Read The Silversmith's Wife _ Sophia Tobin Online
Authors: Sophia Tobin
The Silversmith's Wife _ Sophia Tobin
Silversmith’s
Wife
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Sophia Tobin 2014
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Sophia Tobin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
HB ISBN: 978-1-47112-808-0
TPB ISBN: 978-1-47112-809-7
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-47112-811-0
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
To my parents
November, 1792
‘Who’s there?’
Edward Digby heard the hoarseness of his shout as though watching himself from a distance. He felt his breath catch in his throat. For a moment there was no reply, and his right hand went instinctively to the hilt of his knife, feeling the reassuring texture of the cloth-bound handle beneath his fingers. Even in the open space of this elegant square, every dark corner was threatening. He was alone on the watch and it was past midnight: late, too late for anyone respectable to be hiding in the shadows.
‘Show yourself,’ he shouted.
‘It’s Bright Hemmings,’ came a familiar, plaintive voice. ‘I came to find you. Someone’s stolen my pig again.’
Digby almost laughed out loud with relief, but instead began to cough. With every inhalation of cold air he felt a nagging pain grate in his lungs. He had caught a cold, and he knew he wouldn’t shift it until the sun broke through winter again and the daffodils were blooming in St James’s Park. If I live that long, he thought grimly. Predictably, the coughing fit brought little relief. Even as he caught his breath, he could feel the corruption, flickering and insistent, in the back of his throat. ‘Evening to you Bright,’ he croaked eventually, his voice splintering and dying. ‘Another one lost, eh?’
Bright had emerged from the shadows: a slight figure, his black eyes shining in the lantern beam, with an exaggerated expression of outrage on his face. He was a local joke. Every time he acquired a new pig it was gone within a week, leaving only the reproach of its smell and a few handfuls of soiled straw fluttering in its empty stall. At the sight of Digby he launched himself into a litany of complaints about pig-stealing and the treachery of neighbours.
‘Foes are all around, Edward Digby, you mark my words. They’ve taken her: my Sunbeam. There’s not a person this side of Piccadilly I’d trust to leave my livestock be.’
He was about to continue when Digby cut him off. ‘That’s enough,’ he croaked. ‘I don’t have Watkin with me tonight. I’ll make enquiries in the morning.’
‘No you won’t!’ cried Bright, his voice growing shriller. ‘You’ll leave me complaining to the air, just as you did before.’
‘I swear it,’ said Digby. As he walked away he swore under his breath. His heart was still hammering in his chest. ‘Stupid bastard,’ he muttered.
He walked swiftly down Hays Mews. The smell of horseshit and hay didn’t disturb him, thanks to his blunted senses. Behind the grand terraces of Berkeley Square the mews buildings crouched in darkness and near-silence apart from the occasional shifting of one of the equine inhabitants, a faint nicker or the sound of a shod hoof on poorly covered stone. Their human attendants were still, probably lying in death-sleeps of fatigue. Digby wished he could join them. He hurried on, thinking of his bed. On Hill Street the pale moonlight picked out details here and there, like highlights on a watercolour.
Normally Digby was glad of a full moon – at least he could see his way across the ground and identify potential hazards without hunching over his lantern beam. But tonight, patrolling alone without Watkin, the sight of it made him shiver. He felt there was something malevolent about it. The wind rustled through the trees to the north of the square. He put his collar up and hurried on, stopping once to succumb to another coughing fit. This was the only stretch he had to do alone tonight: he would meet with other members of the watch on Hay Hill. Damn Watkin and his pointless reading society; now, he would be poised over some volume of poetry, his lips moving. Digby knew the learning he got would be of no use to him on London’s streets.
Candles were still burning in the tall town houses on Berkeley Square; Digby saw their soft glow beyond fanlights and windows as he passed alongside the facades of the houses. Some were tall rectangles of dark brick; others had frontages of chalk-white stucco. No one house was the same, as though the rich families contained within were asserting their individuality. The square had been built only fifty years before, raised out of the mud by prospectors with building leases and high hopes. Digby’s grandfather had told him stories of it as a child; he knew where the buildings had come from, and he knew what had been here before: Brick Close, a patch of land that had once been a farm, with a sewer at its south end. This knowledge, he fancied, gave him a kind of superiority to the grand ladies and gentlemen that lived there. He tried to remind himself of it. The houses were just bricks and mortar, even those set behind high walls like separate estates, and the people within, living souls, just as fragile as him. Yet the houses seemed as inviolable as churches, and as serene, as though they had always been there.
As he walked, Digby felt his jaw tighten, the old familiar resentment. It was the same every night. He never considered how often he repeated himself; each night he picked at the scab of his hatred. Past his fortieth year, he hated with the intensity of a young man, just as he still yearned. The women who had come and gone in his life had all urged him to pray – strange, that, how he drew them to him, all these holy women – but he always ignored attempts to force serenity upon him. The only prayer he ever said was a line from the evening service:
lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.
He felt it fitted him, for now he was a private watchman, paid by the wealthiest inhabitants of the square to keep watch over the hours of darkness. He was nothing to them, but he kept his sharp eyes trained on their lives. On a summer’s night he might pause, and try to see in their windows from a distance, as though by glimpsing a silk-covered wall, a candlestick or even – if he was lucky – a face, his curses might have more meat to feed on.
But this night he had an overwhelming urge to huddle into his coat, to fold his arms and suffocate the infection out of himself, so he was denied the pleasure of watching the houses. He was in pain, and felt as if his bones were sewn together with threads of ice, crystals forming in their marrow. He wasn’t stopping for anyone.
Stepping off the path he dodged a young man driving a phaeton too fast: it passed him with the clatter of hooves and wheels, heading for the mews. Digby stayed against the railings, glancing warily behind him at the dark heart of the square. They had planted young trees there, as though trying to create a country estate in the midst of the city of filth and ashes.
At a quiet stretch on the square, where a house stood vacant, a faint cry made him stop and look about. A woman? He paused and listened. In the distance he could still hear the sound of Bright Hemmings wailing about his bloody pig, and wondered that his reedy voice could carry so far. He supposed it was for his benefit. Who else would listen to him at this time of night apart from thieves and vagabonds? He thought about going back and telling the man to be quiet if he valued his life.
As he walked on a shiver ran through him, from the top of his head to the depths of his guts. He looked around. Something was wrong.
Then he spotted it. There was a dark mound on the other side of the railings bordering Berkeley Square: an irregularity in the chill depths of the grass, the edge of something protruding from shadow. He marvelled that he should know his beat so well; that the moonlight sliding off one curved surface should draw his eye.
‘Who’s there?’ he said.
There was no reply.
He grasped the ring of keys in his pocket, wincing at the cold of them, and went to open the nearest gate into the square. It moved at his touch; it had been left unlocked. As it creaked open, his hand found the knife hilt again.
The irregular shape was a man asleep, face down in the grass, beside one of the young plane trees. Digby relaxed a little. A drunk.
‘Come on, you,’ he said. He tried to inject some levity into his tone. The man did not move. Digby was faintly aware that in the distance Bright Hemmings had fallen silent. He and this man were alone in the heavy darkness of the London night. ‘Wake up,’ he said, giving the inert mass a sharp, practiced kick. It did not stir.
He changed the details in the telling, of course, but that was how Edward Digby found Pierre Renard dead.
28th April, 1792
This book has been ordered special for me from Mr Laveen. The best marbled paper, the finest calfskin, although we had a dispute about the quality of the gilding; but it is well enough. One day, all of the things in my house will be as beautiful as this book.
I wish to keep a record of my thoughts; not just for myself (for there are few persons I can confide in), but because the generations that follow me will wish to know of Pierre Renard. Founder of a dynasty of silversmiths. Gentleman. This is not mere intention, but resolution; I have my eyes set high. This precious record will serve as a reminder of the rough road I have travelled, when I one day come to write of my life. For now, I will keep it tucked away: as safe as silver.
She did not know what prompted her to turn her eyes away from the full moon on that winter’s evening in 1781. She had waited, unmoving, for so long, her face cold against the windowpane.
That was when she saw him. Even before she could make out his face, she recognized the way he moved, each step with a confident spring to it. Hope died in her, as quietly as a candle snuffed out by a draught. She had allowed herself to hope he would not come.
All day she had listened for the sound of her brother Eli’s footsteps on the stairs; she kept forgetting that he had been taken to stay with her aunt. Without him the house seemed to have lost its soul, and the silence was heavy and charged, like the air when a storm is approaching. She longed to hear his laughter and his quick, lively footsteps. But Mary had been made to understand that Eli’s absence was absolutely necessary: the survival of her marriage prospects depended upon it. A clean, healthy bloodline, Pierre had said: strong, wholesome sons. Pierre Renard esteemed Mary, but the small brother who sat watching him, staring as though he could see into the very soul of a person: he was a problem.
‘Look at the silversmith’s moon, Marie,’ Mr Renard said that evening, her name becoming French under the influence of his voice. When they had first met, she had thought it was mere affectation, for though of French parentage, he had been born in England. But now she realized his accent strengthened by habit rather than will, when he was trying to make love to her, or persuade a stranger of his artistic heritage. She said nothing.
‘What do you see?’ he said.
‘The night sky,’ she said. He gave a little sigh: the wrong answer. She tried again. ‘The full moon?’ she said, and was relieved to feel his hands squeeze her arms, a gesture of approbation.
‘When you see the moon,’ he said, ‘I see silver. A blank disc of silver, waiting on my bench to be worked. It is the moment I love the most.’ His voice lowered to a whisper, as though he was telling her some profound secret. ‘The moment of potential.’
After he had gone, she stood at the window, and thought: it is not too late, not yet. I must do something, now. I must end this.
Mary came to with a start. The memory stayed with her, fading only as she looked around her, and she realized she had been dreaming of a time long ago, and of events that were fixed and irreversible. Eleven years had passed from that November night to this one – but still, the words moved through her mind, as slowly as a piece of cotton pulled through the eye of a needle.
It is not too late. I must do something. I must end this.
Dazed and half-asleep, she rubbed her eyes and breathed steadily, waiting for her heartbeat to slow. She was alone; in her little parlour, the fire was burning low, casting shadows on the wall behind her. She shifted in the hard chair: mahogany, with a shield-shaped back, chosen by her husband. She wondered if he wished her always to be uncomfortable. As she put her hand back to rub her neck she felt that her skin was damp with sweat.
‘Pierre?’ she called, and heard her voice falter. She was relieved when there was no response. But of course: after dinner he had left with the words ‘I may be late’, by which she knew that he would be gone for most of the evening, and possibly all night. She had said nothing and tried to keep her expression neutral, an approach that sometimes calmed Pierre, and sometimes maddened him. For a man who had made his way from obscurity to a goldsmith’s shop on Bond Street, he had a surprisingly thin skin.
Mary glanced nervously at the clock: it was nearly one, and her hands went to her keys before she remembered that she had secured the doors straight after dinner. Some instinct had urged her to make the tour of the house then, locking the inhabitants into their rooms – customary in many houses, but strictly adhered to at Pierre Renard’s establishment on New Bond Street. Had she fallen asleep without doing it, she would have been culpable indeed.
In the long evenings when he left her alone, she would step on to the street for a moment before locking the door, casting one brief look up and down, lest her husband was approaching. She could not recall doing it this evening, but her slippers were damp, so she must have done. She closed her eyes, and massaged her temples: two glasses of red wine at dinner had dulled her nerves, but now she could not remember the evening, only her intention to be safe, and her fear of her husband’s displeasure. It was the monotony of trying to please Pierre; each nerve strained in one direction, so that every other part of life was peripheral. Her husband’s approval was a thin line to walk, and she often stepped off it by accident. At the thought of it a cold, hard little bead of anger rolled in her stomach; every day she felt it sitting there, insoluble, like one of the pills her husband bade her take to help her breed, Dr Taylor’s scrawled writing on the label.
A noise. She tensed.
Someone was knocking on the front door.
There was a short pause, and when the sound came again, it was harder. Soon it was joined by another noise – was someone calling? She sat, immobile with fear. The silver and gold plate were never far from her mind, and the house was vulnerable without its master. Her maid would be fast asleep; Grisa, the shop manager, was in his lodgings a street away; and though the apprentice slept in the shop downstairs he was merely a boy.
‘Marie.’
She heard the shout; heard her name, indistinct, but pronounced as only he would. If he was shouting in the street he was in drink and in a vengeful mood. She ran downstairs and took to unlocking the door, her hands clumsy and fumbling in the near darkness. Luckily she had left the bar off, not feeling strong enough to lift it. When she finally opened the door the face that appeared out of the night was not that of her husband, but his friend, Dr Taylor, the physician.
‘Oh,’ she said, giving a little sigh of relief.
He leaned against the doorframe, as though trying to diminish his height – six foot in his stockinged feet, as he was proud of saying. ‘Mrs Renard,’ he said. And his words, too, came out with a sigh, as though after all his knocking he was sorry she had come to the door.
‘Dr Taylor,’ she said, with a small curtsey. ‘It is very late, sir.’ She wondered whether he was in liquor; there was something not quite right about the expression on his face. He was always a plainer dresser than Pierre, but normally so fastidious that it was strange to see him in dishevelled clothes, and the wig he normally wore – a little old-fashioned, but elegant – left off. It made him look curiously vulnerable.
They regarded each other in the moonlight. His eyes were shining, watery; he looked as though he was on the brink of tears.
‘Do you wish to come in?’ she suggested helpfully, then cautioned: ‘My husband is not at home.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘But it is for him that I am here.’
Talking in riddles, she thought in her befuddled brain. Perhaps it is some game they have been playing again – she knew how Pierre and Taylor delighted each other with wordplay, though she often thought they sounded like overgrown children. She let him in, and directed him up to the parlour. If he was going to speak cryptically to her, they may as well be warm; and as for respectability – there was no one respectable out to know that she was receiving him without Pierre in the house. She followed him up the stairs wearily.
She thought later how strange it was that he should make such a mess of it. Dear Dr Taylor, who was normally so authoritative; so used, as a doctor, to presiding over birth and death. Yet there he was, walking up and down her parlour, the floorboards protesting beneath his heavy feet, his hesitant speech fading to a mumble as he groped for words. He said her husband’s name several times, as though by saying it, it would give him the momentum to speak on, but each time his voice trailed off, and he muttered the name of Digby, and spoke of Berkeley Square, and of footpads.
‘Please tell me what has happened,’ she said, eventually. Taylor ceased his pacing. He stood over her. It was odd to see his face, which usually bore an expression of jovial kindness, twisted with sorrow, the shadows and the firelight laying contrasts on it, making him seem gargoyle-like.
‘He is dead,’ he said. ‘Someone has taken him from us. I am sorry. So very sorry.’ Then, hesitantly: ‘Marie.’ It was the use of her Christian name that most clearly showed his distress; until this night, he had never said it. A fat tear rolled down his cheek.
Mary stared at the floorboards, and the Turkey rug that Pierre had made such a fuss over. ‘Make sure it is brushed, Ellen, and brushed properly,’ he had said to the maid before he left. There was a spot of dirt on it. She had to resist falling on to her knees and picking it up, pincering it between the nails of her thumb and forefinger, before Pierre came back and saw it.
‘Has the constable been called?’ she said.
‘The watchman will make his report to him, but – when he was found – there was no one nearby.’
‘How did he die?’ she said. She knew it was an unlady-like question, but she also knew that in his current state, Taylor would tell her; tomorrow, it would be too late, but for now, all delicacy and convention had flown.
‘They cut his throat,’ he said. His voice was barely a whisper.
Tick, tock, went Pierre’s lantern clock, and as Mary’s eyes darted around the room, all she could see were things chosen by her husband, for he had crafted his home carefully. She gazed on the dull brass colour of the lantern clock; it was over a hundred years old, he had told her when he bought it. She would have preferred something else in this room: something made of wood, ‘something feminine’, he had scoffed. Everything in the house had been done to his liking. Except for the papers in this room: cream, with little scarlet fruits. They had agreed on the choice, startling each other with acquiescence.
She heard the doctor pull a chair towards her, and felt him take her hands. They were unexpectedly rough. He was an accoucheur, and she had always assumed his hands would be soft, silken, for attending to a woman’s most delicate parts; but no, these were large paws, chapped, as though if you stroked them the wrong way the skin would rise up like scales.
I never had a child, she thought. And I never will, now. In this, as in so many ways, I failed my husband and my family. She closed her eyes and thought: my poor, dead father, and his promises.
The night he had proposed to her, Pierre had made her come to him on the front steps of her father’s house. He was standing just beyond the front step, looking up at the night sky. He seemed elaborately posed; had her father given him a few minutes to prepare himself? Beneath his cutaway coat she glimpsed the lilac satin waistcoat and the large watch he was so proud of, the gold case chased with putti and clouds, and bordered by thin slices of coloured hardstone. He treasured that watch; he never let anyone touch it but him, keeping them at a distance with one hand as he showed it to them. His shoe buckles were new additions, set with glittering white pastes, and were larger than any she had seen before. He stood as though he was acutely aware of them, and wanted to show them to their best advantage. Every movement said: you are lucky, madam. I have chosen you. Every movement had spoken of self-confidence, and his certainty that he would rise in the world. Now, someone had cut him down.
She did not know how long she sat with Dr Taylor, only that her reverie was broken by the house itself, warning her of the people within. She heard footsteps on the wooden floors upstairs; the suggestion of her servant’s and lodgers’ voices. ‘I’d better unlock the doors. They’ll have heard you come in,’ she said. But instead of going up she went straight downstairs, to the door that divided the hall from the shop. Again, she had to fumble with the keys to get the door open.
On the other side her husband’s apprentice was standing. He alone of the house’s inhabitants had stayed quiet, but he was dressed and awake. She had guessed he would be most afraid, and she could see he was trembling. She put a hand out to him in reassurance. He was still recognizable as the fifteen-year-old sent to them from the Welsh borders some five months before who had taken to following Pierre around with the grateful look of a rescued cur. The dim candlelight glanced off his blonde head, his blue eyes in their bruised hollows wide with misgiving. He did not take her hand.
‘Come on, Benjamin,’ she said. ‘There are bad tidings. Your master is dead.’ Her voice wavered only slightly on the word: dead. The boy looked at her dumbly. She gave him the keys. ‘Go upstairs. Unlock the others. I haven’t the strength.’
It was unprecedented for her to hand over the keys, but Benjamin took them without a word and bolted past her. As she went back into the parlour, Mary heard the thumps and creaks as he ascended the upper stairs in his lumbering, heavy-footed way. She sat down again.
‘You may go, Dr Taylor,’ she said. ‘It is late. You must be needed at home.’
The doctor stood up, but did not show any sign of going to the door. ‘He was a good man,’ he said. ‘He was my best friend, in all the world.’ At the sight of her face, he seemed to remember himself. ‘My sincere condolences. Are you sure you wish me to leave? Can I not be of assistance in some way?’ He stayed where he stood, looking her over as though she was one of his patients. She felt the piercing intensity of something just out of vision begin to strum at her nerves.