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Updated: July 16, 2025
Neither of the men disputed the lady's proposition, and the duchess rising, left them to their wine. Armed with the twenty guineas, Gay presented himself the following day at the Bedfordbury coffee house. Mrs. Fenton was still ungracious, but the sight of the little pile of gold and the chink of the coins mollified her humour. "Where and when are you going to take her?" she demanded.
"The mistress is a bit sweet in that quarter, eh?" whispered a customer with a jerk of the head and a wink to Hannah the waitress, whom Mrs. Fenton had brought with her from Bedfordbury. "I should just think she was," returned the girl contemptuously. "It makes one sick. She ought to be a done with sweetheartin'." "A woman's never too old for that, my girl, as you'll find when you're her age.
"At the coffee house in Bedfordbury." "Does she keep it?" "Yes, sir." "And what do you do?" "Wait on the customers sometimes." "And sometimes you sing in the streets round the taverns, eh?" "Only when mother drives me out." "Oh. She ill treats you, does she? That bruise on your shoulder was it her work?" The girl nodded. "You wouldn't mind if you left your mother and did nothing but sing?"
The Old Bailey, from its nearness to Smithfield was crowded, and the buxom proprietress of Fenton's coffee house was hard put to it to serve her clamorous customers and to see that she wasn't cheated or robbed. Mrs. Fenton had improved in appearance as well as in circumstances since she had come from Bedfordbury to the Old Bailey.
Fenton in the squalid days of six months before at the Bedfordbury coffee shop and she well knew how Lavinia was constantly getting into a scrape, not from viciousness, but from pure recklessness and love of excitement. Her mother's treatment of her "to cure her of her ways," as the lady put it, was simply brutal. Hannah was not a little afraid of what would happen when Mrs.
Bedfordbury was not worse than St. Giles. The girl led him to a shabby coffee shop from the interior of which issued a hot and sickly air. "That's mother," she whispered when they were in the doorway. A buxom woman not too neatly dressed, whose apron bore traces of miscellaneous kitchen work, scowled when her eyes lighted on her daughter.
And what was the use of education while she was living in a Bedfordbury coffee house! "She must be sent to a boarding school and be among gentlefolk," declared Gay energetically. "Excellent," said Bolingbroke, speaking for the first time, "and may I ask who will pay for the inestimable privilege of placing her among the quality?" The irony in St.
Fenton set eyes on her wilful daughter. At the same time, Lavinia was not the same girl who at Bedfordbury used to run wild, half clad and half starved, and yet never looked like a beggar, so pretty and so attractive was she. Six months had developed her into a woman and the training of Miss Pinwell, the pink of gentility, had given her the modish airs of a lady of quality.
She had always had some infatuated young man hovering about her even when she was her mother's drudge at the coffee house in Bedfordbury. Perhaps she inherited flirting from that buxom, good-looking mother who had the reputation of knowing her way quite well where a man was concerned. "Archibald Dorrimore will be Sir Archibald some day," she mused. "It would be rare to be called her ladyship.
Thus they manage in the summer; what it's like in winter time is terrible to think of. In many cases it means the pauper's grave, as in the case of a young woman who was wont to sleep in a van in Bedfordbury. Some men who were aware of her practice surprised her by dashing a bucket of water on her.
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