England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton Read Online Free PDF Page B

six shillings, with extra money needed for food and lodging along the way—over two months of Sarah's wages. If Mary had not been mistress to a man of means, Emma would have been unable to afford the fare.
    The journey from Chester to London usually took just over five days but could last seven or even nine, depending on the traffic, the state of theroads, and the frequency of stops. Traveling south through Nantwich to Lichfield, then Birmingham and Northampton, the passengers were usually too uncomfortable to marvel at the unfamiliar towns. Battered by the wind and the rain, they felt every clatter as the wagon bumped over unkempt, pitted roads littered with rubbish and the detritus of broken carts, the wheels splashing into the deep streams of mud. Post chaises swept past (so fast that their horses had a life span of only two years) at about ten miles per hour, and aristocratic carriages overtook them as swiftly as their coachmen could whip. The horses drawing Emma's wagon would never move faster than a walk. On many journeys a horse collapsed, and the passengers had to wait while the carter hunted for another. Every time the wagon halted to load and unload goods, the travelers had to disembark, sometimes for hours, passing time perhaps by swapping tales about drunken carters and robbers before battling for a place back on board.
    At night, the wagon stopped and the passengers slept where they had been sitting all day. If they were lucky, a landlord at an inn might, for the price of six- or ninepence, give them a supper of cold boiled beef and bread in the kitchen followed by a bed in the straw of the stables. Hardened traveling salesmen, soldiers, and sailors stalked the inns on the lookout for easy prey, and many girls never reached their destinations.
    The town of Barnet was the main coaching center for passengers arriving in London from the north. Like any eighteenth-century coaching inn, the courtyard under the rooms was covered by a large wooden roof (the only remaining example is The George, on London's Borough High Street). Passengers had to leave their original wagon and push through crowds of sightseers, prostitutes touting for clients, horsekeepers, waiters, and hawkers selling cheap ribbons, papers, jewels, and pencils to find a cart to take them into the city. To country ears such as Emma's, the London accent sounded entirely unfamiliar.
    Finally crammed into a coach bound for the city, they joined the long queues waiting for hours to enter the Great North Road. Sometimes up to 130 coaches a day rattled through the gate, along with horses, wagons, and herds of cows and sheep from as far away as Wales. Emma's wagon would have taken the route through Finchley Common, seven miles of thick undergrowth colonized by robbers. Not long before her arrival, eleven carriages were ransacked there in a single night. One unfortunate man was even mugged on his way into London and accosted by the same highwayman on the way out. Closer to the city, market gardens and nurseries flourished. In greenhouses, exotic fruits such as melons and pears grewunder human manure brought every morning from the town by the night-soil men. Nearby were the holes in the ground where the bodies of the poor were thrown. The hogs destined to become London's bacon roamed freely, and at the brickworks, smoking kilns towered over the piles of warm bricks, under which the workers ate their food and slept.
    Farther along the Great North Road lay the rural villages of Highgate and Islington, home to pleasure gardens busy with Londoners at the weekend enjoying wine, tea, cakes, and music. Looming nearby was every poor traveler's greatest fear: the holding prison for migrants. With hundreds of new people from the provinces arriving in London every day and the population complaining about overcrowding and crime, immigration was a controversial political issue. Since factories, sweatshops, and building sites depended on low-paid labor from out of town, the