The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles (22 page)

“First, Mr. Sholto, that we’ll be in your debt forever for your kindness. I wish we could repay you.”

“Who has asked for payment? We do our duty to our fellow men, according to the precepts of the Scriptures.” The brown eyes darted momentarily to Hosea, who had wandered to the far corner of the bed, perching there until his father glanced his way. Immediately he stood up. He clasped his inky hands together, first at his waist, then behind him. Leaning against the wall, big Esau covered a smirk with one black-nailed hand.

“Your mother has wakened once or twice,” Mr. Sholto said. “But the fever still claims her. And so far, we don’t know your names.”

“Mine’s Phillipe Charboneau, sir. Of the province of Auvergne.”

“A long way from London,” the elder Sholto observed. “What brings you to the city?”

Phillipe hesitated, the teacup at his lips; he was already beginning to like the strange, strong brew.

“Come, sir,” Mr. Sholto chided firmly. “Enlighten us! French people don’t simply pop up from nowhere. Unless you’re an escaped murderer destined for hemp out on Tyburn Road, you’ve nothing to fear.”

Phillipe thought a moment, then said carefully, “We came to England because of an inheritance.”

“Somehow connected with that box you guarded so well?” Esau wanted to know.

“Yes, it—where is the casket?” he asked abruptly.

“Safe in the wardrobe in your mother’s room,” Mrs. Emma Sholto assured him.

“Along with that French sword,” Hosea put in. “I’d give a deal to be able to hang that elegant sticker at my hip next time I visit White’s.”

“You and the fleshpots of St. James’s Street,” grumbled Solomon Sholto, “will not become reacquainted for quite some time. Would God that those infernal dens would shut all their rooms to the merchant classes, not just their subscription rooms. But extra presswork will serve the same temporary purpose. And allow time for reflection on the sins of drunkenness and vanity, which permit no thought for the well-being of others.”

Hosea cringed. Esau again looked amused, only this time he let the amusement become a guffaw. Solomon Sholto silenced him with a glare equally as stern as the one he’d thrown Hosea. Then he continued to Phillipe:

“We do not pry into the belongings of our guests, you may be certain. So whatever’s in the leather box, only you know.”

But his straightforward gaze as he hunched over, one ink-stained hand on his knee, indicated that he would very much like the information.

Phillipe glanced from face to face. Esau. Hosea. The small, strong wife. And finally the heavy-bellied head of the household—

Danger seemed remote. He offered a hint to test that conclusion:

“My mother and I fled from a village in Kent because we incurred the wrath of a great family. My life was threatened. We thought we’d be safer in the city crowds.”

Mr. Sholto said nothing, merely continued to stare. Warmed by the food and by these plain, open faces, Phillipe felt resistance and suspicion melt. It was a relief to speak.

He told them most of it, omitting only the primary reason for the fateful struggle with Roger—Alicia.

At the end; he leaned back on the pillow with his hands around the still-warm teacup, awaiting a reaction.

“Amberly!”
Mr. Sholto exclaimed with sudden animation, hopping up and pacing the plank floor. “I don’t wonder you fled from that high-handed Tory crowd. This house is of a different persuasion. The Whig persuasion, which does not fully approve of the antidemocratic policies of the King or his puppet ministers—that little clique of King’s Friends. From all I know of Whitehall gossip, your father would have been welcomed to that group with enthusiasm, had he not suffered an untimely death.”

“My mother speaks nothing but good of James Amberly,” Phillipe protested. “It was the same with the landlord and several others in Tonbridge.”

“Yes, well—the dead are the dead. Why haggle over their politics? I rather admire your audacity in challenging such a family. But I sense you have discovered what I could have told you merely from knowing the Duchess of Kentland’s reputation. You waged a lost battle from the start. Nor would you be any more successful here, I expect. For every twisty-tongued lawyer you could buy, they could buy a baker’s twelve, plus judges, magistrates—and thugs of every ilk, if that became necessary. When a woman like the Duchess wishes to refuse your claim, it
will
be refused, fair means or foul. Babies from the wrong sides of noble blankets can be found on every street in London. Some very few are lucky. Press their causes to successful ends. But most fail. For your own safety and peace of mind—as well as your mother’s—I’d advise you to give up your quest, find a means to earn enough money to pay your way back to France, and forget the whole matter. Above all, say absolutely nothing about your claim—and your origins—outside this house. You’ll never become rich, but you’ll live longer.”

Emma Sholto rested a tiny hand on her husband’s shoulder. “He’s tiring, Solomon.”

“Nonsense, he’s a stout young man.”

“Still, I insist we let him go to sleep.”

Garrumphing, Mr. Solomon Sholto pushed the chair back to its place. He herded his sons toward the door. Both stared at Phillipe with new appreciation.

After the printer’s wife had gone, Esau and Hosea lingered in the hall while the elder Sholto paused in the doorway.

“Should you decide to follow my advice, young man, and wish to do honest labor to accumulate that passage money back to France, we might be able to make a place for you here.”

“I wouldn’t want special favors, Mr. Sholto.”

“None given, sir! You’d be in for hard work, I guarantee.”

“Don’t London craftsmen keep apprentices to help them?”

“Aye, and I’ve had two. Both have run off. I am demanding, but not cruel. The lads, however, considered me the latter. I wouldn’t tolerate the swilling of gin by ten-year-old boys. Where they came by the stuff, I preferred not to know. Stole it? Killed for it?” He shrugged unhappily. “They were already so hardened before I took them on, they reminded me more of ancient dwarfs than children hopeful of learning a trade.”

“Bad sorts, both of ’em,” Esau agreed.

Phillipe broke in to say that the Methodist landlord of Wolfe’s Triumph had mentioned the evils of gin drinking among the London lower classes.

“Then,” said Mr. Sholto, “there’s a point at which I, a High Churchman, and your friend of a Dissenting sect, may agree. But it’s no wonder boys like that must besot themselves early in order to survive. They’re brutalized from age seven or eight on up. With long hours. Back-breaking labor suitable only for grown men. The abuses of inhumane masters. I don’t blame a lad who’s known nothing but brutality and poverty for learning to drink, and drink hard, almost as soon as he can walk. For that reason, I did not order pursuit of either of the runaways—you realize there are severe punishments for the crime? Fingers or toes may be cut off. The two boys I lost one after another will be punished enough before their days run out all too soon. Ah, but I’m chattering on—Mrs. Emma will have after me in earnest. You’ve heard we have an opportunity here. Esau could teach you the fundamentals, I imagine—”

“Right quickly,” Esau grinned.

“And it’s a noble trade, because it promulgates that which neither kings nor armies can put down. The free traffic of the ideas of men’s minds.”

A small, protesting voice sounded from down the hall.

“Yes, Emma, yes—a moment more!” He looked at Phillipe. “To put it plain, we would welcome your assistance. Especially since some in the firm prefer virgins’ sighs to vellum bindings. The offer is open.”

The door closing hid the three—including Hosea, who had turned all red again.

The next day, Phillipe made his way to Marie’s room. He told her of the printer’s advice, finishing, “I think I’d best accept Mr. Sholto’s offer.”

Marie protested instantly: “No! I will not let you give up the claim!”

“Just for a time,” he said, with quiet authority. Inside his mind, a faint voice mocked him:

Or do you really mean forever?

Marie started to argue again, then looked closely at her son’s face. It seemed older, showing the understanding of hard lessons recently learned. She put her head back on the pillow and turned away.

Phillipe left the room with a sense of sadness. Yet he was excited by a fresh sense of purpose, too. A purpose born of plain, homely kindness, of black tea—and the new world of presses and books waiting for him downstairs.

T
HE BUSINESS ESTABLISHMENT OF
Mr. Solomon Sholto was divided into two sections. The smaller, occupying the front part of the main floor, opened onto the clatter of Sweet’s Lane. This was the stationer’s shop, where Mrs. Emma presided over the sale of an assortment of drawing and memorandum books, fine Amsterdam Black writing ink, quills, sealing wax and sand.

During the preceding year Mr. Sholto had expanded the shop with a new service—a lending library. Several similar libraries had become popular in recent years because, as Mr. Sholto explained it, only the rich could readily plunk down two guineas for a personal copy of a monumental literary achievement such as
The Dramatick Works of Wm. Shakespeare, Corrected and Illustrated by Samuel Johnson,
which ran to eight annotated volumes with deluxe Turkish leather binding.

Mr. Sholto bemoaned the popularity of “frivolous” fictional tales such as Defoe’s
Moll Flanders,
Fielding’s
Tom Jones
and Johnson’s moralizing fable,
Rasselas.
But he was quick to recognize the commercial appeal of such works. As a result, his lending shelves had expanded to fill two walls of the tiny shop and were crowded with all manner of novels, as well as nonfiction. Phillipe was captivated by some of the lurid fiction titles.
Delicate Distress. Married Victim. Adventures of an Actress.

But he had little time for reading. Mr. Sholto was, as promised, a demanding taskmaster. He kept Phillipe busy in the noisier part of the business, in the back.

Here, two tall, wooden flat-bed presses sat on platforms flanking a central work area. On these premises Mr. Sholto and his sons did the production work for their clients—booksellers in the Strand, Ludgate Street, Paternoster Row. Sholto’s churned out editions on individual contract to each seller.

Mr. Sholto and his sons divided the labor according to the skills of each. Esau, who looked the least graceful because of his size, proved to have hands of amazing speed and dexterity. These hands plucked the metal type letter by letter, then locked it into the large chase. The chase held a form of four pages. Mr. Sholto had invested in presses of some size, to be able to print that many pages at one time.

The father and his other, more easily bemused son were responsible for operating the two machines. Mr. Sholto was faster and more expert. But Hosea knew what he was doing. When Phillipe would lug one of the astonishingly heavy chases over to him, Hosea would lift it as if it weighed nothing.

Hosea would then seat the chase in the coffin, which sat on the rails of the horizontal carriage. He would place a dampened sheet of paper between the tympan and frisket hinged to the coffin, then snap his fingers for Phillipe to be at his work.

To the new employee fell the task of inking a pair of leather balls. The balls were used to apply the ink to the waiting type. Though the balls had handles, it was messy work. Phillipe’s leather apron, as well as his face, hands and forearms, was constantly sticky and smeared.

On his first few tries, Phillipe failed to press hard enough, leaving several lines of type uninked. But all three Sholtos were patient. They sensed Phillipe’s eagerness to learn. Within a couple of days he had the hang of it and could ink a form neatly with no difficulty.

As soon as Phillipe finished the routine at one press, he frequently needed to run to the other to perform the same job. Hosea, meantime, would clamp the sheet between tympan and frisket, and fold both down so that the paper showed through the frisket in four page-sized cutout sections. These cutouts permitted the paper to come in contact with the inked metal.

Next Hosea would slide the coffin under the massive vertical head of the press. Hauling on the screw lever lowered a four-inch-thick piece of hardwood on top of the closed coffin. The leverage thus applied brought the thick platen down with sufficient pressure to leave an impression on the paper.

Finally, the platen was raised, the coffin pulled back along the rails and the finished four pages removed as a single sheet and set aside to dry. A new sheet was inserted in the coffin and the process was repeated, with re-inkings as necessary, until the right number of sheets had been run.

Handling his chores on both presses, each of which creaked and thunked outrageously, kept Phillipe running from one platform to the other virtually all the time.

But in spare moments, he was also assigned the task of washing the ink from each form once Hosea or Mr. Sholto had finished with it. To do this, Phillipe used a foul-smelling alkali solution that not only removed the ink from metal—and his knuckles—but left his hands raw by the end of the long day. The print shop operated from before daylight till after sunset every day except Sunday.

As the winter of 1771 approached, Phillipe grew fairly skilled at his job. His hands became swift and adept with the leather balls. His arms strengthened from carrying big stacks of dried sheets printed on both sides. The sheets were taken away by the apprentice who worked for Mr. Sholto’s bookbinder. Sholto had long ago decided that he could produce books more quickly by subcontracting the sheet cutting, the sewing of the binding and the mounting of the leather-covered boards.

What gave Phillipe the energy to endure the always tiring, often confusing weeks was his interest in, and admiration for, the process of which he’d become a small part. It struck him as downright amazing that so many black-inked pages, precisely alike, could be produced at such speed by the raiding presses.