The coach soon emerged from the trees and entered the first of the villages that were slowly being swallowed up and overwhelmed by the sprawling capital. The cottages and small shops gradually gave way to dense housing that rose up on either side, crowding the cobbled streets. Occasionally the coach passed workhouses and the premises of small industries from whose chimneys smoke belched into the sky, adding to the brown pall hanging over London. At length they arrived at the yard of the coach station in Chelsea, and after a curt farewell to Mr Jardine Arthur tipped a porter to carry his travel case to one of the cabs waiting out in the street. The rest of his baggage was in the hold of the Indiaman and would be sent on to London as soon as it was unloaded.

‘Cavendish Square, if you please,’ Arthur called up to the cabby as he climbed aboard and pulled the small door to.

‘Aye, sir!’ The cabby nodded, and then flicked the reins, urging his horse forward. The cab rattled out into the traffic passing along the crowded thoroughfare. At once Arthur was struck by the stark difference between the streets of London and those he had become used to in India.As a boy, his family had mostly lived in the countryside of Ireland, and Arthur had been horrified by the squalor and the smoky, sweaty odours of Dublin and then London. But he had quickly become used to them, just as he had become used to the appalling poverty and stench of the primitive slums of Indian cities. Now he measured London by a new standard and marvelled at the obvious wealth of the capital and the fine facades it presented to the paved and cobbled streets.

As the cab turned into Cavendish Square, Arthur’s mind turned to his family. The house that his mother rented was in a street off the square. It was modest by the standards of the aristocracy, but Anne Wellesley had been saddled with debts after her husband had died and what little was left of her private fortune was supplemented by loans from her sons. Arthur wondered what kind of greeting she would offer him after an absence of a decade.They had not parted on good terms, mostly because they had never been on good terms. She had regarded Arthur as the least able, and most indolent, of her sons, and had always been cold with him. Now that he was a major-general and the hero of Assaye he wondered if his stock with her might have risen. Would she now embrace him and hold him in the same regard as Richard,William and Henry?

Arthur rapped the side of the cab and called to the driver. ‘Stop here!’