St. John’s Wood, June 1835
Benjamin Hopkins watched Sibylla, who looked very pretty in a cornflower blue dress, noticing how the color brought out her eyes. The blonde hair visible under her hat was coiffed in tight ringlets and the hat was secured with a coquettish side bow. The ladies with their parasols, colorful dresses, and patterned silk scarves resembled birds of paradise, and the gentlemen in their dark dress coats, top hats, and long slender pants seemed very elegant.
Three thousand Londoners had assembled at the cricket ground at St. John’s Wood in Regent’s Park on that warm Sunday in June in order to attend the most important social event of the season: the annual cricket match between Eton and Harrow, the two best schools in the country.
The game had been going since morning, and now Sibylla’s younger brother, Oscar, had just scored the winning run for his team. Time for tea.
Looking as proud as any family member, Benjamin stood next to the Spencers and received the congratulations of the other spectators. Today, he was no mere observer of the rich but one of them.
With a smile and a bow, he escorted Sibylla to a picnic area the servants had set up in the shade of an ancient plane tree. There were blankets spread out on the lawn, silverware and crockery on a folding table, and a jug of lavender lemonade and a bowl of fresh strawberries sat prepared. Richard opened the wine and champagne bottles, while Sibylla handed out ham-and-salmon sandwiches and her stepmother, Mary, sliced the cheesecake.
The enjoyment of these delicacies in the open had been made popular by Princess Victoria, and Lord’s Cricket Ground, a green oasis right in the middle of London, was excellently suited for it.
“Would you please get the tea, Oscar?” Mary asked.
“Why me? I want to celebrate!” Oscar replied, holding his champagne glass for the servant to fill. He looked sweaty, his white cricket uniform dusty, his hair disheveled, but he was beaming with pride. Having spent the previous year as a substitute, he had not been thought capable of such heroics.
“If you continue guzzling champagne like that, we will have to keep you away from the kerosene cooker,” Sibylla teased.
“Says the woman who fell into the harbor,” he retorted.
“A piece of rather good fortune, I daresay. For, had I not saved your esteemed sister, I would not be present here today,” Benjamin boasted.
“Incredibly good fortune, indeed,” Oscar said under his breath. He wondered whether his sister could really like this tall, pale Hopkins or whether he was just another hapless suitor whom she would scare away before long.
“Mr. Hopkins, if I might ask you to take care of the tea, please?” Mary sighed as Sibylla attempted to swat her brother with a napkin. “And, Sibylla, did you bring your father his sandwich?”
Mary had married Richard shortly after Sibylla, then just four years old, lost her mother in a riding accident. She had raised Sibylla and loved her no less than she did her biological son, Oscar. But her gentility had not rubbed off on her stepdaughter. Sibylla was mercurial, quick witted, and difficult to manage. Richard did not approve of her behavior and was constantly trying to rein her in. Yet the older Sibylla became, the harder she fought to make her own decisions.
Mary threw a furtive glance at Mr. Hopkins. Perhaps, she thought, he might be a husband for Sibylla at last.
She did have her misgivings, though. Richard had shared with her that Hopkins came from an honorable but humble background, and she knew well that a man who rose in society as a result of his marriage was rarely taken seriously.
A business associate approached Richard and clapped him on the shoulder. “What a splendid son you have there, Spencer! Someone who can truly follow in your footsteps one day.”
“That he is,” Richard agreed as his face lit up with pride.
Sibylla pursed her lips. Everyone was behaving as though Oscar had just single-handedly defeated Napoleon. But it was just a game, a leisure activity! She immediately regretted her bitterness, though. When she was a girl, she had often played cricket with Oscar in Hyde Park. She had been good, but then her father and Mary deemed it unseemly for a young lady to break into a sweat and scream and pant trying to hit a small ball. Of course, Oscar, not even particularly fond of cricket, was encouraged to practice.
But it was not in Sibylla’s nature to give up. If she was not going to be permitted to play cricket, she was going to attract her father’s attention by some other means. And today she had a particular kind of surprise in store for him.
“Look, Father,” she told him with gleaming eyes as she reached into one of the wicker baskets. “I’ve grown these myself in the greenhouse.”
“Tomatoes?” he asked impatiently. “What for?”
“To eat,” she replied and then took a hearty bite out of one of the red fruits.
“What, are you mad?” Richard leapt over, tore the tomato from her hand, and cast it into the bushes. “Spit that out at once! Or do you want to kill yourself, you foolish girl?”
Sibylla’s eyes filled with tears as she turned away to spit the piece of tomato into the handkerchief that Mary had quickly handed her.
“They aren’t poisonous,” she sputtered. “A Colonel Gibbon Johnson has proven that by eating them in public. They’re quite palatable, in fact. You could make a lot of money if you sold them, to city dwellers, for instance, because they have no time or space to grow them themselves.”
“Nonsense!” Richard said. “And terrible business sense. Even if they weren’t poisonous, people would believe they are. It is difficult to eradicate superstition.”
“If Oscar had come up with this idea, you would have been thrilled,” she replied furiously.
“Enough!” Richard roared. “Stop it with your foolish schemes and adventures. Accept your station in life.”
“Richard, please,” Mary admonished him quietly, because he had attracted the attention of several people. She signaled Benjamin, standing by the kerosene heater, to start pouring the tea.
“Sibylla, dearest,” she began gently. “Won’t you pass your father a cup of tea?”
Sibylla obeyed without comment or expression. The festive mood of that summer’s day had been dashed. Oscar went off with his teammates to celebrate. Mary’s spirits only lifted once two of her lady friends came over to inquire in detail about the young man accompanying Sibylla. Richard had fished the Times out of a picnic basket and was studying a report about the progress of the Commercial Railway, set to link the western part of the docks to central London.