The Shadow of Great Britain

Chapter 1592: Chapter 20: Wheatstone and Hastings Amidst the Scent of Daily Life

At 2:30 in the morning, in most cities around the world, this time is called midnight. But in London, it’s not just midnight; it’s the beginning of a new day.

While Moscow falls silent, while St. Petersburg gently slips into the Baltic Sea’s dreams, while doctoral students in Gottingen toil through the night for tomorrow’s thesis defense, the Covent Garden Market in central London is already bustling with activity.

Rows of horse-drawn carriages, carts, and fruit and vegetable vendors’ pushcarts gather on the surrounding streets, the air thick with the scent of coal, earth, moist vegetable leaves, and early apples, mixed with a trace of rising human chatter.

Lights flicker in the upper windows of the taverns, not as a sign of city dwellers preparing for rest or the pubs about to close, but as a signal that the proprietor is getting ready to open for business.

A new day is about to arrive, and the image of thoroughfares filled with vehicles will appear again in just an hour.

Before the sun rises over the Thames River, roads leading from the suburbs to London are already clogged with carriages, goods-laden carts, and men and women busy for their livelihoods.

With heavy baskets of fruit on their heads, they start from several miles away in Fulham or the fruit and vegetable gardens southwest of the Thames, moving towards Piccadilly Square, passing through Green Park, and heading to Covent Garden Market.

Among the crowd, in addition to the vegetable farmers and small vendors, are many people whose lives depend on the early market.

The coffee stall owners carry a yoke with coffee pots, small pots with coal burning brightly, the firelight flickering in the gradually fading night.

Butchers’ lightweight carriages creak by, followed closely by the public carriages weaving between the city and the suburbs, men inside dozing sleepily, and then come the tall, burly drivers for the brewers, marked by their dirty jackets, leather trousers, and the red soft caps adorning their heads.

Though everyone is rushing towards the city, the coffee stall owners are always the first to arrive at Covent Garden Market.

On the European Continent, cooking at home is decidedly more cost-effective than dining out.

But don’t forget, this is London, hence the situation here is entirely different from Europe.

Most workers in London live in narrow single-room apartments without their own houses. While they can use communal kitchens, most will only use the fireplace in their rooms to boil water before work. It’s exceedingly luxurious to burn a fire when no one is home; it not only costs money but also time.

In the workers’ abodes, water is always a scarce commodity; although early commercial water companies have emerged in London, it does not mean that everyone can enjoy piped water services.

Not all houses are equipped with water piping, and even those that do might not often use the piped water; for instance, Arthur never drinks the tap water at home.

This is not because his beverage requirements have risen since acquiring the title of Sir, but rather due to the notoriously poor quality of London’s tap water.

The water from the dozen or so water companies in London originates from various places, some even drawing straight from the heavily polluted lower Thames River, none of which undergoes purification in the modern sense. Naturally, it contains human and animal excrement, industrial wastewater, and even unidentified corpses, and so on.

Thus, uneven quality and severe pollution are common phenomena in London. Worse still, even when the quality is utterly poor, water supply remains irregular, sometimes available only for several hours a week.

Figures like Arthur, who are prominent enough in London, suffer from this. Let alone the workers who cannot even access tap water.

For worker families, the nearest water sources are the street pumps, but these pumps, like the piped water service, are excellent, with a supply lasting only a few hours a week.

And worker families generally lack storage space, are plagued by pest infestations, and can only afford limited food availability. These factors mean it’s not easy to store food or even tea overnight. Thus, after waking from sleep, choosing to drink a cup of hot tea and eat breakfast on the way to work becomes almost an inevitable choice.

The coffee stall owners also know that what customers value most on a dark and cold London morning is the temperature of the coffee and tea, followed by the strength and sweetness; it’s to warm their hands with the cup and awaken their bodies with hot tea, that makes your business successful.

Though most coffee stalls are very simple, some are just a board placed on two wooden sawhorses; some are equipped with stools and tables on a pushcart. Without exception, stall owners will set up a brightly burning coal stove in front of their stalls, while those with the means may even equip a small tin boiler with an external copper spout.

If a stall could have a canvas tent to shield against wind and rain, that would be ideal; with a lamp lit inside the tent, and cloth covering the table, cups and saucers are arrayed on it, and a few of the largest, grandest plates set with bread, cakes, and butter.

Just like that, within fifteen minutes, a 19th-century London trending coffee stall can be ready to welcome customers.

The stall owner has just set the scene, not yet able to catch a breath, when he sees a guest pull aside the tent curtain and step inside.