Two days ago I should have been celebrating my tenth birthday at my home in Queen Anne’s Square. Instead, my birthday has gone unremarked; there are no celebrations, only funerals, and our burnt-outhouse is like a blackened, rotted tooth among the tall, white brick mansions of Queen Anne’s Square.
For the time being, we’re staying in one of Father’s properties in Bloomsbury. It’s a nice house,and though the family is devastated, and our lives torn apart, there is that to be thankful for at least.
Here we’ll stay, shocked, in limbo—like troubled ghosts—until our future is decided.
The blaze ate my journals so beginning this feels like starting anew. That being the case, I should probably begin with my name, which is Haytham, an Arabic name, for an English boy whose home is London, and who from birth until two days ago lived an idyllic life sheltered from the worst of the filth that exists elsewhere in the city. From Queen Anne’s Square we could see the fog and smoke that hung over the river, and like everybody else we were bothered by the stink, which I can only describe as “wet horse,” but we didn’t have to tread through the rivers of stinking waste from tanneries, butchers’ shops and the backsides of animals and people. The rancid streams of effluent that hasten the passage of disease: dysentery, cholera, typhoid . . .
“You must wrap up, Master Haytham. Or the lurgy’ll get you.”
On walks across the fields to Hampstead my nurses used to steer me away from the poor unfortunates wracked with coughs, and shielded my eyes from children with deformities. More than anything they feared disease. I suppose because you cannot reason with disease; you can’t bribe it or take arms against it, and it respects neither wealth nor standing. It is an implacable foe.
And of course it attacks without warning. So every evening they checked me for signs of measles or the pox then reported on my good health to Mother, who came to kiss me good night. I was one of the lucky ones, you see, who had a mother to kiss me good night, and a father who did, too; who loved me and my half sister, Jenny, who told me about rich and poor, who instilled in me my good fortune and urged me always to think of others; and who employed tutors and nursemaids to look after and educate me, so that I should grow up to be a man of good values and of worth to the world. One of the lucky ones. Not like the children who have to work in fields and in factories and up chimneys.
I wondered sometimes, though, did they have friends, those other children? If they did, then, while of course I knew better than to envy them their lives when mine was so much more comfortable, I envied them that one thing: their friends. Me, I had none, with no brothers or sisters close to my age either, and, as for making them, well, I was shy. Besides, there was another problem: something that had come to light when I was just five years old.
It happened one afternoon. The mansions of Queen Anne’s Square were built close together, so we’d often see our neighbours, either in the square itself or in their grounds at the rear. On one side of us lived a family who had four girls, two around my age. They spent what seemed like hours skipping or playing blind man’s bluff in their garden, and I used to hear them as I sat in the schoolroom under the watchful eye of my tutor, Old Mr. Fayling, who had bushy grey eyebrows and a habit of picking his nose, carefully studying whatever it was that he’d dug from the recesses of his nostrils then surreptitiously eating it.