in only a few months. Light and airy, its hollow iron supports neatly doubling as drainpipes, the Crystal Palace represented everything that was modern and progressive. The only old-fashioned feature in the whole thing had been the importation – at the suggestion of the old Duke of Wellington – of a pair of sparrow-hawks to deal with the birds that had infested the galleries. The idea for this international exhibition and its great hall had come from the young Queen Victoria’s clever German husband, Albert, who had both masterminded and seen the whole project through to completion. The royal couple were hugely proud of it.
And already it was declared to be a triumph. People from all over England had flocked to see it. French, Germans, Italians, travellers from America and even the Far East had come, not just in their thousands but their millions to see its wonders. Nor were these only people of the better sort. On most days, ordinary folk could come in for only a shilling.
Harriet had not been to the Great Exhibition before, although it had been open since May.