Bess sighed. “I know. I’m sorry, Lucy, but your mother is so hoping for you to be able to debut this Season. We ought to behave ourselves and find a spot on the viewing platform with the other ladies.”
“That’s not what you want. I know you’re as keen to see the re-enactment as I am!” Lucy accused, but she didn’t argue further. Instead, she allowed Bess to lead her away from the water’s edge, back toward the more respectable area.
The mock sea battle was ostensibly in celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the Royal Navy’s triumph at Trafalgar, but Bess’s native pragmatism made her wonder if it might not also serve to drum up a bit of excitement for a newly coronated monarch about whom no one seemed especially thrilled.
If that was the aim, she had to admit, it wasn’t a bad ploy. The mood of the crowd she and Lucy were maneuvering through was as festive as the Five Mile taproom the evening after the farmers got the hay in.
Everyone who was anyone, alongside lots of folk who weren’t, seemed to be there on the banks of the Thames that afternoon.
They passed a florid-cheeked white man with a tray of roasted chestnuts wrapped in paper, their shiny brown shells split enticingly, and a sprightly West Indian man in a white apron, cheerfully tinkling his bell and shouting, “Hot muffins!” Children darted between the street sellers with shrieks of glee, adding to the general air of happy pandemonium.
Though she knew she’d persuaded Lucy to the more sensible course, Bess wished they could simply enjoy the day. She resolved to try to recapture the spirit of the crowd around them, squeezing Lucy’s arm and smiling at her friend until she got one of Lucy’s irrepressible grins in response.
Laughing and clutching at each other, she and Lucy made their giddy way up the shifting mud of the riverbank, but before they could reach the viewing platforms, the crowd began to whistle and cheer.
“Look, here they come!” Lucy stopped at once to peer down the river, her intent gaze fixed on the pair of small-scale warships squaring off in the brown Thames waters.
The ships were nowhere near as large as the real boats that had been involved in the Battle of Trafalgar, but they were big enough. Bess’s heart pounded as the ships drew near enough to exchange fire, the sailors aboard shouting and clambering amongst the ropes and sails.
Lucy’s delicate, fine-boned face was rapt in the fading afternoon light slanting across the river, her dark blue eyes shining with excitement. There would be no moving her now.
“Bess, can you believe it? Like a play, but better, more real—it’s as if we are watching history unfold before our very eyes.”
Bess might not have had much formal schooling, but she’d read enough to make her doubt the historical accuracy of the mock sea battle; the movements of the ships appeared tightly choreographed, slow and stately and playing to the crowd. But as the shipboard cannons boomed, making her flinch and multiple ladies on shore shriek, she couldn’t deny that it was very effective theater.
Perhaps too effective. The percussive blasts of the guns emitted curls of smoke to hang over the ships, each new shot blazing flame-red for a moment before men on the opposing ship tumbled about as though hit.
Bess frowned when a sailor on the nearest ship clutched at his shoulder and pitched overboard into the frothing river water. That was going a bit too far with the show.
And he wasn’t the only casualty. As the spectators around them gasped and cheered and roared encouragement, the sailors continued to play-act their battle. But occasionally, one of the fighting men would scream and stagger back in a way that seemed entirely too realistic—and surely no one would voluntarily tumble into the Thames, which roiled with silt and sewage foamed into a frigid, noxious broth.
The two ships had now drawn alongside each other and commenced hand-to-hand combat between the actors. Some of it was clearly faked for effect, but there were pockets of what looked like real fighting.
Beside her, a disapproving frown had darkened Lucy’s brow. “I’m not sure I like this much, after all,” Lucy muttered, and flinched as the boom of another cannon blast echoed across the Thames.
“Perhaps a bit more excitement than we bargained for,” Bess agreed, suppressing a pang of disappointment. Lucy was, in many ways, quite sheltered despite her family’s ups and downs. “Shall we go home?”
“I wish we could go home—back to Five Mile House. I miss Little Kissington, and my cozy room above the kitchen, and Gemma and Hal. And Beeswax!”
“As pleased as your sister would be to know that she ranks higher than the cart horse in your affections, I still think Gemma would prefer that you try to take this trip to London for the opportunity that it is, rather than as some sort of punishment.”
“An opportunity to do what?” Lucy’s tone went a bit sulky in a way that made her seem even younger than her nineteen years. “To sit in a dull, cramped, rented drawing room waiting for invitations that will never come?”
The complaint pricked at Bess, reminding her of the wide gulf between her friends’ fortunes, breeding, and station—and her own. But Bess had learned quite early on that riches and rank were no guarantee of happiness, and reminding herself of that, she reached into her deep well of patience and pulled out a smile.
“I know the house in Charlotte Street is not as grand as the place you grew up, though it seems quite fancy to me!”
The neighborhood where Lucy’s family had been able to afford to let a house was respectable but by no means fashionable.
Charlotte Street was lined with squat brown brick buildings, all jostled in together cheek by jowl. The brewery down the road filled the air with the bitter scent of hops, which competed with the city’s pervasive scents of unwashed bodies, the brine of the Thames, rotting refuse, horse manure, and plaster dust from the ongoing construction of a chapel a few doors down.
The people were cram jammed as well, the streets positively heaving with hackney carriages careening wildly, heedless of the many pedestrians and stray dogs and scruffy children going about their business.
And the noise. The noise. It fair made her ears ring, the constant clang and clatter and shouting and hawking of wares. Bess lay in her tidy room at night at Number Eighteen Charlotte Street, staring up at the draped bed canopy, her head full of the clamor of the bustling road three stories below.
It was never quiet in London.
After a lifetime spent in the pastoral countryside, Bess had been rather surprised to find herself invigorated by the two weeks they’d spent thus far in London. But she was. She liked it. Even more than she’d expected.
