The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,53
As soon as everyone was again seated, while Miss Sheridan was still smiling at the compliments being showered on her, two attendants, they too in the livery of the gardens, began to mount with supper trays. There was fricassee of quail, the slices stewed in wine and butter, and a good quantity of the legendary Spring Gardens ham, the slices so thin that it was said you could read a newspaper through one, though no one at the table claimed to have tried this. Champagne and claret accompanied the meats, and there were custards, tarts and cheesecakes to follow.
Kemp could not forbear making further calculations while he ate. There must be at least twenty-five guests, he thought, taking all three boxes together. The price normally charged here for a bottle of French claret was five shillings, already far from cheap; ordered up thus for the occasion, it would cost considerably more. Then there was the champagne, then there was the food, then there were the musicians to pay, and the waiters. This was a man in straitened circumstances! The thought came charged with feelings of resentment; Spenton was heedless of expense because he had been born to money, whereas he himself had had to fight and scrape and resort to questionable methods in his pursuit of it.
After supper Spenton suggested a stroll, and this was generally agreed upon. Emerging from the arcade, Kemp saw that there were men engaged in dismantling the orchestra platform, confirming his suspicion that it had been erected there solely for Miss Sheridan’s benefit. Spenton took his arm, and together they turned into the first of the graveled walks that led off from the central avenue. This extended some hundreds of yards and ended in a series of triumphal arches. Beyond there was a further vista, what appeared to be a ruined Roman temple with Corinthian columns, a recent addition to the gardens that Kemp had heard spoken of but was seeing now for the first time: not a building at all, but a triumph of illusion—a trompe l’oeil painting on a huge scale. The walk turned off from this at right angles, leading past a small Chinese pavilion and a statue of Handel playing a lyre in the character of Orpheus. At this point they heard the ringing of a bell not very far away.
“That is the bell for the water show,” Spenton said. “I always make a point of seeing it when I am in the gardens. I am having some hydraulic features installed in the grounds of Wingfield, my house in Durham, and so it is of particular interest. Would you care to give it a glance?”
Kemp assented, though somewhat taken by surprise; he had been expecting his companion to broach the subject of the loan, not this one of waterworks. Spenton was obviously a man who dallied and delayed—or perhaps merely affected to. But he was in need of a loan, they would come to it; otherwise they would not be walking here together.
There was a gated turnstile at the entrance to the show, and another liveried attendant there to take the money. It was considerably more expensive than the general charge for entry to the gardens, half a guinea a head. Spenton insisted on paying for them both. “Come this way,” he said. “The figure with which they begin is particularly impressive.”
They were in time to see the figure of Death, a skeleton with an hourglass, slowly rising from the surface of an oval pool and pointing with his dart at a pillar on which the hours were marked. He had a lamp inside him, lighting up his skull, and his progress upward was menacing and slow.
“He is standing on a board with a hole in it,” Spenton said. “The dropping of the water out of the cock and through the hole in the board makes him rise up little by little. Ingenious, ain’t it? When he is clear of the water, he will strike with his dart at the pillar, and it is this that releases the clockwork and starts up the show. I am presently constructing something similar in the grounds of my house.”
There was no sound of a blow, but the movement of the dart was swift when it came, and the effect was immediate. The pillar was only one of several; all were brilliantly lit up now, and the water came out in a sheer flow, breaking into forms of dragons and swans and fish. At the