‘Your Majesty is most kind. I have taken the liberty of bringing Your Majesty and Your Royal Highness a chart of Tierra del Fuego, prepared from the survey expedition commanded by Captain King. It is the first one off the Navy’s copper press, sir.’
‘Capital, Commander, capital!’
FitzRoy unrolled the chart and spread it before the King and Queen, pointing out Woollya, Desolate Bay and York Minster, the homes of the three Fuegians.
‘And these blank spaces - I dare say you’ll fill them in when you take these three back in the Beagle?’
FitzRoy seized his chance. ‘No sir. The Admiralty has decided to prosecute no further surveys of the area. Although I understand that the French have sent an expedition to that quarter under the direction of the naturalist Captain du Petit Thouars.’
‘The French? The devil take ’em. What are those damned fools in the Admiralty playing at?’
‘I understand there are economic limitations, Your Majesty.’
‘Economic limitations be hanged. We can’t be outdone by the French. What about all those uncles of yours? Do not the dukes Grafton and Richmond interest themselves about you?’
‘Unfortunately, sir, I have had to request a year’s leave from the Service to enable me to keep my faith with the natives using my own means. I hope to see our friends here become useful as interpreters, sir, and to be the means of establishing a friendly disposition towards Englishmen on the part of their countrymen.’
‘Absolutely. Any fool can see that’s a capital idea.’
Fanny looked across at her brother, a worried expression stealing across her face. He was taking an enormous risk, manipulating the conversation like this.
‘We can’t have good men like you lost to the Service, Commander. You leave their lordships to me. Economic limitations, indeed!’
His Majesty levered his portly frame from his chair, grunting with the exertion involved, indicating that the interview was over. Queen Adelaide, meanwhile, left the room for a moment, then returned with one of her own bonnets, a gold ring and a small purse of coins, which she gave to Fuegia Basket. She tied the bonnet under the little girl’s chin and slipped the ring on to her finger. ‘The money is for you, my dear, to buy travelling clothes.’
‘What must you say, Fuegia?’
‘Thank you, Your Royal Highness.’
The ring alone, FitzRoy realized, was valuable enough to keep a working man’s family in food for a year.
Bennet rose before dawn, in the little room that discreetly separated Fuegia Basket’s quarters from York Minster’s, and woke the three Fuegians. Jemmy donned his pink coat and Fuegia her new bonnet, from which she utterly refused to be parted. They assembled in the shivering half-dark of the schoolyard, where they boarded Wilson’s carriage, which the clergyman had kindly donated for the day. They took the road for Islington, a cold grey light at their backs. Half-lit brick kilns, orchards, cow-yards, tea-gardens and tenter grounds rattled past, allotments rising as islands from sodden, misty fields. On either side of Hackney village there were bare strawberry allotments, where early-risen women with rough clay pipes in their mouths were potting runners from the summer’s exhausted plants.
At first, theirs had been the only carriage on the road, but as they neared Islington the traffic thickened. Milkmaids from the outlying farms took to the road, bowed under the weight of their heavy iron churns. Boys with sticks drove massive herds of cattle and pigs uncomprehendingly forward into the maw of the metropolis, to feed the insatiable appetites of the one and a half million citizens who teemed and sweated in the cramped lattice of streets and alleyways. After Islington, where the new tenements lining the Lower Road disgorged an anthill of clerks, the City Road, St John’s Street and the Angel Terrace heading downhill towards Battlebridge became a veritable swarm of commuters, mounting their inexorable morning assault on London. No one, it seemed, had occasion to pause, even for a few seconds: passers-by grabbed buns and biscuits from pastry shops en route, tossing their pennies through the open doorway. Floating serenely above the jostling river of humanity in their opulent carriage, Bennet and his three charges felt as if they were being carried shoulder-high into the very heart of the city. They could see London below them now, drifts of yellow smog lining its alleys like mucus, the ever-present kites soaring and wheeling high above.
At Battlebridge came the first of the city’s great sights.
‘A mountain!’ exclaimed Jemmy.
‘A mountain of rubbish,’ clarified Bennet, inviting them to look again. It was indeed a mighty triangular summit of ordure, cinders and rags, its secondary hillocks of horse-bones swarming with ravenous pigs. Cinder-sifters and scavengers combed the upper slopes, ragged panting children and women with short pipes and muscled forearms, more wretched than their Hackney sisters, with strawboard gaiters and torn bonnet-boxes for pinafores.
‘All of London’s rubbish, all her waste, is piled up here,’ said Bennet, by way of explanation.
‘What for do they want rubbish?’ asked Jemmy.
‘Tin canisters are re-usable as luggage clamps, old shoes go for Prussian blue dye. Everything is re-usable.’
‘These are low people,’ said Jemmy. ‘Not gentlemen.’
‘That they are not, Jemmy. All of this is to be flattened, they say, to make way for a great cross, in memory of His Late Majesty King George IV. Take it all in, for you will never see its like again.’
At the top of Tottenham Court Road they had to queue for their second turnpike. ‘This area,’ explained Bennet, ‘belongs to Captain FitzRoy’s family. Not to the captain himself, but to his family. It’s called Fitzrovia.’ Grand terraces and squares rose behind allotments and smallholdings to the west.
‘If it belongs to capp’en’s family, it belong to capp‘en.’
‘Not quite, Jemmy. It doesn’t really work like that.’
‘All family not live together?’
‘They don’t live here at all.’
Jemmy subsided into his seat, completely baffled.
‘I love Capp’en Sisser,’ offered Fuegia.
At the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, the rush-hour traffic finally congealed. A hundred stationary horses tossed their heads and blew steam from their nostrils, while the drivers bellowed greetings and friendly obscenities at each other. Bennet invited the Fuegians to step down from the carriage, and arranged to rendezvous with their driver at the same spot that evening. They pressed through the crowds and turned right into Oxford Street.
After his years of exile in the Southern Ocean and the many long, quiet months in Walthamstow, even James Bennet, a Londoner, was momentarily stunned by the sudden assault on his senses that ensued. It was as if they had stepped not into a main thoroughfare but into the middle of Bartholomew Fair. The street seethed with activity. The rattle of coachwheels competed with the buzz of flies. There were German bands clashing with bagpipes, who clashed in turn with Italian mechanical organs mounted on carts. Dustmen rang their bells. News vendors blew their tin horns and bragged of ‘Bloody News!’ and ‘Horrible Murder!’, their headlines screaming loudest of all. One side of the street was plastered with song-sheets, as if some unseen authority were orchestrating the cacophony.
Everyone, it seemed, had something to sell. There were knife-grinders and pot-welders and women selling huge blocks of cocoa. There were toy theatres with hand-drawn characters cut and pasted on to cardboard, their owners peddling seats in the street at a penny a ticket. There were jugglers, conjurors and microscope exhibitors. There were men offering tickets to dogfights, cockfights, even ratfights. There were dancing bears, performing apes, and a model of the battle of Waterloo pulled by a donkey. There were baked-potato men, men offering plum duff ‘just up’, pudding stalls, egg stalls, shoe-cleaners and beggars by the score. Starving lynch mobs might well have been roaming the fields of southern England demanding reform, but here within its heavily policed boundaries, London pursued its pushing, shoving, shouting commercial life without
shame, without hindrance, without distraction.
And then there were the children. Literally hundreds upon hundreds of them, begging, offering themselves up for work holding horses, fetching taxis, opening doors, or simply performing cartwheels for a halfpenny. ‘D’you want me, Jack? Want a boy?’ came the clamour of shrill voices as every passer-by was besieged. There were black, unwashed climbing boys, their brushes standing to attention against their shoulders like rifles. There were silent, diseased children curled in corners, the ones who would not live long, wasting away in pale misery. There were proud, red-jacketed boys chasing after carriages, collecting fresh horse manure as it fell and placing it in roadside bins; bunters, scooping up dog excrement for the tanning trade; and crossing sweepers, clearing paths through the ordure for gentlemen wishing to cross the street. There were nimble children easing silently between the crowds, risking the gallows by picking pockets. There were drunken children, leaning against the long mahogany bars of the myriad gin palaces, slumped beneath serried ranks of green-and-gold casks, fumbling with their pipes, or challenging each other to meaningless, swaying punch-ups. These people are multiplying, thought Bennet. They are multiplying indefinitely.
Surprisingly, it was York who spoke first. ‘So many people,’ he said simply.
‘So many people,’ echoed Fuegia.
‘There are one and a half million people in London. When I was a boy it was just over one million.’ These figures mean nothing to them, he realized. I must find another way to express it. ‘There are more people in this street, now, than in the whole of Tierra del Fuego. In this one street. Do you understand me? That is why this is the biggest city in the world.’
The colours of Oxford Street’s inhabitants were so vibrant, so dazzlingly, tastelessly lurid: there were scarlet breeches, candy-striped waistcoats, lime green petticoats and lemon yellow riding jackets. The races that sported these extravagant clothes came in all shades as well: there were Africans and Indians and Spaniards and Chinese and Jews and Malays and West Indians. Any fears he might have entertained as to the conspicuousness of his charges, Bennet realized, were groundless; a Fuegian Indian in a pink coat, even though he might stop the traffic in Walthamstow, would not merit a backward glance on Oxford Street.
The palette on which this kaleidoscopic array had been daubed was jet-black. The buildings on either side were thick with soot and grease. Fallen soot had blended with horse manure to create a three-inch layer of soft black mud in the middle of the road, through which the crowds surged heedlessly. The air was thick with a cloying yellow mixture of seacoal dust and water vapour, which insinuated itself into eyes, ears and noses, and worked relentlessly to dampen the garish extremes of colour in its clammy shroud. Jemmy kept to the new raised wooden pavement until it ran out, then hopped carefully from one dry patch to another, in a vain attempt to keep his shining boots unspattered. He dabbed at his increasingly sooty pink sleeves with a crisp white handkerchief, faintly distressed mewling sounds coming from under his breath.
‘Don’t worry, Jemmy, it will wash off,’ Bennet reassured him.
Blackest of all were the narrow alleys that led off Oxford Street, from which no light at all seemed to emanate. There were only glimpses to be had of the subterranean creatures who inhabited these worlds: painted women with swollen features, ragged Irishmen with uncombed, waist-length hair, canine children, wolfish dogs. Round white eyes peered from desperate black faces. Windows were stuffed with rags or paper, the window-frames themselves loose and rotten.
‘Is it a cave?’ said Fuegia, transfixed.
‘Don’t go in there,’ said Bennet, grabbing her arm to hold her back, a gesture that sensibly went unchallenged by York Minster. ‘Those are the rookeries. Where the St Giles blackbirds live. The black men. And the Irish. It’s dangerous. You must not go down any of the bye-streets.’
To distract her, he shelled out fourpence for four tickets to see ‘The Smallest Man in the World’, with his fellow exhibit ‘An Enormous Fat Woman’; followed by a further tuppence to look through the viewfinder of a kaleidoscope, a contrivance that sent Jemmy into raptures.
Finally, in the centre of Oxford Street, the narrow overhanging buildings and patchwork windowpanes of the last century opened out into a wide circle of pale, graceful stone.
‘This is Oxford Circus. This is modern London,’ Bennet explained. ‘And that is Regent Street.’
To the south ran two elegant lines of white pillars, so new as to be barely stained by coal dust, in a curving Doric colonnade. The buildings behind them soared skywards in blinding white stucco.
‘It is a new construction, built by Mr Nash, running from Regent’s Park at the north of London, down to Waterloo Place at the far south. It is lit up by gas at night, like a starry sky. It is said to be the most beautiful street in the world. On the west are the streets of the nobility and the gentry. On the east is Soho, where the mechanics and traders reside. They had to knock down a hundred lanes and alleys, and a thousand shops and homes, to build it. And there will be other grand streets like it. Old London is being torn down, the London I was born in. In its place they are building a new, modern city, a beautiful city of wide roads and circuses and parks. London will become the most beautiful city in the world.’
‘The most beautiful city in the world,’ breathed Jemmy. York looked blank. Fuegia stared at a crimson dress in a nearby shop window. Jemmy was the only one of the three to have taken Bennet’s little speech to heart.
By some unspoken common consent, the crowds promenading up and down Regent Street were of a different class from those who thronged Oxford Street. There was money on display, both in the shop windows and on the customers’ backs. Two men whose blue swallow-tail coats and top hats gave them away as policemen no doubt had a part to play in keeping the pickpockets away, but that could not have been the only factor: it was as if old London had been fenced in by the new street, as if all that gaily coloured squalor was slowly being squeezed by the advancing metropolis, with its stern, clean, white lines.
They walked down to Waterloo Place, keeping a block to the west of the Haymarket’s prostitutes and litter, then headed east to Charing Cross, where another huge construction site marked the final remains of the old Hungerford Market. A low growl from York indicated that something was amiss. Jemmy and Fuegia looked confused. Bennet turned to see what had agitated his companion so, but he could see nothing. York was frozen in the same pose he had adopted back in Plymouth Sound, to signal his aggressive intent towards the paddle-steamer. One or two passers-by were starting to stare. Finally, Bennet looked up, and located the source of the challenge: a stone lion atop Northumberland House. He placed a gentle hand on York’s forearm, just as it dawned upon the Fuegian that the creature had not moved for several seconds. He relaxed.
They went to see the new market at Covent Garden, where classical colonnades had once again marched across acres of ramshackle sheds and flimsy stalls; they saw pineapples that had been brought from overseas by fast ships; they joined the crowds staring at daffodils and roses out of season, and fuchsia plants from the other side of the world. Then they went down to the river to see the new London Bridge, five elegant arches confidently spanning the river, overlooking its shamed predecessor, which sat rotting and disused a hundred feet downriver.
‘King William and Queen Adelaide opened this bridge only last month,’ explained Bennet, leaning over the parapet. ‘There used to be houses on the old bridge. And they used to put bad men’s heads on spikes there. They don’t do that any more.’ His mind leafed back to the day when his father had taken him, as a child, to see the heads of the Cato Street Conspirators. His father was dead now.
‘They’re building a tunnel under the Thames as well. Do you see over there, to the right?’ He indicated the Southwark side of the river. ‘Look. New factories. There’s a steam flour mill. And there’s the Barclay’s Brewery - there are giant steam engines in there, and vats of beer, each one as big as a house. And there’s
a factory where meat and soup are sealed into tin canisters.’
He looked down at the rickety, lopsided warehouses beneath the bridge, the crowded pubs almost spilling into the water, the flocks of ragged mudlarks and the foul-mouthed watermen in their numberless ferry-boats; then across once more at the factories advancing inexorably up the Surrey shore, black smoke trailing eastward in their wake; and he felt a pang of regret for the London of his childhood, mingled with a surge of pride for the new metropolis rising all around him.
‘Some people say they shouldn’t spend so much money on building the new city. They say it should be given to the poor people instead. But the more money they give to the poor people, the more children the poor people have, and the more poor people there are.’
‘London is the most beautiful city in the world, Mister Bennet,’ said Jemmy gravely. ‘One day I will build some city like London in my country. There will be big streets, and factories making canisters. I will call this city New London.’
‘Cities like London don’t just spring up overnight, Jemmy,’ said Bennet. ‘It takes thousands of years of gradual change. The old London that they’re knocking down - once that was new London, and it swept away what went before it. Now it is old London, and it is weak and rotten, and it will lose its mortal fight. Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but the people down there in the mud with their rushlights and their sailboats will get weaker, little by little. And the people over there, with their gas lamps and their steam engines, will get stronger, little by little. And slowly, with each succeeding year, the people over there will encroach towards the heart of the city, and the people in the mud will give way, and London herself will end up bigger and stronger as a result. That is how great cities are created.’
‘But, Mister Bennet,’ said Jemmy, ‘I do not want to be in mud. I want to be one of the people with steam engine. You can teach me.’
They ate at a little dining house on the Strand, for discretion’s sake in a curtained booth lit by an oil lamp, where Bennet’s natural cheeriness reasserted itself over a plate of chops, devils, bread and pickles. The Fuegians wolfed everything they could lay their hands on, as they always did, as if their lives depended on it. After dinner they bought outside shilling seats on the new omnibus to Vauxhall Gardens, where Bennet took them to see the iceberg. This proved to be something of a damp squib, as the three seemed not in the least surprised to find a large iceberg adrift in the middle of a South London park.