Carola Dunn (7 page)

 Throughout the morning, tension built in Rosabelle until she felt she might explode at any moment. When at last she set out for the City, with Fanny as her companion, she ordered the coachman to drive down to the riverside first. She had promised Papa not to venture onto the ice, but if she saw the Frost Fair still in full swing, she would have to do something.

 Peters drove them to the top of the Queen Hithe stairs. Rosabelle stepped out of the carriage. To her dismay, the river was still covered with the gaily-flagged booths and tents.

 “Can’t we go, Miss Ros?” Fanny begged.

 “No, it’s not safe. Oh, what am I to do?”

 A trickle of people, much reduced from the past few days’ flood, was passing the toll-collecting watermen and descending to the ice. Among them, Rosabelle picked out a pair of lads of twelve or so, and called them over.

 “I’ll give you a shilling to take a message for me to someone at the fair.”

 “An ‘ole shilling, miss?” asked one.

 “Yes. Find the booth of Dibden’s, the pastrycook, on the Grand Mall just west of Freezeland Street. Near the donkey-rides. Ask for Mr Rufus and tell him Miss Rosabelle is waiting for him at the Queen Hithe stairs. Can you remember that?”

 The other boy gave her a cheeky grin. “Dibden’s, Mr Rufus, pretty Miss Rosabelle waitin’ at Queen ‘Ithe. Reckon ‘e’ll come straight, miss!”

 “There’s a crown for you if you come with him,” said Rosabelle, partly to ensure her message’s reaching its destination, partly from a pang of conscience at sending the lads into danger. They were going anyway, but if they came to harm on an errand from her—

 “Miss Rosabelle?”

 At the sound of that beloved voice, she swung around. Mr Rufus strode towards her, the worried creases smoothing from his brow as he saw her face. He held out both hands.

 “It is you! I was not sure.”

 Today, instead of the ruby cloak, she wore a fitted pelisse of
gros de Naples
in a rich green shade, and a bonnet with a curling green ostrich plume. Yet he had recognized her from behind.

 She put her hands in his, speechless with relief.

 “Thank heaven I’ve caught you in time!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been walking up and down the wharves, just in case you came today. It’s not safe on the river.”

 “This ‘im, miss?” queried one of the boys, disappointed. “No crown for us then.”

 “I’ll give you a crown to stay away from the fair, off the ice. You heard Mr Rufus. It’s not safe.”

 They consulted each other with a glance. “Done, miss. We was there yes’day anyways. Ta, miss.”

 “What was all that about?” Mr Rufus asked as the pair ran off, each with a half-crown clutched in his grubby hand.

 Rosabelle explained. “I hoped to persuade you not to go back,” she added. “You won’t now, will you?”

 “We went out there first thing this morning to dismantle the stall and haul everything ashore. Dibden’s wouldn’t imperil its people for the sake of profit.”

 “Your notion turned out profitable?”

 “Extremely, for an enterprise of that size and duration,” he told her with a complacent smile. Then the smile faded and he turned to look out over the Thames. “A few cautious ones have already left, but with money to be made there’s a general air of bravado. One or two of the printing presses are turning out ballads proclaiming their defiance of ‘Madame Tabitha Thaw’.”

 “Do you think the ice will melt soon?” Rosabelle asked.

 “I fear it is already melting from below. The chief danger, though, is not sinking through as it melts but that it will break up. I’ve talked to people coming off who speak of creaks and groans underfoot. It isn’t only that the air is too warm. Today is a spring tide, with high tide a little while ago. In winter the sea is always warmer than rivers, and salt water freezes at a lower temperature than fresh.”

 “So the ice is being undermined? I wondered about the effect of warmer rainwater flowing in from the west.”

 His glance was admiring. “I hadn’t thought of that.” He turned to gaze westward. Dark banks of clouds were building beneath the haze which had spread across the sky during the morning. “A good point. But the main factor, I believe, is that as the tide continues to ebb, the ice is left unsupported. When it fails, it may collapse very suddenly.”

 “Any moment now?” asked Fanny, who had been listening with a bemused expression. “Eh, Miss Ros, I’m that glad we didn’t go to the fair. Can we leave now? I don’t want to see all those people drownded!”

 As one, Rosabelle and Mr Rufus turned to stare with dread out across the river.

 “What can we do?” cried Rosabelle.

 “Nothing, now. I’ve tried to explain my reasoning to everyone I’ve spoken to. Some listened. Some didn’t.”

 Rosabelle listened, trying to hear the creaks and groans of the overburdened ice. All that came to her ears was the merry notes of barrel-organs, fiddles, pipes and drums, the shouts of barkers, the hum of the crowd’s myriad voices.

 “I can’t—”

 With a crack like a thousand coachmen’s whips snapping in unison, the ice split. The music ended in a horrid jangle and screams rent the air. The watchers on the wharf saw jagged channels open, dark, toothed mouths gaping for their prey.

 The prey fled, those who could, swarming across the remaining ice towards the banks, leaping the widening gaps. Some made it.

 Some did not.

 Rosabelle closed her eyes in horror. When she opened them, Mr Rufus was gone, as were the boatmen. In less time than seemed possible, from stair after stair, the Thames wherries pulled out into the stream. Boathooks reached, caught, dragged the hunted from the hungry current into the frail cockleshells dodging between the floes.

 Mr Rufus appeared at the top of the stairs, soaked to the waist, a dripping child in his arms and a weeping woman clinging to the skirts of his coat. Rosabelle ran to him.

 He thrust the child at her. “Take care of them. There’s not much more I can do from here. I’m going out in a boat, to wield the boathook so that the rowers can concentrate on their oars.”

 He leaned forward, over the wailing child’s head. His kiss was warm on Rosabelle’s mouth. Then he was gone again.

 Rosabelle cast a last glance at the dreadful scene, then set about helping the woman and child. They were soaked to the skin, and beginning to shiver convulsively. She sent Fanny to the carriage to fetch a lap-rug, while she stripped the little girl naked and her mother to her shift.

 As Rosabelle wrapped the child in her own pelisse, Fanny came back with the rug. Before the woman had been enveloped in its folds, another dozen drenched fugitives reached the wharf, with more behind.

 Peters was close on Fanny’s heels, his heavy, caped topcoat already half off. Fanny—rather unhappily—took off her cloak. They were but the first.

 As word spread of the disaster on the Thames, the people of London rallied round. The poor brought ragged sheets and blankets; rich merchants sent bales of woollen cloth and cartloads of clothes; charitable institutions set up soup-kettles all along the wharves. Dockside warehouses were opened to shelter the victims from the wind, which no longer seemed benign.

 Rosabelle had no time to think. More and more of those the boatmen saved had to be carried ashore and into the nearest warehouse. Chilled to the bone, they were incapable of stripping off their own sodden clothing. Her fingers numb, Rosabelle worked alongside whores and dock-labourers, tapsters and jarveys, fishwives and chimney-sweeps, struggling with buttons and tapes and hooks and pins. She undressed women and men alike, for modesty was an unaffordable luxury when frigid death lurked close at hand.

 And then suddenly the influx ended. Swaying with weariness, Rosabelle stumbled towards the great door of the gloomy warehouse to make sure no one else was coming.

 Peters caught up with her and took her elbow. “Time to go, Miss Ros. There’s others’ll tend ‘em now. You done your bit, and more, and you need to get home and change your clo’es.”

 A gust of wind blew in through the door, making Rosabelle aware that her own gown was damp. She shivered. The coachman was in his shirtsleeves, and the knees of his breeches showed wet patches where he had knelt. Fanny, joining them, was also damp and weary.

 “Fanny, have you seen him? Mr Rufus?”

 “No, Miss Ros. Likely he ended up at one of the other stairs and went home by now.”

 “Yes, I suppose so.”

 As cold inside as out, Rosabelle let Peters lead her to the carriage. She slumped in one corner, her head resting back against the squabs. Her eyes were closed, but branded on the lids was the last sight she had seen on her last glance at the river.

 Just as Mr Rufus ran down the stairs to embark in the first wherry available, one of the little boats out on the swirling water was struck by an ice floe and overturned. He had gone out onto the perilous stream, among the deadly floating islands. Had he come back?

* * * *

 Between the tales told by Fanny and Peters, and the newsboys already crying scores drowned—though hundreds were saved—Madame Yvette and Mr Macleod did not wonder at their daughter’s low spirits. Clucking, Madame hustled Rosabelle to bed and plied her with tisanes and broth.

 “It will not do to fall ill with the Season almost upon us,” she scolded gently as Rosabelle pushed away the cup of broth, silently shaking her head. “Hot drinks will help to warm you thoroughly. Shall I send for
chocolat
instead?”

 Rosabelle burst into tears. Maman rocked her in her arms as though she was still a little child.

 “A
crise de nerfs
is natural after such an experience, chérie. Tomorrow you shall stay in bed.”

 But lying in bed gave her all too much time to think, so on Saturday morning she got up as usual. She found it impossible to present the necessary cheerful face to clients downstairs, and the chatter in the workroom was unbearable. In the end, she took some embroidery to the drawing room to work on in peace. It was a complicated task which demanded her full concentration.

 If now and then Mr Rufus’s face floated between her and her work, she fiercely blinked it away. Dead or alive, he was lost to her forever, so what did it matter whether or not he had survived unscathed?

 By Sunday, that argument had worn itself out. Rosabelle bitterly regretted not having sent to Dibden’s yesterday to discover Mr Rufus’s fate. Now she had to wait until Monday. Filled with restless energy, she would have liked to go for a long walk in one of the parks. Rain poured down all day, and maman refused even to consider letting her going out. She paced the drawing room, back and forth, back and forth, like a caged tiger at the Tower.

 Monday, the seventh of February, a whole week since she first met Mr Rufus, was merely damp and dreary. However hopeless her love, she had to see him.

 If he was still alive.

 Growing impatient with her fidgets, her mother hurried to make up the list for Braithwaite’s. “Take the carriage,” she said. “You must go to Van Biederbrok’s, too, to select the seed pearls, since you did not get them on Friday. Lady Vanessa’s gown cannot be made up until the embroidery is done. I shall have to put off her first fitting appointment.”

 “I’m sorry, maman. I’ll go there first.”

 At the jeweller’s, Rosabelle managed to give her attention to choosing matching pearls. She found it more difficult at the cloth wholesaler in Cheapside, which had none of the interest of rarity. Fortunately her companion, Mam’selle Fogarty, was one of the older and more knowledgeable seamstresses. Between them, they settled on the needed materials.

 Bidding Mr Braithwaite a hurried good-bye, Rosabelle led the way out to the waiting carriage and went to speak to the coachman.

 “Peters, there is a pastrycook’s shop in Cornhill called Dibden’s. At the sign of the Pie and Pipkin. Do you know it?”

 “Aye, Miss Ros, I seen it often. Half way up on the left, just past the Royal Exchange. Hungry?”

 “I didn’t eat much breakfast.” Which was true. She had lost her appetite last Friday and it had yet to return.

 “Have you there in a jiffy, miss.”

 The carriage seemed to crawl the quarter mile, through the busy traffic of Cheapside and Poultry and past the vast pillared portico of the Mansion House. There was the still vaster Bank of England, off to the left in Threadneedle Street, and the Royal Exchange with the Stock Exchange just beyond it. Here was the financial heart of the City of London, of England, of the world.

 And, half a dozen houses farther up Cornhill, here was Dibden’s.

 The carriage stopped. “Wait here, I shan’t be a minute,” Rosabelle told Mam’selle Fogarty. She stepped down, her gaze on the pastrycook’s premises.

 Shop was too meagre a word. Over the double fa‡ade with its sparkling windows on either side of the door, the sign—gold on dark green—read

PASTRYCOOK DIBDEN CATERER

established 1679

Caterers to the Lord Mayors of London

with a golden pie on one side, a golden pipkin on the other. Beneath, in smaller script, was a list of further distinguished customers, from the Directors of the Bank of England to Merchant Taylors’ and Grocers’ Halls.

 Dibden’s was no commonplace small shop. If Mr Rufus was no more than a shopkeeper’s assistant, at least he worked for one of the best.

 Had worked?

 Heart in mouth, Rosabelle pushed the door open and went in.

Chapter 8

 Though Rosabelle’s heart was in her mouth, her mouth began to water as she stepped into the pastrycook’s. The mingled aromas almost awoke her appetite, but her anxiety was too great for that.

 No one appeared to notice the jangle of the bell as the door swung shut behind her. The large room was abuzz. Customers stood and waited their turns at the counter which ran down one side and across the back; more sat at the small tables to the right, where waiters in striped aprons hurried to and fro.

 Rosabelle scanned the faces of the waiters and the counter assistants. The one face she wanted was missing. Perhaps he was working in the kitchens today. The shopmen were dashing in and out through a swinging door to the rear of the premises. Mr Rufus might appear at any moment.