London - Edward Rutherfurd [555]
There was also another possible reason for the boy’s misery. He was ravenously hungry.
The Charterhouse school had started in 1614, some seventy years after the last monks had been ejected from the site by Henry VIII. More recently, the school had moved to a new location, thirty miles south-west of London. It was a fine old school and parents paid good money to send their sons there. Yet strangely, they either did not know or did not think it mattered that, once there, the children they undoubtedly loved were given almost nothing to eat. Thick slices of bread thinly buttered, stew or gruel in tiny amounts, cabbage boiled until it was bleached, wads of almost inedible suet pudding – this was the fare of privileged schoolboys. “Mustn’t spoil them. Boys should be brought up hard.” The survivors would rule the empire. Had it not been for hampers sent by his mother, Meredith could almost have starved.
But as he returned to his hard bench in the classroom and the desk scored deep with the names of earlier sufferers, it was neither the electric pain nor the hunger pangs that caused Henry Meredith to choke back the tears. It was the article that an older boy had showed him in a newspaper that morning.
As the trap passed through the park gates at Bocton that autumn day, Violet still found it strange to think that her mother would not be there. Mary Anne had died the previous year and, of the four Dogget sisters, only Esther Silversleeves was left now.
The drive was long, and Violet nervously clutched her six-year-old daughter’s hand the whole way down. There was no going back now. I’ll hold my head high, she promised herself and gripped the child’s hand tighter as she saw her father waiting for them in front of the house.
What made it worse was that old Edward Bull had been so good to them. Because Meredith had remained so strong and slim, she had supposed he would live to a great age. He had fathered their two sons and, when just over seventy, their little daughter Helen. So when he had suddenly died three years ago she had been taken by surprise. A massive heart attack, half a day when he could not speak, a tender look, a squeeze of her hand, and he was gone, leaving less money than she had thought. They were not exactly poor, but to keep up an appropriate household and educate the children she had found that her income was a little stretched. She had been grateful when her father had stepped in to pay for the children’s schools.
For two whole hours while he walked them round the deer park and played with his granddaughter in the old walled garden Edward Bull said nothing. Only when Helen had been removed by the housekeeper and they were alone in the library did he take a folded newspaper, drop it down on the sofa beside her and remark:
“I see you’ve been talking to the Prime Minister.”
Violet waited to see whether this was the prelude to an explosion.
The subject on which she had accosted the great man was not new. Since the Great Reform Act of 1832, democracy had been marching slowly forward. Two more Acts had enfranchised first the middle, then the better-off working class. Some two thirds of all adult men in Britain could now vote – but no women.
A respectable group of ladies known as Suffragists had been quietly protesting against this injustice for forty years, but got nowhere. Five years ago a new group led by the fiery Mrs Pankhurst had appeared on the scene. “Suffragettes” these new crusaders were soon dubbed. Their motto was Deeds Not Words and they lived up to it. They began to sport their own colours – purple, white and green – on sashes, banners and posters. They held public meetings and interrupted parliamentary elections. And,