Page 25 of By Marsh and By Moor (Marsh and Moor #1)
Neither Solomon nor Wallace had the slightest knowledge of the Navy, and they were highly entertained by Vaughan’s endless fount of amusing stories about life at sea, and the officers and men he had known.
Sometimes, he had a cruel streak to his tongue, but as the people in question weren’t present to hear themselves mocked, there seemed little harm in it.
He told them about his life in London: haunting the Admiralty each morning, and talking his way into the gentlemen’s clubs popular with Naval officers in the hope that a friendly captain might arrange a lieutenant’s posting for him.
“Come, friends, you will know how to advise me,” he said one evening. “I am invited to Richmond Park with a party of gentlemen tomorrow.”
“I doubt you’ll find our advice to be of any use to you for that,” Solomon said with a grin.
“Ah, but you see, I must hire a horse to go riding with them. And like many men who have spent their entire life at sea, I know little of horseflesh.”
They told him where and how to go about hiring a horse without falling victim to an unscrupulous dealer. He was suitably grateful.
“It is dreadfully humbling sometimes,” he confessed. “At sea I am a Godlike figure, answerable only to the captain. But on land I am a mere babe. Tradesmen see me coming, and cry, Here comes a flat. ”
It became a pleasant tradition, the three of them sitting around a table of an evening.
Wallace blossomed under Vaughan’s attention.
Other regular patrons of the alehouse began to refer to them as an established pair.
Wallace spent every spare moment with Vaughan, whenever he could get away from the Crown.
There was just one other evening he held sacred: choir practice at the Dissenting meeting house of which he was a member, to Solomon’s bemusement.
He sometimes thought of asking Wallace how on Earth he reconciled the strictures of religion with the licentiousness and dissoluteness of their life in London—a conflict Solomon dealt with by tucking it away inside of him and ignoring it.
Several times, Wallace had tried to bring Solomon along to choir practice or Sunday morning services at this meeting house. But Solomon had always steadfastly refused.
One weekday evening, while Wallace was at choir practice, Solomon ran into Vaughan at their usual alehouse.
“I see dear Wallace has not managed to cajole you into joining his choir,” Vaughan said. “Is it the nonconformity you object to? Or have you simply a general aversion to religious assembly?”
When he left home, Solomon had vowed never again to set foot in church or chapel, but he didn’t intend to explain all that to Vaughan. He only said, “I en’t much of a church-goer.”
“Then perhaps we are kindred spirits. I’m afraid I am a lost sheep myself—to the dismay of my father.”
“He’s a clergyman, I mind?”
“Yes, who ruled with an iron fist over a little kingdom of eight obedient offspring.” He made a rueful face. “Wallace told me you too come from a clerical family?”
“In a manner of speaking. Revivalists, you know.”
Vaughan gave him a perceptive look. “Not a happy family?”
Solomon had nothing much to say against his parents. He remembered them as always being very busy, carrying out the work of the Lord as manifested in the desires of Joseph Crawford, travelling preacher. And Mr Crawford had never said that Man was put on Earth to be happy .
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” he said.
“And yet here you are in London without them.”
“Yes.” Solomon shrugged. After a moment he admitted, “There are some people I miss. Childhood friends. But… it’s been years since last I saw them.”
Perseverance had been sixteen the last time he saw her, but now she was no doubt married to another of the Converted, though she had always said it was the last thing she wanted.
And as for Ephraim, the preacher’s son, with his soft voice and hesitant smile…
It broke Solomon’s heart to think that he had doubtless been browbeaten into following in his father’s footsteps.
The three of them had discussed running away so often, but in the end, Solomon had left them behind.
“I do sometimes wish I knew how they’re keeping,” he added.
“It’s not easy, is it?” Vaughan said. “One has built a life for oneself, happy and flourishing, but one cannot help worrying about those left behind.”
It was almost uncanny how he seemed to see directly into Solomon’s heart, bringing his worst fears to light and making them seem, perhaps, not so bad after all.
“Yes, that’s exactly how it is.”
Vaughan made a little humming in his throat.
“Going away to sea was a great relief to me. An escape, one might almost say. And yet…” His voice trailed off.
His eyes had been on the pattern he was tracing in a drop of split beer on the table, but now he looked up at Solomon.
“One hears a great deal about the duty of filial obedience. But I always felt a greater duty to my younger siblings. A duty that I then shirked.”
It was odd, this thrill of fellow feeling. Vaughan had a way about him that invited confidence. Solomon found himself telling him things he had never intended to share with another living soul, as they talked late into the evening.
Summer turned into winter. The ostlers went about bundled up in multiple layers of clothing, fumbling with numb fingers at ice-cold harness buckles.
The day of the first snow, the stable boys were irrepressible, shirking work to throw snowballs.
Watching them, Solomon was reminded of snow fights with Ephraim and Perseverance, the year they’d spent the winter near Manchester.
Mr Crawford had drawn crowds of tens of thousands, who braved the cold to hear him preach about the fires of hell.
That was the year Solomon had learnt to drive a cart—and how proud he had been. Of course, he’d then had to stand up in the weekly meeting and accuse himself of the insidious sin of Pride.
He shook off those thoughts and went in search of Wallace, finding him on the kitchen threshold. “Ready to go?” They both had a night off at the same time, and when that happened they usually walked out to Bermondsey together.
“I’m not coming tonight,” Wallace said. “Hugo has gone out of town.”
Solomon regarded him with bemusement. “What has that to do with anything? It don’t stop you going without him, surely.”
“Oh, I don’t think Hugo would like that.”
Solomon grinned. “What, you reckon he’d be jealous? Surely not. Not over a drink with some friends. And”—he winked—“you can look but not touch, you know.”
But Wallace still refused, and Solomon went off alone, tramping through the snow, feeling somewhat disgruntled.
Vaughan’s return to Town was delayed for a few days by the snow, but when he finally returned he was at his wittiest, full of amusing stories about the house party he had attended just south of London.
“I am what they call a hanger-on, you see,” he confided in Jed and Solomon over a pint. “I am called upon when a hostess needs someone to make up the numbers. Entertain the ladies and show the gentlemen in a better light.”
“Make conversation at the dinner table too, I suppose,” Solomon suggested. “I expect you’re good at that.”
“Well, I am, rather. And what dinners! I am more than compensated for my efforts by the excellent spread. Mrs Jennings knows how to furnish a table.”
“I thought you were going to see a fellow called Forsythe,” Wallace objected.
“Mrs Jennings is his mistress. His wife has gone off to Harrogate, I believe.”
Wallace’s eyes widened. “I didn’t think a gentleman would bring his mistress into his home, never mind have her welcome his friends.”
“My dear boy, you are a perfect innocent sometimes. What a foolish little notion.”
Solomon blinked, taken aback. That seemed rather harsh. But Wallace only smiled, so Solomon did too.
“Now let me tell you about the woman Sir Richard brought with him. A delightful creature—”
Later that night, as Jed and Solomon walked back to the Crown together, Wallace said shyly, “Hugo has asked me to live with him.”
“But… what about work?”
The ostlers had to sleep at the Crown, where they could be called upon at any time, day or night. Some of them were married and had set up their wives and children in rooms near the Crown, but even those men could only visit their families a few times a week.
“Hugo says he has work for me. I’m to help him in his business dealings. And there’s a club he knows as is looking for waiters.”
Wallace loved working with horses. It was hard to imagine him serving drinks to gentlemen and being happy doing it. But what did Solomon know?
“I’ll be sorry to see you go.”
“You’ll still see me in Bermondsey,” Wallace said.
But they didn’t, in fact, see much of each other in the following months. As winter turned into spring, Wallace was at the alehouse less and less often when Solomon went there; Hugo Vaughan, too, was rarely to be seen.
Then the head ostler at the Crown broke his leg, and Solomon was asked to step into his shoes, at least temporarily.
On his very occasional nights off, he rarely had the time or energy to walk as far as Bermondsey.
When he did make it there, he always left a message for Wallace at the alehouse, but Wallace never received it.
“No, he en’t been in,” the barman always said. “Nor that fancy gent he keeps company with. But you know”—he winked—“they’re very much in love. Everyone knows that. Wrapped up in each other. Don’t need to come here and bother with the likes of us.”
Solomon murmured something noncommittal. He tried not to feel hurt that Wallace seemed to have quite forgotten him. The barman was right: Wallace was in love.
One afternoon around Eastertide, at the Borough Market, Solomon was stopped by a man he vaguely recognised.
“You’re one of the ostlers at the Crown, en’t you?”
Solomon nodded.
“Is Wallace Acton still working there? We en’t seen him at choir practice in months now.”
“Oh,” Solomon said, surprised. He could place the man now: he was one of Wallace’s friends from the Dissenter meeting house.
This wasn’t the first time someone had asked after Wallace—acquaintances at the Bermondsey alehouse had too. But Wallace seemed to have drifted away from all his old friends.
Solomon felt a stirring of hurt and unease. Had Wallace left the neighbourhood entirely, without even telling him?