Alexander Graham Bell: Master of Sound #7 (8 page)

“You won’t be able to miss my grandfather,” Aleck said. “He wears a big gray beaver hat. You’ve never seen anything like it,” he added with a chuckle. “It was in style when he was a young man, and he’s never been able to part with it.”

“That must be him then,” Maisie said, pointing.

“Indeed!” Aleck said.

The old man looked very much like Aleck, Felix thought, with his piercing black eyes and a rather large hooked nose. His hair was white, but he had a lot of it, and his face looked kind.

“I’d recognize that Bell nose anywhere, my boy,” Grandfather Bell said, taking Aleck into a bear hug.

When he released Aleck, Aleck turned to the others.

“It’s been nice meeting you all,” he said.

“Aren’t you going to Harrington Square?” Felix said quickly before the Bells could walk away.

“Yes,” Grandfather Bell answered.

“So are we!” Felix said.

“Is your mother meeting you here?” Aleck asked him.

“She’s sick,” Maisie interjected. “Remember?”

“Come on then,” Grandfather Bell said. “We’ll drop you.”

Relieved, they followed him out into the early London evening.

To Maisie’s horror, the air stunk like nothing she’d ever smelled, and her stomach immediately started to churn.

“What is that smell?” she asked from behind the hand she’d placed over her nose and mouth.

“I think it’s every horrible smell there is,” Hadley said, her nose wrinkled in disgust.

“You’ve been in Scotland so long you’ve forgotten the beautiful aromas of London, have you?” Grandfather Bell said with a big belly laugh. “That’s horse manure and the sewage in the Thames and all sorts of other unpleasant things.”

It does smell bad
, Felix thought. But he was more taken aback by how it looked. Even though it was not yet six o’clock, the city was dark with black smoke
and thick with a yellow fog that seemed to go on for miles. The combination seemed to wrap around him and fill his lungs. He coughed. And then his eyes started to water.

“Take each other’s hands now,” Grandfather Bell ordered, “so you don’t get lost in the fog.”

“Does that actually happen?” Felix asked in a trembling, choked voice.

Rayne took his hand and squeezed gently.

“Just yesterday a man drowned in the Thames when he fell in because he couldn’t see it,” Grandfather Bell said.

The street was more crowded than even Times Square in New York City. And muddier than anything any of them had ever seen before.

But what caught Maisie’s attention was how many children clogged the street. Dressed in ragged clothes, some of them even barefoot, all of them with dirt-streaked legs and cheeks, the children seemed to be in perpetual motion. They ran to open cab doors. They held on to horses’ reins. They carried brightly wrapped packages for women in fine clothes. They yelled at passersby to buy oranges or matches or flowers from them.

A boy stopped right in front of them, looked at Grandfather Bell, and broke into a series of cartwheels, right through the mud.

“Ha’ penny, sir?” he asked hopefully when he was upright again.

Grandfather Bell tossed the boy a coin.

“Orphans,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “So many orphans.”

Maisie thought of the movie
Oliver!
that her mother liked to watch so much. It had been a play, too, and her mother had been in during that long-ago summer when she’d met Maisie’s father. They were going to watch it that very night. Now she wished she had paid closer attention. The movie was about London right around this time, and orphan children who become pickpockets to survive. She turned to whisper this to Felix, but Grandfather Bell had hailed a cab and everyone was already piling in. Maisie picked her way through the muddy street and followed them.

The city was so noisy that even inside the cab the sounds of dozens of horses’ hooves beating on the pavement, wheels clacking, bells ringing, peddlers
calling out, music playing—some kind of brass band, a clarinet, and the tinny grind of an organ—could all be heard.

“There’s so much I want to show you, boy,” Grandfather Bell told Aleck as they moved through the crowded streets. He spoke loudly to be heard over the cacophony that penetrated the cab. “But I’m afraid it will have to wait until morning. I have a class tonight.”

“That’s all right,” Aleck said. “I’d love to sit in on your class, if you’ll let me.” He looked at the children and added, “Grandfather Bell is an elocutionist.”

“An
elo-what
?” Rayne asked.

“He teaches people to speak correctly,” Felix told her.

“I’d love to come, too,” Maisie said suddenly.

“Well, I—” Grandfather Bell began, but Maisie interrupted him.

“We took a class with Aleck’s father just this morning. Lips and tongues and everything,” she said.

“It’s rather unorthodox—”

“Do you say things like ‘
The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain
’?” Rayne asked.

“Well—”

“Oh! I do hope you do that exercise,” she said, turning her pretty blue eyes on the old man hopefully.

“All right then,” Grandfather Bell said with a deep sigh. “But you must all be very quiet so the girls don’t feel self-conscious.”

The cab came to a stop then, and out of nowhere a young boy, no more than six or seven years old, appeared from the shadows and opened the door for them.

Another one just a bit older swept the street in front of them as they walked.

“Orphans,” Grandfather Bell said again softly as he tossed half pennies at the boys.

Maisie watched as the two little boys ran off to meet another cab approaching the square. At least she and the others had a warm house to go into, and parents back home, and food and water and beds and…
Oh!
she thought.
Stop counting your blessings
. After all, she didn’t know what was going to happen to them next here in 1862.

G
randfather Bell settled them all in the drawing room, which looked like a living room to Maisie with its arrangement of sofas and chairs. A coal fire burned in the fireplace, and the children sat close to it for warmth. Outside, darkness had fallen and even with the streetlamps lit, Maisie couldn’t see the gardens across the street.

A maid in a gray uniform with a white apron and cap came in wheeling a small cart of sandwiches and tea. Maisie watched Felix survey the sandwiches suspiciously. She was hungry enough to eat almost anything, but Felix could be persnickety. Apparently, he was the only fussy one, though. Hadley and Rayne looked ready to dig in.

Aleck helped himself right away, filling a plate with sandwiches and little triangular scones. He spooned some jam onto the side of his dish, and then added what looked like spoiled cream.

Maisie did exactly as he did, but paused over the cream.

“Is this okay to eat?” she asked him.

“I would think so,” Aleck said, amused. “It’s clotted cream.”

Hadley and Rayne took some of everything, but Felix wrinkled his nose at the word
clotted
. He decided to stick with just jam. One type of sandwich appeared to be cucumbers with butter, a favorite of Great-Aunt Maisie. Another had some dry gray meat in it and bright green jelly. Felix passed on those. He decided that if he had to paint the city of London, he would use the color gray for almost everything.

By the time they’d finished eating, Grandfather Bell’s students had started to arrive. About ten women made their way into the drawing room, removing hats and gloves and finding seats, chattering together as they did.

“They all look so pretty!” Rayne said with a sigh.

“Can you Adam and Eve it?” one of them said, peering at the five children. “I was going up the apples and pears and thought I’eard dustbin lids up ’ere.”

“Dustbin lids?” Hadley repeated.

Even Aleck looked confused at what she said.

The woman laughed.
She’s young, like Miss Landers,
Felix thought. Up close like this, he could see that the fabric of her dress was worn in spots and slightly frayed at the hem. Her hands were rough and red, and some of her teeth were gray. Yet somehow she was pretty despite that.

“I’ve been on my plates all day,” she said as she dropped onto one of the chintz-covered chairs.

She pointed a finger at Felix.

“Use your loaf, boy!” she said. “I’m a working girl.”

That made all the other women laugh, too.

Grandfather Bell’s voice broke through the laughter.

“That slaughtering of the English language,” he said in his precisely enunciated words, “is what is called Cockney.”

“Like Eliza Doolittle,” Maisie whispered to Felix.

Felix thought of the young and pretty Audrey
Hepburn and tried to imagine
this
woman singing “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”

“It’s like we’ve stepped right into a scene from
My Fair Lady
,” Rayne said softly.

“Translation,” Grandfather Bell said. “‘Apples and pears’ is stairs. ‘On her plates’ means on her feet. And ‘use your loaf—’”

“Means use your loaf!” the woman interrupted cheerfully.

Grandfather Bell shook his head. “This one,” he said, “is impossible. I would like to take her for six months and teach her to speak not just better English, but the King’s English. Then I would buy her a beautiful gown and take her to the fanciest ball in London. I’d dare anyone to discover that she was really a Cockney peddler and not a society woman.”

“But that’s what Henry Higgins does!” Felix blurted.

“’enry ’iggins?” the woman said. “Who’s ’e?”

“I have no earthly idea,” Grandfather said.

He opened a heavy book with gold-trimmed pages.
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
was written across the cover in dark red script.

“Shall we?” he asked—rhetorically, Maisie thought.

“Enough wit’ this rabbit and pork,” the woman said, rubbing her hands over the fire. “On to ’
amlet
!”

For two hours the women took turns reading parts of
Hamlet
out loud. They weren’t all Cockney. Some had different kinds of accents; some seemed just to be shy. To those, Grandfather Bell ordered, “Project! Project your voice! Throw it to the farthest wall!”

“Until next week,” he said when the clock struck eight.

The women gathered their things, pinning their hats and pulling on gloves.

“And,” Grandfather Bell added, looking at the children, “good night to all of you as well.”

Aleck yawned. “It’s been a big day,” he said.

Maisie fingered the magnet in her pocket, its metal cold against her hand. Was this the time to give it to Aleck? Or should she wait?

“Normally we would have supper now,” Grandfather Bell said. He patted Aleck on the shoulder. “But you should turn in early tonight.”

Maisie pulled the magnet from her pocket.

“Aleck,” she said, feeling Felix and Hadley and
Rayne watching her, “I wanted to give you this. For your experiments with sound.”

“A magnet?” Aleck asked her.

He took it from her and examined the various reeds attached to either end.

“What are these for?” he wondered out loud.

“You’ll figure it out,” Maisie said.

“Well,” Aleck said, placing the magnet on the table, “thank you.”

Maisie realized that the maid had appeared with all of their raincoats.

“Nancy will show you out,” Grandfather Bell said.

What could they do except slip into their slickers, go out to the hall where their boots waited for them, and then go outside into the dark, rainy, smelly London night?.