Most Secret (3 page)

After a consultation Squire Thunderman mounted to the stable roof and stood up against the gilt face of the clock in the tower, where he made a speech declaring all bets void. Uncle Godfrey followed him, being whistle-drunk by this time, and the politest man in Somerset always.

“A few words, good people?” appeals Uncle Godfrey. “A few words, under favour and by your leave?”

“If that be your desire, have at it,” says Squire Thunderman. “And yet the hour grows late. You will be short, sir?”

“Oh, ay,” cries Uncle Godfrey, striking as much of an attitude as his years and weight would permit. “There need be no fear, dear brother-justice. I will be short; depend on’t.”

True to his promise, therefore, the old gentleman held forth for less than an hour in the most graceful terms, thanking the spectators for their presence there and congratulating both sides: he invited everybody to drink his health in the dining room, as well as my grandfather’s for good measure; and concluded (in the course of a complicated oratorical gesture) by falling off the roof.

Thus amicability was restored, and all went right merrily until well into the following morning. Indeed, my grandfather liked this carter for his fight, and discovered him to be a most excellent fellow; shaking hands with him warmly, and saying, “By God, man, I am thy brother!” He also made him a present of a fine team of greys, feeling a trifle guilty about that dairy maid; and would have handed him the girl, too, if she had permitted it; and so passed the day.

You now have some notion of the calm pastoral life Roderick Kinsmere led, and of the elements that went into his making. It will not do to dwell on this, since there are mighty things a-brewing in the great world beyond Blackthorn gates. The time has come to speak of him—some eight or nine months after his fight with the carter—when he must pack his saddlebags and ride up to London to claim his inheritance.

From the strongbox in the library he took the letters his father had written for him years ago, notably a letter to His Grace the Duke of Buckingham at York House, one of the most powerful noblemen at court; and also from that strongbox he took the fine sapphire ring. His uncle Godfrey presented him with a letter to Mr. Roger Stainley, a pouch full of money, and a new sword.

All the tenantry had assembled to see him go, lined up deep before the old grey house. Under pretext of addressing parting injunctions to his nephew, Uncle Godfrey did not lose the opportunity of holding forth to them at considerable length.

The old gentleman stood on the steps under the arched doorway out there, carved with heraldic beasts as you see it now, and wiped a vinous tear from his eye as he exhorted. Uncle Godfrey bade
him
to be of good cheer; to remember the manners of his father, and his father’s famed civility; to reflect on and hold dear the ancient Kinsmere name, its honesty and its worth; and manfully to smite in the eye any ill-disposed thus-and-so who doubted it. Uncle Godfrey further counselled him (rather unexpectedly) to remember that flesh is but grass, and man travelleth a weary road throughout his life, and liveth but to die; and after some minutes of this vein he had got both himself and the tenantry into such a depressed frame of mind that he fell back overcome.

During the harangue my grandfather sat quiet on his horse, with his hat off out of politeness. But he refused to be cast down; he could taste the air of springtime and see the green meadows warm under the sun. So he replied that he would strive to remember all this advice; he bade everyone good-bye, and rode down from the house with the tenantry cheering behind him, in a very tolerable good humour with himself and with the world. Mingled in the cheers he could hear the bells of Keynsham Church ringing far away, and the friendly pigs honking by the roadside; and this was in the green month of May, being the Year of Our Lord one thousand six hundred and seventy, and the tenth since the return of Our Sovereign Liege Charles the Second.

B
UT NOW I MUST
tell you of London, of its masks and fashions, of its squalor and glitter, as my grandfather first saw it all those years ago.

They caught the highwayman Claude Duval one night in January, at the Hole-in-the Wall in Chandos Street: as they catch knaves, almost always, whose tongues clack too freely in public. Claude Duval was the graceful cutthroat who played the flageolet on Hounslow Heath; who stopped the coach, and danced a coranto with the lady on the smooth turf in the moonlight before he relieved her husband of much booty.

But they took away his own money pouch and pistols, clapping him into Newgate. Then arose a great uproar and to-do; ladies in vizard masks came tearfully to visit him. Claude was a hero. Claude postured with ease in the dock at the sessions house, speaking up mighty jocosely to the red-robed judge above the bar, who felt his own importance when he fitted on the black cap.

And then one raw morning the great bell boomed at St. Sepulchre’s. They put Claude into a cart, with the sheriff going before and the javelin men around; they presented him with a bunch of flowers as the procession moved out along roads that ran two and a half miles through the countryside to Tyburn gallows. A vast crowd saw Claude turned off after an affecting last speech, but his honours had only begun when his legs ceased to twitch.

Wailing their lamentations, his admirers arrayed him in finery, put him into a mourning coach, and set his body to lie all night in state at a tavern near St. Giles’s, with eight wax tapers burning about the bier and eight black-cloaked gentlemen in attendance. This, then, was at the turn of the year, at the beginning of the second decade in the reign of King Charles the Second; and Claude with his dancing master’s airs might have been put up as a model for the time, like the status of King Charles at the New Exchange.

It was a noisy time, a posturing time, a time of jigs and of bludgeoning wit: a cruel, swaggering, credulous, clever time, for smoky London on its mud-flats. This New Exchange, on the south side of the Strand, made a shopping centre for the western end of town, waxing rich on my lord and my lady’s passion for gewgaws. Four galleries, inner and outward walk, upper and lower walk, held a clamour of damsels crying finery at their stalls. Very good gloves and ribands, sir; choice of essences, rings, clouded canes with silken tassels; the true wigs of Chedreux, sir, and our dusky Lower Walk very useful for assignations. In the courtyard pigeons fluttered round a statue of His Majesty’s self, looking stately in the dress of a Roman emperor.

But for the finest knick-knack wonders, the trinkets of China which my lady must have or die of shame, they went further. They went into the darkest City, to Leadenhall Street, where the India House held its sales, its auctions, its raffles and tea drinkings. A prosperous time, this, for the fat merchant companies: for the Turkey Company, the Russia Company, the Africa Company, the newly formed Hudson’s Bay Company; most of all, for the great East India Company. Would my lady have a fall of Mecca muslin, woven with gold and silver? A dragon in speckled porcelain? A caged nightingale? Some gilded jars of snuff and pulvillio, or the stuffed sawfish everyone so much admired?

It was all there for her. She had my lord’s purse, or somebody’s purse. On any day she could go rolling in her huge springless coach to the India House, where the raffle-wheel spun, and spices were burned in the fire, and opulence served tea out of cups like tinted eggshells.

A season of prosperity, too, for the toymakers round Fleet Street, who could charm the most sober minds with a jack-in-the-pulpit or an ingenious climbing monkey. His Majesty the King much prized an artfully fashioned clock which was made to run by the motion of rolling bullets down an inclined plane; he would roll bullets for hours at a time. His Royal Highness James Duke of York—who not many years before had been putting bullets to a rather less domestic use, in the war against the Dutch—sat on the floor with a bevy of ladies, playing “I Love My Love with an A,” or enjoyed the Cromwellian pastime of cushion pelting.

Give us, cried fashion, all manner of toy wonders. Even the Royal Society, under the aegis of their silver mace, gravely played at science with clocks, barometers, vivisection, and chemistry. They exhibited mummies and the livers of vipers. They conceived plans for a steam engine, a housebreaker alarm, and a tinderbox that turned into a pistol; they injected sheep’s blood into a man’s veins, to see what happened, and puzzled their wits over His Majesty’s query about the fish in the water pail. Very remarkable grew the debates of the Royal Society at Gresham College, until they gathered up their flasks and loadstones to run westward before the roar of the Great Fire.

The fire swallowed thirteen-thousand-odd houses in that year ’66, when Prince Rupert and the Duke of York were scorching the Dutchmen’s tail feathers at sea.
Annus Mirabilis,
Mr. John Dryden called it when he wrote the poem, in his natural enthusiasm and desire for preferment. Mr. Dryden even had the wondering fish raising their heads out of the water to contemplate the spectacle. And from this ruin a new town had begun to take shape. Kennels were no less foul, sewage as bad, and paved streets as few. The tanneries, the lime kilns, the soap vats still brewed a murk of oily smoke, raining soot flakes as big as your thumbnail and making a fog all the year round.

But the new streets were raised and widened; the new houses were built of brick, not pitch-coated matchwood; and the plague of ’65 had been burnt out of every hole. Back crept the vintners to Three Cranes, the mercers to Paternoster Row; Cheapside once more raucously rang with the cries of ’prentices, and coaches rumbled again past the rails round the black-gutted stumps of Old St. Paul’s.

In fine, none had fared better through evil days than those same merchants I was speaking of. Their tables grew heavy with gold plate, and four Flanders mares drew their coaches to the Royal Exchange. They were the aldermen of that powerful body, the Corporation of the City of London. As symbol of their pomp, my Lord Mayor rode to the feats at Guildhall in scarlet robe and black velvet hood, with the gold chain around his neck. His trainbands numbered twelve regiments of foot and two of horse; the corporation’s own poet laureate rhymed (somewhat optimistically) the splendour of his name in future ages. Hence your merchant-lords, watching the throng of bubbleheads who bought their gauds in such profusion, could scheme better bargains at Lloyd’s Coffee-House in Leadenhall Street, and drink the soot-black delicacy out of a dish.

Already a multitude of glass lanterns had appeared before the coffee-houses. A glass lantern was its sign, as a red lattice indicated a tavern. Presided over by pretty jillflirts of accommodating character, they were fair quarters for the inhaling of tobacco and snuff. Though the best of them in the money-changing area might be accounted Garraway’s, off Cornhill; yet these dusky rooms of high-backed settles were the forerunners of all our clubs; and, to taste the true flavour of an institution uniquely British, any foreigner went westward.

He took an uncertain footing down Ludgate Hill, where the hackney coaches splashed a jolting passage. From here to the Strand, under painted gables, rolled a din of barter and brawling. They cried rotten fruit, jars of usquebaugh, and scrofulous-looking sausages. They hawked mackerel and rosemary, their voices rising as harsh as the clank of passing-bells.

“Have you,” bawls a tinker, after his rattle of ghostly knocks at somebody’s door, “have you a brass pot, iron pot, skillet, kettle, or frying pan to mend?”

“No, we have not. Be off!”

“Come, mistress, a word with you. I’ll adventure it.”

“Will you so, God damme? Gardy-loo, jackanapes! ’Ware slops below!”

This may have been witty; it may not. Yet any pedlar, you conceive, must be nimble in more senses than one. Here rattled the crooked lanes of street signs, bright-painted, gilded, carved to huge goblin shapes a-creak in high winds; and an imp-black dwarf of a chimney sweep tripped up an incautious baker, coloured all silver-grey from the dust of the basket on his head.

Now God help, in all pious sincerity, any impertinent foreigner who went to find the good talk of the coffeehouses in Fleet Street. They always took him for a Frenchman, what they called a Mounzer, and they hated him. They knocked him under waterspouts, pelted him with rams’ horns out of the kennel filth, mashed his toes with the barrels that draymen were rolling into cellars. Does he clap handkerchief to his nose against the smells? Won’t he let the bootblacks brighten his shoes with a polish of soot and rancid oil? That beggar at the corner of Water Lane, who has burnt sores in his own face and festered them to hideousness with powdered arsenic: that bundle of ulcers wheedling on his knees, with white eyeballs uprolled—is the foreigner heedless of his whining.

“French dog!” screech gamin and slut. “Mounzer! Papist! Lousy spy!”

Mounzer’s periwig is fouled with beer foam or twitched off as a trophy. Mounzer, who can find no coach, bolts over Fleet Ditch, past Bridewell Prison and the scaffolding round new St. Bride’s Church, which Dr. Wren is fashioning for the peace of God; up the long slope toward Temple Bar. The clatter of pursuit, battering through Fleet Street like a ‘prentices’ football chase, will bring Bully of Alsatia shouldering out of his den to see the sport.

He was all too familiar a figure, Bully of Alsatia: a greasy, swaggering, chin-jutting, many-oathed bravo. They knew his flopping hat, pinned up at one side; his frowsy linen and sandy weather-beaten peruke; above all, the scandalous iron sword rattling at his heels. Alsatia, his stable, made a small plague spot bounded on the east by Water Lane, on the west by the wall of the Temple, on the south by the Thames, and on the north by Fleet Street: a dozen-odd stinking lanes in a corner, the sanctuary for every unhanged rogue in town.

No bailiff’s footstep shook the flies off a dead dog’s carcass inside Alsatia; no bailiff dared come. Even a magistrate would not venture among such mephitic houses without a company of musketeers behind him. Let any suspicious stranger be detected here, and they set on him a-whooping with swords, spits, bricks, and broomsticks. They battered him senseless, tossed him in a blanket to point the lesson, and flung back the pulp to Fleet Street.