Well, I thought, I’ll bear that deprivation as bravely as I can. But in truth I didn’t much care for the prospect of country life. I loved to walk about busy streets and listen to what people said, and so I concocted a plan that was more to my liking and, conveniently, to Jack’s. It was agreed that when Papi and Mother shifted to Seagreens I should lodge with Miss Tod in Meard Street. She vowed to watch over me like a mother but I knew she wouldn’t have time to do any such thing. Miss Tod was in a small way of business herself, trimming bonnets, but she was also an active, sociable person so she did what she had to do with speed and efficiency, the sooner to be paid and free to go out of her house. She kept current with the affairs of the nation and cultivated a very mixed acquaintance. Between Hog Lane and Wardour Street very little happened without Miss Tod being one of the first to know.
She was older than my mother, though she didn’t seem it.
She took Godfrey’s Cordial night and morning as a preventative against headaches and, never having had a husband to accommodate and not affording to keep a cook who had to be pandered to, she made her own dinner and ate at whatever hour she pleased. I moved in with her in January 1794.
In February a letter came from Sofy:
Such MISERY! Our new sister has been delivered of a baby boy but we are not allowed to know him and Gus hasn’t even seen him, his own little son. The Queen said he must go away IMMEDIATELY, for the sake of his health. It’s too cruel. We saw him before he left for Harwich and he said his heart was broken but he did not dare oppose the Majesties. Minny thinks he should have showed more spine. How could he abandon his wife at such a time? What do you say? Billy Clarence went to the Chancellor and showed him Gus’s marriage lines, to see if anything could be done to help the case, but it didn’t help at all because Old Loughborough ran to the King immediately and told everything. The Queen is in SUCH a fury for you know she won’t have anything upset the King and he is VASTLY UPSET. The marriage is to be declared void and Goosy is to be put away in Devonshire. Imagine! Gouly says there are no roads there, only muddy tracks and wild moors, so we will never get to be aunts. The baby is named Augustus which our own Augusta says adds up to too many Gustuses by far and she wishes they had called him Harry but as we shall NEVER see him I don’t see that it matters. Now Dolly’s wounds are mended and he is gone back to Flanders so we are all in a slough of boredom and CHILBLAINS. I hope I may see you soon.
In fact she didn’t see me until the summer. Jack Buzzard kept me too busy to go on what he called ‘a jaunt’ to Windsor. It became my job to wait on the pleasure of a locksmith, who promised for Monday morning and appeared on Thursday afternoon, and on the sign-writer who swore he would be with us by Friday but never appeared at all. Sometimes I thought I’d have been wiser to go to Hammersmith and commune with Papi’s cow, but working for Jack brought some advantages. It was left to me to go out and about, to buy string and sealing wax and linen straining cloths, and then, there were the accounts to be kept. A confectioner required a great quantity of costly items: balancing pans, brass basins, marble slabs, cocoa beans, sugar, nuts and spices. And a scribbler’s notebook was easily concealed beneath a pile of receipts.
The first thing we sold was a tray of Naples biscuits to Lady Abbot. They were flavoured with orange-flower water and she liked them so well she ordered more, but we couldn’t make a living on a tray of biscuits. Jack wasn’t idle for a minute, putting up cordials and marmalades in case, as he said, we had a rush, but the people who had sworn to follow him from Gunter’s didn’t come. They were the kind of customers who went out as much to be seen and have their new hat admired as to enjoy a water ice. The Green Pineapple wasn’t that kind of establishment.
Jack said, ‘I won’t let you down, Nellie. Whatever I have to do, we’ll have a house. Somewhere fit to raise young Buzzards.’
I said, ‘There’s plenty of time.’
How I prayed for time. I had my story well sketched out. I’d go to Windsor, or to Weymouth with the Royalties. Tom Garth would be there and find an occasion to speak to me alone. ‘Nellie,’ he’d say, ‘I hear you’re engaged to be married. Am I too late to declare myself? Dare this old man hope?’ I’d be wearing a particularly flattering gown and a very simple necklace. The fact that I owned neither cornflower blue lawn nor a string of pearls in no way spoiled my enjoyment of the scene. Garth and I ended in each other’s arms. Papi’s anger was soon extinguished by the sheer superiority of my new lover, Jack nobly released me from my promise and was soon enough married to a suitably bovine girl, and we all lived happily ever after.
Jack said, ‘Better to have babies while you’re young though. And two or three’s enough. I won’t see you worn down like my mam. We’ll have a girl first, then the boys. Boys are steadier if they have a sister’s example.’
That was how he was. Everything according to a plan. When he was making a confection he had each thing laid out in order on the table top: white of eggs, powder sugar, almonds, wafer paper. I suppose that’s why he took things so hard if his plans went awry. Jack thought in ounces and gills and degrees of heat. He had no notion of luck or whimsy.
The pink lemons were my idea. We wrapped them in muslin and steeped them in cochineal syrup until they’d taken the colour, then we put them in the window, piled high on a looking glass. Everyone who passed came in to ask what they were and no one left without buying something. Then an enquiry was made from Lady Dummer’s residence for a grand dessert, sufficient for twenty guests and appropriate for an Easter luncheon. Jack was on his way.
He made candied jonquils and marzipan cakes pressed with the Dummer heraldic device, and cornucopia wafers to hold the ices which were a sorbet of violets and a cream ice of coffee, all to be set around a crystal bowl of sherry trifle on ratafia biscuits. While he worked I was left to mind the shop. I told him he had better think of getting an apprentice for I couldn’t always be there, but he didn’t answer me. When Jack was in his kitchen the house could have fallen down around him.
Three days before Easter he came to Miss Tod’s house, hammering on the door well after ten o’clock. Miss Tod had just gone to bed but she came down in her nightgown, I think more to know Jack’s business than to watch over my virtue.
He said, ‘I’ve had an idea. Two ideas.’
He brought out two sugar-paste eggs, white, about the size of a plover’s, and gave one to me and one to Miss Tod.
I said, ‘They’d look prettier if they were mottled. Blue and green.’
‘They will be. Spinach water and indigo stone. Leave me to know my business. But crack them open.’
They were hollow, and inside each one there was a piece of paper, rolled up.
I said, ‘It’s blank.’
‘That’s where you come in. You reckon to be the writer, Nellie. I’ll need twenty mottoes, Saturday morning at the latest.’
Miss Tod said she loved a motto and between us we’d think them up in no time. But I knew I’d have them done before I slept that night.
I said, ‘What was the second idea?’
‘I was thinking,’ he said. ‘Seeing how things have turned out, instead of the Green Pineapple we should be called At the Sign of the Pink Lemon.’
And as the sign-writer still hadn’t deigned to appear, that’s what we did.
Morphew came to Meard Street to drive me to Windsor in time for the summer exodus to Weymouth. The Royalties were to call first at Portsmouth, for a review to mark the Battle of the First of June. Our army in Flanders seemed to make little progress so a victory at sea was a great cause for celebration.
Morphew was in a morose mood. Though he was born a country boy he had left Norfolk when he was twelve years old and lived ever since in the city. Hammersmith didn’t suit him.
‘I can’t sleep, Miss Nellie,’ he said. ‘And I’ll quote you the reason. Unhooly noises. Foxes screeching. And howls hooting. Then there’s another thing. Sarah Twyvil. She’s getting above herself.’
His life had changed greatly since the move. Papi had retired from his daily attendance at the Prince of Wales’s household so Morphew had less driving to do and more duties indoors. But Twyvil treated indoors as her own kingdom. She had even insisted on his getting a new wig for she said the old one was so full of animal life she could make stock from it and Mother, ever fearful of losing her cook, had a short tie wig brought in for him. But Twyvil’s victory was illusory because Morphew kept his old yellow coiffure in the coach house and the very moment he was out of sight of Seagreens he’d put it on.
I said, ‘I think Twyvil is fond of you.’ He chuckled.
I said, ‘I think nagging is her way of showing it. Did you ever think of marrying her?’
‘I did not,’ he said. ‘She’s been too long without a saddle on her, that one. But I believe you’re right, Miss Nellie. I believe she do carry a torch for me. I think Sarah Twyvil has had her disappointments.’
He was a disappointed man himself. The Revolution hadn’t come, though he still kept a liberty cap and a cockade in the inside pocket of his greatcoat, just in case. But no gentlemen had been hanged from lamp posts in St James’s and the Prince of Wales, who was every week predicted to be ruined, just grew fatter than ever.
Portsmouth was in full fig for the returning fleet. Admiral Howe had engaged a convoy guarding grain ships bound for France. The French had lost seven ships of the line in the battle but, as we learned later, the grain ships had still reached France, so both sides claimed to have won the day. But the King understood that his Navy would like to see him, no matter how diluted the victory. He was their father and they were his lads that had braved the deep Atlantic.
June 27th 1794
The Majesties and the Princess Royal went aboard Admiral Howe’s flagship, the Queen Charlotte. Then we all processed to church for a service of thanksgiving. Rolfe and Bulstrode are the equerries, both too ancient to see anything of this war. Sofy mistook my enquiry about Garth for interest in his stable-groom.
The Portsmouth review was a trying occasion and I thought the strain of it showed on the King’s face, for though he was cheered loudly wherever he walked there was no escaping the sight of maimed men. Some were regular serving sailors, some were soldiers who’d been drafted to the marine, but many of them were pressed men, farm hands and labourers who had never in their lives thought of going to sea, still less of leaving a leg or an arm at the bottom of it.
Amelia said, ‘Don’t look at them, if it offends you.’
I said, ‘It doesn’t offend me. I know what it is for people to look away. But what will become of those poor men?’
