time at all—or so it seemed—for a pile of shirts that were too loose, trousers three inches too long, and jumpers that scratched at his neck to pile on the counter in the shop. An old, bald man with bugged eyes promised to send his boy out with the delivery the very next day, just as soon as the needlewoman had finished with them. Jack gazed at a small wooden compass, edges bound with brass, until Mrs. Pond added it to the bill.
“That’s a lovely thing,” said Mrs. Pond. “Don’t lose it, mind.”
“I won’t.” Jack had never lost anything in his life except on purpose, which cheated the rule of lost things. Sometimes it was simply easier to misplace a toy or a hat than to tell Mother he did not like her gift.
Outside, Wilson was chasing away an urchin with big eyes for the horses, the bits of ribbon and silver on their bridles. Grubby, rail thin, the wretch slipped around a fruit stall to be swallowed by the city in one meager mouthful.
“Rascal,” scoffed Wilson, returning to where Jack waited with Mrs. Pond. “Home, Effie?”
She looked at the sky. Still the color of old ghosts, haunting the streets and spires from above, but no worse than it had been an hour before. “The Embankment,” she decided. “We’ll have an early lunch, and Jack—”
“Can see the boats!” said Jack, grinning so hard his face might split and earning himself a halfhearted cuff around the ear.
“Don’t interrupt, you. Off we go.”
The gardens, not yet crisp and brown as they would be when the August heat came, cradled a curve of the wide, stinking river. Nannies pushed prams along the curving paths cut into the grass, the babies asleep despite the constant bells, horns, whistles, and shouts that rang out between the ships, carrying over the water. Soot clouded the air and gave white birds black feathers. Below thewalkway, mudlarks scavenged in the shallows for anything to sell, trousers rolled up to their knees.
They left Wilson waiting with the carriage, Mrs. Pond having been raised, many years before, among the East End toughs and thus able to do strange and terrible things with a hat pin should the need arise. Not that anything would, in broad daylight in the genteel, landscaped greenery.
But it was the boats, rather than the flowers, that drew Jack’s eyes and feet, and he ran as far toward them as he could get away with before being shouted at. Everything about them crowed of adventure. The towering masts holding rippling sails that caught winds blowing across the world. The curved bows that sliced through water as if it were air and raced over the seas. He knew all about them—he’d read a very thick book—but Jack would one day sit behind his father’s desk while other men captained the ships used by the company, or ones whose engines and portholes had been forged in its factories.
There were pies and lemonade for lunch, bought from a man with a barrow near the gates, which tasted like the food at school. That is to say, they didn’t taste of much at all, and Jack had to chew hard on bits of gristle. He wanted another, but Mrs. Pond was still carefully eating her first, sipping lemonade between bites.
“Stay close,” she said, wiping gravy from her mouth with a handkerchief. Jack left her on the bench set on the grass, called again by the boats. He slipped among a group of well-dressed folk with odd accents who clustered along the rail, pointing, chattering, words stretched and twanging like violin strings.
“Wouldja lookit that,” said one. He raised a pair of brass binoculars. Jack wondered where the people came from, pitying them. London was magnificent.
They began to blather about setting off to climb the Monument, that towering column with its gilded urn atop, dedicated to the terrible fire that once nearly devoured the city, and Jack stopped listening. Mrs. Pond had taken him, once, gasping and wheezing her way up the corkscrew staircase as he ran ahead. It had made him dizzy, and anyway,