Cupids, page 4
“Mr. Guy,” he calls again. I peer from just beneath the surface of the foam and see him indistinct, a candle in his hand. How could a candle burn so steadily in a tempest? I wonder. “Mr. Guy, are you ill?” He is closer now, walking on the foam perhaps?
The room is dark, only the faint bronze hue of candlelight warming the walls. The ship is gone, as is the foam, and the sea, and Eliza the mermaid. Bartholomew is standing halfway between the doorway and me. I am in bed. Raising my arm to my mouth, I wipe my lips dry with the cuff of my nightshirt.
“How long have you been there?” I ask.
“Ever since I heard you calling out. You must have been having a nightmare.”
“I was merely dreaming. I am quite well.” I haul myself up against the pillow. It has been some time since he has joined me under the sheets. A faint desire mingles with my loneliness, but I know it would unman me to yield to that surrogate passion to which all seamen cling. There is no excuse now. Eliza herself is within reach. “Where have you been for the last two days?”
He pauses, one of those distrustful silences, enough time for such a mind to weave any tale it pleases.
“Come now, answer quickly!”
“I had to meet someone after our dinner at the Egret house.”
“Who?”
“A young lady.”
“Who, I say?”
“Helen, the Egrets’ maid.”
“Her again,” I say with a touch of relief I daren’t examine.
He shrugs and a smile ghosts across his face.
“Just remember our bargain, Bartholomew. You are working for me. I won’t save you from the gallows a second time.”
The smile intensifies. I have invoked a past that his mocking air likes to deny. But I won’t let him deny it. He would be dead now if not for my mercy.
“I am working for you, Mr. Guy. That is why I had to meet her and why I had to follow up on certain paths she unwittingly opened to me.”
“Then why didn’t you apprise me of your plans?”
The candle wavers and shadows duck over his young face.
“You would have slowed me down with your questions.”
“Well, here’s a question, you young rogue: what use is the information of a maid when it is her master we are trying to influence?”
He turns and gestures at the stool at the foot of my bed. I nod. He draws it into a clear space in the middle of the room and sits, laying the candle and holder on the floor.
“With respect, Mr. Guy, only a man who has never been a servant would ask that question. A servant is key-holder of the household. A servant knows where the family’s riches are hidden. And like the creaking floorboard, a servant knows all their secrets too.”
“How would this help us? We need support from Mr. Egret. We are neither robbers nor blackmailers.” My voice fills the room like a whiplash, as though Bartholomew and his secret — and there must be a secret for him to talk as he does — were twin lions I am at pains to keep at bay. But why should I be afraid of any secret? skips the question across my mind. Is it because I am afraid of the uses to which my ambition might put it?
Since Bartholomew disappeared, I have been roaming the streets of Bristol by day and the darker streets of imagination by night. Every twisting thought, every weaving plan was studded by noose, scaffold, and stocks. Nothing within the law, nothing within the narrow confines of morality, shed any sunlight upon my desires. Why, I wonder, would any man ally himself with someone as fearless and immoral as Bartholomew unless he intended to heed the advice of the damned?
Bartholomew pauses before answering. With the light below him, Bartholomew’s face seems almost angelic, like the visage looming from a fresco inside an Italian cathedral. “I am searching for weaknesses and for alliances, that is all. Helen is already ours. I am certain she will act in any way I instruct her.”
Curiosity burning my ears, I fling off my bedclothes and stand. “I am seeking an honourable approach,” I tell him, pulling my breeches on under my nightshirt, “an honest and straightforward argument which may persuade Mr. Egret to venture more capital and to persuade his friends to do the same.”
I catch Bartholomew’s eye and don’t like what I see; it’s an expression close to pity. “How is that tactic working so far?” he asks softly.
I snap up the belt from the trunk in the corner and fasten it around my waist, my face heating with indignation. What does he know? How can I get him to tell me without asking?
“Mr. Egret will risk no more than he has to,” he ventures. “He has told us as much already.”
“It is in the nature of business to keep a closed purse until proof is provided of a lucrative return. He must be persuaded.”
“Or compelled.”
I take a step nearer. Anger rather than curiosity might bore the information out of him. I want to learn his devious alternative, all right, but I mustn’t lower myself so far as to seem interested.
We are almost exactly the same height, and the way he meets my eye has always that mild yet fearless quality. He never flinches, nor backs away, and I feel his confidence draining mine before he even begins to speak.
“You are quite right,” he says in clear, virtuous tones. “An advantage obtained through underhanded means must be disregarded and forgotten, even if it is the difference between certain failure and certain success.”
He bows, takes a step backward and turns to leave the room.
Only as he reaches the doorway does my tongue come unstuck. “Just one second,” comes the order in a strange high-pitched voice. He turns again, a look of amusement playing under the surface of his expression. “Just out of interest only, just so I may know more of your tactics, my boy, what is this secret that you believe yourself to have uncovered?”
“Oh, nothing really.” He shrugs, making to go once more.
“Come, lad, tell me.”
He returns to me like a cat, furtive and coiled.
“It is only this: you are making your pleas to the wrong man and your loves to the wrong woman.”
“Explain yourself!”
“Mrs. Egret,” he says softly, “the creature in the corner with the knitting; it’s she who holds the purse strings you wish to loosen. The poor brother for whom you heard the old man mourning — it’s his interests which have brought old Egret his gold. But he is merely the heir to his brother’s widow.” He smiles at me now. “Opens possibilities, wouldn’t you say?”
“How so?” I snap back, and I can feel that moral shell that neither Bartholomew nor I believe in becoming harder but more brittle. The beast of ambition within me growls, sensing prey in Mrs. Egret. “Assuming your information is correct, there’s a fortress around the old woman. Who can get to her but through her brother-in-law?”
“Mr. Guy,” he says. “Are we not adventurers and explorers? Is it not our vocation to go into regions with hazards and dangers and re-emerge with our prize?”
“We are in Bristol now, boy,” I tell him. “Bristol requires neither astrolabe nor charts, but honest and straightforward business.”
“Humbly, Mr. Guy, I might mention I have observed that even here in Bristol, as in every other place on earth, business is seldom either straightforward or honest.”
For a moment I am lost for words. This time, it seems, it is really quite obvious he has a point.
“What would you have us do then, Bartholomew?”
“For two nights and a day I have been working on this.”
“Working?”
“Searching among the forgotten corners of the shire for a key that might open Mrs. Egret’s memory and stir her to generosity.”
He’s trying to wait me out, his face calm and impassive.
Impatience gets the better of me: “. . . And?”
“I have found him. He is waiting downstairs.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bartholomew
LIKE THE MOST AWKWARD of six-legged creatures, the three of us make our huddled way in silence through the lightly falling snow. Mr. Whip stops frequently to gather his breath. His meagre elbows need supporting by Guy on one side, and I on the other. By the time we reach the Egrets’ door, I am afraid the powdery snow gathering around our feet will make the old man slip before a meeting is achieved.
Keeping one hand under Mr. Whip’s elbow, I go to knock, but Guy motions me away, raises the iron knocker with a flourish and lets it fall once, twice, three times. He sends a white funnel of breath through the air and I can tell he is uneasy.
The door opens, quickly revealing Helen’s face oddly flushed beneath her white bonnet. Her eyes briefly take in the group but rest on me. They darken in the centre in a way that is rather pleasing.
Guy gives a cough.
“Tell your mistress, Mrs. Egret, we have a visitor for her.”
The order is sharply delivered and Helen’s lips pucker a little, her eyes narrowing. But she turns back to me and I nod. She retreats and motions us inside. With some jostling and a brief lifting motion, we ease Mr. Whip over the threshold.
“The master is in church with Miss Eliza, but his sister-in-law is here.”
It seems like more information than is needed. We can clearly see that Mrs. Egret is in the corner of the spacious room, in the very same seat which she occupied two nights before, knitting as she did then. But Helen’s words are for me. We have Mrs. Egret to ourselves. It is the opportunity for which I was hoping.
The old man is the first to shuffle forward, his feet moving far more quickly than before. The four sovereigns of Guy’s that I handed over to him jangle in his purse as he closes on her. Guy and I follow him, one on each side. Dimly, the old lady’s head rises from her work. The needles tap against each other twice and then stop.
“Matilda!” exclaims Mr. Whip, the three syllables collapsing upon themselves like the constituent parts of a cartwheel rim breaking under a heavy load. His angular frame stoops toward her like a storm-ravaged bird spying its half-forgotten nest.
The old lady’s filmy eyes try to focus. Her mouth opens slowly, and the knitting drops first from her lap to the chair, then from the chair to the floor.
“Philip?” she whispers.
Mr. Whip nods slowly. A tear now runs down his hollow cheek.
Mrs. Egret leans forward, her swollen fingers gripping the arms of the chair. “Philip?” she asks again.
“At your service, madam.”
His hands descend shakily into her lap. Hers rise from the chair rim to meet them.
“The years,” she merely says, “the years.”
“Yes, indeed.”
Helen slips a stool beneath the place where she imagines the old gentleman will sit, facing Mrs. Egret, though he shows no signs of wanting to rest now.
Backing away slowly, I reach across and tug at Guy’s sleeve. He wrenches his arm away and glares at me, but still follows me grudgingly to the exit. As I take Helen to the side, Guy rather awkwardly addresses Mr. Whip. “We shall return in twenty minutes to convey you to the carriage that will take you home, sir.” Neither Mr. Whip nor Mrs. Egret paying him the slightest attention, he turns stiffly on his heel and leaves through the main door, motioning me to follow.
I take Helen’s hand, turn it palm upward and, passing my own hand over hers, let Guy’s sovereign drop. Her smile at my touch turns to surprise as she feels the gold. When she looks into her palm, displeasure floods her face.
“Does money insult you, my Helen?” I ask, taking pains to ensure there is kindness in my challenge.
“Other things please me more, sir. Like honesty and trust.”
“Is gold the enemy of honesty and trust?”
She is rolling the coin in her hand now, adjusting to the feel of it, her expression betraying some struggle.
I must follow Mr. Guy. My fingers touch hers once more and then I leave through the still-open door.
Guy is scowling at the empty street as I alight.
“Two sovereigns for the maid, and eight for the old man,” Guy says testily. “An expensive scheme, my lad, at ten pounds; it had better work.”
“It will, Mr. Guy. We must reunite Mrs. Egret with her past, remind her of her intrepid husband, and make her associate his memory not with her brother-in-law but with us. You know it takes money to win people over and ensure they act in our best interests.”
Guy turns and surveys the falling snow with some sourness.
“I may be a dull man,” he says under his breath but loud enough for me to hear, “but I have always been hardworking and decent.”
He turns to me and I find myself looking away, though I am naturally anything but shy. My face burns too, and I sense now a glint in his eyes as he recognizes the unwanted nature of his confidence. “Yes, hard-working and decent. I dislike tricks, my young friend.”
His glare remains on me and finally I’m obliged to look at him. He says nothing else, merely holds my stare, but I understand the reproach: and this is what I have come to.
It’s odd, this sense of responsibility that sweeps upon me like an unexpected wind. I am the nephew of a merchant fallen into insolvency, an orphan turned apprentice cook, turned convict, turned imposter. How came it about that I should wield so much power?
I remember the paths that met at a rough crossroads on the hill above Cupers Cove, how the stubble of wheat and barley, freed of the weight of bulging kernels, skimmed against one another in the breeze, reminding me that the shed below was crammed with enough winter food for our beasts. The constant double blow of hammer and echo, hammer and echo, came from below as men laboured like ants over the new twelve-ton boat. Escape was on my mind, but the colony’s apparent success was my prison. I had approached Guy once, and saw the flex of impatience about his jaw when I mentioned the roving eyes and hands of his men. His words were like the heavy fastening of a bolt: “There are no articles to cover such occurrences. You are a man. Defend yourself.”
I prayed for deliverance instead, following by rote the murmured verses of my childhood, adding the desperate heat of my shame. But there was no God here. We had either tipped over the horizon beyond His sight, or He was simply unheeding to begin with. Action, I decided, was more potent than faith. As a cook, I always carried the means to induce flame: a cloth, a flint, and some powder. My fingers tingled and rooted in my pocket as the thoughtless breeze swept around me once more. A distant cumulus bulged over the sea, heavy but retreating. If God would not help me, I thought, I will conjure a devil that might.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Matilda
I SENSED SOMETHING WOULD happen this morning even before I heard the three loud knocks, before Helen scurried to the door and admitted the visitors. Ever since I awoke and returned to my habitual corner, portents have echoed in the click of my needles, in the breeze-like rustling of my wool. Within the bulging folds of new cloth which grew upon my lap, I saw the rise and dip of unknown mountain ranges.
Sundays are always quiet, but this silence was so intense I could hear the thump of my heart and the creak of my joints. So when he came toward me, this man, nimble and upright for his age, when his shining eyes claimed my attention, his name — Philip Whip — passed through me like a ghost before I could have reason to hope it might be him.
And now we are alone. Like the stirring of soft wings within the hard, dry casing of a caterpillar’s home, life is returning. The mean, grey years are falling from me. The dust has been so thick and so stifling that at first the memories were too blinding to be endured. Only through the kindness of the handsome face before me can I be guided safely back into the light, to memories of my Nicholas. I trust Philip’s clear, blue eyes as a blind woman might trust a soft and comforting voice.
“Have you been in Bristol all this time?” I ask him.
“Some miles distant in the country, my Lady, I have dwelt a quiet existence this fifteen years past, though in my dreams I venture still to the blue seas of the Mediterranean, to the wild frozen wastes of the north, to the deserts of the east where I travelled once with your worthy husband.”
“Ah,” I gasp, feeling the affection of his phrases close too tightly upon my heart. “You and he were men indeed, men indeed.” His hand comes down upon mine again and I hold back further tears.
“Why did you not come to see me all this time?” I ask with more reproach than I intended.
“I did, my dear Mrs. Egret, twice soon after I purchased my house in the country. Both times your brother-in-law sent me away before I could see you. He told me you were too sick to be disturbed and I should not come again.”
A band of heat stings my forehead as though I had been struck with a lash. I am used to seeing my bother-in-law’s dry inadequacy as neutral — a blind, unmoving barrier against joy; I have never before thought of it as a predatory greyness, an invading dust which harms wilfully and with malice. He sees my reaction and smiles.
“He may justly have thought me a vagrant, the first time anyway. I was still recovering from my final travels, tired, sunburned, and disinclined to dress for company. He perhaps considered me a likely carrier of some foreign plague.”
Grief heaves inside me again. Despite my old friend’s kindly interpretation of his behaviour, I have a sudden vision of my brother-in-law as a wingless vulture sitting on the threshold of the mean house, pecking and harrying the most exotic of migratory birds, one of which carried messages of friendship and of love lost. Who else might he have turned away?
I am aware that a wealthy widow is never more than a few steps from the ducking stool, the scaffold, and accusations of witchcraft. My own riches have remained a firmly concealed secret, and my brother-in-law’s status in the community has always cast a deep shadow, obscuring me from Bristol’s scavengers. I have no surviving family but he and Eliza, and it is true Mr. Egret, the younger, has been my protector as well as my jailor. Like oil and water the incompatible elements of anger and thankfulness swirl inside me. “If I have been sick,” I say at last, my voice weak, “it is a sickness brought on by want of those I have once known who are now gone from me. He had no right to turn you away.”
