Page 52 of The Duke Undone

She thinned her lips. No more secrets, she’d said to Kate, but, surely, she could omit a few details. And the situation with Weston’s sister was delicate. Euphemia’s secrets were not hers to share.

• • •

Anthony stepped down from the cab onto Shoreditch High Street, straightening his hat. It was scarcely two in the afternoon, an hour before he was due to meet Miss Coover. He’d allotted himself that hour to explore, and as he turned off the High Street and onto another busy thoroughfare, he realized he knew nothing of Shoreditch by the light of day. It even sounded different. The roadway that stretched before him was lined with hulking warehouses, furniture showrooms, factories, and foundries. Carts piled with rough tables and skeletal chairs creaked along on their way to the varnish makers and upholsterers. Peering down a side street, Anthony could see a massive wardrobe dangling on a hoist. A group of men strained below, trying to lift it up to or lower it down from their workshop. Indeed, such sights greeted him down every side street. Men loading and unloading furniture, and inside the workshops, more men were sawing and hammering. The streets vibrated with the din. He wasn’t fool enough to romanticize sweated labor. Still, the memory of engaging his muscles to accomplish something tangible made him clench his teeth.

The daily exercises he performed were mere ploy, a means to accustom the servants to his visits to the garden. They didn’t tire his muscles like grooming in the cavalry regiment, hours sweeping out stables, changing bedding, brushing the horses until their coats reflected like mirrors. Discipline as activity he enjoyed, no matter how grueling the regimen. It was discipline as passivity, as prohibition, that chafed.

On a narrower street, he was trapped, briefly, behind a knife grinder and his barrow, which groaned with the weight of the treadle and grinder. His singsong rose above the noise.

“Pots, pans, or kettles to mend? Pots, pans, or kettles to mend?”

A throng of schoolboys shoved by, flushed from a victorious day of truancy, and he pushed along behind them. That was his tribe, the truants, the scapegraces. He followed them into muddier lanes, where the sludge beneath his boots gave way to polluting streams. The crush of people made it hard to move. Young children, scarcely more than infants, played in the ooze at open doorways. Every misery and disease impoverishment could wreak was written on the faces and figures of the men and women slumped against walls, the men and women passing in and out of the courts with baskets and buckets, with rags and bottles, the junk from which they made their livelihoods.

Anthony pressed a coin into the sticky palm of a knee-high girl tugging his pant leg and she handed up a flower. He wanted neither to hold it nor to let it go. He stumbled on. The eyes that passed over him held little curiosity. The middle and upper classes weren’t strangers any longer to these districts. Charity workers and thrill seekers alike came to gasp at the horror, hoping to spy a corpse under a railway arch or factory girls scrapping in sewage.

Before he’d left for India, enjoyment of the city depended on the invisibility of the slums. If you traveled east, for the brothels or casinos, you went at night, in a coach, windows closed against the stench.

Now the slums were calling. Everyone had a use for them. Political, social, religious, personal.

Shoreditch. Guaranteed to shock your conscience into life, or kill it off completely.

By calling for a royal commission on the housing question, his father had hoped to accelerate slum clearances in the name of public health, presenting thundered demands for the end of the urban overcrowding, the improvement of sanitation.

Anthony had spent the night reading through copies of his father’s speeches. He’d also read the notes on the speeches, which surprised him less.

His father had indeed worried about the poor. He’d worried that hungry, hopeless mobs would one day succumb to animal instincts. Rise up. Swarm into the wealthy precincts with clubs and knives. Slum conditions posed a grave peril to the state. Best to scrub the diseased villages from the map.

He’d proffered himself as a champion of the very people he hoped to push out of the city entirely. He would dish the Liberals in the process, picking up working-class votes for the Conservatives. He would also scoop the Pall Mall Gazette reporters, who were preparing an exposé on elite indifference to the suffering in London’s slums.

Brilliant. Like all his father’s plans, it was cold, complex, heartless.

He reached dryer ground, a proper street, paved and drained. He could still taste the foul air in his mouth. A drink. A drink would cleanse the film from his tongue.

Every morning, Humphreys brought him a few sips of whiskey, the small metal flask stowed in the soap dish of the shaving kit.

This morning was no exception. He’d broken his fast with a burning mouthful. The salutary benefit had long worn away.

A few grinning clerks were slapping open the door of a public house on the corner. He stopped walking, rocked on his heels. Pulled forward. Leaning back.

He shouldn’t. The freedom he felt knowing Yardley was occupied in Putney was deceptive. The rules were still in force, the stakes as high as ever.

But no one on this dismal street could guess who he was, not in a million years. One single drink. There was no harm in it.

He put his back to the public house, walked with his head down, was almost struck by an omnibus as the lead horses came around the corner. He jogged to the next curb. Which way to Charlotte Road? He turned a slow circle, assessing.

All at once, the smell of fried onions assaulted him. His nostrils flared.

Right in front of him: another public house, this one flanked with stalls selling sheep’s trotters, eel pies, pickled whelks, hot potatoes. His stomach rumbled.

A man had to eat.

The next thing he knew he was pushing open the door. He waited on the threshold to allow his eyes time to adjust to the darkness of the passage. It was one of those dim, cavernous places where you could lose any sense of the outside world. Sweat broke out across his brow.

He heard the sound of cutlery on heavy plates, men’s voices, the scraping of benches. Normal sounds. Simple pleasures.

No harm, no harm.

In the taproom, he wove between tables.