Goldsmith's Row (11 page)

"No," said Edmund Beck, "because he injured his right hand—through a trick that was played by your brother."

Joel tried to get up, which was difficult because the bench was pushed in too near the table. "Are you insinuating…"

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Joel, sit still. You're making a song and dance about nothing."

Joel was dimly aware of this, and he was not sorry to be interrupted by the Master of Ceremonies striking the board with his mace, a sign that he was about to propose the Queen's health. They finally emerged from the banqueting hall in the middle of the afternoon, and Joel spent the rest of the holiday rollicking round the taverns with a host of boon companions. As time went by, he knew less and less about what was happening. There was drink and laughter and lewd stories and someone falling down. (Someone? It was me, he decided painfully.) There was more drink, and pushing and shouting in the dark streets, and some sort of scuffle with the watch. Another fall, into the stinking gutter this time, and then he was being dragged up a flight of stairs and dumped on the floor of his lodging in Bachelors' Alley—a floor that pitched up and down under him all night long, like a ship in a heavy sea.

One of his friends roused him next morning with heartless exhortations and a wet towel; the squalid room was still swaying slightly, and he felt stiff, crumpled and extremely ill. But there was no help for it, he had somehow to dress himself properly and go to work. He arrived late in Goldsmiths' Row, with a parchment complexion and stabs of flame burning through his eyeballs, to be met by an impatient Laurence, who said, "We've been waiting for you this half-hour. Wasn't the night long enough for you?"

"I overslept," mumbled Joel, wondering resentfully how Laurence managed to look so spruce this morning. He had certainly drunk deep enough yesterday, yet here he was saying that he always woke early after a feast. Life was very unjust!

Laurence had been inspired to start working on a commission he had been given by one of his uncle's best customers. For the last week or so, since his hand had finally healed, he had been finicking with some little trifles of jewellery, but this morning he had decided to begin making the flat silver dish that was to be encircled with a wreath of laurels and inscribed with a famous coat of arms.

"And I shall need you and Ralph to help me at the forge," he announced carelessly.

Joel's heart sank. The mere mention of the forge oppressed his spirits. When you wanted to hammer metal into a particular shape you had to soften it in the furnace, and then beat it on the anvil. The important thing was to work as fast as possible, while it was still pliable, so in the case of a large piece like a charger it was usual for three men to work at the anvil together. But did he have to be one of them? He asked hopefully where Edmund was. Laurence had sent Edmund round to the assay-master with some plate that needed the Company's hall-mark, and Sam had gone with him. Apart from Laurence and Ralph, that left Joel's father, who was in the shop, and the younger apprentice Will, who was busy pumping at the organ-bellows. Joel knew that he couldn't cry off while there was no one to take his place except an old man and a small boy. Crossly, he tugged at the points of his doublet, while Laurence put the silver bullion into an iron cradle that was slung above the pinkish-white, incandescent fire.

At least, Joel thought sourly, this cornedy was not likely to continue long, for Laurence must be woefully out of practice. No doubt he wanted to pretend that he was making an important piece of plate, but it was Ralph who would do the work.

Presently Laurence brought over the great lump of silver in a shovel, and dipped it into a bucket of cold water. The water spluttered and a jet of steam hissed upwards to the ceiling. Laurence fished out the sluggish, yielding metal, placed it on the anvil, holding it steady with a pair of tongs, and the three men began to flatten it. Their hammer blows fell in a steady rhythm. First Laurence's, then Ralph's, then Joel's: chink—chink—chink. Joel was sweating. It was a warm, overcast morning, and the workshop was stifling from the heat of the furnace. He began to breathe quicker, and glanced at Laurence out of the corner of his eye to see how he was bearing the strains. Laurence seemed perfectly happy; he was hitting the target firm and true every time. Joel gritted his teeth and struggled to keep pace with his two companions, though the shock of each blow came shivering up his arms, through the back of his neck and into his throbbing head.

At last there was a respite. The now flattened block of silver had hardened with beating, as it always did, and needed to be freshly annealed at the fire. This time Ralph took it over there. Laurence waited, resting one foot on the base of the anvil, and playing idly with his mallet. He looked a great deal tougher in his shirt-sleeves than Joel had expected, and was evidently as strong as a horse in spite of his slim build. He used his body with a supple economy of movement which brought one fact home to Joel with an astonishing certainty: this wasn't a man who had done nothing more active for the last six years than paint little pictures. Whatever else he had done on the Continent, Laurence must have spent a good deal of his time as a working goldsmith.

He ought to have told us, thought Joel indignantly. And then remembered that they hadn't wanted to listen.

All too soon the turgid grey lump was back on the anvil and they were hammering it once more. Joel's fingers kept slipping down the handle of his mallet; twice he botched his stroke altogether. There was a pain in his chest and his mouth was as dry as a sandpit.

When Laurence next called a halt, Joel half hoped that he or Ralph would see to the annealing. He waited, pressing his hands over his eyes.

"Get on, man," Laurence ordered him. "It's your turn at the fire."

He had to go through the whole process, carefully watching the battered chunk of silver and copper alloy until the surface liquefied to exactly the right consistency. The temperature near the furnace was intolerable. He staggered back with the shovel of hot silver and nearly lost it in the bucket. By the time he got it squarely on the anvil he would have given anything for a rest and a cool drink. Instead he had to take up his mallet immediately, though he was scarcely able to swing it; he had a stitch in his side and he felt sick, and the scene kept wavering before him and floating away into a black swamp. Though he could see so little, he always managed to see Laurence's face; taut, hostile and contemptuous. Ralph was there too, keeping his place in the orderly rotation, yet he was no longer aware of Ralph. He was involved in a fantastic duel with Laurence, and he was losing.

The swamp engulfed him; he had to beg for mercy. . "For God's sake—I can't…"

His mallet went crashing on to the stone floor. Then someone put an arm round him and steered him out into the yard at the back of the house. He slumped there, gulping, doubled over with faintness and nausea, until his vision cleared and he discovered that the person supporting him was Laurence.

This effected a rapid cure. Making a great effort, he managed to stand upright.

"Take it slowly, you'll soon recover," said Laurence, not unkindly.

"I'm well enough." He felt it necessary to make some kind of apology. "The truth is, I drank too much yesterday."

"You were in good company."

But they didn't all make such damned fools of themselves, thought Joel, brooding. It had started to drizzle, and both young men welcomed the cool rain that trickled down their necks and soaked through their thin shirts.

"How many demonstrations will you require before you are satisfied?" added Laurence.

"Satisfied—in what respect?"

"That I am fit to occupy the place of a master-goldsmith and to employ craftsmen of your quality. Come now, Joel, there's no sense in putting on those airs of innocence; these are the claims you've been refusing to accept since the day I came home. And I'm damned if I can see why; I may not be as good as my uncle or your father in their heyday, but I was their pupil, as you very well know; I was a journeyman of about your standing when you were serving your indentures and if you have forgotten how my uncle dealt with idleness or bad workmanship, I certainly haven't. He thought my painting was a sinful waste of time, and when I refused to give it up, he turned me out of doors—but no one gave you leave to suppose that I paint portraits because I'm too stupid to do anything else. Limners don't earn much, as a rule, and I should have had a lean time these past six years if I'd not had a second trade at my finger-tips and the sense to profit by what I could learn from foreign masters.  Remember that,  next time you feel , tempted to treat me as an unskilled ignoramus."

Joel muttered something incoherent. He was too confused to defend himself, and indeed he hadn't much of a defense. He could first recall Laurence at the age of twenty, already fighting a continual battle with his uncle because he wanted to be a painter. With a little encouragement Joel might have been inclined to take his side, but there had been nothing very heroic about this rebel, white-faced and sullen, hunched over his little chalk scribbles and repelling any sort of friendly curiosity with that sharp tongue of his. It only dawned on him now that Laurence must have been desperately unhappy; the boy Joel could not have envisaged that sort of unhappiness. Instead, he had accepted the popular opinion, which was not that Laurence was trying to escape from the shop because he wanted to paint, but that he wanted to paint because he was a poor craftsman who did not like working at the forge. That was old John Tabor, twisting the truth, damn him. Because of his insidious prejudice, Joel had grown up thinking of Laurence as a weak, pretentious idler unequal to the rigorous virility of the goldsmith's craft. And then John Tabor had fooled him again with that monstrous will, cutting out the Downes family and leaving everything to the nephew he had taught them to despise. It was a wicked injustice— but all at once Joel began to see Laurence as another of the old man's victims.

"I'm sorry," he managed at last, "if I've seemed uncivil. I never thought of you as—well, we none of us did. We've all been misled."

"Misled?" repeated Laurence. He spoke lightly, but Joel thought there was a dangerous under-current in his voice. "I dare say. I never knew a houseful of people who'd got hold of the wrong end of so many sticks. If you have any more trifling misapprehensions to clear up, I am perfectly willing to listen. But I warn you, Joel, I may not always feel so magnanimous."

"No," said Joel loudly, blustering a little. "There's nothing else. What should there be?"

Laurence turned and went back into the workshop.

14

Towards the end of June, Mrs. Tabor told Grace that next month they would be going down to Thurley, her late husband's property in Hertfordshire, so as to avoid the noisome air of London during the worst part of the plague season.

"Oh, must we go away, madam? I'm sure it will be a great benefit, only I am not accustomed to the country."

"And you don't want to go there, sweetheart?"

Mrs. Tabor was not at all surprised. Town-bred herself, she dreaded these annual trips to Hertfordshire, to that large, unfriendly house surrounded by empty spaces. The rough lanes always seemed to be inches deep in mud, not that it mattered for they led nowhere in particular, while as for the inhabitants, both gentry and villagers looked down their noses at the rich newcomers from the City. As long as her husband was alive Mrs. Tabor had been forced to endure this yearly exile. Now he was dead she might have escaped, but having Grace to care for, she felt it was her duty to take the child out of reach of the plague.

Immediately after dinner Mrs. Tabor took a short rest, and Philadelphia sat down to her daily practice at the virginals. Grace knew how to seize her opportunity; murmuring something about helping Martha in the kitchen, she ran down the back stairs and then out into the street, confident that she could count on an hour of freedom before she was missed. Crossing Cheapside at its widest stretch, she made her way between the booths of dairy produce to the corner where two church spires leant towards each other above a cluster of small shops and she was caught in the interwoven shadows of St. Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, and All Hallows, Honey Lane.

She tiptoed into St. Mary's and bobbed down in a pew near the back for a few seconds of inarticulate prayer. Then she settled herself to contemplate the monumental tomb that was being constructed on the north wall of the church. It was a memorial to a wealthy merchant who had died recently, and when it was finished the effigies of the dead man and his wife would be seen kneeling devoutly under a canopy of wrought stone, while their fourteen children were shown in relief all round the base of the tomb. The big alabaster effigies had been brought to the church already complete, and were propped against the wall, swaddled in sacking, but the raised figures of the children had to be done on the spot. Eight sons in single file faced their six sisters along the side of their parents' grave. The boys were remarkably alike, except that they were graduated in size from the eldest at the front to the two little ones at the end of the line, each carrying a skull as a sign that he had died before the parents. The girls, too, were so many peas in a pod, but the sculptor had put in a few individual touches: one of the sons was reading a prayer-book, another had his hand on his heart, while several daughters were weeping and one was mopping her eyes with a handkerchief so real that it looked more like linen than stone.

There was a very large man lying prostrate on his stomach in the aisle, patiently chipping out a decorative border at the foot of the tomb. Grace knew him well by sight, though in fact she could see nothing of him at this moment except his enormous backside and the patched soles of his boots. He was Melchior Breda, an immigrant stone-carver from the Low Countries and the employer of her dear friend Coney.

At first she thought he was alone; she could see no sign of Coney. Then she heard a slight movement which made her look up, and she was able to catch a glimpse of him standing on the raised tomb and almost hidden by one of the black marble pillars of the canopy. He too was working on the monument, carrying out his master's design with minute strokes of the chisel, so that inch by inch between them they covered every surface and made the bare stone flower.