Mrs. Cook Read online

  James and Ned sidestepped another pair of ladies whispering promised pleasures into the ears of two mariners newly arrived from Canada. The men were showing the ladies furred pouches and telling them that they were fashioned from the testicles of bears.

  James and Ned waited for a carriage to pass then crossed the road, stepping over the flow of effluent in the middle of it. ‘Here we are,’ said Ned when they reached the corner of Wapping High Street and Brewhouse Lane. ‘This is your lodgings.’ James looked at the big brass bell above the entrance to the alehouse, then back to the river. It was only a short distance away, yet with the crowd and the noise and everything going on, it seemed to take an age. ‘As good a house as any is the Bell,’ said Ned.

  James stooped as he entered the low doorway. He and Ned pushed through the heat and noise inside, making their way to the bar. Standing on the serving side of it was a man with grey hair and side whiskers, along with a couple of serving wenches, pouring ale into mugs and sliding them across the bar as fast as they were ordered.

  ‘A new apprentice of Mr Walker’s,’ Ned introduced James to the man. ‘This here is Mr Blackburn. He’ll look after you all right.’

  James thought of offering his hand to Mr Blackburn but let it drop to his side when he saw what a grimy paw he’d be offering his host. Instead, he merely nodded.

  He looked around and recognised some of the coal heavers he’d worked with, pints of ale in front of them, well on the way to being drunk and without the benefit now of hard work to sweat it out of them. They’d come straight to the alehouse, spending more time here than they did in their humble abodes. If you wanted work, you stayed where the publican who organised it would notice you. The coal heavers were presented with more pints of ale and continued slaking a thirst that was bottomless.

  There were a few landmen in the alehouse but most of the customers were seamen, judging by the loose-legged trousers and short jackets. Practical working clothes that wouldn’t get caught in winches and ropes and all the other traps on board ship.

  Mr Blackburn slid a pint of ale in front of James. ‘A glass of London hospitality,’ he said, although it would be Mr Walker paying for it.

  James looked at his hands again. ‘Much obliged to you. I’ll wash some of this off first,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to dirty your mug,’ he added.

  ‘No-one minds the coal around here,’ said Mr Blackburn. ‘It’s the living of all of us, one way or the other.’ James looked at the pint of proffered ale, wondering what to do. He was dog-tired from shovelling the coal and having had no more than four hours sleep at a spell during the voyage. But he was in London, and he didn’t want to miss a minute of it. He looked around for Ned and found him renewing his acquaintance with a young woman whose bosoms rose out of her dress like two plump doves. Everyone, even the women, seemed to be covered in coal dust. That might be all right for the riverside, but James intended exploring every inch of London and he didn’t want to go about looking like a coal heaver.

  ‘I’ll wash up first, if you don’t mind.’ James saw the ale go to someone else.

  ‘Up the stairs, first room on the left for you apprentices. You’ll find a pitcher of water. Mind you don’t drink it though,’ he joked. ‘No-one drinks the water in London.’

  James strode up the stairs, rising above the rollicking noise. He found the room Mr Blackburn had indicated, and inside it a bed, a jug of water on a stand and one straight-backed chair. Then he heard a trill, like the whistle of a bird, but not a seagull or a pigeon, which were the only birds he’d seen so far in London. He heard it again—a bird trapped inside perhaps, calling to its mate. He followed the sound down the corridor and identified the room.

  It wasn’t a bird but a little girl, five or six years old, about the same age as his sister Margaret. She was kneeling on the floor, her skirts neatly about her. James could see the soles of her house slippers, the beginnings of a hole in one of them. In front of her was a box and a set of tiles which spelled out ELIZABETH.

  She sensed his presence and turned, looking up at him, twin pools of blue in a small pale face. ‘I . . . I thought I heard a bird,’ James began. ‘I was going to open the window and let it fly out.’ He looked at the red and green painted bird in the child’s hand.

  ‘It’s Sam,’ she said, holding it up. ‘He’s made of wood, and can’t fly. Unless I make him.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ James said, feeling foolish. He’d been taken in by a child’s plaything. She sat perfectly still, waiting for him to leave. Thankfully Ned was not here to witness the scene. He could imagine the jibes, there’d be no end to it.

  James Cook crept back down the corridor, hearing the door shut quickly behind him.

  THE FAN OF TIME

  In the year of 1752 the calendar changed and there were riots in the streets over eleven lost days, or more precisely, the wages for those days. For more than two hundred years England had resisted the Popish Gregorian calendar, which kept time for Spain, Portugal, France and the rest of Catholic Europe. England, while considering herself far ahead of her continental papal neighbours, was in fact eleven days behind. In 1750 the Earl of Macclesfield addressed the Royal Society on the inaccuracies of the Julian Calendar, the matter was brought to the attention of the Secretary of State and in May the following year, the ‘Act for regulating the commencement of the year, and for correcting the calendar now in use’ became law.

  In the coffee-house newspapers, on street notices, from church pulpits, in alehouses and wherever people gathered, news of the New Style calendar spread. The year would now commence on 1 January instead of 25 March. Easter Sunday would fall on the first full moon after the spring equinox. Centennial years would not be leap years unless divisible by 400, and the modification that caused the most talk in that year of change—2 September would be immediately followed by 14 September. That is, eleven days would go missing.

  Elizabeth, eleven herself in that year, was putting the finishing touches to her calendar. She had given the making of it a lot of thought, especially how to accommodate those days that would go missing. Perhaps time was a large expanse of fabric, a shimmering silk that you could make narrower by pleating it. So in the fabric of the calendar, 2 September was pleated next to 14 September and the lost days disappeared from sight; but if need be, you could unfold the pleats and the missing days would reappear. The best way to do this was to make a folding fan.

  She had used Mama’s as a model, but instead of a painted pastoral scene, Elizabeth had embroidered numbers onto her fan. She had chosen golden silk so that when the fan was opened to its full extent it looked like the sun rising on the horizon. Mama had at first been reluctant to let Elizabeth use good silk for this project but Elizabeth assured her that it was not a plaything, that she would look after it and keep it forever. ‘I can even use it to do arithmetic,’ she said, presenting the argument she knew would most convince Mama. Finally Mama had consented. She’d even gone to the staymaker’s to get bone for the struts.

  Elizabeth was very proud of her fan of time. It could show days, months and even years. She could arrange the fan so that it revealed her year of birth—1741. She could even make the fan show years yet to come such as faraway 1800.

  If the fan could show time yet to come perhaps it could also reveal where lost things were—mugs and other items that occasionally went missing from the alehouse. Sometimes things that disappeared turned up again. But not Sam Bird.

  Sam Bird had disappeared in the earthquake, the sudden shaking as if a giant were rattling her bed like a plaything. It had happened two years ago, when she was only nine. The whole house shook, the whole of Wapping, and maybe the whole world. Doors and windows rattled, the candlesticks fell over, glass smashed. Outside, horses whinnied and reared, people screamed, and ships ground together with the thud of timber on timber. For the first time since it had been installed above the doorway of the alehouse, the Bell’s bell rang.

  In the aftermath, when they were sweeping up smashe
d glass and putting everything back in its place, Elizabeth could not find Sam Bird. She looked everywhere, under her bed, under the stairs, in the fireplace, in drawers and cupboards. She even took a candle and went down into the cellar. ‘That’s enough, Elizabeth,’ Mama had chided. ‘You’re too old to be fretting over a plaything.’

  But Sam Bird had been a gift from her father, and now he was gone.

  Elizabeth was concerned that if man changed the calendar, something tumultuous like another earthquake might occur. ‘No, no,’ Mr Blackburn assured her. ‘It is a simple matter of us adjusting our calendar to that of the Almighty,’ he said with a little cough, as if he were embarrassed. The Old Style calendar year was longer than the time it took for the earth to travel around the sun—by eleven minutes, Mr Blackburn knew precisely. Over the centuries those minutes had grown into hours and then days.

  ‘Dinner’s ready,’ called Mama.

  ‘What happens to the birthdays?’ enquired Elizabeth, putting aside her fan. ‘The birthdays in the pleats.’ It slipped out before she could stop it.

  ‘In the what?’ asked Mr Blackburn, the beginnings of a teasing smile on his face.

  ‘The birthdays in between,’ she amended.

  ‘They can still be celebrated,’ said her mother, sticking her fork into a piece of turnip. ‘Say a person’s birthday falls on 7 September. When it is 2 September, how many more days till their birthday?’

  ‘Five.’ She didn’t really need the fan to work it out; after years of Mama using every possible occasion for instruction, Elizabeth had all the combinations in her head. Whatever it was, Mama made arithmetic out of it. When ale was delivered, Mama would ask, ‘If there were six barrels on the cart, and now only two, how many barrels are in the cellar?’

  At the school opposite St John’s, the girls learnt their catechism and passages from the Bible. They embroidered numbers on their samplers and learnt to recognise them, but they did not learn arithmetic as such. What was the use of it for a girl? Mama had found it extremely useful. The century was rising, half over, and England prosperous, though Mary Blackburn had only to look outside her own door to see that prosperity was a fine word in the newspapers and the coffee houses but it wasn’t an air that everybody breathed. For some it required hard work, she said, watching to see that none of those six barrels found itself ‘accidentally’ rolling down the street and being sold again, even though she had already paid for it.

  Education improved the mind and prevented idleness, idleness being a playground for the devil’s work. But there were those—mainly the high born—who were of the opinion that you did a boy no favour by educating him above his station. It could lead to riots and revolt. As for educating girls . . . Mary imagined the curled lips of those lords and gents. To be skilled in embroidery occupied a woman’s hands and her thoughts, and didn’t addle the brain as novel-reading did. A little instruction in music and dance, perhaps French. That could be considered part of a young woman’s dowry and, along with an amiable disposition, make her an attractive prospect for marriage. But arithmetic? Well, thought Mary grimly, one did not always know what the Almighty had in store. A widow might well find herself running an alehouse where knowledge of arithmetic proved very useful indeed. Who knew what lay ahead for Elizabeth?

  ‘So if, in the New Style calendar, the day after 2 September is the fourteenth, what will seven days after the second be?’

  ‘Twentieth.’

  ‘So the person can celebrate their birthday then.’ Elizabeth’s mother waved away Mr Blackburn’s offer of wine.

  Elizabeth took a sip of ale. ‘But the person was really born on 7 September, and that day will disappear.’

  ‘It is only for this year,’ said her mother. ‘Let that be the end of the matter.’

  Elizabeth was silent for a moment, cutting the fat off the beef. She liked it hot and freshly off the fire, but when it grew cold and white and solid it had a rancid taste to it. ‘Perhaps,’ suggested Elizabeth’s mother, ‘if you use your mouth more for eating and less for asking questions, that would not be necessary.’

  ‘Yes, Mama,’ Elizabeth demurred.

  Mr Blackburn, who hadn’t yet finished eating, got up and went to the chamber pot to relieve himself. The sound of it was as loud as a horse. ‘Mama,’ Elizabeth said over the top of it, ‘if the year now starts on 1 January, does it mean that I will be thirteen next birthday instead of twelve?’ Thirteen sounded so much more grown up than twelve.

  Mama was using her last piece of turnip to sop up gravy. ‘You were born eleven years ago on 24 January. Next birthday you will be twelve.’

  Elizabeth heard the chamber pot being slid back into the cupboard. ‘It’s the men grumbling about lost wages,’ said Mr Blackburn, rejoining the conversation. Elizabeth watched him fill his glass with wine and spill a little of it on the table. ‘But they’ll get paid the same as ever—a good day’s pay for a good day’s work.’

  ‘No doubt there will be a period of confusion,’ said Mrs Blackburn. ‘But we will grow accustomed to the New Style calendar as indeed we grow accustomed to everything.’ She spread salt on the stain of wine.

  Elizabeth arranged the scraps of fat in a neat pile then laid her knife and fork side by side, the way Mrs Sheppard in Essex had shown her. The calendar and dates were arithmetic. Man had made a mistake and the new calendar was for aligning man’s time with God’s time. Nevertheless it seemed odd to her that a year should start in the middle of winter and no longer at the beginning of spring. That seemed altogether better aligned with the calendar of the Creator.

  In the six years he had been with Mr Walker, James had sailed into the Baltic, to Finland and St Petersburg. He also continued the Whitby to London run. By 1752 he had become mate on Mr Walker’s ship the Friendship, with Captain Richard Ellerton in command. James was starting to rise. He learnt the ways of leadership from Mr Walker—to be firm but fair, to teach and encourage by example, to foster pride in work rather than using force and abusive language.

  He was on the coastal run again, this time from Shields to Whitby, in that September when the calendar changed. Seamen went by a different system of time from landmen, their days beginning at noon although the sun had brought the natural day to them hours before. James was interested in time, not only in calendars that marked the passing of days, but as an instrument for pinpointing positions in space. A sailor could navigate using time.

  Most of the old hands avowed that dead reckoning was good enough for them but in James’s conversations with John Walker, now less master to employee than man to man, the problem of ascertaining longitude was discussed. It had been a subject of conversation, of wild schemes and ambitions, for as long as James could remember, if for no other reason than the king’s ransom of £20 000, on offer since 1714, to whomever could find, and here Mr Walker quoted, a ‘generally practicable and useful method’ of calculating longitude. ‘It will come,’ said John Walker, ‘if not in my lifetime, then certainly in yours. This is a century of revelations. Latin and Greek are fine studies with which to become acquainted with the knowledge of the ancients, but science, mathematics, they are the way of the future.’

  It wasn’t just a mathematical problem. Ships had been dashed upon rocks and the lives of thousands of seamen had been lost due to lack of a reliable method of calculating longitude. Though of more benefit to seamen than landmen, it was a subject that was in the air. On a trip to London James had seen, in the window of a shop near St Paul’s, a print of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, depicting a madhouse in which one of the lunatics was working away on the problem. ‘Certainly there are those who scoff at the idea,’ said John Walker, ‘but a solution will be found.’

  James was in favour of a mathematical solution, although not every seaman was as adept at the discipline as he. The simpler solution was a watch-machine, but who could build such a machine that would keep time precisely, despite being subject to storms and waves and all the other vagaries of sea life?

  Whether
a solution was found or no, James enjoyed his conversations with John Walker on the matter, and felt that he was living in an age when anything was possible, even discussions of this kind with his employer. It stretched James’s mind in the same way shovelling coal had stretched his muscles.

  THE PORCELAIN TEAPOT

  ‘Please, Elizabeth,’ said Mama, ‘you’re eighteen now, you must think of the future. Take this opportunity to buy something for your own trousseau. Embroidered cushion covers aren’t enough. Use your birthday money. And mind you hide it up your sleeve,’ she warned. ‘Oxford Street may be smart and elegant but that doesn’t mean there won’t be thieves around. Even more than on the riverside, with the pickings being so much better.’

  Elizabeth loved going shopping, whether she made a purchase or not. She especially loved the windows—you never saw this much glass by the riverside. To visit those shops, where no end of trouble or expense had been gone to on decoration and lighting, was to enter into a world far removed from the riverside, though much of what could be bought there had come in to London through the docks. But at the docks the goods were still in boxes and pallets.

  Everything about the shops was extravagant, the chandeliers, the columns and statues, the way great long falls of material were displayed—silks, muslins, striped dimmity, and chintzes, hanging in folds as they would when made into a dress, so that you had a perfect idea of the finished garment simply by looking at the cloth. Some shops even sold ready-made dresses.

  When she went with Mama, they would examine everything on offer, and come away with a few buttons, or a small piece of ribbon, a kind of payment for the privilege of looking. But today she was shopping with her best friend Becky Southwood and they had money to spend.

  ‘So much all in the one place!’ Becky exclaimed when she and Elizabeth alighted from the coach. Rather than having mainly booksellers as in Little Britain or lace and milliners as in Paternoster Row, in Oxford Street were shops of every kind. Becky was shopping for her trousseau. She was marrying her father’s apprentice. Not only that, she was with child. Becky wasn’t the first riverside girl to put the cart before the horse, nor would she be the last.