London (156 page)

“My maiden name was Dogget, the same as yours,” she ventured.

“Really? Your father a Dogget? What did he do?”

She saw Harriet Penny glance at her nervously; but she had prepared for this.

“He was an investor,” she said with only the faintest blush.

“Sounds a good man! We came over with the
Mayflower
,” said Mr Gorham Dogget, and turned his attention back to young Penny who, it seemed to him, had some interesting ideas.

If Esther had found the Bostonian a little abrupt over some of her conversational gambits, this was made up for by the pleasure he seemed to take in the younger generation. Her own eldest son Matthew and his wife had evidently found favour. Matthew was a lawyer with a good firm of solicitors and the Bostonian had already indicated that he might have some work for him. As for young Penny, he was eager to push the family insurance business into an exciting new area. “For the first time in history there is sufficient prosperity not only in the middle class but in the small shopkeepers and even the skilled artisans for them to afford life insurance,” he informed Dogget. “The size of each policy, naturally, will be small; but the volume of numbers is potentially huge. The Prudential Insurance Company is already active here, but there’s plenty of room for us, too.” The Penny Insurance Company had recently taken on the younger Silversleeves son as an actuary. “Get the numbers right and offer cheap rates and there’s nothing we can’t achieve,” young Penny assured them all.

“A sound, forward-looking young man, your son,” the Bostonian murmured to Harriet Penny.

But it was when her desserts were being served that Esther Silversleeves really got her chance to shine. For it was then, glancing around the table, that Mr Gorham Dogget casually enquired: “Does anyone here know anything about a fellow called Lord St James?”

Oh, but indeed she did. Flushing with pleasure at the connection she could claim, Esther began: “I hope you won’t think we are getting above our station . . .” This little phrase, used whenever she became socially self-conscious, made the Pennys secretly wince and had caused the Bulls to become rather distant. “But I can tell you all about the earl. He and my brother-in-law are partners together in shipping.”

“A vessel, you mean?”

“Yes indeed. She’s called the
Charlotte Rose
: a clipper. They think she can beat the
Cutty Sark
herself!” She became rather confidential. “In fact, the earl has bet on it so heavily that I believe his fortune may rest entirely on my brother-in-law’s shoulders. He’s the captain, you see.” And she beamed at them all, thinking how well she had done, while Mr Gorham Dogget looked thoughtful.

Time was running out for Lucy Dogget. If she wanted to try to save the girl, she knew she must make the effort soon.

Lucy Dogget was seventy that year, but she looked more. Compared to Silas’s daughters, she would have seemed not a decade but a generation older. Sometimes now, as she sat hour after hour at her worktable, she would wonder what had happened to her life.

It had been hard for a single woman with a child in Whitechapel. Some had it worse: families with six or seven children and a father out of work. Thieving and prostitution were the only way for them, and disease and death usually followed soon. For Lucy, it had been keeping her little boy out of that condition that was the great struggle. His father had tried to help surreptitiously in the five more years he had lived, but after that she had been alone.

She had worked at a variety of menial occupations to feed herself and the child. She had managed to persuade the boy to attend a parish school, for which she had to pay a few pence. But he had grown bored, preferring to run about and find odd jobs. By the age of twelve, though he could read a little and write his name, young William was working most of the day at a boat-building yard where out of kindness the master had agreed to let the boy apprentice to the trade. But he would not stick at it and by sixteen he was seeking casual work at the docks. By nineteen, he had married the daughter of another docker. By twenty he had a son of his own who died at six months; then another; then a daughter followed by two more, both sickly, who died. Eight years ago he had lost his wife in childbirth. Such things happened; men married again. But William did not. He took to drinking instead. And so, at the age of sixty, Lucy had found herself, in effect, a mother again.

Whitechapel itself had changed significantly by this time. In the early 1880s in Eastern Europe a series of terrible pogroms forced a large section of the Jewish population to emigrate. Many were able to flee to the United States, but a large number, some tens of thousands, made their way to tolerant Britain; and many of these new refugees, like others before them, found their first home in the East End by the Port of London.

The transformation was astonishing. Some English and Irish stayed, others moved into neighbouring districts to make way, as street after street of Whitechapel became Jewish. The new arrivals were usually, like most refugees, very poor. They wore strange clothes and spoke Yiddish. “They keep themselves to themselves and they don’t give any trouble,” Lucy noted approvingly. But she moved into nearby Stepney with her neighbours all the same. And there, while her son sometimes worked, and sometimes remembered not to drink his meagre wages, she found work at a factory that made waterproof clothing and did her best to help two grandchildren to survive.

In one respect she did a little better. Since 1870 it had become compulsory for children to attend school, and even in the East End schools of some kind were now to be found in every parish. Not that it was possible as yet to enforce the law in practice. Few children attended more than sporadically and with the boy, Tom, she was forced to give up when he was ten. “You’ll end up like your father,” she warned him. “I ’spect I shall,” he would reply casually, and she recognized that there was nothing she could do for him. But his sister Jenny was quite another story. By the age of ten she was earning a few pence helping the master teach the other children how to read. Something good, Lucy prayed, might finally come out of the sacrifice she had made all those years ago, to keep her disappointing son. Jenny could yet be saved.

Five years ago, because her legs were weak, Lucy had been obliged to give up going out to work. But for a woman sitting at home in the East End of London, there were still ways of making a few pence, and the surest, though the most tedious, was making matchboxes. She only needed the materials, a table, and a paste brush to assemble a matchbox. She was given the raw materials except for the paste which she had to buy herself. The work was not difficult. Bryant and May paid her tuppence ha’penny for every gross she delivered. Lucy could make seven gross in a day if she worked fourteen hours; so in a ninety-eight hour week she earned four pounds ten shillings. With young Jenny helping her a few days a week they could pay the rent and buy a little food. But what would become of Jenny when Lucy was gone?

As she looked around her, the signs were not encouraging. Her son was a drunk. Young Tom had taken up with some of the rowdier youths of the Jewish community; and though these Jewish boys did not drink so much, they were always gambling. “Which is just as quick a way of losing your wages,” she pointed out to Jenny. Then, the previous year, there had been the terrible murders of Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel. So far the victims had been prostitutes, but with madmen like that about, what girl was safe?

There was something else that worried Lucy, too. The first sign of trouble in the East End had been last year at the Bryant and May match factory, when the girls there, led by a vigorous outsider called Annie Besant, had walked out in protest at their starvation wages. This year, more ominously, another woman called Eleanor Marx, whose father Karl Marx, they said, was a revolutionary writer who lived in the West End, had come to help the gasworkers organize a union; and soon after that, there had been a huge strike down at the docks.

“I’m not saying they’re wrong,” Lucy told Jenny. She knew all about the pay of the matchworkers; and her son had often described the terrible scenes at the docks where casual labourers were allowed to fight each other for the shift-work. “But where will it lead?” Whatever the future held for the East End, she wanted to find Jenny a safe haven, before she herself was no longer there to protect her. But how? Every year the East End had grown larger as the population swelled and immigrants came in. Villages like Poplar had completely disappeared in the endless, dreary wasteland of docks, factories and long rows of mean houses. Lucy could think of only one possible hope. And so, on a cold December day, she set out on a journey she had not attempted for over thirty years.

In the universe of lawyers there is no place more august and dignified than the big square near Chancery Lane known as Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A noble old hall adorns one side, lawyers’ chambers and other ancient offices stand quietly round the rest. And in one corner, up handsome, shadowy stairs which, somehow, suggested an appropriate air of dignified obfuscation, were the offices of Odstock and Alderbury, Solicitors.

Lucy had never gone to see Silas’s lawyers, since she had not given up her child. Nor, given the circumstances, had she ever mentioned Silas to her son. But she could not help hoping that at his death at least he would do something for her. What other kin had he, after all? She had tried to discover what had happened to him and at last, a dozen years before, she had learned from an old newspaper of his death. She wrote to the lawyer and, receiving no response, wrote again to ask whether her kinsman had remembered her. This time she received a brief and curt reply: he had not.

She could think of no one else who could give her what she wanted: a nice place for Jenny in a decent house as far from the East End as possible, where she would be treated kindly. And besides, might not some tiny drop of Silas’s great fortune come the girl’s way?

At ten o’clock in the morning, therefore, she presented herself at the office in Lincoln’s Inn, gave her name and asked if she might speak to Mr Odstock.

He kept her waiting two hours, a bent, severe, grey-haired old man who was certainly surprised to see her, but who also, clearly, knew well enough who she was. He interviewed her in a small, book-lined office, nodded carefully, and after some thought replied: “I am afraid I cannot help you. I know of no such situations, though no doubt they exist.”

“My kinsman left no word about me at all?”

“Apart from his original instructions, nothing.”

“But what became of all his fortune?” she suddenly burst out.

“Why,” he looked a little surprised. “His daughters . . .” Then, seeing her look of mystification, he shut up like a clam. “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do,” he told her, opened the door and before she quite knew what was happening, ushered her out.

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.