The Silversmith's Wife _ Sophia Tobin (8 page)

‘The turning is there,’ said Jesse, tapping his foot. After a moment, he reached a decision. ‘We will not go,’ he said. ‘Not today. She gave me a poor welcome the last time I called on her, and I do not have the temper for another one. Besides, there is too much to be done at home.’

‘It will not take a moment to call,’ said Alban. ‘Was Agnes worried about Mallory? Why did you not mention it before?’

‘Agnes should worry about herself,’ said Jesse, looking about him. ‘She is too kind a soul. When folks make poor choices – like welcoming Renard into a family –they should live with them. We have work to do, and I have had enough of widows for today.’

19th May, 1792

Having served my apprenticeship, I found some clients of my own who were happy to invest in me, and this is how I gained my own firm and finally landed on Bond Street. It was just before I came here that the sad story of my marriage began.

It is impossible to think of my wife with an unpolluted view, for so it is when you are deceived. Yet when I married her, she had bright skin, and seemed healthy, and altogether had an appearance of malleability, which I thought would serve me well. But that placidity was little more than a veneer; and all the impressions I had hoped to make upon her seemed to fade beyond the moment I suggested them. She did not respond to my delicate shaping, only remained her own obstinate self.

Now, she is cunning enough to be docile to my face, to pretend that she obeys me. She thinks she keeps me content with her pretence of supplication. But I know she has a rebellious heart. She thinks herself cleverer than I. Now and then, proof of it slips from her tongue, but when I reprimand her she only says that I twist her words, and cries.

With her constant weeping, and her feigned melancholy, she would make me out to be monstrous. Yet I would be a good husband if she were a good wife; I want only the chance to prove my goodness. Had I married Sarah, I might have augmented the delights of my profession with the joys of a warm bed and a large family. As it is, I am left only with her, and she is but the shell of what I was promised.

Joanna was going to the kitchen to drink a dish of tea when she found Harriet in the staircase hall, walking towards the library. She had hoped for a few moments of respite after breakfast, but when she saw the determined look on her mistress’s face, she knew it was not to be.

Harriet’s eyes lit up when she saw her. ‘Come, you are to stay with me,’ she said, holding her hand out. Joanna noticed the glance of the footman nearest the door, before he gave a slight bow of the head.

Joanna sensed Harriet’s agitation; the girl’s hand was hot and clammy in hers, and she pulled Joanna through the door with some force. Even crossing the threshold felt like an intrusion; for all its marble fireplaces and lush decoration, the library was a masculine room, decorated in a dark claret, red and gold and with mahogany furniture that absorbed the light from the three tall windows that ran along one wall. Mr Chichester sat at his desk in a deep library chair, one arm lying along the swept-up arm of the chair, holding a letter in his hand, looking up as though to form a tableau of surprise. There was an empty glass on the desk beside him, and a fire crackled in the grate. When he finally put down the letter, rose and bowed, it was with clear reluctance. Joanna curtseyed, then stood with her eyes on the exotic details of the carpet, only allowing herself the occasional glance up.

Joanna could not gain any lasting impression of Mr Chichester; despite much thought on the matter, she could not pin him down. She wondered whether it was his youth that made his looks and manner so malleable, for every impression she gained of him was as fleeting as a shadow. If you took each part of him individually he was unremarkable; the miniaturist who had painted his portrait for Harriet had made free with his looks to transform him. The face painted on the small oval of ivory that hung on Harriet’s wall in its silver-gilt frame was smooth and wide, its features depicted with an almost feminine delicacy. In reality the young man’s cheeks were faintly pitted, and his wide brow tapered on a long journey to a small chin. Around his mouth and beneath his nose the hair was trying to break through, so that he looked like a boy trying to grow a beard, each individual bristle painful to contemplate. Yet he dressed elegantly; his French valet had seen to that. Joanna found the certainty of his gaze compelling. She, who had wandered directionless for so long, never quite knowing the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, longed to bask in such certainty.

He settled himself back down in his chair and graced Joanna with a fleeting smile. ‘Miss Dunning. Do you wish to speak privately, Mrs Chichester?’ he said. Joanna curtseyed for the second time, and took a small step back in the hope that she would be allowed to withdraw.

‘Stay here,’ said Harriet.

The master pushed his chair away from the table. He was all angles, like a long puppet folded into a box. Long, crooked nose, visible cheekbones, wrists, knees, all shone out as points on a diagram, the white of bone showing under the skin. As Harriet sat down opposite him, Joanna thought how incongruous they looked together. Harriet was all blonde softness, especially now, with her slightly swollen figure. Her face was rounded, pink, and dominated by her glistening blue eyes; her husband was all cold, dry brownness, like the winter landscape outside the window.

As Harriet gazed at her husband, a smile tinged with triumph settled over her face, as though she had drunk glasses and glasses of wine, or held the perfect hand at cards. The high carriage of her head conveyed the message that she was winning some silent war, and was prepared to be charitable with him.

‘What do you have to say, madam?’ said Chichester. ‘Have you come to warn me of your extravagance? Have you been emptying Bond Street of goods?’ There was a hard sarcasm in his tone which shocked Joanna.

‘I think, perhaps, you will be more careful of my feelings,’ Harriet said, ‘when I tell you that I believe, that is, the signs seem to show, that I am with child. You will forgive me for waiting some weeks before I told you, but I wished to be sure.’

Nicholas Chichester let his hands rest on his breeches like a pair of spindly white spiders. His stare fixed on his wife’s face. His eyes were glazed and Joanna could not tell his thoughts. To her mind he looked like an ice sculpture, his self-containment frozen, yet dissolving imperceptibly moment by moment. She heard a slight creak beyond the door and wondered if the footman was looking through the keyhole. She glared in that direction and narrowed her eyes.

‘Well,’ Nicholas said eventually. He rose, took his wife’s hand, and kissed it. ‘You have done your duty. My dear girl.’ The last sentence sounded more like an insult than a term of affection.

‘Perhaps we can now send for Mr Renard,’ said Harriet. ‘Our commission, sir; a new silver service. We discussed it with him.’

‘I put him off some days ago,’ said Chichester.

‘Oh,’ said Harriet. Her voice was faint, childlike.

‘Is there anything else?’ he said, looking at the letter again. There was a long silence.

‘You sent away my coachman,’ she said. ‘He was trained in my father’s stable.’

‘And he was very much your servant, Harriet,’ said Nicholas. ‘But the horses are my concern. He hobbled my best grey.’

‘I am sure it was not his fault,’ said Harriet. ‘The roads are a disgrace in some parts of town. May I request his return? He was a good servant. Trustworthy. And it is so hard to find trustworthy servants, especially in London. I have heard you say it, sir.’

‘Touching as your concern for the government of this household is,’ said Chichester, sounding bored, ‘you need not worry yourself. His replacement has already started and I am perfectly satisfied. A lady should not concern herself over her husband’s coachman. And Harriet – you must write to your father. He can no longer deny us your portion.’ He glanced quickly at Joanna, and she thought she saw something like shame in his face.

Harriet gave a forced laugh. It sounded ugly in the grandly furnished room, reverberating off crystal and marble. ‘Is that all you have to say?’ she said.

‘I will engage Dr Taylor as your accoucheur,’ said Nicholas. ‘I understand he attended my cousin’s wife, and is a respectable man. He studied at Oxford, I believe. I trust you do not object?’

‘It hardly matters,’ she said. ‘I must go and rest. Joanna?’

Joanna tried not to look at Chichester as she followed Harriet, but she could not help glancing back once. He caught her gaze, and held it, before she looked away.

‘Joanna,’ he said, as she turned. ‘I require your presence here for a moment – once you have seen Mrs Chichester to her bed.’

She nodded.

As she supported Harriet up the stairs she glanced up, and blinked in the white winter light streaming in from the cupola in the staircase hall. It was so beautiful that she paused, and felt Harriet tug on her. If only I could breathe it in, she thought, like vapour; it would make me new again.

In Harriet’s room, Joanna helped her to the bed. As she passed her secretaire, Harriet let her hand trail over the polished veneer of purple tulipwood and mahogany. The key sat in its lock, the lank ribbon hanging from it. Once, the ribbon had been pale blue, but Harriet had taken to wearing it around her neck, and now it was grey from its proximity to her skin. She must have put the key back in the lock that morning.

‘You may open it if you wish,’ she said, catching Joanna’s eye as though daring her to do so. ‘For in there lies what was once the promise of happiness.’

‘I won’t open it, madam,’ said Joanna. God knew what was in there, but she didn’t want to. And for all Harriet’s dramatics, she thought, it probably contained nothing but the detritus of a privileged childhood: a feather here, a piece of ribbon there, a jewel.

She excused herself from the room with a low curtsey, and ran back down the stairs. Mr Chichester was waiting in the staircase hall. He did not respond to her smile with one of his own.

‘Renard, the silversmith, has been murdered,’ he said. ‘Do not tell her; she should be spared the shock of it, for now.’

Joanna could say nothing; her face was frozen in its customary blankness, but her lips parted with shock, and she felt heat gathering in her face. Mr Chichester’s gaze softened. ‘It is a terrible thing,’ he said. ‘Our streets are not safe.’

Joanna shook her head, and managed a poor curtsey as he walked away. She was glad he had instructed her not to tell Harriet; she had been particularly fragile of late, and Joanna had the feeling that the loss of the silversmith would send her into a fit of the vapours.

‘Did I hear aright?’ said one of the footmen, approaching her as she stood immobile, one hand on the balustrade. ‘Is the French silversmith dead?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and turned away. She ran up to the first landing, then through the hidden door so she could go up the back stairs. She needed movement, and solitude, to calm her feelings. She made her way up to the servants’ floor, where she had a room to herself.

When Harriet was at her most trying, she asked Joanna to sleep near her, but Joanna preferred her garret room. She had requested it specifically when Harriet’s mother had interviewed her, and on her first day Mrs Holland had handed over the key, raising her eyebrows as she did it.

Once inside the room she closed the door behind her, turned the key, and sat on the bed. She still felt hot, and slightly sick, as though she was beginning a fever. She put her head in her hands.

Damn Renard, she thought. Damn his sly looks and his cold eyes and his flattering tongue. Even in death, he had found a way to disarrange everything. It was not just that she would have to deal with Harriet; there was something else, infinitely more precious to her, another loss that she could not afford.

She dragged the wooden locking box out from under the bed.

From the candle compartment she took what she was looking for: a small packet of paper. She opened it, and gazed at the tiny curl of dark brown hair there. She had retained just a strand or two, for she wanted some always before her eyes so that she would not forget the colour. She had given the larger lock of hair up for setting; it had been in Mr Renard’s possession, and now she feared it was lost. She folded up the packet and kissed it, stifling the sob which had taken hold of her throat. She had no time to grieve, not now. She must go back to Harriet, and behave as though everything was normal.

She went to her window and looked out over Berkeley Square, trying to think herself out of sorrow, and the view did offer some relief. She had waited for snow for a long time, and now it was getting colder, she had the hope of it. Disciplining her focus, she imagined Berkeley Square blanketed in white, the young trees bowing with snow, the black prints of animals and early risers criss-crossing it. There will be beauty, she thought, for the snow made everything new, transforming dirt into purity and muffling the harsh noises of the city. The places she had long grown tired of seeing would seem lit up by some internal light, redeemed by the silent fall of snowflakes.

Without thinking, her arms formed a cradle against her chest, and she looked down upon the face of an imaginary baby, her right thumb stroking the cheek. ‘Maybe there will be a Frost Fair, my love,’ she said, out loud, then caught herself. But she only felt foolish for a moment. What did it matter if she spoke out loud, in an empty room?

As Digby emerged from the pawnbroker’s shop he told himself it was impossible that anyone could have followed him. The place was so hidden in the maze of alleyways off the Strand that he would be hard-pressed to find it again. So disturbed was he that he even passed a tavern without pausing, keeping his eyes on the ground and pushing forwards to the main thoroughfare. He wanted a drink, and badly, but he also wanted to find his way out of this place, the light falling like mist into the dark and polluted air. If he felt guilty, he didn’t want to admit it.

The pawnbroker had a tiny room, with a barred window, and a few meagre trays of seals and rings set out there. It seemed strange to Digby that the man even bothered with those trays, for surely to find him you would have to know where he dwelt. You wouldn’t simply pass by such a place. The man, his eyeglass permanently held in his eye socket with a spasm-like squint, had looked over the seals and the small gold pendant with its lock of hair set under crystal. Then he had dropped the eyeglass from his eye and caught it in one smooth movement. When he first named a price Digby didn’t hear him; he was too busy looking at the man’s face, disliking the cynical expression there, the one raised eyebrow.

He hit the Strand. His hand was clenched around the watch; he was stewing it with his own sweat. He let go, feeling its weight in the depths of his pocket, thinking perhaps the heat and moisture would hurt the precious thing in some way. He had meant to lay it on the table, for the man would have given him such a price for it. He had half-relished the idea of seeing the man’s expression at that. Such a masterwork would never have ordinarily found its way into this back alleyway full of greasy brooches and rings. But when the moment had come, he had not done it. There was the doubt, after all – if the pawnbroker had seen the handbills circulated by Taylor telling of the watch’s theft, Digby could not count on the man’s dishonesty to save him. Before he had left his room, he had separated off Renard’s seals and pendants in his other pocket, making them easy to hand over separately, so now he wondered whether he had ever meant to do it at all.