We buried her at Brompton Road, in the grave where her sons lay, feeble little souls who’d had no interest in breathing. Henry opened up the Pink Lemon the next day and took his grief into the kitchen. Annie did her best to be rational, as recommended by Robert Clearwell. We are born to die and if we don’t the world will soon be so crowded we shall have to stand on each other’s shoulders. Sometimes, though, she came to me in the evening and we enjoyed a good irrational weep together.
It was quite expected that Annie and Robert would marry. They were together every working hour and many evenings too, and they never seemed to quarrel. They were an earnest pair, fond of reading and debating, which I do commend, but I wondered never to see any little touches of longing between them. Those late years with Garth had made me regretful of what I’d missed. And then there was the case of Sofy, primed and brought to a fever of passion by Ernie Cumberland, then cast aside, ruined, without any hope of being loved again. I wanted everything to be right for Annie. They waited six months after Sally’s passing.
Annie said, ‘Grandma Nellie, I have something to tell you.’ I’d guessed it, of course, but not what followed. The marrying was to take place in a meeting hall. There’d be no wedding gown, no flowers, no clergyman. Robert had joined the Society of Friends, Annie intended to follow him, and they were to take up posts as teachers in a Quaker school in Stoke Newington.
I said, ‘I shall never see you.’
She said, ‘You would if you lived with us.’
In Stoke Newington! The very idea! It must be eight miles out of town if it’s an inch.
I said, ‘You know I’m not suited to country living.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you might if you tried it again. Better than staying here alone.’
I did think of that, of course. This is a big house. I’d offered rooms to Georgiana Astley but she preferred to stay at Lant Street, to be close to Tommy she said. And not to run the risk of turning on to Portman Street and seeing people she used to count as friends.
I promised Annie I would go to Stoke Newington when her babies came, to help her with her lying-in.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that won’t be any time soon. We have work to do. Robert uses an assurance cap. He buys them at the barber’s shop, so there won’t be any babies until we’re ready for them.’
I thought, well, if there’s to be no clergy and no babies I wonder they’re bothering to marry at all, but I said nothing, at least, not to Annie. I picked it over with Sofy instead.
She said, ‘A wedding without a vicar? I can’t believe it’s lawful. And wherever Stoke Newington is, you mustn’t go there. How would you ever come to Kensington?’
Chiefly though she was interested in the preventing of babies. She had never heard of Dr Newman’s prophylactic sheaths. She declared that if she’d known of such a thing she’d have taken a dozen lovers, and still would. She had no idea what a comical sight she made, dry and shrunken, peering out from her lace cap and talking of taking lovers. As her sight failed we’d grown closer in one respect. She was too blind to see her reflection and I still avoided looking-glasses as I had done all my life. We both knew we must be growing old and lined and whiskery but between us we either couldn’t or wouldn’t see it.
Robert and Annie named the day. May 5th 1834, which was her twenty-second birthday. The marrying was to take place in Finsbury, at a meeting room in Bunhill Fields, after a period of silent contemplation. I asked Henry his opinion. He said, ‘They’re a queer pair and no mistake, but if it’s what they want. I’m not one for a lot of churchifying, as you know. And we don’t have to be there till five o’clock so I shall only have to close up for half a day.’
Annie wore her blue sarsnet gown and her everyday mantle. No bonnet. But she did carry Sal’s old kid-skin gloves and she humoured me by borrowing the garnet bracelet given to me by Garth. There was no procession, no giving away. We sat for an age, with no sound but the creaking of chairs and Henry Topham cracking his knuckles. Then suddenly—I suppose the spirit must have moved them—Annie and Robert got to their feet and married themselves.
‘Friends,’ he said, ‘I take this my friend, Cornelia Ann, to be my wife, promising to be a faithful and loving husband to her until it shall please the Lord by death to separate us.’
‘Friends,’ she said, ‘I take this my friend Robert to be my husband, promising, with divine assistance, to be a faithful and loving wife to him as long as we both shall live.’
Then they shook hands.
As Henry said, ‘All the way to Bunhill Fields for that.’
And for once I agreed with him. We rode back into town together, as silent as a Quaker wedding, then as we got to St Giles’s he said, ‘Nellie, you may as well know. I’m going to marry Grace Messenger. She’s a butcher’s widow from Woodstock Street.’
Well, I knew Grace Messenger. I knew her when she was married to Bardwell who kept two rag and bottle shops. She seemed to turn a good profit marrying tired men with thriving businesses.
He said, ‘It’s been more than a year, since Sally. I’m not cut out for being on my own.’
I said, ‘Yes. I see that.’
‘Grace is a good woman. She’s clean and cheerful and she’s careful with money.’
‘Does she have children?’
‘None living,’ he said, ‘but she’s only thirty-six so I have every hope. Not to find any fault in Sal, but you know I always wished for a lad to carry on the business.’
If Grace Messenger was only thirty-six I was the King of Spain’s daughter.
I said, ‘You’re an old man, Henry, to be starting again with babies. I’d leave it to Annie and Robert. They might give you a boy to learn the sugar work.’
He said, ‘I wouldn’t depend on that. They’ll be too busy setting the world to rights. Anyway, I’m not so old. There’s life in this dog yet.’
I didn’t want to hear any more about that. I could see what would transpire. He’d marry Grace Bardwell Messenger, she’d ride the lovesick fool to death and the Pink Lemon, that Jack and I had struggled and worked for, would be hers for the price of a few midnight tumbles.
I began to think I had lived too long, but here I am still.
40
A memoir is doomed to end with a recital of death and decay, unless the writer believes the history of her life to be so compelling she plans for it to run to several volumes. I have one last story to tell and only set down this list of the departed to clear the stage for it.
Billy Gloucester died, which was a loss for his gamekeeper and his ghillie but a triumph of survival for Minny. Mrs Fitzherbert died, and no one noticed. Henry Topham died, not from an excess of love as I’d predicted but from the bullying and badgering of his new wife and the two grown men who appeared directly after the wedding and identified themselves as her previously unmentioned sons. The business and the rooms above it were sold before the earth had settled on Henry’s grave. It’s a poulterer’s now, with cockerels and pigeons hung up where the sign of the Pink Lemon used to swing.
I never really cared for the place. I disliked its sweet smell and I had unhappy memories of being chained to its front counter in the early days, liable to be jerked out of my thoughts at any moment by the jangle of the shop door opening. Nevertheless, I cried a little when I heard it was sold and even now I take care not to walk that way, if I can at all avoid it.
So much for those who passed unmourned. Then there were those who went before their time. By 1834 Tommy Garth was near enough solvent to be allowed to live outside the confinement of the King’s Bench gate but ‘within the rules’ as they call it, on Lant Street. Nature took its course and before the year was out Lady Astley was carrying a child, a daughter. She was born in the summer of 1835 and named for the mother she would never know, for within a week Georgiana Astley was dead. It was given out in the news sheets that she’d succumbed to scarlatina but it was childbed fever that killed her, in a mean house in Southwark, and in the arms of a man who wasn’t her husband. The Astleys and Georgiana’s own family were powerful enough to make sure such embarrassing facts weren’t broadcast in The Times.
In this sad way Sofy became a grandmother, though she never saw little Georgiana nor even asked about her. Fate, on the other hand, brought me closer to my granddaughter. Robert Clearwell was lost in the great snow storm of ’35, walking home from a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society. It was the same death that had claimed my Aunt Hanne and they say it’s a gentle way to go. Robert was a young man, though, with his busy life before him. For a time my Annie was quite unhinged by her loss. In these cases the Quaker way is to give thanks for a joy received, to trust in providence, and then continue along life’s path without faltering. But Annie wanted to put on mourning clothes and rage against God, and so did I. I brought her from Stoke Newington to be with me at Seymour Street.
There are others, more illustrious, whom time has gathered in: Elizabeth Homburg, Frederica Cumberland, Gus Sussex, and of course, the King. But I’m running ahead of my story. In 1837, or perhaps it was ’38, I met a man called Ernest Jones. It was after King Billy had died, that much I know for sure, because Victoria was on the throne and John Conroy, understanding that his Kent goose was cooked, had become even more attentive to Sofy. He hardly left her side. And it was Conroy who foisted young Jones upon me one afternoon, to get him out of Sofy’s drawing room.
‘I believe Mrs Buzzard is something of a scribbler,’ he said. ‘You should ask her advice.’
It was at Vicarage Place. Sofy had gone there after a hole in the roof had finally brought down the ceiling plasterwork in her apartments and obliged her to leave Kensington Palace. The Royalties and their suite were all on the move anyway, as happens whenever a sovereign dies. Our new young Queen had gone to live in Buckingham Palace and had taken Vicky Kent with her. Victoria was still very young, but she understood only too well that her mother had better be kept on a short tether. John Conroy had been kicked upstairs to a baronetcy and told to stay away. With King William dead, Adelaide moved out of Clarence House and became a wandering, childless dowager, visiting friends in their great houses, a month in this county, a month in that, but never grand or demanding, always easy to satisfy. Princess Augusta, who had begun to find Frogmore cold and lonely, took over Clarence House, and Dolly Cambridge, who hadn’t been in England for twenty years, brought his family home and opened up his house in Piccadilly. He was no longer needed as viceroy in Hanover. Its ancient laws prevented Victoria from reigning as its queen which, as far as I was concerned, was as much our gain as their loss. It meant that Ernie Cumberland had succeeded as their king and would trouble us no more. So that was how things stood.
Ernest Jones was Ernie Cumberland’s godson. His father was Major Charles Jones, who had served beside Ernie many years in the Hussars and then in his household in Hanover. The Major was now in poor health and living in Marylebone. It was a fine afternoon so after we left Sofy’s house Mr Jones and I walked together across the park. He was a pleasant young man, I suppose no more than twenty years old. He had already had a number of his poems published in Hamburg and now wished to try his hand at novelizing. My advice was to learn a useful trade first, like the pulling of teeth, something that could always be depended on to provide an income, and then to turn to writing.
I said, ‘I’m the last person you should apply to. Each book I write sinks faster than the one before. No publisher will deal with me now except I agree to pay their losses. But it may help to be a new name. That’s the most encouraging thing I can say to you. The reading public soon grows bored and books aren’t like great monuments, you know. They’re soon pulled off the shelf to make room for something new. Pulp to paper and back to pulp.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘but what about Miss Austen? What about Sir Walter Scott?’
Well, Walter Scott wrote himself to death and still left his bills unpaid, and as for Miss Austen, I could have disliked her for the way the public had taken up her books so avidly, but she was fifteen years in her grave before they did it and it would be a pitiful thing indeed to envy the dead.
I supposed he had gone to Vicarage Place looking for a patroness.
I said, ‘If it’s funds you’re seeking I can tell you Her Royal Highness won’t help you. Everything she has is spoken for.’ He said, ‘I didn’t go there to beg. Not exactly. I went to ask her to intercede. It’s my father, you see. His investments have failed and he finds himself in great need. He applied to the Duke of Cumberland more than once, but the Duke, well, I must remember to call him King Ernest now, but King Ernest doesn’t reply. And my father said of all the Royal Highnesses still living Princess Sophia has the most influence with the Duke, with King Ernest.’
I said, ‘I don’t know that she has any influence there. Rather the opposite. She dislikes any criticism of her brother.’
We passed the Powder Magazine and out of habit I turned to take the path to Stanhope Gate. He said, ‘You don’t go the most direct way?’
I said, ‘I like to walk. But you mustn’t feel obliged to accompany me. Young men are always in a hurry and old ladies are not.’
