Page 4

With a sinking heart, Madeleine held up a grey muslin afternoon dress. When she had tried it on, she was so disappointed with how unbecoming the colour was, and wondered if adding some blue ribbon might make it more attractive. The sound of fast footsteps in the hall made her look up, then the door burst open and a dark tousled young man, his lively face flushed and questing, stood on the threshold.

Madeleine was taken by surprise. ‘Edwin! You’re back.’

‘I am, Coz. Where’s the old dragon?’

Madeleine laughed, then checked herself. ‘I don’t know who you mean?’ she said.

‘Yes, you do, she’s most dragonish with you, after all.’ He smirked at her, then said unexpectedly, ‘It’s good to hear you laugh, it’s the most affecting sound and cheers up this gloomy house no end.’ Noticing the grey gown in her hands, he added in his usual peremptory way, ‘What a dirge of a dress! Surely you’re not going to wear that?’

‘It’s a perfectly good gown. I thought I could trim it and that might make it look better.’

‘Well, Maddie, my advice is throw it out! I presume it’s been cast your way by my spoilt sister? Wearing that drab, you wouldn’t stand out in a fog, and I wager she wouldn’t even sleep in anything that dull!’ With that, he swung out of the door in search of his mother.

Lord Lockhart was the pampered only son and heir. He had just returned from a libertine week at the Hertfordshire estate of one of his Oxford friends. Young men liked him for his recklessness and humour, his profligate spending on horses, gambling, women and champagne. He was always up for some wild lark. Society mothers and their daughters liked him for his physical attractiveness, his title, and the promise of a fortune once his grandmother died.

Edwin Lockhart was one of the young bucks about Town and was kind enough yet patronising to his plain cousin living with the family on not quite equal terms. She, of course, had written him into her novel as the rakehelly heir who returns from the dead, to lay waste to the fortunes of his family. She knew she was unfair to her cousin, but it amused her no end to make him wicked: a dishonourable lord, carousing drunkard and card-marking cheat, a man of appetites akin to a satyr, with pointed hairy ears and lips red and wet as bitten cherries.

Madeleine was ashamed of her characterisation of Lord Lockhart; he was kinder to her than his mother or sister and had a sense of humour, but she excused her portrait’s venom by the fact that every gothic romance needs a villain and, with some grotesque embellishments, he was hers.

Once he had gone, she looked again at the offending grey gown and thought the only thing was to try to dye it, so she walked into the kitchen to ask Mrs Porton, the cook, what vegetable or flowers would colour it blue.

‘Well, Miss Madeleine, there’s always Dyer’s Woad. They sell it in the market at Covent Garden.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Porton. Can I borrow Dot tomorrow morning and we could go and buy some? I need to dye a dress.’

‘Lawks, Miss! The Garden of an early morning is no place for a young gentry mort.’ She shook her head sadly.

‘Dot and I will only go there to buy the woad and then we’ll come straight back.’

‘Well, don’t tell her Ladyship. And certainly don’t say I told you anything!’

Madeleine knew she would have to be discreet and found Dot hanging sheets to dry in the courtyard by the kitchen back door. ‘Dot, would you accompany me to the flower market tomorrow early? Perhaps at six in the morning?’ Dot was the most birdlike of creatures, so thin and light-boned, she looked as if she could fly away. Her face was small and peaky, her eyes bright as a robin’s.

‘Ooh, I’d like that, Miss.’ Dot had been rescued by Mrs Porton from the streets of Covent Garden when barely out of childhood, and was brought back to the Lockhart residence to be trained as a kitchen maid. She still had associates in the market who thought she had done well for herself. Those children who grew up on the streets and were left behind to their semi-feral existence lived a much more precarious, often criminal, and eventually tragic life.

The following morning, the sun was just up when Madeleine crept from her bed, slipped into her workaday gown, twisted her hair into a low bun and crammed on a plain bonnet. For clandestine entrances and exits, it was fortunate to have her bedroom on the ground floor. She padded along to the kitchen, where the warmth from the stove made it welcoming and where Dot slept. She was already dressed and waiting and the two young women left quietly through the kitchen door.

Although the gentry and nobility were still abed, London and its workers were wide awake. The carts filled with produce and firewood were busy delivering their goods to the kitchens of the rich. Early grooms were exercising prize hunters for their masters. Stray dogs loped about in loose packs and the laundrywomen and bakers, the seamstresses, milliners and printers, the brewers, tanners and blacksmiths were all on their way to their separate places of work. Among this motley band of people intent on their own business, Miss Rose and Dot were barely recognised as being intruders on this early shift. They had just over a mile to walk, down affluent Bond Street, before turning east towards Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square.

The morning was surprisingly chilly and both young women were wrapped in shawls, but excited to be abroad among the people who made London work as a great city. Madeleine’s eyes were alert to the wealth of activity and variety of people she saw before her: bulky weather-beaten men from the Essex coast with wide wicker baskets on their heads filled with monstrous-looking fish, trailing a wake of fishy aroma; a ruddy-faced country girl with large bunches of wild flowers, scattering petals as she walked; a farmer’s wife, one plump fowl under each plump arm, and her daughter pushing a wheelbarrow filled with plaited-paper baskets of eggs. Every sight and sound fascinated Madeleine. Here was life so hard yet vivid and real, and of scant interest to the people she lived amongst. Madeleine glimpsed thin girls, no more than children, huddled in doorways round the taverns, and raggedly dressed urchins scavenging any bruised fruit that fell from the carts. The harshness of their lives touched her and she felt powerless to affect even the smallest change.

Dot had speeded up with anticipation, pointing out people she remembered and hailing others. Madeleine recalled how her companion had been one of these children rescued from danger and trained up by Mrs Porton and she seemed to have thrived, retaining her affection for the people and haunts of her youth. Aware that they should not tarry too long, once they had reached the market itself with its stalls and carts of produce, Dot led Madeleine to one cart with its own calico canopy to protect the mound of bluish-green leaves laid out for sale. ‘This only sells woad for dyeing.’ Dot tugged at Madeleine’s sleeve and pointed.

‘It looks like spinach.’ Madeleine was intrigued.

‘Mrs Porton knows how to steep and reduce it in her dyeing vat. We need a prodigious amount of leaves to dye just one dress.’

The stall owner was a slender woman with corn-gold hair and seeing their interest, said with a country burr, ‘Harvested fresh in Lincolnshire these last days. Just ten pence a bag.’

Dot unfolded a canvas sack she had brought with her and the young woman stuffed the leaves in to the brim.

The kaleidoscope of life in the market excited and disturbed Madeleine, her senses almost overwhelmed with the colour, the sounds and smells, the raw emotion of the place. This she would put in her novel. She wanted her heroine to have the kind of picaresque adventures that in reality were denied to young women like herself, with neither close family, nor high social status, nor substantial financial means. Madeleine at least could award this creature of her imagination a modicum of beauty to protect her from the world’s contempt. The real pleasure for her in writing, however, was to give her heroine everything she herself lacked and had longed for, and to end with the hero’s happy realisation that he desired to spend the rest of his life with her. She would be a young woman as adventurous and brave as any man, but also a young woman aware of the darker strains of existence.

She and Dot were just about to return to the civility of Grosvenor Street when someone grabbed Dot’s hand. ‘Oi! ’Tis ye! Dot, how glad to see y’again.’

Both women turned to meet the sparkling eyes of an elfin girl dressed in green.

Dot hugged her. ‘Susie, you look pretty. This is Miss Rose.’ She turned to introduce Madeleine. ‘We’re here to get some dyeing woad to improve a dull muslin.’