Jem stopped to gape. People were strolling along the raked gravel paths dressed in far finer clothing than anything he had seen in Lambeth. The women wore gowns so structured that the clothes seemed almost to be alive themselves. Their wide skirts were in bright colors-canary yellow, burgundy, sky blue, gold-and sometimes striped or embroidered, or decorated with tiers of ruffles. Elaborately trimmed petticoats filled out the women’s figures, while their hair, piled high on their heads like towers and capped with huge creations in cloth that Jem was reluctant to call hats, made them look like top-heavy ships that might blow over easily with a passing wind. These were the sorts of clothes that you could never wear if you wanted to do any work.
If anything the men’s clothes surprised him more, for they were meant to be closer to what Jem himself wore; there was a nod toward utility, though clearly these men did no work either. He studied a man passing by, who wore a coat of brown and gold silk that cut away elegantly to reveal breeches of the same pattern, a cream and gold waistcoat, and a shirt with ruffles at the neck and cuffs. His stockings were white and clean, the silver buckles on his shoes highly polished. If Jem or his father wore these clothes, nails would snag the silk, wood shavings would be caught in the ruffles, the stockings would get dirty and torn, and the silver buckles would be stolen.
In such well-dressed company, Jem felt even more ashamed of his patched breeches and frayed coat sleeves. Even Maggie’s attempts at dressing up-her battered straw hat, her wrinkled neckerchief-looked ludicrous here. She felt it too, for she smoothed down her dress once more, as if defying others to look down on them. When she lifted her arms to straighten her hat, her stays creaked.
“Wha’ be this place?” Jem said.
“St. James’s Park. See, there’s the palace over there, what it’s named for.” She pointed across the park to a long, redbrick building, crenellated towers flanking its entrance and a diamond-shaped clock suspended in between that read half-past two. “C’mon, the Blakes will get away from us.”
Jem would have liked to linger longer to take in the scene-not only the costume parade, but the sedans being carried about by footmen wearing red; the children dressed almost as lavishly as their parents, feeding ducks and chasing hoops; the dairy maids calling out, “A can of milk, ladies! A can of milk, sirs!” and squirting milk into cups from cows tethered nearby. Instead he and Maggie hurried to catch up.
The Blakes headed north, skirting the east side of the park. At the beginning of a wide avenue planted with four rows of elms-“The Mall,” Maggie explained-which ran down past the palace, they veered into a narrow lane that led out to a street lined with shops and theatres. “They’ll be going up the Haymarket,” Maggie said. “I’d best take your arm.”
“Why?” Jem asked, though he didn’t pull his elbow away when she tucked her hand into it.
Maggie chuckled. “We can’t have London girls taking advantage of a country lad.”
After a minute he saw what she meant. As they walked up the wide street, women began to nod at him and say hello, when no one had paid him any attention before. These women were not dressed as the women in St. James’s Park had been, but were in cheaper, shinier gowns, with more of their bosom revealed, and their hair bundled under feathered hats. They were not as rough as the whore he had met on Westminster Bridge, but that may have been because it was daylight and they were not yet drunk.
“An’t you a lovely lad,” said one, walking arm in arm with another woman. “Where you from, then?”
“Dorsetshire,” Jem replied.
Maggie yanked his arm. “Don’t talk to her!” she hissed. “She’ll get her claws into you and never let go!”
The other whore wore a floral print gown and matching cap, which could have looked elegant if she didn’t have so much cleavage on show. “Dorsetshire, eh?” she said. “I know a girl or two round here from Dorsetshire. Want to meet ’em? Or would you rather have London-bred?”
“Leave him alone,” Maggie muttered.
“What, got your own already?” the floral one said, grabbing Maggie’s chin. “Don’t think she’ll give you what I can.”
Maggie jerked her chin away and let go of Jem’s arm. The whores laughed, then turned to latch on to a better prospect while Maggie and Jem stumbled off, silent with embarrassment. The haze had grown thicker, and the sun had disappeared, poking through only briefly now and then.
Luckily Haymarket was a short street, and they soon passed into quieter, narrower lanes, where buildings were crowded, making the way darker. Though the houses were closer together, they were not shabby, and the people in the streets were a little more prosperous than Jem and Maggie’s Lambeth neighbors.
“Where are we?” Jem asked.
Maggie skirted some horse dung. “Soho.”
“Is Bunhill Fields near here?”
“No, it’s a ways yet. They’ll be going to his mam’s house first, and take her from there. Look, they’ve stopped. There.” The Blakes were knocking at the door of a shop where black cloth had been hung in the windows.
“James Blake, Haberdasher,” Jem read aloud from the sign above the shop. The door opened and the Blakes stepped inside, Mr. Blake turning to lock the door behind him. Jem thought he glanced up for a moment, but not long enough to recognize them. Nonetheless, they backed down the street until they were out of sight of the shop.
There were no carriages waiting near the door, or any sign of movement inside once the Blakes had disappeared. After leaning against the side of some stables a few doors down and attracting sharp looks from the people passing in and out of nearby houses, Maggie pushed herself off of the wall and began to walk back toward the shop. “What you doing?” Jem said in a low voice as he caught up with her.
“We can’t stand there waitin’-attracts too much attention. We’ll walk round and keep an eye out for the undertaker’s carriage.”
They walked past the shop windows and up and down the neighboring streets, soon finding themselves at Golden Square, whose name a posy seller told them. As London squares go, it was not particularly elegant, but the house fronts were wider, and it was lighter than the surrounding streets. The square itself was fenced off with iron railings, so Jem and Maggie strolled all around the outside of it, studying the statue of George II in the center.
“Why’d they do that to me?” Jem asked as they walked.
“Who do what?”
“Those…women in the Haymarket. Why’d they ask me those things? Can’t they see that I be young for-for that?”
Maggie chuckled. “Maybe boys start earlier in London.”
Jem turned red and wished he hadn’t said anything, especially as Maggie seemed to relish teasing him about it. She was smiling at him in a way that made him kick at the gravel path. “Let’s go back,” he muttered.
By the time they arrived, a cart was stopped in front of the shop and the door was open. Neighbors began to open their own doors and stand in the street, and Jem and Maggie hid among them. Mr. Blake appeared with the undertakers and two brothers-one of them the man Jem had seen at Hercules Buildings the day before. Mrs. Blake followed with another woman who had the same thick brow and chunky nose as the Blake men, and must be a sister. As the men carried the coffin out of the door and placed it in the cart, the gathered crowd in the street bowed their heads and the men removed their hats.
When the coffin had been loaded, two of the undertakers climbed onto the box seat and, touching the horses with their reins, set off slowly, the mourners following on foot, with the neighbors behind them. The procession moved up the street until it narrowed; there the neighbors stopped, and stood watching until the cart doglegged into an even smaller street and disappeared.