Gail Hamilton is Always a Story-Teller First

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Excerpt from Gail's latest novel set in Victorian England

Tomorrow Country

Gail Hamilton

Chapter One

"God in heaven, the child's....alive!"

The curate stood to his toe tops in unspeakable London filth. His face turned gray. He would have fainted clean away save for rigid shock holding him upright.

He was only twenty-two, after all, and never before away from his sheep-raising village of Aylesham, Surrey. Sheep-like mildness informed his round blue eyes and the whiskers springing tenderly from his cheeks. Gusts jerked derisively at his coat, which was hopelessly old-fashioned, and tried to snatch his hat, a hand-down from the vicar. Only his cravat held firm, for Mrs. Warren had tied it herself in the predawn rush to catch his train for Victoria Station.

His business had taken only an hour to conclude; somewhat of an anti-climax. But then, how his innocent heart had bounded at finding himself footloose for a day at the very core of the

Empire. Widowed Queen Victoria owned a palace not a mile away. Soldiers with sunburnt, tropical faces talked jauntily of India and whistled through the streets on leave. The Thames was jammed with ships disgorging mahogany and nutmeg and aromatic chests of Ceylon tea.

Such crowds! Such a din!" he had cried as swaying hoop skirts scooped him from the kerb and the brass on a sea of hansom cabs dazzled his eyes. Vast stone porticoes yawned at him, guarded by doormen magnificent as pashas. Jewelled snuff boxes, ornate soup tureens, painted China mandarins winked gorgeously from windows and he had to tear his gaze from displays of sybaritic bonbons and lacy pantelettes. His pulse stopped altogether when a street conjurer stepped in front of him breathing a tongue of flame at the sky.

He had been afloat, bobbing and spinning on the glorious tide of London, it's heart-tide, the tide of the City, that ancient, unimaginably opulent square mile under the dome of St. Paul's where the spoils of an empire had been poured into white-fronted mansions, immense public buildings and the towering splendour of the Bridge.

Then Great Ben struck noon and the curate halted, cold inside. He'd been agog, credulous as a boy while Old Scratch laughed to see one more fool slide into the glittering trap. "Fatuous vainglory!" the young man whispered, shaken that temptation should display itself in such tangible, mesmerizing forms just as the vicar had warned.

He mustn’t let the vicar find out how he'd squandered the morning!

God, in the form of the vicar, would grill him severely on his return. In the familiar, moss-grown church of Aylesham, farmers and good housewives heard that life was a constant skirmish with Satan in which they might jerk from any fireside nap to battle for their souls. The vicar lived on this drama, growing gaunt and beetle-browed. When he discovered his stumbling curate must go to London, he had reared up like a thundercloud from behind the vestry coat rack.

"Fleshpots jingling in golden harnesses! Pits of sin blacker than the Serpent's maw! You look and you take heed, my lad. Tis Babylon you're going to!"

With all Aylesham breathless for the tale, the curate could hardly say he'd gorged on treacle tarts and gaped at tumblers on the Strand. Reluctantly, he turned from the lacquered carriages, the flags streaming in the smoky golden sunshine and set out to see for himself the sores of foulness and misery gnawing the city's underbelly.

He hurried east past the Tower and, in his innocence, hired a half-crazed hag to guide him into districts tough where sailors dared not go. At once, she brought him down sweating alleys, past broken doors breathing excrement to this--a festering garbage heap oozing toward the Thames.

"Aye, it be!" she cackled contemptuously.

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© Copyright Gail Hamilton 2009