The Silversmith's Wife _ Sophia Tobin (20 page)

‘Forgive me, I am not making myself clear,’ he said urgently. ‘I have come to ask you if you will consider becoming my wife. As I said, my accounts are all in order, and I can present them to Dr Taylor at his convenience.’

Mary searched for, but could not find, emotion in his eyes. But of course, she thought; he speaks of money, why would he not? I was a fool to have imagined more. It felt to her as though the colour had drained out of the surroundings. She had placed meaning on such inconsequential events, so many years ago. All at once she felt ridiculous, and wronged, and angry. The memory of Mr Exham speaking to Benjamin on the stairs was still sharp.

‘Despite all the rumours, Mr Steele,’ she said, ‘I am not a good investment. I thank you for your kind offer. I will pretend you never made it.’ As she turned away, she felt as though every piece of warmth had fled to the core of her body, leaving her weak.

‘Wait,’ he said.

She stood still, her back to him.

‘I did not think of the money,’ he said in low voice. She felt, rather than heard, him take a step towards her. ‘I ask you to consider my offer,’ he said. ‘It is honestly made.’

She waited for a moment, but no more words came from him. She felt no flicker of temper; only the leadenness of disappointment in her stomach.

‘Do not make me repeat myself,’ she said, but she did not move. There was something she had to ask. She didn’t know whether it was because she had to guard the pillaged treasure of the past, or let it be finally trampled and laid waste.

‘Did you think of me much these past years?’ she said.

She saw Avery watching them, silently, from across the aisle.

‘Why would I?’ he said. ‘You were married, and far from me.’

There was nothing she could say in response; she only looked at him, as though for the last time.

‘I promise always to be honest with you,’ he said.

Mary turned, curtseyed without meeting his eyes, then left the church. It was only out in the darkness of Jermyn Street that Avery finally caught up with her.

2nd June, 1792

I was looking over the ledgers tonight, when my wife interrupted me with her meaningless chatter. When she remarked that Benjamin seemed to be a good boy, but a little timid, I detected her cunning at work. I told her that she was not to criticize him, and that he meant more to me than she knew, and at this she protested. It is my habit to keep things close to me and not to share them with Mary, but I could not help but tell her that there had been someone before her, far better than she. Yet when I spoke it did not quite come out so; there was a bitterness to my words. I am vexed that I did not keep myself more in check, but when a man has been wounded so many times, it is natural that a little venom should now and then escape. I must follow Dr Taylor’s example, be patient, and pray, for I know God is just.

Alban lay back on the mattress, the footsteps of his nieces and nephews pounding backwards and forwards on the floorboards. He was exhausted, but the sound of their running feet comforted him. He remembered what it was like to be a child, to run thoughtlessly, when every day was like a new lifetime.

Jesse came down the stairs, yawning. ‘Don’t get up,’ he said. ‘What time did you work until?’

Alban shrugged.

‘Listen to them. Doesn’t it make you glad not to be a father?’ said Jesse.

Alban said nothing. He did think that perhaps it was for the best that he would never be a father now; he did not want to watch his children become mired in the cares of the world. But he wished Jesse and Agnes would stop trying to prise acceptance out of him. He could seek it in his own way, though he did not wish to rebuff their kindness.

As he lay there he could not chase away his memory of eleven years before. We were not alone, he thought, for one moment long ago. I know we found each other. A brief illumination, as when a cloud moves away from the sun, before another passes over it.

He said to himself now that Mary had punished him for telling the truth. Her vanity had been unable to bear it. He had not had time to explain that there would have been no point in thinking of her, or torturing himself with a useless jealousy Until that day on Bond Street he had believed himself dead to her, and it would have been as pointless as banging his head against a wall to have dwelt on the hope that had flared so briefly into life and then been snuffed out.

What he had not told her was that in those moments after their eyes had met, so many years ago, he had committed her name to memory, holding the swaying Eli in his arms, the child all warmth and life and glowing blue eyes. Mary Just. He had pictured the letters of it in the way he remembered decorative motifs, borders, edgings, designs, so that it could be assigned to his visual memory. He was a man who saved scraps of beauty, who buried precious things in his mind, hoarding them to be used later in the process of creation. So he had said her name, then buried it. He had not dwelt on her in the intervening years. Occasionally, in the long evenings when he drew, he would fall into a reverie, and return to London, and Mary, in his imagination. One evening he had designed a dinner service; drawn it completely to his own taste. He could see it on his own table, and the life he could have lived. She was there, in that life, even if she was only represented in the cypher he had drawn of their initials. Her name had always been there. If she could not see the sanctity of it, that was her fault.

When he had come home from church and told them what had happened, Agnes had left the room, her hand clamped across her mouth, and tears in her eyes.

‘She is emotional, it’s the breeding,’ said Jesse. ‘She wishes you to stay, as we all do. She had some vision of you with a wife and a houseful of children.’

‘I will stay until you no longer need me,’ said Alban.

‘It is a cursed house, that Renard place,’ said Jesse. His expression was grim and hard. ‘And she is part of the curse.’

‘Why would you say that?’ said Alban. The cruelty in Jesse’s tone chilled him; he was glad Agnes had left the room. ‘Say you do not mean it, or we will have words.’

Jesse sighed. ‘Forgive me. If I speak harshly, it is out of loyalty to you. That woman has grieved you, and I am sorry for my part in it. I wish I could make her suffer as you do now.’

‘Do not say that,’ said Alban. ‘I do not wish her ill. She has done nothing wrong. And my injury is slight; I will forget it in a week. I was wrong to make a hasty proposal based on one look eleven years ago.’

When Mary entered the shop it was past ten in the morning. It did not seem as dark as usual, for Grisa had taken down some of the black velvet which had draped it in mourning, and the winter light reflected off the glass in the counter and presses. He held a salver up, turning it in his hands, inspecting the ornate chasing. It flashed in the light as he flipped it: white, grey, white, grey. Mary longed to rest her hands on its smooth coldness. Beside it, on the counter, a set of six salts had been placed, part unwrapped. Apiece of sacking was still draped over one of them. With her right forefinger Mary unhooked it and let it fall silently on the counter.

‘It is beautiful work,’ she said. Grisa looked at her, taking his eyeglass out.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Nothing but the best for the firm of Pierre Renard’s, though we strike your mark on it now.’

‘Who made it?’ said Mary.

‘Jesse Chamac’s workshop,’ said Grisa, and Mary felt a sick stab of distress in her stomach. ‘The new man, Alban, does fine work. I have asked him to send more pictures too, for he designs, and they have just the right look: clean, not like that ornate heavy stuff. Hullo there!’ He waved his hand, and Mary looked back to see the watchman at the window, raising his hand in greeting. She nodded, and smiled, and he walked on. ‘He keeps looking in,’ said Grisa, raising an eyebrow. ‘I feel looked-after.’

Mary touched one of the salts, its cold surface hard and unyielding. It was edged with beading.

‘When were these made?’ she said.

‘They have just been delivered,’ said Grisa.

Mary ran her fingers over the beading. The pieces of silver had been made by a confident hand. They had the charisma of things thought about, more than pleasing, as though the craftsmen had set his finger on the balance of nature. Alban may have made this, she thought: he may have turned it in his hands. She imagined him at work at his bench. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to be a silversmith, as though those hands – large, rough hands with long fingers, she remembered – had been made to shape metal. Despite the keenness of her disappointment in church, she had found that she could not shake off her good opinion of him. Now, when she thought of him she felt sad; a sadness that lay lightly over everything like a layer of dust.

‘I’ll have the boy polish them,’ said Grisa, narrowing his eyes at her putting her hands all over the salts. ‘Let’s hope the customer pays this time.’

‘What of that?’ she said, pointing at a large monteith, plain but immense, on the floor beside Grisa’s feet.

‘It is to be melted down and refashioned,’ said Grisa.

Mary nodded. Pierre had loved the melting down of old pieces to make new; it had reminded him of his own desire for constant reinvention. She remembered him with an old salver to be scrapped, bending it with his bare hands just for the sport of it, stamping on it, laughing. If she was truthful, she had despised him for his ready destruction of something that had been made with such care. Yet she had laughed when he urged her to. How she despised her pliability now.

There were no customers about, so Mary wrapped a cloak around her and, not heeding Grisa’s silent disapproval, went out on to the street. She stood for a moment looking up and down, when she saw Mr Digby advancing towards her. The early morning light made his red hair appear even brighter, and his blue eyes fixed on her with a mournful expression.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘It looks as though ’twill be a fine day.’

‘Let us hope so,’ she said. ‘Forgive me, but sir, I have meant to thank you for some time. You helped me one day, when they were taking the table on to Bond Street from Dr Taylor’s house. And then I saw you at my husband’s funeral. Are you watching over me, Mr Digby?’

She smiled, and he smiled in return, though he seemed unaccustomed to it, wearing the expression with some awkwardness.

‘I am meant to watch,’ he said. ‘It is what I am for. If I have the reward of your good opinion, then there is no need for thanks.’

Mary opened her mouth to express acquiescence, but something told her that Digby did not wish for any more polite exchanges. He seemed comfortable in the silence between them, making no move to go. His hands clasped behind his back, he looked up at the sky as though pleased to feel the sun on his face.

‘When I see the street all quiet in the morning light,’ he said, ‘it looks new to me. I could imagine myself a boy again, as I was when I first saw it. There is an art to looking so, do you not think?’

‘It is art,’ said Mary. ‘It is money, too. This street keeps alive always. I used to think it the scenery where my life is lived, but now I think that Bond Street has its own life, which will continue when we are gone. But forgive me, you must think me a madwoman, venturing out without a hat on my head, talking away.’

‘It is a pleasure to hear you speak,’ he said.

‘But such dark thoughts,’ she said, ‘I should keep to myself.’

‘You do not seem, to me, to be a lady capable of dark thoughts,’ he said.

‘I am capable of it,’ she said. ‘I am frightened what I am capable of.’

‘Yet if you will excuse me,’ he said, ‘I can’t believe a bad thing would cross your mind, when I see you like this, with the light on your face.’

‘There was a time when that was true,’ she said. ‘When I was young, and all my family was around me. As I remember it, I was surrounded by love, even amidst all the cares of life.’

‘And what surrounds you now?’ Digby said. He looked absorbed; his words were not formulated with intent, but spoken naturally.

She turned and looked at him. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

He knew that it would take some time for Mallory to come to the door, but he could not leave it. She struck him as the type of woman who did not like unexpected callers, especially if they were repeat offenders. Sure enough when she opened the door she stood motionless for a moment, looking at him with suspicion.

‘How can I help you, Mr Digby?’ she said.

‘May I come in, Mrs Dunning?’ he said.

She opened the door wider. ‘Paying calls in the day now as well as the night, are you?’ she said. ‘We have none of the apple tart left, I’m afraid. It is buttered cabbage or nothing.’

The hallway smelt musty and closed-up to Digby. Mallory showed him into the parlour, and in the daylight it looked even more threadbare than he remembered it. She waved him into a seat, and when a child came hurtling through the door she pushed her, rather less than gently, back in the direction of the hall and kitchen where, he presumed, there would be someone else to look after her.

‘I wanted to tell you myself,’ he said, ‘that a couple of us went to your shop and it was exactly as you say, nothing to worry about at all. There was a similar coffee pot, but it had been there some time, and the maid was mistaken.’

‘I know you’ve been there, I get my report as I said,’ she replied. ‘But it’s good of you to come and tell me that. It makes me sick to think that someone would slander me in that way, when they know it would mean the noose for such a crime.’ She moved as though she might stand up, and see him out.

‘And there was one more thing,’ he said. ‘The night Pierre Renard died, did you speak to him?’

She had backbone, he had to give her that; she sat completely still. There were no hysterics or fainting away, only her dark eyes, fixed on his face. ‘Now who would have told you that?’ she said.

‘I’ve heard it from the lips of more than one person,’ Digby lied. ‘The thing is, Mrs Dunning, I don’t feel like speaking with anyone about it. And I won’t, if you tell me what you had to say to him.’

‘Is there some other payment that you want?’ she said. He saw the suspicion in her eyes. ‘We may as well skip to that, if there is. I know what people think of me,’ she said. ‘Living alone as I do, with just the children.’

‘I have just seen your sister, Mrs Renard,’ he said. ‘I would never think of either of you with anything less than respect.’

‘My sister lives in a different world to me, as well you know. Well, I do not have the kind of life that she has, but she has paid dearly for it. What I am trying to say is, I don’t like men coming here and demanding things of me.’ Her voice was louder, resonating with firmness, almost aggression.

‘Now, now,’ said Digby. ‘I know what you’re driving at and I’m not demanding anything. I just want to know what you had to say to him. I’m sure a charming creature such as yourself wouldn’t have been involved in anything untoward. Though I am doubly sure there are men who would do anything for you, if you asked them. Men like Jesse Chamac, for example.’

Just beyond the window a disagreement had erupted and a man was shouting, but Mallory neither looked out nor flinched. She sat as though listening for her children, a distant background noise of small voices. Eventually, satisfied, she leaned forwards towards Digby.

‘I can fight my own battles,’ she said, in an undertone. ‘If you must know, I did speak to Renard that evening. I went to ask him to give my son an apprenticeship. You see how I live, and I was just about done with having nothing from him but insults. It was understood by my parents that through marriage, Renard would be a help to us all; that my eldest boy, at least, could count on an apprenticeship from him. My parents may be in heaven now but I meant that man to honour the promise he made them. I went to call at Bond Street, but I met him before I got to his house, at the corner of Old Bond Street and Piccadilly. He had been drinking, and was in a hurry to get somewhere. But I wouldn’t let him move on until I had an answer from him. It was my right.’ Her eyes were bright with anger.

‘What did he say to you?’ said Digby.