London - Edward Rutherfurd [549]
For fully ten minutes, Lucy sat in the cold of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and pondered. There was no doubt about what the old lawyer had said: Silas had daughters. Might one of them, perhaps, take pity on her and the girl? But who were they? And where?
It was then that Lucy remembered something she had been told. At the start of her reign Queen Victoria had ordered that all births, marriages and deaths, usually only registered in each parish, should in future also be recorded in a single, combined register in London. The register could even be consulted by the public. If I could find any of his daughters’ marriages, Lucy thought, then I could at least discover their names. Nervously approaching a lawyer walking past, she was informed that the office she sought was not far away. And by early afternoon she found herself, along with several others, in front of the huge registers. They were arranged by each quarter of each year, beautifully inscribed in copperplate on thick parchment paper, and contained every marriage in England.
Lucy had no idea there were so many Doggets in the world. At first she wondered how she would ever find anything; but gradually, working her way forward, she began to make sense of it. She missed Charlotte, because the family had not yet moved to Blackheath when she married, but a little later, just before the office closed, she came to another entry, in what looked like the right place. It read: Dogget, Esther, to Silversleeves, Arnold.
Could this be a daughter? Where was she now? How in the world could one discover an address? For several minutes after she left the registry she wondered how to proceed, and then remembered something else she had seen, a directory of sorts, while she was waiting in the lawyers’ offices.
Just after he returned from a very good lunch old Mr Odstock happened to encounter young Mr Silversleeves, the promising grandson of Silas Dogget whom he had been glad to welcome as a junior in his office.
“Do you know,” he began cheerily, “I saw, this very morning, a most curious kinswoman . . .” he was about to say, “of yours”, but suddenly remembering Silas’s clear instructions, he thought better of it.
“Kinswoman?” young Silversleeves enquired.
“Nothing,” the old man corrected. “Cousin of mine. Wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
Since he had plenty of time and was in a cheerful mood, the Earl of St James had decided to walk.
His proposal to Nancy had been a great success. He had had the happy idea of taking her for a carriage drive. The weather had been kind. Under a cold, clear blue sky, the frosty ground was sparkling as the carriage left Piccadilly, passed the noble residence of Apsley House which the old Duke of Wellington had built, and entered Hyde Park. The scene had been like something from a fairy tale. The icy trees seemed to be made of glass as the carriageway took them by the site where the great Crystal Palace once stood. A tall, ornate monument to Prince Albert marked the place now while opposite, just outside the park, rose the huge oval shape of the new Albert Hall. They had sat gazing out in the magical silence until, just as they reached the place where the western section of Hyde Park turned into Kensington Gardens, he had asked her to marry him.
She had asked for time to consider – that was the form, of course – but only for a few days, and he had little doubt from her manner that the answer would be yes.
“Though of course you will have to ask my father,” she had reminded him. He was still not quite sure, as he made his way along now, whether he would be seeing the father or the daughter first.
Either way, he had felt so cheerful, had so positively told himself he really liked the girl a lot, that he had paused to buy himself a present.
There were many picture dealers in London, but his favourite was a Frenchman, Monsieur Durand-Ruel whose gallery