by Tanya Moir
‘French spy?’
‘That Monsieur LeBlanc, sir. They’re saying his real name’s Daytevvy-something, and he works for King Louis of France, and you were going to give the French king money so France would win the war.’
‘That’s not true!’ cries Theresine. ‘We would never do such a thing.’
Guillaume presses the heels of his hands hard against his eyes. Feeling the softness of his own skin, he is filled with nostalgia for its safety. ‘You must help us,’ he says softly. ‘Please.’
‘Oh, I daren’t, sir.’ Beth’s caterpillar brow shoots up. ‘I don’t like to think of you hanged, sir, and your parts hung up round the city walls, and the mistress thrown out to beg for her bread down the market, if she’s not transported. But if they find out I’ve let you slip away out the attic window, it’ll be my neck in the noose, you see.’
Guillaume stares at the maid. She looks back at him.
‘It’s not that I don’t want to, sir. But just think how much you’re asking.’
There is a pause. Theresine sobs quietly.
Beth continues. ‘More than my life’s worth, maybe. And my life’s worth ever so much to me, sir. Just as yours is to you, I’m sure.’
Guillaume’s life, it turns out, is worth almost everything. The seventy remaining years of the lease on the house in Fournier Street, with its looms and its silk and its silver and marble and tarnishing brass, and its fig tree in the garden. All Jean-Pierre’s new designs, as well as the dining table on which Guillaume has left them sitting.
He leaves through the attic window with nothing but his gold, and a pocket full of bank notes. With his wife, he hurries, crouched, along the rooftops of Fournier Street in stockinged feet, startling sleeping pigeons and dislodging the neighbours’ slates. Theresine lags behind Guillaume, a whimper caught in her throat, silk slippers in her hand. I don’t doubt that she worries, as they make good their escape with the aid of the pastor’s fig tree, about the wasted fruit.
The next morning, in Theresine’s kitchen, my great-great-great-great-great-granny Beth makes a nice fig tart, and sends Thomas to fetch her mother.
Guillaume’s trial, in absence of a defence, is over within the hour. The evidence of foreign treachery proves compelling; the testimony of the Crown’s star witness is vividly detailed, and widely read the next day in all the London papers. The shock of it reverberates up and down Fournier Street, rattling even the pastor, who is moved to declare his former neighbour a papist as well as a spy.
There’s an ugly quiet in Spitalfields. In the attics, the English apprentices mutter more than usual, and the French keep their heads down. By the end of the day, Guillaume Chaumet (if that was his name!) has not a friend in the world, and Brave Beth is the toast of the town.
On Friday, 1 October 1756, the Crown is granted an act of attinctus against Guillaume Jean-Baptiste Chaumet. They throw in his wife for good measure. From now on, the Chaumet name is officially black, and their property forfeit. In law, Theresine and Guillaume are dead, and the duty of loyal Englishmen everywhere is to make them so in fact, upon sight, by whatever means convenient to hand.
The Chaumets are in a tight spot.
That afternoon, in the kitchen of 30 Fournier Street, the gist of the tainting act is explained to Beth by Mr Nathaniel Sharpe.
‘It will be better for all concerned,’ she agrees, ‘when Mr Chaumet and his wife are truly dead. But as for his property, sir, I’m afraid I can be of no help, for I don’t know where you’ll find it. This house and everything in it were sold last month, to a Mr Hardynge of Brick Lane. I’m expecting him the day after tomorrow.’
Sharpe blinks. ‘Are you telling me that Tobias Hardynge, the fellmonger, has bought this house?’
‘No, sir. Hal Hardynge, the weaver.’
‘Tobias’ son? With what? How could he do so?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir. He must have come into funds. You’d have to ask him.’ Beth looks thoughtful. ‘I did hear tell an uncle of his went out to the Indies a few years back, though.’
‘You expect me,’ Sharpe says slowly, ‘to believe this?’
‘Well,’ says Beth, almost sweetly, ‘you wouldn’t want to call me a liar, now, would you, sir? After all I’ve been through?’
There is a moment’s silence.
‘Tell Hardynge I’ll be calling on him next week,’ says Sharpe, getting up. ‘With a notary. We’ll be wanting to see the deed of sale, and the lease.’
Beth, the good servant, hands him his gloves. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something, sir?’
The two stare at each other. Beth inclines her head towards Sharpe’s coat pocket, and raises her brow. The Crown’s agent sighs. He pulls out a small leather bag, containing the sum agreed — £100 — and leaves it on the table.
(This is a pivotal point in the Harding family fortunes. But we’ll return to the fate of Beth’s hundred quid in due course. First, the clock is ticking for Theresine and Guillaume, now past their expiry date, and in need of an ending. Here, the records desert us, and Maggie’s story and mine diverge.)
My mother, still hopeful of Huguenot blood, sheds that of the Chaumets in a Wapping alley. Hal Hardynge follows them down to the quays, slits their throats in the darkness and slides them ungently into the waiting Thames, thus cementing his fiancée’s recent bargain.
And I’m not saying this can’t be true. Hal’s a good hand with a knife, and accustomed to noxious trades. But it’s too early in the piece for that yet: the Hardings need a few centuries to evolve. So here’s my story:
It, too, begins in Wapping, where its protagonists are in something of a hurry. It’s not far — an hour’s walk, maybe, in Theresine’s heels — from Fournier Street to the river. In the dead of night, Theresine and Guillaume travel faster than news, arriving still wealthy silk merchants, and far from friendless.
Guillaume thinks quickly. After all, it’s not the first time he’s had to flee a country. What French merchant can’t find a customs-cleared ship on the Thames with a little spare room, and a captain who won’t split hairs?
I say the Chaumets are gone with the tide, leaving that name behind them, down in the river mud with the rest of the night’s victims.
I see them in India, where Theresine is blessed with an abundance of figs, and Guillaume weaves another fortune. I see them in Montreal, where Guillaume puts his trust in no weaver but God, and among the trappers of furs, finds colleagues less rapacious.
(Maggie says nothing. But what does she know? It’s my story, too, and I’ve every right to end it as I please. Indeed, I have the final word.)
TWO
Back at school, I’ve become a celebrity. The kid who’s been to Europe. I’m asked to give a talk to the class, in which I mumble and fluff and can’t keep the airports straight. We do a project about jet lag.
Maggie is suffering too. On her first day back at work, the editor laughs and sends her home. Two weeks later, the last of her sick leave is gone and nobody’s smiling.
‘It’s all I can do,’ I hear her tell Mrs Booth from Institute, ‘to get up in the morning.’
‘You must be coming down with the flu,’ says Mrs Booth, and leaves us a cream sponge.
It’s the middle of summer. As the long days pass, I wait, hopefully, for a cough or a sneeze. But all Maggie comes down with is a case of the shakes.
‘They just don’t know,’ she tells Mrs Cousins. ‘They’re giving me pills for the headaches.’
Lithium, in fact. I’ve read the label.
March comes. Maggie tries another doctor. ‘She thinks it might be Tapanui flu,’ she confides one night on the phone to her friend Ruth, from the paper. ‘She’s signed me off for another month.’
I’m worried. Our school cricket team played Tapanui last month. Perhaps I’ve brought it home. The next morning, I ask Miss Brady.
‘What’s Tapanui flu?’
She turns the question back to the class. ‘Does anyone know?’
Joelle Adams stic
ks up her hand. ‘My dad says it’s another word for being bloody useless.’
Miss Brady is not impressed with Joelle or her dad, but I am grateful. I don’t mention Tapanui flu to anyone again.
Maggie’s headaches get worse. She has to lie down all day with the curtains drawn, so it seems to make sense that she stops getting up in the mornings.
Mrs Cousins takes to inviting me round for tea. She feeds me ginger crunch and talks a lot about family. ‘What about your nana and granddad?’
‘They’ve moved to Nelson.’
‘I bet they ring you up all the time.’
‘No.’
‘Oh. I see.’
I don’t like Susan Fisher any more, and I’m pretty certain she doesn’t like me. But for some reason, she keeps asking me round to her place. Her mother picks us up from school most Friday nights, and somehow or other I end up having to stay the whole weekend there.
The Fishers have built a brand-new house, all Summerhill stone, with a wrought-iron gate and two concrete lions. The house has gold taps with purple jewels on top, and an open-plan living room that smells of pot-pourri and mutton.
Susan and I don’t really have anything to say. Sometimes we play Swing-ball. Sometimes Mrs Fisher makes Susan give me a go on their new video game. Mostly we watch TV.
One Sunday, we’re allowed to stay up late to see Oliver Twist. Miss Brady has sent out a note. She wants the whole class to watch. We have to write a report on it the next morning in school.
Afterwards, I lie awake in the dark in Susan Fisher’s room, longing for my own bed. Mrs Fisher’s sheets smell funny. She sneaks in to kiss Susan goodnight, and I feel really quite sorry for myself, in spite of my full stomach. The hall light goes out, and the Fishers’ bedroom door shuts. I can tell from her breathing that Susan’s not asleep.
‘Dad says,’ she whispers, ‘that if they find out your mum’s gone mental, they’ll put you in Some Sort Of Home.’
I’m speechless.
‘What will you do?’ Susan pulls her blankets up. ‘I think I’d run away.’
Maggie’s up when I get home from school on Monday. She’s taken to spreading her London notes out on the dining table and staring at them for hours. She’s still in her dressing gown, with her unwashed hair tied up in a scarf, and she looks like a low-rent gypsy hag, ready to read something bad into our fortune. Her latest doctor has told her to try and keep busy, but I don’t think this is what he had in mind.
‘I don’t want,’ I tell her urgently, ‘to be put into a home.’
My mother smiles a little, as if I’ve said something funny, and I think, just then, that I could strangle her. (A figure of speech, of course. Still, looking back, this might be my very first bud of rage, unfurling wherever it is such things do. Behind the eyes. In the bones or the chest. My blood bubbling up to the boil.)
‘I don’t expect anyone ever did,’ she says. ‘No matter how bad it was where they came from.’
It’s an odd response, by anyone’s standards. At the time, I take it to mean that the Fishers are right, and Maggie has indeed ‘gone mental’ — just another loose thread in my mother’s rapidly unravelling top blanket. But now, if I pull at it — look! — it will take us right back where we need to go. Spitalfields, London, in 1756. Granny Beth, with her £100, mistress of her dream home.
The house she has wanted ever since she first saw it, standing in muddy Fournier Street long ago, holding her mother’s hand.
I see a fairy-tale wedding. A silk dress, of course — new, not just one of Theresine’s let out — and sticky yellow Madeira toasts in a private room at the Weaver’s Arms. The happy couple are in funds, after all, and besides, the bride’s a local celebrity. I’ll even give them a few days’ honeymoon, of a sort, behind the expensive draperies of Guillaume’s tester bed.
But after that, the Hardynges must turn their attention to the house. Like every young couple in their first home, Beth and Hal want to make some alterations. And they’d better be quick, because already the children are on the way.
Out go the second-floor furnishings. In come the little beds. In no time at all, Beth and Hal have turned the Chaumets’ house into a home. The whole parish chips in. Which is why the Hardynges name it as they do — St Mary Spital’s Home for Friendless Boys.
The first twenty boys — friendless no more — are given a roof and an education. In the Hardynges’ attic, their fresh-scrubbed fingers are quick to learn (if they wish to be fed) how to spin raw silk into thread, wind the weavers’ quills and draw their bows. By the time the weavers have paid for the use of the looms and the boys, their own profit is slight, but the Hardynges’ grows immensely.
Even so, by 1757, silk is a slippery business. Jean-Pierre’s brocades, Hal has learnt, are not easily woven. The winds of fashion are fickle, and with all of Europe at war, the markets are in constant flux. Sharp-eyed Beth looks up and down Fournier Street and sees more master weavers than can profit.
Across the dinner table, Hal passes the silver cruet set and agrees that faint heart has never won the hand of fortune. The Hardynges decide to expand.
Up to this point, Beth’s mother has enjoyed a place by the kitchen fire, from which, with the aid of a knotted stick, she supervises the kitchen boys, keeping mouths and pockets empty, staying their hands with the gruel ladle and stopping them salting the bread. But now, Great-granny Marialuisa comes into her own.
After Beth’s father passed away in 1742, as a result of a brawl in Goaty’s Tavern, Marialuisa made ends meet by managing the Azorean Inn off Whitechapel, an establishment which, over the years, became widely known to single men as the Portuguese widow’s doss house. As a result, she developed quite an eye for the use of space.
Out go the looms. In come the boys. Marialuisa stacks them up under the attic glass, four high, in hammocks they sew for themselves out of sacks donated by the parish. (I imagine it must have been cold at the top, but they’d have a nice view of the stars.)
There’s a little space in the centre, where they can be shown how to throw and wind, those few who aren’t weavers’ sons, and don’t know already. But their real work is done outside. Each morning, the St Mary’s boys go out, taking the stairs to attics all over Spitalfields, spinning and winding for master weavers large and small, those multifarious silk speculators Hal and Beth Hardynge no longer compete with, but supply.
By 1765, 30 Fournier Street is recorded as home to one hundred and fifty-nine children. Not all of them are friendless. There is Tobias Hardynge, aged eight, and William, who is seven. There is a long-awaited Henry, now safely aged four, and a rather fancifully named Marguerite, aged two, as well as a baby, Joshua, of months too scanty to be noted.
Theresine’s flower beds have long since given way to a row of latrines and a second kitchen. Still, Number 30 must be cramped, and the view from its back windows can’t have improved.
The following year, St Mary Spital’s takes over the lease of 32 Fournier Street, and the second-floor boys move down a door, along with Marialuisa. Those on the top floor remain. Hal has it closed off from the rest of the house, and an opening knocked through to the attic next door, thus removing sight and sound of the boys from the Hardynges’ stairs. Number 30 is remodelled, in rococo style. The workhouse kitchens go, and Beth calls in a gardener.
More houses follow. Throughout the seventies, Hal and Beth are expanding, winning new contracts as neighbouring parishes outsource their poor relief, buying up the fag-ends of old leases cheaply, as the master weavers of Spitalfields begin to go through. (They’ve an eye for bricks and mortar, my great-grandparents — you have to admire their style.)
It’s true that as silk prices fall, so must the price of the boys’ labour. But this lowering of unit profit is offset by the increase in production. Whatever market conditions prevail, there is never a shortage of friendless boys in London. The Hardynges have so many boys now — their costs more than met by the parish contracts — that even in the gloomiest years, our fami
ly fortune continues to grow.
In Number 30’s fashionable first-floor salon, Beth now pursues gentle habits, trimming bonnets and embroidering screens, her crafty fingers turning scraps of mis-woven brocade into cushions and exquisite little dolls’ gowns. She’s happy enough with her life to have it recorded in oils, a full-size portrait with her red-headed brood around her feet (all Hal, you might think, Marialuisa’s contribution lying dormant), which she hangs above the stairs.
On the second floor, its fire surrounds and carpets reinstated, the Hardynge children go about the business of growing up. Their windows look south, to the sun, over fig and mulberry leaves and a fertile kitchen garden, to the tangle of open ground where squirrels, stray cats and unwanted French weavers are known to hide.
Marialuisa no longer puts the children to bed with a moustached kiss and a Portuguese lullaby. Instead, they are soothed to sleep by the pitter-pat of the friendless boys’ bare feet on the rush floor over their heads. A comforting sound, like rain on the roof when you’re tucked up warm and dry.
In time, Tobias Hardynge is taught the business and its books, and comes to work as a clerk for his father. Clever William, his mother’s son, is sent to study the law (one can never be too careful). Less clever Henry, soon tiring of his leafy view, sails with the East India Company, having purchased command of a troop of foreign friendless boys. Marguerite does as she pleases. Little Joshua watches and waits, to see which course will prove the most successful.
On Tobias’ twenty-first birthday, his father signs over to him the lease of the newest home, St Bart’s, a double-fronted affair on the corner of Silk Street. The second generation of Hardynges are officially in the business. A year later, William celebrates his majority with the deed to 14 Princelet Street — once a very fine home, built for the failed silk investor Nathaniel Sharpe.
The dashing young Captain Hardynge never makes it back to Fournier Street to claim Number 32, the home closest to his mother’s heart. Poor Henry meets his end in Travancore, when he leads his scout party of sepoys into an ambush which, curiously, claims no life but his, his men returning without a scratch. (When in enemy territory, his CO notes, the captain had the sometimes dangerous habit of leading from the rear.)
