When Will arrived in Clerkenwell Green that evening he needed the help of all Matty’s servants to carry his parcels into the house. And when they were unpacked they filled the parlour; two dozen basins in crates, four boxes full of cheap towels, a dozen cakes of carbolic soap, and, set down with particular care upon the table, a small flat parcel labelled, ‘Caroline’.
Matty said it was like Christmas, and all of them were intrigued to see what Caroline’s parcel would contain.
It was a set of cards tied together with ribbon to make a small, hand-painted, hand-printed book. There were two letters of the alphabet on each card with two pictures and a rhyming couplet to accompany them. ‘A is for apple that grows on the tree. B is for bread that we eat for our tea.’ It was a child’s primer.
‘How delightful!’ Euphemia said, as Caroline turned the pages. ‘Where did it come from? It’s beautifully painted.’
‘Papa sent it,’ Will said. And now that it was unwrapped, he could see why. ‘I remember it, Carrie. Mama made it to teach me and Matty and Edward to read. We used to sit in the garden in Rattlesden, under the cherry tree, learning our letters.’ The sight of the little forgotten book was making him yearn with loss, as if he were a child again, and she were newly dead. Dear patient Mama. Oh, how well he remembered her.
‘Just look at this drawing of a lion,’ Euphemia said. ‘It’s very realistic, Carrie. Your mama must have seen a lion somewhere and sketched it from the life.’
‘I like the weaver “who works at his loom”,’ Caroline said. It was the picture of a dark squat man bent over an old-fashioned wooden loom, and there was something dogged and dependable about him that she found most attractive.
‘It’s a peace offering, Caroline,’ Matty said. ‘You must write and thank him.’ It would be the first step towards a reconciliation.
‘Will may thank him if he likes,’ Caroline said, ‘but I ain’t writing and that’s flat. If I can’t write to Henry then I can’t write to Papa.’
‘But it’s a lovely gift,’ Euphemia said. ‘Think how useful it will be.’
‘So it will,’ Caroline agreed, ‘and we’ll all use it with the littl’uns, but I ain’t writing, so don’t ask me.’
‘It will upset him,’ Matty said.
But the answer was adamant. ‘That is inevitable. Consider how he upset me.’
It was no use pursuing the topic. ‘Time for dinner, I think,’ Jimmy said. ‘Shall we go in?’
He did his best to keep the conversation light throughout the meal, for there was no sense in provoking disagreement and giving them all indigestion. So Will told them about Nan’s new extension to the Strand headquarters, and Matty spoke well of the new maid she was training up, and Jimmy was delighted to inform them that he’d been able to take on ten new pupils since Caroline and Euphemia had arrived, and they reached the pudding quite amicably.
But then Caroline altered the tone by asking her brother if he’d been to see Mr Dickens yet.
‘In point of fact, I have,’ he admitted, looking uncomfortable, ‘but please don’t say anything to anyone else yet, because I haven’t spoken to Papa.’
‘Why not?’ Caroline said bluntly, ignoring Euphemia’s pleading expression. She still hadn’t forgiven him for being so lukewarm in his support of her.
‘Mr Dickens means to start a new radical newspaper in January,’ Will explained. ‘It’s to be called the Daily News and he is to be the editor, and he’s offered me a job as a reporter, if everything goes according to plan.’
The news was greeted with delight all round the table.
‘But how wonderful!’ Euphemia said. ‘I’m so glad for you.’
‘It might come to nothing,’ Will said, ‘and in any case it’s all a great secret. That’s why I haven’t told Papa. Or anyone at all except you.’ Time enough for that when the paper was founded.
‘Your secret is safe with us,’ Matty promised. ‘We’ve all got too much to do to be gossiping, especially now that the soap and towels are here and we can get our scholars clean.’
‘I wonder how they’ll take to the idea,’ Jimmy said. ‘Another slice of tart, Will?’
They were to find out the next afternoon, when the three young women put on their holland aprons to protect their clothes and set about the task of instructing their pupils in the civilized art of hygiene. Each and every child was presented with a basin of fresh warm water and required to apply soap to their hands and faces until their skin was pink.
Some obeyed meekly, but others were annoyed. ‘We come ‘ere ter be learned,’ one boy protested, ‘not fer none a’ this caper.’
‘You’ll learn better when you’re clean,’ Caroline told him firmly. ‘Put your hands in the basin if you please.’
It was very hard work but the transformation they achieved was spectacular.
‘That boy they call Josser is really quite handsome when he’s washed,’ Euphemia said later.
‘He’s a clever boy,’ Jimmy told them. ‘He will make a good monitor when he’s older.’
‘The littl’uns loved their new primer,’ Matty said. ‘It was kind of your father to send it.’
‘Yes,’ Caroline said. ‘It was.’ But she still didn’t write to him.
The only letters that interested Caroline were the ones that were delivered at the door every evening by Henry Easter. His familiar knock was the highlight of her day. She would rush to the drawing room window at once, lamp in hand, to watch him as he stood beneath the chestnut tree with his own lantern held aloft to remind her. And when he was gone she would feel quite bleak for an hour or two, missing him painfully and feeling the full impossible weight of her father’s punishment.
‘How wonderfully patient he is,’ she would say.
But on the eighth evening, his letter was written with such a furious lack of patience that she could barely decipher it.
‘I cannot bear this,’ he wrote. ‘To see you and not speak is torture to my innermost being. Could you not slip from the house for just a minute? Your father need never know of it.’
It was a terrible temptation, but it had to be resisted. And at once, while her resolve was wrong.
‘Dearly though I wish to speak to you,’ she answered him, sitting beside the window so that he could see her as she wrote, ‘I cannot do as you suggest, although I will write to you, just this once, to explain to you. I have given my word to my father and an Easter’s word is her bond, as you must know. I love you more dearly than ever and shall never waiver in my intention to be
Your own
Caroline.’
Then she sent Mary Ann to run out of the house and give it to him, watching in her turn as he took it and read it, holding the little paper up to the lantern. When he’d finished reading it, he looked up at the window for a long time, his face pale in the lamplight. Then he seemed to be tearing the letter in two. Oh dear! Had she upset him so much? But no. It was just a corner he’d torn off and now he was writing something on it, leaning it against the trunk of the tree.
‘You are quite right,’ he pencilled. ‘I was wrong to ask. I love you. H.O.’ He was saying the right thing, but the effort it was costing him was making him hot with frustration and bad temper. She could have sneaked out just once to see him. It wouldn’t have hurt. There was no need to be quite so proper, devil take it. Oh, this was a preposterous situation!
He gave the note to her servant and watched as she went trotting back to the house with the little scrap of paper in her hand.
Caroline read her second note with mounting affection and was just about to tell Euphemia how noble she thought he was, when she looked down into the square again and saw that he was kicking the tree. It was such a violent outburst and so unexpected that she didn’t know how to respond to it. She would have liked to accept it as romantic evidence of his great love for her, but she recognized that temper just a little too clearly, remembering the way he’d sworn when his horse threw him on that first afternoon. And even when he’d recovered
himself and taken up the lantern and waved goodbye and gone, the memory of those stabbing legs still disturbed her.
For the first time in her life, she didn’t tell Euphemia what she was feeling. These emotions were too raw, too muddled and too private. So they went on disturbing her for several long slow days. And to make matters worse, the one person she could have talked to, who would have understood how she was feeling, was over a hundred miles away from her and not likely to be back in London for months and months.
Nan Easter was in Penrith with Mr Brougham, as usual, wintering at his house on the edge of the great Brougham estates in Westmoreland.
Frederick Brougham had inherited the land when one of his cousins died some twelve years earlier, and had built himself a house on the bank of the river Eamont, well away from the town and with a breathtaking view of the distant fells. It was an isolated place and when she first went there, Nan, the town dweller, had felt ill at ease in such a wilderness, although she had to admit that the scenery was magnificent.
But over the years she had grown to appreciate it almost as much as Frederick did. The local people kept themselves to themselves but were friendly enough when they chanced to meet. The food was excellent, the water sweet and pure, which made a refreshing change after the stale waters of London, and although most parts of the house were extremely cold in wintertime, particularly first thing in the morning, the parlour and their bedroom were always warm, since Frederick gave orders that the fires there were to be kept going day and night. She liked the spaciousness of the rooms with their thick carpets, and their chandeliers and their marble mantelpieces, the kitchen with its two ranges and its two huge dressers, the drawing room on the ground floor and the stepped terraces that rose before it into their steep garden, each with its own hidden delight – sundial, dovecote, fish pond.
And then there were the Broughams, a tribe of aristocratic cousins with whom they visited and gossiped and dined in the leisurely way common to most people who lived among the fells. There was no rush or fret in their isolated tranquillity, and with those magnificent folded hills brooding above them it was impossible to fuss about trivialities, which was refreshing and restful to a woman as busy as the great Nan Easter. So it soon became her habit to spend two or three months there every year.
However, this year proved rather less idyllic than usual. In her second week Frederick took a chill and within two days was racked by a feverish cough that kept them both awake most of the night and worried Nan more than she admitted. She kept her Frederick in bed and dosed him with calfs-foot jelly, but he didn’t improve, and finally she gave the butler orders to send to the village for a surgeon.
The gentleman who came was a quiet wizened man, who examined his patient slowly and then pronounced him very sick indeed. ‘He has a congestion of the lungs, ma’am,’ he told Nan. ‘I will bleed him directly which should ease the condition somewhat but the prognosis is not happy.’
So Frederick was bled, first by the application of leeches and then, when that didn’t seem to improve his condition at all, by cupping, which reduced him to panting exhaustion, which alarmed Nan but which the doctor assured her was ‘a most excellent sign’. But although his fever did drop a little, poor Frederick still coughed incessantly, and now there was no doubt that he was very ill indeed, just as the surgeon had said.
That night she wrote to John and Billy to tell them that she would be staying in Penrith until Frederick was better, ‘The firm is in your capable hands,’ she said. Then she returned to the sick room.
‘I keep you,’ Frederick worried between bouts of tossing fever. ‘I keep you, my dear. You should be in London.’
‘You en’t to talk squit,’ Nan said lovingly. ‘I shall stay with ‘ee till the fever’s gone, my dear. Don’t ‘ee fret. Billy and John can run the firm for a day or two, surely to goodness.’
But it wasn’t a day or two, it was more than six weeks. In fact by the time he was able to tremble out of bed and totter across the room on his pathetically shrunken legs and sit most gratefully by the bedroom fire, it was well into November.
‘Now you must go to London, Nan my dear,’ he urged. ‘It increases my guilt that I keep you here so long, and a guilty man makes a slow recovery.’
She was relieved that his wit had returned. ‘If that’s the way of it, I shall travel tomorrow,’ she grinned at him.
But in fact she took time to check all the household stores and give detailed instructions to the housekeeper and the cook, and to impress upon Frederick’s manservant that she was to be informed at once if he took so much as a fraction of a turn for the worse. Then she took the closed carriage to Lancaster and the railway.
It was a very cold journey, for the first snow of the winter had fallen overnight, and even in the relative comfort of a well-upholstered first class carriage her hands and feet were soon chilled, despite her fur muff and stout leather boots. Fortunately she had the carriage to herself for the first twenty miles, so she curled herself up like a dormouse for warmth and tucked her feet under her petticoats.
The white hills rolled past her little misted window, black trees spiked the horizon like wild hair, the occasional black homestead crouched under its white roof, black and white, white and black. There is no colour in the world, she thought, as the engine chuffed white steam into the grey sky and the wheels clacked clicked clacked over frost-black rails. The spring seemed a long way away. She realized that she was exhausted. I must be growing old, she thought, to have so little energy and to feel the cold so acutely. Until then she hadn’t thought of herself in terms of age at all. She was simply Nan Easter, busy running her great firm and happily involved in the complicated affairs of her huge family. Now, and for almost the first time, she was aware of her seventy-three years. As the train rocked her into sleep, she knew she would be glad to be back in London with her work to occupy her and the renewal of spring just round the corner.
Chapter 15
‘You’ve just got back in time for bad weather,’ Will said, as he handed his grandmother out of her carriage outside the Easter headquarters. The sky above the Strand was the colour of blue ink and seemed to be pressing down upon the buildings as though the air were weighted.
‘I shouldn’t be a bit surprised,’ Nan said, walking briskly into the building. ‘It’s been snowing in the north. When that lot starts a-falling we shall know about it.’
It started a-falling at three o’clock in the afternoon, and by then a strong wind was gusting, so the first downpour was hurled sideways into the open doorway of A. Easter and Sons and blown underneath the tarpaulins that covered the exposed joists in the new extension.
John and Nan were inspecting the site. The first floor of the building, where they now stood, had been completely gutted, with all the inner walls removed and the central stairway left as a perilous ladder. A hoist had been fitted on the floor above them, and a large hole, which would eventually become a double loading door, had been made in the wall overlooking the courtyard. Most of the labourers were on the ground floor converting the rooms to offices, and the foreman was nowhere to be seen, having taken himself off through the back door the minute he heard Nan’s voice.
‘Off to buy wood at four o’clock in the afternoon? That’s a likely story!’ Nan was complaining, when the sudden shower swooshed through the loose tarpaulins that were supposed to be covering the hole. She was drenched from shoulder to thigh.
‘There you see!’ she said, shaking her skirts. ‘That should never have happened. Shoddy workmanship, that’s what that is. Oh, I shall have something to say to that foreman when he gets back.’
‘You must get into dry clothes, Mama,’ John said anxiously. ‘You are soaked to the skin.’
‘Tosh!’ she said. ‘I en’t a baby. Bit of rainwater never hurt nobody.’
He gave her his wry grin. ‘And here you’ve been telling me all about poor Mr Brougham and how ill he’s been with the congestion of his lungs, and what caused that if it wasn’t th
e damp?’
‘I’m made of tougher stuff,’ she said. But she was wet. There was no denying it. Wet and beginning to feel cold in consequence. So she allowed herself to be persuaded and went back to her office to change into the clean clothes she kept there for emergencies.
She was sitting at her desk afterwards, feeling a great deal warmer and checking through the order books, when Will arrived with a pot of tea and a dish of fancy cakes.
‘Papa thought you might need sustenance,’ he said. The gale was still blowing, roaring so loudly outside her window that she could hardly hear what he was saying.
There were two cups set on the tray, so he obviously wanted to be asked to join her. ‘Come in, come in,’ she said, beckoning him towards her.
‘What weather,’ he said, as she poured the tea. ‘I’ve just been down to the Isle of Dogs. You should see the tide that’s running. They’ve been trying to tie all the colliers to their moorings there, tiers and tiers of them. I’ve never seen them all tied up before. There must have been about eighty of them along the Mill Wall. They were like an armada. I’m going back again presently. I think there’s a story in it.’
‘You still write then?’ she said, sipping the hot tea.
‘Now and then,’ he admitted, ‘just to keep my hand in.’
‘Is this a commission?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Who is it for?’
‘Well actually,’ he said, in that deliberately casual way that showed how very important it was, ‘it’s a commission for Mr Dickens.’
‘The novelist feller?’
‘The same,’ he said. But then his casual facade was breached by excitement. ‘He’s offered me a job, Nan. On his new paper. He’s been planning it for months and now it’s all set. The first issue will be out in January. He’ll be advertising in the trade in two weeks’ time.’
‘Does your father know?’
‘Not yet. I thought I would tell you first. See what you think.’
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