London - Edward Rutherfurd [560]
“My uncle, sir.”
“Hmm. Give him my best wishes when you see him.” It was very clear that it was Bull who was conferring the favour.
He talked a little about how Charterhouse had been when he had been there, discovered another boy’s father had hunted with the West Kent, of which his own son was now joint master; but kept his best move of all until, at the very end of the huge tea, he leaned back, smiled meditatively and remarked to Henry: “I miss your dear father, you know, Henry.” And then by way of explanation to the boys: “Colonel Meredith, you know, was a most remarkable sportsman.” And with a nod of admiration: “He had probably shot more tigers than any other man in the British Empire.”
This, to the boys, was a hero indeed. Before he left, Bull tipped them each half a crown and gave Henry a whole one. His grandson, he rightly guessed, would have no more trouble at school that term.
As she went down into the bowels of the earth, Jenny Ducket wondered what she was doing. And on a cold day too. Not that it was cold down in the tube.
Arnold Silversleeves had just missed seeing his dream of an electric tube system come true. Gorham Dogget’s conclusion after a year of trying to raise finance – “We’re a decade too soon” – had been about right; and early in the new century it had been another American entrepreneur, a Mr Yerkes from Chicago, who developed and organized most of the London tube. Just as Arnold Silversleeves had envisaged, the electric trains ran deep underground; and at high points like Hampstead, the shaft down from the surface had to be so long that it seemed almost like descending a mine.
From Hampstead, Jenny’s route would take her down to Euston Station where she would take another tube to the Bank of England. She could walk from there. Though I’m going to look a right idiot walking up and down on Tower Bridge freezing my bottom off, she told herself again.
Mrs Silversleeves didn’t go out much nowadays, but when she did there were two places she liked to visit. One was Highgate Cemetery where, as he had wished, Arnold Silversleeves had been buried under a cast iron tombstone of his own design. The other was Tower Bridge; for that massive iron machine, whose bascules he had helped design, had been a source of such pride to Arnold Silversleeves in his final years that when Esther took her carriage down to the bank of the Thames she would gaze at it and declare: “Now that is my husband’s true memorial.”
The previous week however, she had not felt up to going out and had said to Jenny: “You go down there for me. You can take the carriage, have a walk and tell me how it looks.” And this was what Jenny had been doing when she met the Fleming brothers.
Dear old Mrs Silversleeves. How vividly Jenny remembered her first arrival in the big, gabled house. She had been so nervous, with her new name of Ducket and all her grandmother Lucy’s warnings and instructions ringing in her ears. “But they will give you a home, Jenny,” her grandmother had told her, and in their way they had.
Life as a servant was hard work. Often Jenny would leave her tiny room up in the attic at five in the morning. As the youngest she had had the worst jobs, carrying the coal scuttles upstairs, cleaning out the grates, polishing the brass and scrubbing floors. At nights she would sink into bed exhausted. But compared to the life she had known in the East End, it was heaven. Clean clothes, clean sheets, enough to eat. She was expected to go to church every Sunday with the family, but she didn’t mind that. And if at first she had found it difficult to remember to bob a little curtsey to Mr Silversleeves or to be properly respectful to the housekeeper, she knew it was only the proper order of things. “For we none of us, Jenny,” Mrs Silversleeves would gently tell her, “need to get above our station.”
Gradually, little changes had taken place. There was always a present at Christmas. Old Mr Silversleeves