‘A great Stevensonian adventure with a 21st-century spin’ says William Boyd, ‘…dripping with atmosphere and exotic life.’ It is August 1867. King’s Road, Chelsea, is a sea of plant nurseries, catering to the Victorian obsession with rare and exotic flora. But each of the glossy emporiums is fuelled by daring adventurers sent into uncharted lands in search of untold wonders to grace England’s finest gardens. In the opening of author Thomas Mogford’s first historical novel, published today, we meet the book’s hero, and are thrust into the world of the Victorian plant hunter…
The day which was to change Harry Compton’s life forever began like most of the others this past year. His eyes snapped open – as they usually did – a good ten seconds before Mrs Pincham’s maliciously brisk knock at his door. How did his mind manage to wake him so efficiently? Harry wondered yet again. Was it chalking off the hours as he slept?
‘Master Compton?’ came his landlady’s harsh, London vowels.
‘Awake, Mrs Pincham,’ Harry groaned. ‘Wide awake.’ He lay there a moment longer, staring up at the damp-stains that spread across his ceiling like dark, unexplored continents. Then he rolled out of bed and carried his chamber-pot downstairs, trying to avoid the fierce eyes of his landlady as she cracked eggs one-handed at the kitchen range.
Slops disposed of, Harry hurried back up the stairs to his bedroom, where he dressed as quickly as possible. Flannel shirt and trousers, twill waistcoat, flatcap and boots – comfortable clothes, the clothes he’d worn in his former job. Unlike the other salesmen at the boarding-house, Harry preferred to complete his ablutions at work, and as he caught sight of his unshaven face in the glass, he realised how much older he looked since he’d arrived here from Battersea last summer. Dark eyes tired, and a touch wary; the little cleft at the base of 3 his square jaw blackened by stubble. It was a handsome face, he’d been told more than once, and it had been both his fortune and his curse. For without it, he’d never have landed this strange new job in the first place… Turning away, Harry ran down the stairs and into the dining-room, where the landlady was already laying out the chafing trays.
‘First down again, Master Compton,’ Mrs Pincham said. Her keen gaze took in his unkempt appearance, then flickered away.
Within a few minutes, Harry knew, Barrington, Ratcliffe and Drinkwater would make their appearance – preening and strutting, resplendent in their freshly-brushed frockcoats, beards carefully clipped, hair gleaming with pomade. They were always ‘Mister’ to Mrs Pincham, despite the fact that two of them were even younger than his own twenty-one years.
‘The early bird, Mrs Pincham,’ Harry said, using the tongs to lay a poached egg between two triangles of cold toast. There was no danger of spilling the yolk, he knew, as the landlady liked to steam the things until they had the consistency of indiarubber. Having washed his down with a cup of hot, strong tea, Harry headed for the front door, just catching the first bars of ‘Mr’ Barrington’s tuneless voice issuing from the stairwell behind him.
It was a fine summer’s morning, Harry found to his delight. In the open countryside at the end of North Street, the sun was rising over the fields of Fulham, and in the misty distance he could just make out a ploughman steering his dray-horse, digging furrows for his next crop of potatoes. After crossing the humpbacked slats of Stamford Bridge, Harry skirted the railway line above Chelsea Station. In the cutting below, the stationmaster was standing outside his ticket hut, clay pipe cupped in one hand, scarlet cravat knotted jauntily around his neck. The man raised an arm to Harry, well-used to seeing him pass at this time of morning, and Harry waved back.
Turning away from the railway line, Harry wove between a network of market gardens. August had been warm this year, and, judging by their wilting tops, all those carrots, turnips 4 and runner-beans could use a drink of water. The scrubby grounds of St Mark’s College appeared to his left, and Harry followed its fencing for a time, then drew to a halt, feeling that little heart-clench of excitement which always accompanied this part of his walk to work. For just a few yards ahead of him lay the King’s Road, Chelsea.
As soon as Harry joined the road, he was struck once again by the magnificence of Mr Weeks’s stovehouse. Something in the way that it rose so dramatically from the pavement, a fantastical cathedral of white-painted iron ribs and gleaming plate-glass. Within those domes, a lush jungle of exotic plants pressed against the panes, flaunting their charms, enticing one to enter.
Harry’s attention was caught by one of Mr Weeks’s undergardeners, who was setting up a pavement sign outside the nursery with a new poster fixed upon it. ‘Madonna Lily Bulbs!’ the lettering screamed. ‘Lifted fresh from the Plains of Syria! Only three sovereigns a halfdozen!!’
‘Only three sovereigns?’ Harry said.
The undergardener glanced up. Boulter, his name was – Harry had met him once or twice at the Man in the Moon.
‘Cheap at half the price,’ Boulter said, baring his snaggle-teeth. ‘You ain’t seen nothing like these blooms, Harry. And the fragrance…’ He fanned a hand against his chest like a swooning lady. ‘Fuck me ragged.’
Harry threw Boulter a doubtful look, then continued past the next stovehouse, where a team of window-cleaners was busy polishing the glass, trying to attain a sheen that could compete with that of Mr Weeks’s. Behind lay Mr Veitch’s Royal Exotic Nursery, with its neat rows of greenhouses running between here and the Fulham Road; then came Mr Wimsett’s stockground, acre upon acre of beds and borders stretching all the way down to the Thames – musk roses, monkey-puzzle trees, forsythia. Was there anywhere else on earth that hosted as 5 many valuable plants as the King’s Road? Harry wondered. The plains of Syria? He doubted it.
He continued along the elegant, gravelled thoroughfare – reserved for the monarch’s exclusive use until 1731, as the most direct route from St James’s Palace to Hampton Court, but now a hive of private enterprise. Flowersellers from Hammersmith were setting up barrows of peonies, hoping to capitalise upon the prestige of the plant nurseries. Harry knew a few of them by name, but they were too busy securing the best pitches to greet him. Next came the gates of the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens, padlocked shut now, a couple of smashed flagons outside suggestive of last night’s festivities. A beggar in tattered clothes sat amidst the earthenware shards, head bowed, upturned cap laid out before him. Harry dropped a fourpenny piece inside, and the beggar nodded without looking up. Sometimes, Harry wondered if the man waited there especially for him, as he was usually gone the moment that he passed. Not that it mattered – one thing Harry wasn’t short of these days was spare change.
He reached the dog-leg of the King’s Road, where the publican of the Man in the Moon was busy sweeping the horseshit off her section of pavement. ‘Morning, Ma Potts,’ Harry called out, and the old woman swivelled her hatchet-face his way, leaning heavily on her broomstick.
There’d been more plant nurseries on the King’s Road once, Harry knew – as many as twenty, at one point – but London’s steady creep westwards had proved unrelenting, and a few of the weaker operations had been sold off for housing, or for shops catering to the new residents – tobacconists, tea-sellers, chop-houses. Only past the squawking cacophony of Mr Baker’s pheasant dealership – ‘Exotic Fowl to the Royal Household!’ – did the nurseries begin again: Colville’s, Tuck’s, Little’s. This last had a placard outside. ‘Just 4 miles from London,’ it proclaimed. ‘Omnibuses from the Bank every ¼ of an hour.’ Nice idea, Harry thought – lure in the City boys to Chelsea village. If you could still term it a village, he 6 reflected, seeing a fine new terrace of houses sprouting from the green grass of Markham Square.
But as he reached the most ornate stovehouse of them all, Harry felt his spirits ebb. Raising his head, he read the words ‘JM Piggott’s Plant Emporium’ detailed in curly wrought-iron above the door. Josiah Piggott, he thought – my Lord and Master…
Mr Piggott had been a foundry-man once, Harry knew – a pig-iron manufacturer from Bow. But then he’d got wind that the tax on glass was to be dropped in 1845, and had purchased these premises from an ailing nurseryman. A canny choice, as the price of glass had duly plummeted, and Piggott had poured all he had into constructing his new stovehouse. A touch smaller than Mr Weeks’s, it was true, but a good deal showier, its thousands of sinuous curves and rectilinear glass panes calling to mind the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition. Just the thing to draw the eye of the well-heeled punter. The only catch was that its owner knew next to nothing about horticulture.
Taking a steadying breath, Harry turned off the King’s Road into Anderson Street, and knocked on the nursery’s backdoor. ‘Name?’ came an aggressive voice from the other side.
‘Harry Compton, sir.’
The door opened to reveal Decimus Frith, Mr Piggott’s Nursery Foreman, and the man tasked with securing his operation from espionage and theft. Mr Frith was a short, thickset man in his middle-50s, with sandy blond hair and a pair of washed-out blue eyes that seemed always to be smiling at some private joke. According to Jack Turner, Harry’s old friend from Cultivation, Frith had served as an officer in the Crimean War – killing twenty Russians in a single day, Jack claimed – and the yellow stripe he wore down the sides of his worsted trousers still lent him a faintly military air.
Frith peered up at Harry, blue eyes crinkling in amusement above his waxed blond moustaches, which protruded from the sides of his face in sharp, elegant spikes. ‘Why do you 7 always arrive alone, Compton?’ he asked. ‘Too good to keep company with the other chaps from Mrs Pincham’s?’
‘I like to take my time, sir. See the King’s Road wake up.’
‘Things don’t wake up, Compton,’ Frith drawled, waving Harry into the backyard of the nursery. ‘People do.’
Harry gave a flat smile, eyes sliding inexorably to Frith’s Ulster coat. Whatever the weather, the man always wore it, leading Jack Turner to claim that there was a pistol concealed beneath its skirts. ‘A fair few of Frith’s fancy-friends died in the Charge of the Light Brigade,’ Jack had vouchsafed to Harry. ‘Learnt him the dangers of being unarmed, so now he always carries a barker…’
‘Run along now, Compton,’ Frith added in his cut-glass accent. ‘Get your glad-rags on!’
Harry rounded the hoardings that shielded the nursery’s customers from the sights Josiah Piggott did not want them to see. The brick outhouse containing the boiler that heated the stovehouse – a smoke-belching, potbellied beast that some underpaid stoker was constantly feeding with coal. Then came the coalstore, and the potting-shed, where the nursery’s Head Gardener, Mr Jarvis Siggers, propagated the rarest and most valuable plants Piggott owned – those bought from the curators of botanic gardens, or from auctions following the deaths of private collectors. That was where Harry was meant to be working by now – that was what had been promised him – but no, he had to walk on by, around the stinking heap of manure and into the cramped little hut set aside for Piggott’s salesmen to change their clothes.
Harry pulled closed the warped door, then lit the paraffin lamp, the ammoniac reek of horse-manure still stinging in his nostrils. At least there was no one else inside. His outfit still hung from the peg where he’d left it at close of business on Saturday. Quickly, Harry undressed, then slipped on his white linen shirt and fawn-coloured trousers, and changed into his frockcoat. Silk lining, velvet collar, double breasts of the softest black cotton – how well 8 he remembered having that coat fitted on Jermyn Street! It had been Mr Frith who’d taken him. Three years Harry had been working in Cultivation by then – until Piggott had spotted him one morning whilst touring his nursery’s growing-grounds in Battersea. ‘He looks about right,’ Piggott had remarked to Frith, and Harry had been thrilled to be plucked from obscurity; honoured that the master had seen some talent in him. But it had not been that at all, Harry had learnt, for he’d been promoted for his good looks, rather than his horticultural abilities – chosen to work not in the potting-shed, but in the stovehouse, where his handsome face might help flog an exotic plant to an undiscerning client, most of whom were wealthy women of a certain age.
Sinking down onto the bench, Harry stuck a fist into one of his Oxford brogues and began to buff the leather with an ostrich-feather duster. If Jack Turner and the boys from Cultivation could see him now… Shoes polished to the requisite gleam, Harry tied a cotton bib around his neck and set about shaving at the washstand. Then, having towelled himself down, he fixed on his wing-collar and reached for the pot of bear’s-grease pomade. And then there it was, the face that had sold a thousand pot-plants. Harry winked sardonically at the mirror, then fixed on the ash-grey topper that set off the costume so fetchingly. No other nursery dressed up its salesmen like toffs. It was Piggott’s way of standing out from the crowd.
Back in the yard, Harry saw that Mr Siggers had arrived in the potting-shed, and was busy transferring a batch of Slipper Orchids into ornamental terracotta pots, readying them for sale. The man didn’t even turn his head as Harry passed.
On the other side of the hoardings, Frith was opening the back door to Harry’s fellow salesmen – Barrington, Ratcliffe and Drinkwater – who swaggered in like dandies, vanity stroked by all the admiring looks they’d drawn on the King’s Road in their Piggott’s frockcoats. All they would need to change in the hut was their footwear.
‘I’ll outsell you this week, Compton,’ Barrington called over. ‘You see if I don’t!’
Harry made no reply, just followed the cinder path between the petunia beds towards the rear door of the stovehouse.
Thomas Mogford is the author of a series of crime novels about a lawyer from Gibraltar named Spike Sanguinetti. The first book, Shadow of the Rock, was a Spectator ‘Book of the Year’, while the fourth book in the series, Sleeping Dogs, was chosen as one of the Guardian‘s ‘Best Holiday Reads’. The latest Sanguinetti, A Thousand Cuts, was hailed by The Sunday Times as ‘a traditional and thoroughly satisfying crime novel’. The Plant Hunter is released in hardback on 17th February, and is available from Waterstones and all good stockists, RRP £12.99.
Photos by Echo Wang, Kamila Maciejewska, Maia Habegger,
Damiano Baschiera and Stephanie Mulrooney (courtesy of Unsplash).
