The Silver Touch (17 page)

‘Because you have been on previous occasions! You can’t deny it!’

‘I’ve no intention of denying it.’ A nerve began to throb in his temple and his eyes glittered. ‘But let us talk about this in the morning when you’ll be more in charge of yourself.’

‘No!’ She could see the warning signs that his rare anger was rising and recklessly she welcomed it, all resolutions gone momentarily beyond recall. ‘Guilt is written all over you. Why didn’t you tell me you were seeing her?’

‘To avoid such a scene as this!’ he replied fiercely between his teeth.

She hit him across the face with all her strength. His head jerked back and the ring of her forceful blow seemed to hang suspended in the air. She had caught him off balance just as he was about to step on to the landing and he staggered slightly, reached for the newel post to save himself and thrust out a hand as if to keep her at bay. In her fury she would have hit him again, but he caught her wrists and grappled with her. They swayed together, knocking against the little table that stood there, causing it to tilt. The chamberstick and the tablecloth went sailing off the polished surface to land together on the floor. The still-burning candle illuminated them like two actors in the footlights as he bore her backwards against the wall and held her there, his angry face within an inch of hers.

‘You want the truth, so you shall have it! When Caroline took charge of her father’s business after the second stroke, the first thing she did was to see that the ban was lifted from me, which has helped me in gathering in more work. When some of her best journeymen left, not wanting to stay on under the direction of a woman, should I have refused the fine pieces she wanted me to make for her?’ He shook her in his impatience. ‘Answer me!’

‘Yes,’ she retorted furiously, thwarted by him in her efforts to pull free. ‘I should have expected you to have more pride than to accept work from that source!’

‘I never once connected it with my former master. In any case, I bear that sick old man no malice now.’

‘What need when you have Caroline in spite of him? Doing work for her gave you the excuse to see her any time you wished!’

‘And glad I was of it!’ he responded savagely.

With a shriek of jealousy, she tried to hit him again, her range limited by the pressure of his body against hers. They struggled fiercely together until a whiff of smoke reached their nostrils at the same time. As he released her, they turned together to see that the candle had set fire to the cloth that had fallen to the floor with it. He sprang forward to start stamping out the flickering rise of the flames while she dashed into the bedchamber to fetch the ewer from the wash-stand. Rushing back, she tossed the water on to the fire, dousing it completely. She cradled the ewer to her as they stood looking at each other across the mess of water and blackened cloth on the floor between them. The air reeked of the ill-smelling smoke. Shock was in both their faces.

He spoke first, his voice intensely weary. ‘You had better get to bed. I’ll clean this up.’

She nodded, horrified that their quarrel should have endangered not only their house but the lives of their children. If the wall panelling had caught fire — it did not bear thinking about. In the bedchamber she put on a clean night-gown, the other having been splashed by the water from the ewer. She climbed into bed, hearing him still at work on the landing, and did not snuff the bedside candle, leaving it for him. Twice he went downstairs to empty the leather bucket into which he had wrung out a cloth. Waiting for him, she sat up in bed, her own anger gone and only hurt left. She could only guess at his feelings.

Downstairs John shut the back door after swilling the last of the water into the drain. He turned into his workshop and put a light to a candle there before sliding his weight on to a stool and resting his arms on the bench as he stared unseeingly at his own reflection multiplied in the leaded panes of the window. Here in the workshop he was always at peace. The difficulties and challenges of a workpiece did not constitute the kind of stress that reared spasmodically in his domestic life. He should have told Hester about Caroline’s lifting of the ban and of the aid and advice he had given her whenever a problem with the business had arisen. At first he had waited for the right moment, but that had never seemed to come. Hester, loving, laughing and exuberant, fast filling her ambition to become another right hand to him in the workshop, changed whenever the Harwood name was mentioned. A rigidness came over her, the lovely spark in her dampened down by hostility towards a woman who was no challenge to her in her security as his wife. He had not wanted to face that change in her every time a Harwood workpiece was on his bench or a delivery was due, bringing disharmony into the one sanctum, other than their bed, where he and Hester were always in complete accord. To tell her about Caroline would have been to disrupt both.

He had not expected he would have to face two feminine explosions of emotion when he had set out for the Harwood establishment that evening, but as soon as he arrived he saw that Caroline was nervous and upset. They went first into the office, as they always did, where he set down on her desk the silver casket he had made for her. After payment was made it was their custom to go upstairs to the drawing-room where she would serve him madeira and they would discuss business matters before closing the evening with some pleasant talk of books, or music or plays in which they were both interested. Sometimes she would play the harpsichord or the lute for his pleasure. Her mother never joined them. It was his guess that she disapproved of her daughter renewing a friendship that had once caused such an upheaval in the household, but Caroline was now the one to make decisions and no one could gainsay her.

‘What is wrong, Caroline?’ he enquired with concern. She had approved the casket and sat down to draw up a bankers’ draft for the amount due to him, the pen trembling in her hand. ‘Is your father failing?’

‘No more than the steady deterioration from which there is no hope of betterment.’ Her voice faltered and broke piteously. ‘It is my life that is at an end. Richard is home from the sea. He has come into his inheritance in Norfolk and his days aboard ship are over. We are to be married at the end of the month.’ She dropped the pen in a splutter of ink and covered her face with her hands.

He swung up a chair and sat down to bring his face close to hers. ‘Don’t you care for him any more? You’ve been betrothed a long time.’

Her elbows slid outwards and her head sank until her brow rested on the back of her hands in a position of abject despair. ‘He’s a good man. I do care for him.’

‘Then what has happened?’ He put a hand compassionately on her shoulder.

‘Nothing that hasn’t always been there.’ Abruptly she raised her head and looked at him in yearning, the swimming tears spilling from her eyes. ‘It’s you I love and always will.’

‘Caroline, my dear,’ he said huskily. Until now she had shown only that same calm, friendly attitude that she had maintained throughout the time when he had known only relief that she had put an end to promises between them in the hope of a new beginning. Now as then his fondness for her remained unchanged by everything that had happened throughout the past years, since that day she had set him free. If events had not gone the way they had, he would have married her and loved her with the same depth of feeling to the end of their days.

But Hester had changed everything by getting into his blood and eliminating every other woman for him, stirring him to boundless passion as Caroline had never done or would have been able to do. Life with her would always been placid to the extent where it would have been dull. Like food without salt. A dry summer without the welcome break of a thunderstorm. He would have suffocated.

She snatched up his hand and kissed it before pressing his palm against her breast, the nipple hard through the fine silk. ‘This is the last time we’ll ever be alone together.’ Her face had become flushed, a new brilliance in her eyes, and suddenly she flung herself passionately across his chest, breathing deeply. ‘Make love to me, John! Just once! Nobody will ever know and I’ll be able to live the rest of my life on the memory of having been in your arms!’

In the workshop he passed his fingers across his forehead as if to erase what was lodged in his mind’s eye. Behind him the latch of the door lifted with a click and there was a creak as it opened. He twisted round on his stool and saw Hester standing there. The sight of her wrenched at his heart. Her expressive face gave away the relief she felt at finding him there. It was obvious that in hearing no sound after he had closed the back door she believed him to have gone out again. The time must have passed slowly for her.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ he asked, although her shadowed eyes told of wakefulness.

She shook her head. ‘I could ask the same of you.’

‘It’s been a strange night,’ he said, as much to himself as to her, returning his gaze to the window. The first tint of the spring early dawn was streaking pink ribbons across the sky. Somewhere close by birds were chirping.

She pushed the door shut behind her but stayed where she was. ‘I had thought to make myself a pot of elderberry tea. Will you share a cup with me?’

He seemed not to have heard her, deep in his thoughts. Then he turned his head again and spoke as if there had been no previous conversation. ‘My life would be nothing without you, Hester.’ His heart was in his voice. ‘I should have told you about the work for the House of Harwood, but knowing it was only for a limited period I decided unwisely to keep it to myself. As it happens, there’ll be no more work from there in any case. The business is to be sold.’

‘And why is that?’ She spoke quite steadily.

‘Caroline is to be married this month. Then she’ll be leaving London to live in Norfolk.’

For the sake of her own sanity she knew she must believe that there had been nothing between Caroline and him. If Caroline’s decision to marry at last had been the cause of the haunted look in his eyes upon his return home she would not dwell on it now or at any other time. In that direction madness lay waiting to tear heart and mind and soul to shreds.

‘I wish her well,’ she said with sincerity. Caroline’s going was like a bountiful gift that the woman herself had bestowed on their future life together.

His face twisted wryly as if her words had touched a raw nerve and he looked away from her. She went forward and put a hand on his arm. He covered it with his own and held it hard for several minutes before turning his head to meet her eyes again. She touched his haggard face with the fingertips of her free hand.

‘I mentioned a cup of elderberry tea just now,’ she said almost in a whisper.

He nodded heavily on a silent sigh and slid his weight from the stool. ‘I’ll heat the water for you.’

Putting his arm about her shoulders, he kept her close to his side as they went from the workshop together. It was in the kitchen as they sat at the table opposite each other, sipping the fragrant elderberry tea, that she told him she had had the first sign suggesting she might be pregnant again.

‘I can’t be sure yet,’ she admitted uncertainly.

He gave her a tired smile, reaching out for her hand across the table and clasping it, although there was no smile in his eyes, only a deepening of the misery already there. ‘If that should be the case, then it is time we moved house. We are crowded here already.’

She wondered why she should have chosen this moment to tell him what she barely suspected. Was it to try to emphasize the marital bond between them to the exclusion of all else? On impulse, she sprang to her feet, knocking back her chair, and whirled around the table to where he sat. She drove her fingers into his hair and drew his head deep against her breasts. At once he clung to her with a groan, his arms encircling her hips. There was still a breach between them that only time could heal and she felt as lost as he.

It was from a warning carrier, who visited all workshops regularly with descriptions of stolen gold- and silverware and gave the alert on gangs of thieves, that they learned of Master Harwood’s death. It occurred only days before Caroline’s marriage, which took place as arranged the day after the funeral, quietly and privately without any of the pomp that would normally have attended it. The property had already been sold to another goldsmith. Not long afterwards they heard that the widow had left for Norfolk to live with her daughter and son-in-law. The name of Harwood had gone from London as if it had never been, except for what Hester saw as a scar left across her own marriage.

It was summer when they moved into a much larger, three-storeyed house in Nixon Square, Cripplegate, in the parish of St Giles. To Hester’s delight there was a garden to the rear where the children could play, still leaving ample space for a herbal patch where at last she could plant whatever she wished. The other residents of the sizeable square were mainly outworkers like John with workshops in their own homes, following a variety of trades from cabinet-maker to glass-grinder. As with nearly all the houses there, the entire ground floor was a workshop with ample living quarters above and a kitchen basement below. For the first time Hester was able to afford a maid in addition to retaining Abigail, who was looking forward to having a small baby to care for again. Joss was the one who suffered the biggest upheaval through the move. At nine years old he was still a serious child, conscientious and particular, his likeness to his father as marked as it had ever been.

‘There is a charity school in the countryside that I heard about,’ John said to him. ‘It has connections with St Giles’s Church. After I talked to the vicar and showed him some of the mathematical and other written work from your lessons with me, he agreed to speak to the governors on your behalf. Today I received their reply.’ He tapped the letter in his hand. ‘They are prepared to admit you. You are a fortunate lad.’