The Lambs of London Read Online Free PDF

worm-like ornamentation on the base of the building where it met the street. The door-keeper put a hand to his forehead, and pretended to topple back in astonishment.
    Charles passed into the entrance hall, the quick patter of his shoes sending little flickers of noise among the marble pillars, and he mounted the great ornamental staircase two steps at a time.
    There were six clerks in the Dividend Office where Charles worked. Their desks were set up in the pattern of an inverted V—or, as Charles put it, “like a flight of geese”—with the head clerk at the front. There was a long low table running down the middle of this formation, supporting various leather-bound volumes of accounts and registers. Each clerk sat on a high-backed chair behind his desk, with pen and ink and blotter neatly arranged. Benjamin Milton sat in front of Charles, Tom Coates behind.
    Benjamin turned when he heard the familiar scrape of the chair. “Good morning to you, Charlie. It was never merry in England till you were born.”
    “I know. I am witty in myself, and the cause of wit in others.”
    Benjamin was a short, slim youth, dark-haired and handsome. Charles called him “the pocket-sized Garrick” after the late actor-manager. Like Garrick, Benjamin seemed to be perpetually cheerful.
    Tom Coates arrived, crooning the latest ballad melody. He was always in love, and always in debt. He would weep copiously at a romance in the penny-gaffs and then, at the next moment, begin to laugh at his own sentimentality. “I love my mother,” he said. “She has knitted me these gloves.” Charles did not turn round to admire them. The head clerk, Solomon Jarvis, had risen from his seat and was about to distribute the single-column and double-column ledgers. Jarvis was a grave man, an employee for forty years who still felt it an honour to be an East India clerk. Whatever ambition or aspiration he had once harboured, it had come to nothing. Yet he was not a disappointed man—serious, solemn, but not disappointed. He was one of the last clerks to wear his hair powdered and frizzed out in the old manner; it was not clear whether he preferred the fashion of the previous reign out of stubborn antiquarianism or out of some hallowed remembrance of his appearance as a “beau” or “macaroni.” In any case he was, as Benjamin used to say, “a living obelisk.” He was also addicted to snuff, and would take out vast quantities from the pockets of his ancient rust-coloured waistcoat. Charles claimed in fact that his hair was covered in snuff rather than powder, but the theory was never put to the test.
    “Gentlemen,” Jarvis was saying, “a dividend day will soon be upon us. Shall we calculate? Shall we work on the warrants?”
    They wrote out their numbers beneath a fresco by Sir James Thornhill, showing Industry and Prosperity being greeted on the shore of the Bay of Calcutta by three Indian princes who held in their hands the various fruits of that region. In exchange Industry offered a hoe while Prosperity showed them a pair of golden scales. Charles was more interested in the painted sea and landscape. He would put his hands behind his head and gaze at the ceiling, letting his eyes wander among the distant blues and greens. He imagined the thud of the ocean on foreign shores, and the whisper of a warm breeze among the flowing trees, until he was roused by the scratching of the pens all around him.
    He was writing down three round O’s, at the end of a calculation, when the bell sounded at the conclusion of that day’s labour. Tom Coates was already by his chair. “What sayest thou, Charlie? Just the one?” They were joined by Benjamin Milton, who put his hand to his lips and imitated the call of a bugle.
    “Well,” Charles replied. “Just the one.”
    The three young men clattered out of the building into Leadenhall Street. They walked quickly over the stones, their hands in their pockets, their black frock-coats fluttering out behind