Avery & Blake 02 - The Infidel Stain (49 page)

I received a letter from Sir Theo Collinson, Blake’s patron, commending me for my work and assuring me that all my expenses and more would be taken care of, but voicing the wish that it had all been done a little more discreetly. The same day I received a letter from my sister urging me to return home. My wife, she said, was nearing her confinement and starting to complain bitterly of my absence.

Matty was improving daily by then and the question of what she would do became pressing. Blake suggested she might work for Alexis Soyer, the chef we had met at the French dining-room. Apparently he liked to employ women, for he said they listened better than men, and posts were opening up at his vast new kitchens at the Reform, the political club set up to draw the Whigs, liberals and radicals together. There might also be something in the portering line for the boy. I remembered Soyer, the exotic grinning dandy, and I did not like the notion at all, though I knew my reasons were selfish ones. I told Blake it was a capital idea.

Soyer took Matty on, gave Pen a post as a messenger boy and porter and arranged accommodation in the club’s new servants’ quarters. Everyone, especially Miss Jenkins, was extremely pleased. After several days out of prison and off the streets, Pen Horner had entirely lost his shyness and become an exhausting house guest.

When I came to take my leave of her, Matty was tucked in a blanket, sitting in one of Miss Jenkins’s neat, threadbare chairs. She wore a fitted grey cotton dress with a clean white apron and Miss Jenkins had done her hair very prettily. She looked like a young woman.

She was delighted to see me.

‘You said you’d save Pen and you did!’ She grasped my hand in both of hers and brought it to her cheek. ‘And me. I thought they’d lock me up in that room for ever. And you came. I can never thank you enough. And now Mr Blake’s found me a position. I used to dream of having a chance, and you and Mr Blake …’ She was most
uncharacteristically overcome and had to stop, turning her face from me.

‘Matty.’

‘I can never do enough to deserve it,’ she said, her eyes blinking.

I almost said that I had come to think that life had very little to do with what one deserved. But I did not.

She wiped her eyes. ‘You know what I did,’ she said. ‘I spied for the coppers on the ones I cared about. I lied to them and to you. I stole the money on Nat’s body. Blood money.’

‘To protect yourself and Pen,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘I sinned. I should be in gaol.’

‘You kept your head above water when the world left you to drown,’ I said. They were the words Blake would have said. Now I believed them.

‘You know I lost the money. I went back to get it and it had gone. It wasn’t meant for me.’

I held her hand for a while, then I said, ‘I have come to say goodbye. I must return to my home in Devon. My wife is soon to have her confinement.’

Her face fell. ‘Your wife? A baby? That is good news. You won’t be in London then. I thought you might stay till Pen and I started with Monsieur Soyer.’

‘I cannot. But next time I am in London I shall come and dine at the Reform Club, and send my compliments to M’sieur Soyer, and there you will be, congratulated on the port jelly, or the cabinet pudding, or the lemon posset.’

She gave a small laugh, unconvinced. For my part, I knew that as a Tory I could not dine at the Reform.

‘And so, my dear, I must bid you adieu and wish you good fortune.’ I leant forward, aware of the softness of her skin even before I touched it. I kissed her forehead, held her hands for an instant too long, and then dropped them.

‘Goodbye, Captain Avery,’ she said.

‘William, please,’ I said.

My thoughts turned to the winter fields of home, my unborn child and my marriage, such as it was. I resolved to do my best to try to mend it. There was no one at the Oriental Club whom I wished particularly to see again, though I knew my family would be glad I had expanded my acquaintance. So I dutifully exchanged cards, and when asked gave an expurgated version of our – or rather Blake’s – apprehension of Agnes Vickers. Events, I was mildly amused to discover, appeared only to have enhanced Blake’s reputation in that quarter. I was repeatedly asked if I would try to persuade him to allow the club to honour him.

Of all my new acquaintances it was Henry Mayhew and Douglas Jerrold whom I hoped to see again. I knew my family would most certainly regard them as alarmingly disreputable and liberal. Mayhew was somewhat low the night Blake gave them his account of our investigations, as
Punch
was at death’s door and he deep in debt.

Woundy’s Weekly
closed but was almost immediately succeeded by a host of new Sunday newspapers, each vying for the circulation that the
Weekly
had forfeited by its untimely demise. There were also a few heated calls for the publishers of Holywell Street to be shut down, but nothing came of them.

Mayhew and Jerrold came, with Blake, to see me on to the train to Swindon. There was some time before the engine departed, and so they ushered me off for a glass of ale at a noisy hostelry nearby. We spoke of Mayhew’s plans to save
Punch
with a Christmas almanac of the best drawings thus far published, while Jerrold shook his head and made various jokes about Mayhew’s intentions towards his daughter and Mayhew looked somewhat pained. Blake was almost entirely silent. I said I hoped to visit again within the year, and Mayhew said he would write. Jerrold was a member of the Reform and announced his intention to keep an eye on Matty. I shook hands vigorously, and strode into the station with my baggage. I turned, and there was Blake behind me, like a genie.

‘Have you names for the child?’ he said.

‘Frederick Henry if he is a boy, Constance Mary if a girl.’ I remembered with a sudden awkwardness his own child, stillborn. ‘I
hope it shall not be three years until I see you again. And for God’s sake get yourself better, take some rest, let those ribs set.’

He shook his head as if in disbelief and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Goodbye, William. Good luck.’

The train’s piercing whistle sounded. A sudden spume of dirty white smoke enveloped us and for a moment I could see nothing. I felt my way anxiously on to the train. When I turned around, he had gone.

Holywell Street was well known in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century for its pornographic – a word which, frustratingly for my purposes, didn’t come into use until the second half of the nineteenth century – bookshops, as well as second-hand clothes. Along with its disreputable neighbour, Wych Street, it was demolished in 1902–3 to make way for the area now known as the Aldwych.

By the early 1840s central London was on its way to becoming the modern city we know. Nelson’s Column, Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament were in the course of being built. The two houses of government met at Westminster Hall while the building works were going on. Other parts of the capital, however, were very different from today. The River Thames was much closer to the streets (the Embankment, which runs down the north side of the Thames with its network of sewage pipes underneath, would not be built until the late 1850s). You could walk a few steps down from the Strand to Hungerford pier and catch a boat across the river; Cheyne Walk in Chelsea was only separated from the water by a grassy verge and a fence.

What would now be unrecognizable were the old ‘rookeries’ sprinkled around the city, the spiderwebs of broken-down alleys and cul-de-sacs that had degenerated into overcrowded slums for the poorest. Labyrinthine, famous as criminal heartlands, they were often avoided by the police. The best known was St Giles, at the east end of Oxford Street. These areas would be systematically cleared and demolished during the 1840s and ’50s by property and railway developers. One of the initial effects of this was to create more overcrowding and worse conditions, as the newly homeless crammed themselves in with those already occupying what was left.

Coldbath Fields prison closed in 1877; the area, famed for its
swampiness, was optimistically renamed Mount Pleasant. There is nothing left of the fields or the prison, which became the site of Mount Pleasant Sorting Office in Clerkenwell, the biggest post office in Britain. It now borders Farringdon Road and Rosebery Avenue. Spa Fields park, a 350-yard walk east from Mount Pleasant, the site of a radical community between 1821 and 1824 (and a political riot in 1816), is still there.

The early 1840s saw an explosion in publishing and communications. Steam presses revolutionized the speed of printing, paper had become cheaper, and the government repealed the stamp duty which for decades had made newspapers too expensive for any but the rich. Alongside respectable and expensive publications like
The Times
, Britain had long had an energetically scurrilous press industry which included broadsides – a single sheet purporting to report on the latest gruesome murder – as well as publications like the
Satirist
, a journal that covered goings-on about town, including reviews of brothels and courtesans, and was notorious for running stories about scandals. The editor, Barney Gregory, would send the draft of an article to its subject and demand a bribe to keep the story out of the paper. Although the
Satirist
would struggle on through the 1840s, most of its fellow publications had foundered by the late 1830s.

Punch
, first published in 1841, was set up in deliberate contrast to the scurrility and explicitness of papers like the
Satirist
. It was radical, critical of the government’s social policy, and comic but not dirty. Its founders, who included Henry Mayhew, later to write groundbreaking books about the London poor, recognized that there had been a shift in public attitudes to morality: ‘the age is more delicate in words than any former one,’ he wrote. However, the paper struggled in its first two years to find a market and almost went under more than once. Journalism was a precarious and by no means respectable living.

Much more successful was Edward Lloyd, who pretty much
invented the Sunday newspaper with
Lloyd’s Illustrated London
Newspaper
in 1842. A small-time publisher of penny dreadfuls – cheap sensational serial stories illustrated by woodcuts – atlases and ‘penny miscellanies’, Lloyd recognized that there was a potentially huge market for a cheap newspaper with a mix of sensational but not rude news, ‘educational material’ and social comment, and that the new technology could allow him to produce it. His paper was swiftly followed by the
Illustrated London News
, and the
News of the World
. By coincidence, Douglas Jerrold became editor of
Lloyd’s Weekly
Newspaper
in 1852, and made a huge success of it.

The Chartists were the first British working-class political mass movement. Between 1838 and 1848 they campaigned, through a mixture of mass gatherings, vast petitions which they collected and presented to Parliament, and occasional riots and unrest, for universal suffrage – namely that everyone (all men, that is) should have the vote, irrespective of income or position. Their name came from the six-point People’s Charter their founders drew up in 1838.