Goldsmith's Row (7 page)

Philadelphia was inclined to believe that Grace was the lawful heiress, and although she was in no hurry to state her definite opinion, she found herself inadvertently doing so, rather sooner than she expected.

It was a February afternoon, about three weeks after Grace's arrival. The two girls had intended to go for a saunter round the haberdashers' booths in the Royal Exchange, but the sky was so dark and rainy that they paused in the doorway of the shop, wondering if they had time to get to Bishopsgate before the deluge. They had just finished dinner, there were very few people about, and the men were all in the workshop.

As they lingered on the threshold, Philadelphia heard a slight noise which made her glance round. There was a man in the adjoining room, the inner sanctum where favored customers were taken to make their purchases in comparative privacy. This particular customer had got rather more privacy than he was entitled to. He was alone, standing with his back to them, and calmly helping himself to a cluster of gilded chains that hung from a hook on the wall. Philadelphia trod lightly across the space between them and stopped within six inches of his elbow.

"Can I be of any service to you, sir?"

The stranger jumped visibly and swung round to confront her. He was a slender young man, rigged out with all the glories of an absurdly tall beaver hat, a cloak lined with quilted satin and a pair of scented gloves. He had handsome regular features and a small, pointed beard. His light grey eyes had a supercilious expression, and he wore a single pearl ear-ring.

If she had startled him, he soon recovered; he looked her up and down and enquired with extreme civility, "What kind of a service had you in mind, madam?"

Philadelphia was slightly baffled by his air of ease and fashion, and also by the fact that he probably thought she was another customer—she was dressed for the street. All the same, she had been "warned about the effrontery of the accomplished London thief, and the way he had picked up the necklaces and slung them casually over his arm was carrying impudence a little too far.

"I thought you might wish to make a purchase," she said, "and since I am staying in the house…"

"You are?" There was a flickering change of expression; was it fear? Regrettably, it was more like amusement. "I hope you aren't going to send for the constable?"

"Why, no. I never—that is to say…"

"You would find it very difficult," said the young man gently, "to prefer a charge."

Philadelphia came to her senses, feeling every kind of fool.

"You're Laurence Tabor!" she said accusingly.

"Yes. I should have told you so straight away. But I wasn't expecting…"

He broke off, having now caught sight of Grace. He stood gazing at her in rapt admiration. Moonstruck, like all the rest, thought Philadelphia irritably. She decided to give him a surprise in return.

"I must present your new kinswoman to you," she said. "She is the daughter of your cousin Frances, or so we believe, and I am sure you will be glad to make her acquaintance."

For a moment he was speechless. When he found his voice, all the light, teasing humor had gone out of it.

"Frank's child? Who says so? Has everyone here gone mad? I can see it's high time I came home to protect my aunt from such effrontery."

Grace turned as white as a sheet and began to tremble.

"Oh Del, what will happen to me? What will he do?"

"Nothing," said Philadelphia. "There's nothing he can do; your fate isn't in his hands."

A natural instinct to defend the weak had made her take Grace's part. She knew that she ought not to have spoken as though Grace's claims were already established, but in spite of this, she said fiercely to Laurence, "You have no cause to be so discourteous. Or so unjust."

He did not answer, but walked towards the door that led to the back premises, and shouted: "Shop!"

Joel came hurrying through, saw Laurence, and stopped dead. "So it's you."

"The rolling stone, as you see. How are you, Joel?" He held out his hand.

Joel ignored this approach, perhaps deliberately or perhaps because he had now caught sight of Grace, who had begun to cry.

"What's been going on here?" he demanded, with a touch of alarm.

"You may well ask. I came home to Cheapside and walked straight into Bedlam."

"If you'd let us know when to expect you…"

"You wouldn't have left the shop unattended," said Laurence agreeably.

"We've hardly finished dinner," protested Joel, tugging at his starched white collar. "And Sam's about somewhere. We have been taking the greatest care of your property, never fear."

The two young men faced each other with a cat-and-dog hostility. Joel was the dog, of course, large and burly, with his blunt, engaging features. Laurence, in his foreign clothes, had something exotic and catlike about him.

After a moment he said, "I must go to my aunt."

"I'll take you to her," offered Joel.

Philadelphia noted that they were united in their desire to escape from Grace's tears.

They had hardly passed through the curtained archway that led to the staircase, when Laurence's voice floated back into the shop.

"Joel, who the devil are those girls?"

Grace began to wail. "Oh, what shall I do? What will become of me?"

"Hush," said Philadelphia. She was listening, all ears.

"… No, don't tell me she's my legendary cousin. Who is she in sober fact? How did she get here? Did that other wench bring her?"

"She got here because your aunt sent for her; no doubt you'll be told all the circumstances. And the other wench is Mrs. Tabor's attendant, a young gentlewoman of very good family from Gloucestershire."

From the turn of the stairs Laurence's laugh echoed back to them. "A daughter of the manor house, is she? Blue blood and an icicle under the tongue—I might have guessed."

9

Philadelphia was sorry not to have witnessed the meeting between Laurence Tabor and his uncle's widow, for Mrs. Tabor seemed quite undaunted by this new opponent; his refusal to acknowledge Grace as his long-lost cousin made her highly indignant.

"Would you believe it, Philadelphia, he tried to persuade me that Frank never had a daughter—at least he said I had no proof of it. On the grounds, I suppose, that no one ever told
him.
As though they would, a boy of fourteen! I assured him that I'd had all the facts from Bess Angell. I could see that he was mightily taken aback; the best he could do was to go off muttering that the Angells were all out of their wits, Bess and her brothers as well as the rest."

"Why should he say that?"

"Well, my dear, Mr. Angell was a spendthrift, and I don't deny. He bought houses and land in all directions, and two ships that were to go trading for gems in the Orient, only they got sunk in a storm off Gravesend. And by this time his debts were so great that the whole family had to leave the City under a cloud. But that's no reason for Laurence to speak slightingly of Bess because she bravely stood by Frank after the scandal. Or to sneer at her brother Tom, who was once his dearest friend."

Laurence's interview with Mrs. Tabor had left him rather thoughtful, and when he next saw Philadelphia, he made her a graceful apology for having tried to provoke her at their first encounter in the shop.

"Think no more of it," she told him with studied calm.

Laurence certainly did not look the part of a city merchant, and she could not imagine what would happen if he wore a pair of skin-tight hose to serve in the shop. It was against the law to wear the clothes of another social class, and though people laughed at the sumptuary laws and broke them quite cheerfully, the Livery Companies were inclined to be strict about these things.

The Downes family made a silent inventory of his clothes at supper, and abused them afterwards.

"Did you see his breeches, Joel? I thought he was going to split them when he sat down." Sam was fourteen; his ideas of humor were primitive.

"He's been to a good tailor," admitted Joel. "Heaven knows what all that gear must have cost him."

"Putting his wages on his back," said their father with a certain gloomy relish. "And the arrogance of it, walking through Cheapside with a sword on his hip…"

"I dare say he needed a sword in all those foreign places," said Sam, trying to be fair.

"And his ruff a foot high," continued Mr. Downes. "If he wears such a monstrous erection in the shop…"

"You don't suppose he means to work in the shop?" interrupted Joel with a bitter laugh. "That'll be left to us poor menials, while his mightiness sits back and enjoys the profits.

Painting his little pictures when the fancy takes him, and apeing the gentry."

And a very ill-judged performance he made of it, thought Philadelphia, who was still nettled by Laurence's comments on her own gentility. (Blue blood and an icicle under the tongue, indeed!)

Next morning Mr. Downs and Joel were slightly taken aback when Laurence announced that he wished to make a detailed inspection of the stock. Soberly dressed, with a mere frill at his throat (half-way between a merchant and a gentleman, so to speak) he came down punctually and made his requirements perfectly plain.

"Don't you trust the ledgers?" began Joel, touchy because he thought his father's honesty was being called in question.

"I am not concerned with the ledgers at present. I want to see for myself the exact nature of the stock we are carrying."

So Edmund Beck was left in the front of the house to deal with customers, while Mr. Downes, Joel, Ralph Palmer and the two apprentices got everything off the shelves and out of the iron-bound chests, and set up on the benches in the workshop.

There were cups and mazers, salts and ewers of monumental solidity, every inch of the surface crusted with decoration; plates and spoons; flat, polished chargers and gilt standing dishes, as well as a few exotic trifles, like the coconut cups with their shells rubbed smooth and lustrous, mounted on silver stems. All the plate was beautifully worked and impeccably finished, every item a labor of love. The designs were not original; they had been taken out of one of the standard pattern-books, which contained drawings of every possible type of vessel, as well as suggestions for scrolls and borders, and suitable pictures to be copied in chasing or repousse work. This was the normal practice, nearly all goldsmiths used a pattern-book, but the one they had been using in John Tabor's workshop must have been around a long time; the pieces it had inspired were curiously old-fashioned, heavy and massive, as plate had been during the early part of the century, with none of that upsurge of subtlety and fantasy which had swept England into the high Renaissance, at long last, during the past few years.

For instance, there were too many mazers, the deep, widemouthed drinking-bowls that had been largely replaced by tall cups and goblets.

Laurence picked up one of them, breathed on it, and rubbed it against his sleeve, for the pleasure of seeing the metal come up more glittering than ever. He followed the delicate chasing of vine-leaves with his thumb.

"Your work, Ralph?"

"Aye, Master Laurence," said the old journeyman, smiling. He was a man of few words; all he thought and felt was told by his hands.

"I thought so. A marvelous example of its kind." Laurence put the bowl down, and asked Zachary, "How many of those have you sold in the last twelve-month?"

"I—I don't precisely recall."

"Why?" demanded Joel, getting ready to be truculent

"Because people have stopped using mazers."

"Your uncle never believed that. He was convinced that there would always be a market for such good English ware."

"And he made sure that no one contradicted him. Well, so much for the plate; may I now see the jewels?"

Some of the jewellery was old; there seemed to be a good many round hat-brooches of a once popular type, not unlike the religious badges that used to have portraits of the saints on them. There was also a box containing the broken-up fragments of discarded ornaments, cameos and intaglios, some of them very ancient, as well as loose stones—pearls, lapis lazuli, chalcedony—waiting to be reset. There were some plain gold chains, the sort that measured out a man's status by the number and weight of the links. Apart from these, the new jewellery was tawdry, brittle, inferior stuff, not worthy of the rest of the stock.

Laurence scooped up one of the necklaces that had caught his attention yesterday, and flicked it disdainfully between his fingers.

"What in the name of fortune are you doing with this tin finery? I'm astonished my uncle allowed it in the shop."

"Your uncle didn't like it," admitted Zachary. "He didn't like any of these new-fangled trinkets, but he felt obliged to keep a selection for his customers, and this was the best quality we could come by. I know that it's poor stuff, but what can you expect nowadays, when workmanship is so clumsy, no one takes pride in their craft…"

"The work of the continental goldsmiths is finer than it has ever been before."

"This consignment came from the Continent," remarked Joel.

"I was speaking of the designs executed by the greatest masters, not the cheap rubbish that's considered good enough to fob off on the English."

"It may not have occurred to
you,"
retorted Zachary, "that we can't afford to purchase any valuable jewellery. We'd have to tie up too much money, and the profit would be too small."

"I agree. But we could make our own."

Zachary stared at him as though he had gone mad.

"Make your own? Where should we find the profit in that, pray? A single one of these fantastic new pendants or necklaces would take I don't know how long to complete, and the chances are no one would buy it (for I'm sure I don't know where you'd get your designs) and whatever price we asked, it would be swallowed up by the cost of the materials. When you learn what we have to pay now for gold and gems…"

"These new pieces don't depend simply on the value of the stones. The secret is to set them off with a proper use of champleve enamel."