I wasn’t willing to put coins in the hands of the messenger. He looked the kind of varmint who’d spend it on drink and go back to the bailiff empty-handed, but I gave three guineas to the outdoors boy I shared with my neighbours and a shilling for his trouble, and he took it to the address in Skinner Street. I did it for Garth and I did it for Sofy, but mainly I did it because whatever Tommy has become, however wrong-headed he is, I can never forget holding him in my arms, only an hour old, and carrying him off in the dark to live with strangers. I never had a son of my own. Ambrose Kersie was the nearest I came, and Jack Buzzard saw him off. But I’ve seen enough of life to know any child can go to the bad, even the most wisely raised. So what chances then for one reared on whispers and hints and over-indulgence?

When I went to Kensington the next morning, the news had already reached Sofy.

‘Don’t worry, Nellie,’ she said. ‘Major Conroy and Sir Herbert have everything in hand.’

I said, ‘Then I hope Sir Herbert moves faster than his usual snail’s pace. Tommy only has a few days, you know. After that it’ll be the King’s Bench for him.’

She said, ‘I’m sure it won’t come to that. And anyway, I believe Old Garth left him quite well set up.’

Sofy had no idea of money, nor of the amount of credit allowed to a young man with connections, or the games lawyers play, always to their own advantage. It suited Sir Herbert and Ernie Cumberland very well for Tommy to go to gaol, and it suited John Conroy even better, for he had other uses for Sofy’s money. On her birthday, though we didn’t know it at the time, while we drank tea and ate the macaroons Henry Topham had made for her, Tommy was rowed across to Borough and incarcerated in Banco Regis. Lady Astley followed him there. She had sunk from a grand house on Grosvenor Street and a fine country mansion in Norfolk to a furnished room on Lant Street. She may have done it out of true love. I fear she did it because she found all other doors were closed to her.

Tommy must have imagined he wouldn’t be in prison for long, that Sofy would soon have Sir Herbert rescue him. He settled for the cheapest accommodations and boiled up his own rations in the snuggery, the better to conserve what little money he had. If he’d been master of some trade he could have helped himself. If he’d known how to sew a seam or mend a boot he’d have been much better placed. Plenty of those locked up with him managed to live quite well on what they earned but Tommy was at a disadvantage. His only talent was for spending money and his only skill was obtaining credit.

The amount he owed was more than eight thousand pounds, a considerable amount of it due for horses and harness and livery. There were also lawyers bills, and there was the bind: the attorney acting to prove Garth’s will wouldn’t lift his pen until he was paid what he was already owed and without his inheritance Tommy couldn’t pay him. Sofy was his only hope and that was no hope at all.

‘Major Conroy is seeing to it,’ was always her answer.

The thought of Tommy’s predicament troubled me. Garth wouldn’t have allowed it to continue, for Georgiana Astley’s sake if nothing else. It was none of my business yet I felt I should do something, in his memory at least. I had no one to talk to about it. I knew what Henry Topham would say. ‘Let the fool rot. Spare your tears for the tradesmen kept waiting for their money.’ He was a man after Jack Buzzard’s heart. And whatever Henry said, Sally agreed with. Miss Tod could have advised me, or even Morphew, but they were gone, and I was surely old enough to know my own mind. Still I dithered.

I turned to Annie. She was going on nineteen and risen to a full-pay teacher. I’d found too that she often thought along the same lines as me, and when we want advice we generally go to those who’ll tell us what we want to hear.

‘Grandma Nellie,’ she said, ‘I think you should take this man a little money but not too much. Then you’ll feel better and so will he. And I think a prison would be something to see, for a person who writes stories, don’t you? I think it would be very interesting. But you shouldn’t go alone. I’ll come with you and we’d better have a man with us, to protect us. I’ll ask Mr Clearwell.’

I said, ‘And who’s Mr Clearwell?’

She said, ‘He’s the new master at Rose Street. He has brown eyes.’

Robert Clearwell did indeed have brown eyes, and a fine, sharp mind, but he didn’t have a lot to offer as a bodyguard. I’ve seen more flesh on a sparrow. We went to King’s Bench on Saturday morning, the first time I had ever set foot in Southwark, still less in a place of correction. We asked at the gatehouse and were directed across a crowded yard. We found Tommy Garth lounging against a wall with two other gentlemen in threadbare coats and frayed cuffs. He was thinner but he hadn’t lost the old bluster.

‘In expectation of relief any day,’ he said, adding, ‘a man couldn’t ask for better company while he waited for his just dues.’

To hear him talk you might have thought he’d been admitted to Boodle’s Club.

It wasn’t easy to draw him away from his companions. He was so determined to appear at ease, as though we’d bumped into him on Berkeley Square and thought of joining him at Gunter’s for an ice. I’d taken him fifty pounds, but I didn’t want the whole yard to know about it. Robert and Annie understood my wish to speak to Tommy privately. They expressed an interest in seeing the prison workshops and tap rooms and so lured Tommy’s friends away and left us alone for a while.

He asked after Sofy. I made excuses for her, that she was unwell and still quite undone by the King’s death. That money matters were different for Royalties, especially princesses, who relied on their stewards to settle their accounts. The delay was regrettable, but not unusual.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

I said, ‘What I don’t understand is why you still don’t have Garth’s bequest. I know he left everything in good order. What does the lawyer say?’

‘Sacked him,’ he said. ‘The man was a damned scoundrel.

I shall hire another, as soon as my annuity is paid.’

He told me that what I’d given him would be enough to discharge what he owed his shirt-maker, and to buy coal for Lady Astley and decent dinners for himself for a month. His voice grew thick when he thanked me.

He said, ‘The old man always said you were the best of women.’

Robert Clearwell was full of what he’d seen. Stinking privies and inescapable noise. Men three to a room unless you were a person of such consequence that the Marshal knew he could squeeze you for the rent of superior quarters of the State House. Annie harped on just one thing: a woman she’d seen, with a baby at her breast.

‘Not her own child,’ she said. ‘Imagine, Grandma Nellie, sending your little one to be nursed in such a terrible place.’ I said, ‘Well, mother’s milk is mother’s milk, even in King’s Bench, and I suppose prisoners come cheaper than country nurses.’

Robert said, ‘Yes. And if it puts a few coins in the woman’s pocket. Better that than her plying the other trade. How else is she ever to get out of there?’

Annie said, ‘If you ask me, creditors shouldn’t allow people to get in so deep. There should be a law to prevent it.’

I could see at once that Annie and Robert were made for one another. Between them they knew how to put the world to rights. An education, the means of earning a living, a fair wage, and laws to regulate every occasion. Well, Tommy Garth had had an education and none finer, if you rate schooling by the guinea per term. He had a profession too, if ever we had another war. But it was the worst day’s work ever done when he was given to Garth and allowed to know his origins. He should have been left in ignorance and raised by the Sharlands to be a Dorset tailor.

First I’d hesitated to visit Tommy, then when I had done it I hesitated to tell Sofy, but one thing I knew for certain. I’d visit him again. I’d go for Garth’s sake, I’d go to damn Ernie Cumberland and all his works, and yes, I’d go because the place was full of stories. We fell into a routine, Annie, Robert and I, to go to King’s Bench the first Saturday of the month. Sometimes I took money, sometimes a piece of bacon or a fowl, and shirts and stockings that had been Jack’s and still had wear in them. The second time we went Georgiana Astley appeared and what a sad, reduced creature she was, only thirty years old but faded and gaunt with a great deal of silver coming into her black curls. That was what prompted me to tell Sofy I’d been to see her boy.

I said, ‘Herbert Taylor must release some money. Enough for Tommy to pay the attorney and get his Garth inheritance, if nothing else. As things stand, his situation is impossible. And if you could see Lady Astley, cut off from her children, cast out by her family.’

Sofy said, ‘But Nellie, if only she hadn’t been so impetuous. I wonder if her husband could be persuaded to take her back?’

‘Too late for that, and anyway, I think she means to stick by Tommy, whatever happens. I suppose she loves him.’

‘Is she a beauty?’

I said, ‘I believe she was, before she lost her teeth.’ She sighed, then changed the subject.

She said, ‘Gus Sussex is to be married next week, you know. To Lady Buggin. I’m so glad for him. He’s been alone far too long. I just wish he’d do it properly. He says he doesn’t care a damn about Acts of Parliament, but he should consider his bride. I’m sure she’d rather like to be a duchess.’

Cissie Buggin lived not far from me in Great Cumberland Place. She was a fat, jolly little widow, fond of giving parties and a good paying customer of the Pink Lemon. To make her his Duchess Sussex needed the King’s permission for the marriage and the King would undoubtedly have given it, but Sussex wouldn’t ask. Perhaps the prospect brought back painful memories, of another king’s refusal and poor abandoned Goosy and her children. Or perhaps it was an indignity too far, a man of fifty-seven obliged to apply to his brother. It seemed to me it was Sussex and Lady Buggin’s private affair. Sofy’s business was Tommy Garth.

I said, ‘Just a little money, Sofy. It would make all the difference.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You keep telling me so, but things are difficult at present. Major Conroy says I’m over-extended.’

‘But how can you be?’ I asked her. ‘You never buy anything.’

And at that moment her hearing failed her, as it did more and more frequently whenever a disagreeable question was asked.

Eighteen thirty-one was a strange unsettled year. Times were changing and I began to feel old. All the talk was of voting reform, and more than once the House of Commons approved the Bill only to have the Lords reject it, and at every reversal windows and heads got broken. Agitators were hanged and rioters were transported and not only in London. Every city seemed to be coming to the boil. The papers said the only thing for it was for His Majesty to create a great number of new peers, forward-thinking men who could be relied upon to vote the Bill in before the country burst into flames.

The King hesitated to do it, though he wasn’t averse to ennobling Dora Jordan’s children. His oldest boy became the Earl of Munster and was summoned to be an aide-de-camp. The middle boy was given command of the royal yacht, the youngest was promoted colonel in the Foot Guards, and the daughters, who had all made advantageous marriages, were raised to the rank of a marquess’s daughter. The coronation, when it eventually took place, was a sober affair. There were no newly woven carpets, no cloth of gold or borrowed jewels, and no banquet. This was good for business at the Pink Lemon, for while the King and Queen went back to Clarence House for a plain roasted chicken every hostess in London gave a seated dinner in honour of the occasion.

Sofy was out of town. Elizabeth’s long-threatened visit from Homburg had finally begun. She was staying with Augusta and Sofy had gone to Frogmore to see her so I was free of any obligations on Coronation Day. I went with Annie and Robert and their Rose Street pupils to Whitehall to see the King and Queen ride by on their way to the abbey.

‘This is Mrs Buzzard,’ Robert told the children. ‘In her lifetime Mrs Buzzard has seen three kings. Who can name the two who came before King William?’

They all could. They knew their Georges. But they gazed at me like I was Methuselah.

I said, ‘Not only that, Mr Clearwell. I’ve been in the presence of every one of their Majesties and their Queens and spoken with them too.’

Those children looked at me as though I was one of the wonders of the world.

I said, ‘And who will reign over us next, after King William? Who knows that?’