Sofy said, ‘I wonder where they’ll settle? Adelaide likes to live very plain, you know. I can’t believe they’ll go to the Queen’s House.’
She never did learn to call the old Queen’s house Buckingham Palace. King George had made a project of enlarging it, thinking Carlton House wasn’t splendid enough for a king and St James’s Palace was too gloomy but, as often happened with his renovations, he seemed not to know when to stop. Sofy was right. King William and his queen chose to keep Clarence House as their London home. And while the old King lay in state at Windsor the new King looked through the account books and planned how he would reduce his brother’s establishment.
On the day of the funeral all places of business were closed, and from Gravesend to Windsor a chain of minute guns were fired from early morning until the hour of the burying. Sofy was in a peppery mood.
‘I hate change,’ was all she could say to explain it, and there was plenty of change to put her out of sorts. Billy Clarence, or His Majesty as I now had to remember to call him, had his faults but extravagance wasn’t one of them. Secretaries and chaplains were sent away. Cooks and bandsmen and pages and stable grooms were thrown out of work. The menageries were broken up and the animals were sent to the new Zoological Gardens. Contracts with architects and builders were cancelled, horses were sold and great quantities of clothes, ordered by King George but never worn and certainly never paid for, were bundled up and returned to the tailors and linen drapers. And with a new King came a new government. The reformers saw their opportunity. King William was a man of the people. He’d served as a midshipman and had his royal corners smoothed. He would understand the country’s mood. For how could it be right for the pocket boroughs to be represented in government when great cities like Manchester were not?
I tried to explain the reasonableness of it to Sofy. That those who add to the wealth of the nation should have the vote and be able to send their chosen man to Westminster.
‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘It sounds rather dangerous to me. I wish people would leave things as they are and not meddle. And do you know His Majesty’s latest notion? He says he won’t have a coronation. He says the Archbishop can just as well anoint him privately in the Chapel Royal without going to the expense of processions and robes and banquets. But how can he expect the people to respect him if they haven’t seen him with the crown on his head? I just hope Adelaide can make him see reason.’
And Adelaide did. She was a dear, sensible soul, and never seemed to take offence if Vicky Kent mocked her plain looks, nor to resent the great tribe of children her husband had of Dora Jordan, though they hung about, full of expectations now their father was king. So at Queen Adelaide’s insistence a modest coronation was fixed for September of the next year and His Majesty began to plan what he could do for his numerous Fitzclarences.
38
Tommy Garth was still in great difficulties. Herbert Taylor delayed in making him any payment on the grounds that he was by no means satisfied that all the disputed and sensitive documents were accounted for. What if copies existed? What if they fell into unscrupulous hands? For a man who discounted the truth of the story the documents told, for a man who claimed he hadn’t even troubled to read them, Sir Herbert made a mighty meal of dragging out a settlement. And nearly a year after Old Garth’s passing the will was still not proved.
In October the bailiffs found Tommy where he and Lady Astley were hiding from their creditors and he was arrested. I heard of it in the most unpleasant way: hammering at my street door late in the evening and a greasy messenger on my step, asking for money. Tommy had been taken to a spongeing house in Clerkenwell and he needed funds to pay for his bed and board. ‘Only assist me,’ he wrote, ‘until I can apply tomorrow to one on whom I have a true claim. Please do it for my dear departed guardian.’
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.
