London - Edward Rutherfurd [537]
His hand was only an inch away from hers. She pretended not to notice. But she wondered: was it coming closer? Would they touch?
There were three levels of entertainment in late Victorian London. At the apex was the opera at Covent Garden. For the poor, there was the music hall, that wonderful mixture of song, dance and burlesque – the precursor to vaudeville – that was now spreading into theatres in even the meanest suburbs. But between these two in the last decade a new spectacle had appeared. The operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan were full of easy tunes, and charming comedy; yet Sullivan’s music was often worthy of opera and Gilbert’s lyrics, for verbal brilliance and satire, had no equal. The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado – every year a new production had taken London, and soon would take New York, by storm. This was the year of The Gondoliers. Queen Victoria had loved it.
It could not be said that there was anything very remarkable about Miss Nancy Dogget of Boston, Mass. Her complexion, certainly, was good. Her golden hair was parted in the middle and modestly drawn back in a way that was perhaps a little childish for her twenty-one years. But her china-blue eyes were truly remarkable. As for the man who was sharing the evening so attentively at her side, he seemed everything that a man could be. Warm, charming, educated; he had a fine house and a lovely old estate in Kent. At thirty he was old enough to be a man of the world, but young enough for the girls back home to envy her. And then of course, as her mother had announced when she had first discovered him: “My dear, he’s an earl!”
Not that family grandeur could be anything new to a girl from Boston. In the words of the rhyme:
This is good old Boston
Home of the bean and the cod:
Where Lowells talk only to Cabots
And Cabots talk only to God.
The old Boston families – Cabots, Hubbards, Gorhams, Lorings – not only knew exactly whom their ancestors had married but also, with a grim satisfaction, what the family had thought of them at the time. The Doggets were as old as most. They had come over with Harvard. It was rumoured they had even embarked on the Mayflower, “then jumped ship”, a few unkind friends would remember. Their trust funds went down into the bedrock. And if from time to time, one of the family was born with webbed fingers, it caused no great concern: not even their greatest admirers claimed that the old East Coast families were renowned for their beauty.
Mr Gorham Dogget was a true Bostonian. He had been to Harvard; he spoke out of the side of his mouth; he had married a girl from a rich old New York family. But he was also adventurous. Investing in the railroads that had opened up the great Midwestern plains, he had trebled his already solid fortune. In recent years he had also been spending time in London. Though the United States was expanding mightily, the City of London with its vast imperial trade was still the financial capital of the world. American bankers like Morgan and Peabody spent most of their careers there and raised the money for huge projects like the American railroads. His visits to London in this connection had given Gorham Dogget several ideas for further projects.
Like other Americans made richer than ever before by the new industrial age, Gorham Dogget had also discovered the pleasures of Europe. Like English aristocrats in the previous century, they made the Grand Tour: and what better place to base oneself than London? The Doggets had already spent a month in France and another in Italy, where Nancy had made many sketches and acquired a smattering of those languages. Some fine paintings had also been bought. This was now the third time that mother and daughter had stayed, enjoying London’s social life, while Mr Dogget returned briefly to Boston. But it was not only paintings and culture that could be acquired in Europe.
“Do you think St James would be a good husband?” Nancy had asked her mother. She had learned