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By Root 4046 0

had shown her how to look after her tiny savings and augmented them from time to time with a guinea. As for Mrs Silversleeves, as Jenny progressed over the years to housemaid and finally to her lady’s maid, she realized that the old lady was very fond of her. She would often say, “Here’s a silk scarf you might like for your days off, Jenny.” Or a pair of gloves. Or even a coat. Often they were hardly worn and once or twice she suspected that items of clothing had been bought with her in mind all along. Quite often, since being widowed, Mrs Silversleeves would have her remain in the sitting room with her, ask her to read the small print in the newspaper to her and talk to her. Only one subject seemed to be forbidden. When Jenny went, twice a year, to see her father and her brother in the East End, she never mentioned it to her employer. If she did, the old lady became distant and remarked: “We don’t want to hear about that, Jenny.”

There had been no men in her life. When she was a girl, some of the delivery boys had tried to flirt with her, but she had soon sent them packing. Over the years, through the other women working in the house, she had made a few friends and had met men occasionally, going out with them. There had been a young coachman, a greengrocer and a tramdriver who had all shown an interest in her. “I don’t know why, I’m sure,” she had confided to the cook, “because I’m nothing much to look at, all pale and thin.” But as soon as these advances began, she had quietly discouraged them. She had her reasons. And in recent years, she sensed that old Mrs Silversleeves had so grown to rely on her that she would have felt guilty about leaving her anyway.

So why was she going to Tower Bridge? There was something about Percy, with his concave face, a little sad perhaps but determined, which made him look reliable. And when his brother had said that he needed a wife, she had suddenly felt that yes, she could do that. On Friday she had decided she’d just go for a walk on Hampstead Heath on her day off. She only gave her overcoat a good brush because it was time it had one anyway. And if now, on Saturday, she was making her way to Tower Bridge after all, she told herself it didn’t signify. “Because he won’t be there anyway.”

She was really quite surprised to see him then, an hour later, standing in the middle of the bridge, trying to look casual and pretending he wasn’t half frozen after waiting.

“Hello,” Jenny said. “Fancy seeing you here!”

There were several regular places where Violet took her children, because it was good for them. Some they liked better than others. The Botanical Gardens at Kew was popular in summer, because they took a boat upriver to get there. Madame Tussaud’s waxworks was a favourite too. The pictures in the National Gallery were a duty, though they enjoyed feeding the pigeons that swarmed in Trafalgar Square outside. More often requested was a visit to South Kensington.

So great had the profits of Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851 been that the government had been able to use them to purchase a whole area running down from Hyde Park to South Kensington and here, on each side of a broad avenue called Exhibition Road, several magnificent museums were clustered. As well as the Albert Hall by the park, the new Victoria and Albert Museum was almost completed, and opposite, in a vast, cathedral-like structure, was the Natural History Museum, where fossils, rocks and wonderful drawings of plants all gave evidence of the scientific discoveries and the Darwinian ideas which had been changing the intellectual world in the last two generations. The children loved in particular the huge reconstruction of skeletons of the long-extinct dinosaurs.

For Violet herself there was one excursion that far surpassed all the rest, perhaps because the huge site it occupied lay in the heart of Bloomsbury, the quiet brown-brick Georgian area just east of Tottenham Court Road. It was here that many of the buildings of the University of London, which she would have liked to attend, were to be found. Its collection