Wisdom and Rubies: A tale of crime and misadventure in nineteenth century London

By J. F. Slattery

Eminent criminal barrister Adolphus Winterbourne had been worried about his godson Arthur before but when he discovered that the young man was in Clerkenwell prison on remand for suspected burglary, he got quite a shock…

It is 1829, and burglary is a capital offence. But Arthur's brief stay in a London prison on a mistaken charge is only the first in a strange series of interlinked events into which he and Lord Horatio Carlton, his friend and fellow student, are inextricably drawn – events involving every aspect of London life: its journalists and politicians, its artists and scholars, its idlers and gamblers, its burglars, confidence tricksters and pickpockets. Meet George Marshall, irascible editor of The Morning Indicator and his striking print workers; Colonel Henderson and his Indian wife, whose greatest ambition is to walk in a London street without a veil; Oliver Morris and Lieutenant Peterson, on leave from Madras, whose friendship ends in violence and death; and above all, Frank Hoskins – charming, talented, kindly Frank, receiver of stolen goods and police agent, whose career spirals down into robbery and murder. Once Arthur and Horatio lived a life of jokes and laughter but as events unfold they find the shadows of tragedy closing in around them. Only a desperate plea to Sir Robert Peel, Home Secretary and founder of the new Metropolitan Police Force, will avert disaster.

When, twenty-five years later, Mr. Winterbourne takes up his pen to write an account of these events, he wonders how he is to do it…

Based on actual police reports of the period, Wisdom and Rubies is an engaging fictional account of a vital period in English social history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: May 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783066247

Book preview

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PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Mr. Barker was a moneylender. How did I know him? Not by borrowing money from him, you can be sure! He was not a man to get entangled with if you wanted to preserve your property. But some unfortunate people whom it was my duty to represent in court during the later 1820s – those years after the financial crisis of 1825, when money was so tight, people were going bankrupt all over the place, and even the country itself seemed on the verge of insolvency – these unfortunates had got entangled with him, and were thereby led to do things they regretted… So I knew of Mr. Barker before I actually met him. He had once been a junior associate of the great Mr. King, the man who lent so many thousands to Lord Byron when Byron was too young to know any better. I don’t think the author of Manfred and Don Juan ever quite got free of those financial embarrassments even to his dying day, for the coils of the London moneylenders are like the clutches of those snakes, those boa constrictors which, we read, wrap themselves round and round you, then squeeze and squeeze till life is extinct… Anyway, by the later 1820s King had long since retired to his elegant villa in Twickenham and Barker was firmly established on his own. How did I actually meet him? Well, in a funny way, it was all due to my wife.

She was a good women, rest be to her soul: I hope it is at rest, for certainly her bodily frame never was; nor, I must say, did she allow much rest to those about her. She was a person of the highest Christian principles and a close friend of the great Mr. Wilberforce, and she took an active part in those reforming and improving societies which Mr. Wilberforce founded or encouraged: the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and – above all – the Anti-Slavery Society.

I have nothing to say against Mr. Wilberforce, who was a truly great man; but he persuaded my wife into a policy which was not conducive to domestic harmony. He prevailed upon her, as he prevailed upon many others, to banish the use of sugar from their households, on the grounds that it was produced by slave labour in the West Indies.

My older readers may remember that at this time – and I am now speaking specifically of the year 1828 – our legislation on slavery was at an intermediate stage. We had abolished the Slave Trade some years earlier, but not the institution of slavery in our colonial possessions itself. There was widespread public impatience with this halfway house. I was a firm Abolitionist myself and had no truck with those who tried to defend that vile institution. The slaves were very happy… had only the kindest treatment… did not want to be free anyway… Damned hypocrisy! I once refused to represent a certain gentleman who spouted this rubbish at me; in fact I had him turned out of my chambers. But I differed from my wife on the best way to go about things.

My dear, I said, "it will not help the life this morning of a slave in St. Kitts that we should deny ourselves the necessities of life. That is not how things work. Slavery is to be abolished by legislation, and it will be abolished; it is a question of keeping up the pressure upon our legislators. These gestures –"

"Gestures, sir? If everyone is to speak as you do, we shall get nowhere. Let these slave drivers see we shall not accept their goods! Let them put pressure on our legislators! If everyone followed our example, they would be singing another tune!"

"Yes, but that it just the problem, Alethea: people will not follow our example. They will not renounce the necessities of life."

Necessities, Mr. Winterbourne? My wife had that old-fashioned way of calling me by my surname when she wished to be haughty. "Necessities? Sugar is not a necessity. It is a luxury and, given the conditions in which it is produced, it is an un-Christian luxury."

I could not quite agree. To me sugar is not a mere luxury, for I cannot drink coffee without it, and coffee I simply must have with my breakfast, or my brain cannot function rationally for the rest of the morning. My wife was adamant. I was adamant. I declared I would eat breakfast elsewhere. She declined to comment.

But where was I to eat it? My club does a good breakfast. But for a man like me, a public man, a leading barrister, to be seen eating his breakfast every day at his club while he has a wife and two daughters at home – well, remarks might be passed. It might be thought that my house was the seat of infelicity. Such would not have been true. I did not mind drinking my tea of an evening without sugar in it; the cook’s puddings, under my wife’s supervision, remained edible, honey being substituted for treacle. Alethea was, on most occasions, a cheerful companion. But breakfast…

The problem was solved by my old friend, George Marshall, who lived not far from me, in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Hearing my woes, he suggested I call in for breakfast at his house, so it became my practice to do so three or four times a week. I think he was glad of the company. He had been a widower for some years; his daughter was married and living in at a distance; his son was at Oxford. So that autumn of 1828, as October turned to November and London became gloomier and smokier, we sat in George’s dining room, with a bright fire, ate our mutton chops and our ham and our kedgeree, and drank plenty of well-sugared coffee, while my carriage waited outside to take me wherever I was going: to my chambers in the Inner Temple perhaps; or perhaps to the Old Bailey; or perhaps to the Kingston Assizes; for I was full of energy in those days; my practice was at its height.

Yet, I often thought, my energy was nothing compared with that of my old friend. George at this time was the editor of The Morning Indicator, that increasingly influential newspaper. The life of a journalist requires a degree of physical stamina. Usually in his office at the Paper (as it was always called at Gordon Square) till three in the morning or later, he would go to bed in the early hours, having taken a hackney coach home, and be up brightly for breakfast at nine, before walking off to the Paper again at about ten – for he kept no carriage and, I am sure, rather envied me mine.

One morning we had eaten the last chop and scraped the dish of kedgeree clean, when Cosway the butler entered, carrying a card on a tray.

Never heard of him, said George, glancing at the piece of pasteboard. Tell him I am not at leisure, but he may apply to the office at his convenience. George habitually refused to receive any stranger who might be on newspaper business except at the Paper.

But Cosway returned in a moment. I am afraid he insists on seeing you, sir, and he says it is not newspaper business, but private.

I picked up the card, which was lying on the table, and read:

J. P. BARKER

Broker & Agent

36 Fenchurch Street

Good Lord, George, I said, you haven’t been borrowing money have you?

George looked at me in that cold way he had when he was annoyed; I called it his brass-bound look. No, of course I haven’t. Why?

The man is a well-known moneylender.

Then he has no business here. I don’t require his services. To Cosway: Tell him to leave at once or he shall be turned out.

Now George, just a moment. We don’t know why this man has come. It could well be some misunderstanding, or perhaps he is acting for a third party. Might I suggest you receive him briefly. If it is a misunderstanding, it ought to be cleared up. If you prefer, let me be with you at the interview. I must confess, I was keen to meet Mr. Barker, just out of curiosity. Of course you are not indebted to this notorious man. But think: has some fraud perhaps been perpetrated? A fraud on your signature, perhaps? I have known such cases.

A fraud? You don’t say so!

I merely give that as an example. I say, have known such cases. I simply mean, speaking as a lawyer, I think it would be better to receive Mr. Barker. It would be safest.

Safest? Well, I don’t know about that… Oh very well, I suppose you are right. Show him into my study, Cosway.

There is no fire there, sir.

Then show him in here, but clear these things away first.

I signalled through the window to my coachman, who was holding the horse’s head in the street outside and glancing every so often into the room, that I would be delayed for a few more minutes.

As soon as Mr. Barker was shown in, I knew what was going to happen. Stupid of me not to have twigged earlier.

He was one of the oddest men I have ever observed. He was an Englishman, I have no doubt of that: rumours that he was really Turkish and that his former name was Ba’arig were, I am sure, untrue; but he was an Englishman, I gauged, who had lived his formative years abroad, probably in Turkey or the Levant. I was later told he had been born in Smyrna, which seems probable. He had the diction and features of an Englishman, but without the manner. He had never managed to learn the English social tone; perhaps he had never tried. He was too familiar; he fawned. I wondered what on earth he would say next.

Can you be the eminent Mr. Winterbourne? An honour indeed. He grasped my hand. "I see your name so often in the newspapers, particularly The Morning Indicator, which is of course our best paper. Your defence of Mrs. Clarkson – masterly, quite masterly. I read the account twice over. But did she do it after all? Well of course you can’t tell me – ha ha! All those bottles of poison… ! The forensic mind, sir –"

Perhaps, said George, if we might – He had not asked Mr. Barker to sit down.

Indeed, indeed, we are all busy, and I will not detain you long. It is not a great matter. Merely a small bill. He drew papers from his coat pocket.

A bill?

Not a bill of yours, my dear sir. It is a matter of your son.

My son? Arthur?

Arthur, yes. Mr. Barker began to open up the papers. This is what I had foreseen. It is nothing much; indeed I might call it a trifle. We all have these little bills, you know. But they must be settled. Mr. Arthur – he does not pay promptly, you see. In fact, I am sorry to say, he does not pay at all.

Bills for what? His tailor? His wine merchant?

No, not quite; allow me –

I could see that the papers he held in his hand had stamps on them; they were no doubt promissory notes of some sort. He handed them to George.

But… but… these amount to nearly four hundred pounds!

Alas yes, but that is very much less than some young gentlemen run up at Oxford, you know. I am sure you will have no problem –

George, having gazed at the papers, cast them upon the table and went red in the face. A red-haired man, his colour could rise alarmingly when he was angry – which was a state, I am afraid, to which he had always been prone.

This sort of thing – this sort of thing… He was working himself into a rage.

I looked at the documents. They were promissory notes, drawn in Oxford, discounted and sold several times before they had reached Mr. Barker. He had renewed some of the bills more than once over the last few months, increasing the interest each time. In fact I calculated quickly that, of the nearly £400 total, perhaps £100 represented interest and fees of various kinds. There was a certain peculiarity about the transactions. Arthur Marshall was not of age – he was no more than nineteen at the time, so he had two years to go – and his signature on a note of this kind could not be legally binding. All transactions had been made in the name of a Mrs. Carrington, to whom Arthur had undertaken to pay interest at stated intervals, the principal to be repaid upon his coming of age, at twenty-one. He had not paid the interest. Was George, as his father, liable for these debts? The claim might be disputed, but such a course would be inadvisable. To put it plainly, the suave Mr. Barker could, on occasion, be a sort of blackmailer. Debts contracted by minors might have only a shaky legal foundation, or no foundation at all; but their parents or guardians could be made to pay up, out of a sense of honour, or a fear of scandal. Now I said as much to George, in less outspoken terms.

How has he spent it? I give him a good allowance. I pay his tailor’s bills. It can’t all be wine.

Mr. Barker spread his hands, as if to acknowledge the follies of the young. Ah, young gentlemen, they must have their enjoyments.

George stared at him. Please to walk this way, he said.

Alone, I looked at my watch and rang the bell.

Be so good as to tell your master that I cannot stay longer, but with his permission I shall wait upon him later today, a little before the dinner hour. George, whose night sleep was limited, always returned after luncheon and napped until half an hour before dinner.

As Cosway showed me out, George’s raised voice could be heard from behind the door of his (unheated) study, preposterous… outrageous… don’t imagine… , and Mr. Barker’s suave tones, too low to be heard distinctly. I managed to avoid Cosway’s eye, stepped into my brougham, and in half an hour was in my chambers, warming myself at the fire.

Later that morning I received a note:

Printing House Square,

Tuesday

Dear Winterbourne,

Pray do not call this evening. I shall be taking the afternoon coach to Oxford. I intend to return tomorrow. Thank you for your kind interest.

As ever,

G.M.

What a nuisance. I would to have the have next day’s breakfast at the club.

* * * *

George indeed left on the Intrepid coach to Oxford late that afternoon, but it took more than six hours to reach Oxford in those pre-railway days, so he arrived too late to gain entry to his son’s college. He spent the night at the Mitre and, at eight o’clock next morning, pushing past the porter at the gate, strode across the quadrangle and ascended the staircase to Arthur’s rooms. The door was ajar; he opened it and walked straight in.

It was obvious that an entertainment had been in progress the night before. The nature of the entertainment was plain to see. Empty bottles and half-empty glasses stood around; packs of cards and dice lay among the debris. Two young men whom he had never seen before were fast asleep in chairs. As he stood there, slowly observing the scene and interpreting its significance, his son came, yawning and tousled, out of the adjoining room; on seeing his father he opened his mouth, but at first said nothing. He seemed incapable of saying anything; indeed he hardly seemed capable of standing upright. After a moment, while George stared, he managed to pull himself together.

Oh – good morning, papa – I am… surprised… He woke the sleeping men. This my friend Waters, sir, and this is Mr. Fitzgibbon. Waters and Fitzgibbon, having looked at the red-faced man standing near the door, slunk away out of the room. There followed an acrimonious scene. George shouted and waved his arms. Gambling and drinking – the worst type of college wastrel – I am only glad your mother is not here to see it. At least there is now no mystery about how you have spent so much money. There was more in this vein, much more: Arthur, recounting the scene to me later, said he really was afraid his father would make himself ill. George gave his son two hours to pack and then went in search of Mrs. Carrington, who turned out to be the widowed landlady of The Brewer’s Arms, a tiny and none-too-clean public house down a narrow and none-too-clean street. I suspect she was more feckless than designing; an incompetent businesswoman in debt and desperate, she and Arthur (likewise in debt and desperate) had worked up the loan scheme to their mutual advantage. Of the various sums borrowed, she had taken about half. George’s anger with her was such that, when he had left the premises, she had to have smelling salts and a lie down. But at least she knew that her debts had been paid – so far.

George and Arthur returned on the afternoon coach. His Oxford career was at an end. And all because of Mr. Barker.

*

For the next few weeks the atmosphere at 26 Gordon Square was very bad. Whenever I went to breakfast there, I found George wearing his brass-bound look, while poor Arthur slunk around or sat unspeaking at the table. He reminded me of a dog which has been beaten. How unlike the cheerful boy of a few years ago, whom I used to visit at his school in Chiswick. He had not been strong as a child, so it had been decided not to send him to a public school. Instead he boarded with the good Dr. Soames at his establishment in that pleasant riverside town, where half a dozen young gentleman were taught Classics, mathematics and a little French in congenial air by a kindly instructor, and I often called on him if my duties took me in that direction. I would tip him half a guinea to spend as he wished, for he was my godson, and his presence went some way to replace the son I did not have, both my poor boys having died in infancy.

One morning during this unhappy period we were waiting in the dining room for George to come down. It was very quiet. Bloomsbury was very quiet in those days, almost suburban in its calm. There was little horse-drawn traffic: Gower Street and Gordon Street had gates across them to prevent it. Children bowled their hoops down Gower Street. Gordon Square itself was not yet fully built. The ear-splitting, maddening, overwhelming din of London – iron-shod hooves and iron-shod wheels on cobbled streets, the cries of the street-sellers, and the general hubbub of the crowd – never sounded more than faintly in the distance, and that morning all noise was subdued even further by a slight fog. The only sound came from the fire in the grate, as the flames flickered and the coals fell. I said:

Arthur, how is it that you managed to become so entangled in gambling?

Oh, sir, said poor Arthur, my luck ran out. At first I was lucky, but then my luck left me. I knew if I played long enough my luck would return.

That is a delusion, my boy. There is no such thing as luck, There is chance and there is necessity. That is all. Luck is a concept which exists only in the gambler’s mind.

Oh no, sir, that is not true. Luck exists. I have seen it. I knew it would come back to me eventually.

Arthur, Arthur – don’t you know that those are the words of every bankrupt ruined at Crockford’s? Arthur, though cowed, did not look convinced; his face suggested a quiet and unhappy obstinacy. I was disturbed by the conversation. This gambling, this obsession with luck, was it merely a passing aberration, the result of circumstance – a young man plunged, without parental guidance, into the society of other young men, men with more money than he had – or was it something worse? I had no doubt that the compulsive gamblers whom I had met (and I had met a few) were ill; that they suffered from some affliction of the brain or nerves which was driving them to their fate. I was acquainted in former days with a noble lord on whom I called one day at his house in St. James’s Square as the bailiffs were actually removing the furniture from the rooms in payment for his gambling losses, while he sat on the staircase (it had still at least a carpet), telling me how his luck at cards was about to change. I am sure if his brain could have been opened, something odd would have been found there; some strange inflammation, perhaps.

That afternoon, sitting in my club, I said to the man opposite me, Tell me, James, do your fellows in India often fall victim to gambling mania?

Colonel James Henderson, late of the East India Company’s military and diplomatic service, refolded his copy of The Morning Indicator.

"Gambling? No, not particularly. It’s drink that gets them, officers and men. The Europeans, I mean; the English. Not the sepoys, of course. Why do you ask?"

It’s George’s boy.

Arthur?

He’s in a spot of bother. I related the details and said how worried I was.

Shall I have a word with him?

That is what I hoped you would say, James. I felt a little out of my depth with Arthur: I had only daughters; bringing up a son had not been my portion. James would do better than I. He had two sons, grown up now. Moreover I remembered how, when we were at school, he used to befriend the younger, homesick boys, so I suspected he would be kind to young men in trouble. I think that would be an excellent idea.

How is George taking it?

Badly.

I can imagine… the Red Triumvir…

When George and James and I were at school, we were inseparable friends. Someone dubbed us The Triumvirate, and we adopted the name. Since we could not decide who should be Augustus, who Mark Antony and who Lepidus, we used the colours of our hair. I was the Black Triumvir, James was the Brown Triumvir, and George was the Red Triumvir.

The Red Triumvir… , I began, but did not finish the sentence. Do you think people’s characters ever really change much over time?

James put The Morning Indicator on a nearby table, as one who has given it up for the day. No, I don’t think they ever do, not really. You are much the same as when I knew you twenty-five years ago.

Please to be more specific.

Argumentative, logical, dogged, fair, patient.

I am flattered.

And I?

Cheery, amiable, funny, self-mocking. I might have added with a tendency to do things which surprise people.

And what about George?

Well, George…

The Red Triumvir could always be just a little bit difficult… You know, when you first came back to England, I had not seen you for more than twenty-five years but, when you walked into the house that day, I recognised you.

And I, you.

"I do not say I would have picked you out in the street. But I recognised you in the context. Your face had changed of course; but it had not changed. It had developed, but it had not changed essentially. It is the same with a person’s character, I fancy. It develops, but after a certain age it develops round an unchanging structure, a fixed pattern."

We were now in front of the Club, looking at the clattering, crashing afternoon traffic in St. James’s Street.

If George –

What? The noise made conversation difficult.

If George… George, I say…

"Yes… but… Arthur. You will talk to him?"

Yes, bring him round tomorrow afternoon… tomorrow afternoon, you hear? I am in London again tomorrow afternoon…

A carriage stopped, and the door was opened from within before the footman had climbed down. A female form leaned out, a form rather than a woman, hair and face shrouded by an artfully arranged shawl of dark red silk and glittering gold thread, so that only deep, dark, laughing eyes could be seen; on her fingers, as she held open the door, were many sparkling rings. Several people stopped and stared. The Colonel’s face lit up like the gas lamps which the lamplighter, climbing up his ladder, would illuminate one by one in perhaps half an hour. He climbed with agility into the carriage: for a large and heavy man well into middle age, it was wonderful how agile he was; I wished I could still spring into a carriage like that. I took off my hat to the lady, and she acknowledged my salute by a gracious lowering of the head; then she leaned back out of sight, and off they went.

The Begum Henderson! At first never seen, now actually glimpsed in the London traffic! For James Henderson, cheery, amiable and self-mocking, had married an Indian lady – a very great lady – and, when he returned to England, she came with him.

* * * *

James did talk to Arthur. What exactly was said, I do not know for, having brought the boy over to the Club, I left them alone. But the upshot was that the Colonel wrote to George, offering to use his interest at India House to obtain for Arthur a cadetship in the East India Company’s forces in Madras. Arthur himself was not happy when the offer was explained to him. He made it pretty obvious that he did not want to go to India.

"Then what do you want to do? cried George, becoming red in the face. What am I to do with you? I haven’t the interest to get you a job in government. Am I to put you to a counting house? It will kill me. It had been intended – absurdly, madly – that Arthur, having taken his degree at Oxford, would go into the Church. You get an offer like this, an amazingly advantageous offer from a man with influence at the East India Company, and you do not want it. You shall be made to want it!"

It is my desire to finish my education, sir.

And how do you think you are going to do that? Do you think I am going to send you back to Oxford so you can run up more debts? You will be obey me and go to India.

George, I said, James’s offer is no doubt very kind, but I too think that Arthur should finish his education first, and – pray George, wait, let me finish – I collect that a very convenient solution is at hand. In fact it is literally round the corner. The University of London has just opened. Let Arthur be one of its first students, and he shall live here in Gordon Square.

And what will be study there?

I suggest that he continue with his Latin and add German to his reading.

German? asked Arthur, looking a little brighter.

You enjoyed it in the summer.

That summer George, Arthur, his sister Amelia and her husband had made a tour of the Rhine together. I was in Germany at that time, too, visiting my German relatives in Hamburg; having done my duty by my cousins, I travelled to Cologne to join the party, and we sailed off to Coblenz. We enjoyed the fresh air and sparkling river, and my companions were impressed by the romantic castles perched on high cliffs; they were a little dashed when I explained that many of these charming ruins had been built especially for English tourists to look at. In Bad Ems we stopped and drank the waters. Arthur was persuaded to take German lessons, and over the next weeks he made reasonable progress in the elements of that fashionable language. Now he could take it further. George needed considerable persuasion before he finally refused, or half-refused, the Colonel’s offer. He eventually wrote, thanking him for his kindness, but thought the time was not yet ripe. The possibility was held out for the future, after Arthur had finished his education.

He prepared for the coming university term by having private lessons with Professor Gottschlegel, who directed the study of German language, literature and philosophy at London University, and the good professor was to be seen frequently at Gordon Square in the course of December. I knew him slightly, having attended his lectures on German Thought and the German Spirit, delivered at the Royal Institution. He was a tall, elderly but robust-looking man, with bright blue eyes behind spectacles, and he wore a blond wig. He spoke fluent English with a strong German accent. He had been a pupil of the great Fichte in Berlin, and he lost no opportunity to promote the teachings of his master. I had yet to meet Frau Professor Gottschlegel.

So Arthur started at London University in January 1829.

You look better, my boy, I said to him one day.

My friend Horatio says I have grown an inch taller recently.

This was the first time I heard the name mentioned of Lord Horatio Carlton, the younger son of the Duke of Attenborough, who was to play such a role in Arthur’s life – indeed, in all our lives.

CHAPTER TWO

Do my older readers remember the rousing spectacle which once took place nightly at the General Post Office in St. Martins-le-Grand when, at 8 o’clock sharp, the mail coaches set out for every destination in the kingdom? Today [1856] that splendid show has vanished, killed by the railways. Who rides in a mail coach now? Where are the mail coaches to ride in? But at that time it was one of the great experiences of London life, a scene to which one took foreign visitors or country cousins. Imagine – it is twilight, and the great Post Office building is lit inside and out by gas. Twenty-eight bright red Royal Mail coaches are drawn up on the forecourt, their teams of beautiful horses, four per coach, pawing the ground, impatient to be off. The passengers, three outside and four inside, have already taken their seats, and now the mails are being loaded. They are carried out in giant sacks, which are piled on the roof of the coach in front of the guard; he wears a splendid uniform, scarlet with blue lapels and gold braiding, and he sits on a high seat at the back, a blunderbuss in his lap, a pistol at his side. Post Office officials run about and shout instructions, the horses shake their harnesses, the gaslights flare… An elegantly dressed young man, six feet tall, is leaning on a cane; he has big brown eyes, which are sparkling with pleasure.

Good evening Mr. Winterbourne.

Lord Horatio, good evening… you are enjoying the sights of London still, I see.

Yes, and I think this sight is now my favourite. I am so sorry for people who don’t enjoy life, aren’t you?

The last sacks have been loaded – and suddenly the first coach is away, then the next, and the next, bound North, South, East and West, to arrive that night, or next morning, or next day. Gradually the great forecourt empties.

Do you walk back to Bloomsbury Square, Mr. Winterbourne? Shall we walk together? He swings his walking stick. "Arthur is at home, preparing Fichte’s Discourses to the German Nation for Professor Gottschlegel tomorrow morning – rather him than me, ha ha! Pray give me your arm… "

I cannot, at this space of years, remember exactly how and when I first met Lord Horatio. Was it at breakfast in George’s house, or were Arthur and Horatio walking in the street one day, so that I bumped into them and was introduced? That scene at the Post Office belongs to the time when we were more thoroughly acquainted, but it is one of my most abiding memories of the man and seems to me to say almost everything about him, as he was in those days. To Lord Horatio, life – especially the life of London – was a fascinating spectacle, and he could never have enough of it. His big brown eyes, under masses of curly brown hair, seemed to look at the world in constant joy and wonder, like a child at a magic-lantern show. Arrived as a student in London, he set out to explore the metropolis, undeterred by cold weather: he was not interested in the parks or pleasure gardens; instead his steps usually took him eastwards, into the City, where he was thrilled to walk down its narrow, twisting, mysterious streets, past its bustling wharves and warehouses, its offices and manufactories. He entered St. Paul’s and, as we are enjoined to do, looked about him. On the pretext of changing a note, he went to the Bank of England on Dividend Day and watched the crowd queuing up to collect their 2 or 3 or 4 per cents on government stock. He went to the Royal Exchange and observed Mr. Nathan Rothschild leaning against his pillar – his pillar, the particular pillar at which he might be found at stated hours, directing the finances of Europe. Horatio must have popped into every public house between Temple Bar and Oxford Street. He talked endlessly with everyone he could find: with barmaids and porters and mail-coach guards, with jockeys and soldiers, with hackney-coach drivers and prize-fighters – especially prize-fighters. His social ease and lack of condescension encouraged people to make confidences, and they told him of their lives; that is to say, they told him a good deal – not everything. Some of those to whom he talked in this way may have thought him strange, even a little mad. When I first met him, said Ben Burn – Ben Burn the prize-fighter, who knew Lord Horatio better, I think, than any of us did – I thought he was not quite twelve pence to the shilling, if you know what I mean. Ben, of course, soon found his mistake. Lord Horatio was quite excessively intelligent and profoundly sane. Nor was he a dreamer; he was in fact the very opposite of a dreamer. Dreamers look inwards, to an inner world; Lord Horatio looked firmly outwards, upon actualities, without judging them, without coveting them, without rejecting them, without wishing to pretend, for better or worse, that they were other than they were, but simply – so to speak – asking them to come and show themselves to him, as part of the wonderful spectacle of life. He was enthralled, not by imagination, but by reality.

If I cannot remember quite when and where I first met Lord Horatio, Arthur remembered for ever afterwards the circumstances of his first meeting. They were sitting next to each other at a lecture about Luther given by Professor Gottschlegel.

We seem to have been thrown together, said Lord Horatio. My name is Horatio. I was named after Lord Nelson, because my father admired him. But (laughing) I am afraid so far I have failed to live up to expectations.

"My name is Arthur. I was named after the Duke of Wellington, because my father used to admire him. But, not laughing at all, I have been a bit of a wash-out."

Oh no, don’t say that. I am sure that cannot be the case. Not a wash-out. Let us go and have coffee at the Black Boy Coffee House. I generally go there at this time of the day. So they walked off under an umbrella which Lord Horatio provided.

He was indeed an habitué of the Black Boy Coffee House in Holborn, where among other things he used to receive all his letters. Arthur was impressed by the bundle of correspondence which the waiter produced once they had sat down; Horatio had to pay three shillings and sixpence for it. He shuffled through it impatiently, able to tell the writers by their handwriting.

Oh look at this; it’s from my brother Jack; he might have franked it instead of making me pay all that money… This one is from my father; I’ll read that later… don’t want to read this one… that one can wait… ah, this looks more hopeful… While Horatio carefully broke the seal, Arthur noticed the superscriptions on the covers of the rejected letters, thus learning his new friend’s actual name and avoiding the solecism of referring to him as Mr. Carlton. Ah, there now! A piece of folded white paper fell out of the letter. Opened up, it proved to be half of a Bank of England note for £5. My winnings, smiled Horatio. Arthur, immensely intrigued, pretended a polite but vague interest. From the match between Arthur Hemmings and Bert Swinson in Nottingham last week. Arthur understood nothing of this. "The fight. The prize fight. I bet on it. And I won. Too dangerous to put whole banknotes, in the post, you know. I assume they will post the other half tomorrow. They damn well better."

The two boys speedily became fast friends and soon were seldom to be seen apart. It was one of those friendships in which people seem destined to rub along harmoniously and happily, like two well-oiled cogwheels in a watch. Every morning, after attending a lecture or reading with their tutors, they would walk to the Black Boy Coffee House. There the waiter would hand Lord Horatio his letters – occasionally a banknote, or half a banknote would fall out – and then, climbing to a room where, for a small charge, gentlemen might play cards for money without fear