Great Historical Novels (5 page)

Brigit Mahoney was easy to spot from a distance in her pea-green cloak. As she drew closer, a triangle of colour flashed beneath it. She was wearing purple. This was not a good sign.

Purple was not an everyday colour for Rhia’s mother. She wore it when she needed courage, such as on the days when she took tea at the linen hall with the other Catholic merchants’ wives. Brigit was hurrying along the path that meandered through the Green. As she passed, one or two gentlemen turned to catch a second glimpse of her small, swift figure. She did not have the look of a Dublin lady. She wore plain dresses in solid colours, and although she always delighted in the season’s prints, she rarely took more than a passing interest in a fashionable sleeve or corsage. Rhia, on the other hand, took note of every new conceit.

She still had the letter in her hand. That was foolish. By the time she had run up the stairs and replaced it on the dresser, Brigit was in the front hall. Usually, Rhia could judge immediately how the invalid fared by the depth of the creases etched between her eyebrows.

‘He is not improved, then?’

Her mother brushed a loose strand of hair from Rhia’s eyes. ‘A little.’

It wasn’t true.

‘The physician says he might recover more quickly were he cheerful. He frets ceaselessly that he has let us down, that he has,’ she hesitated, ‘caused the ruin of the company.’

‘
Is
the company ruined?’ Rhia could not take her eyes from her mother’s face as Brigit hung her cloak and smoothed her hair. The air turned cold, as if all the shadows in the house had gathered in the front hall to hear her answer. ‘You’re wearing purple.’ Rhia’s voice sounded accusing, even to her ears.

‘There are things that need doing in the front room. Will you help me?’

The room was bathed in darkness. Brigit pulled the curtains open and let in the morning light. The long cutting table in the centre looked forlorn and the Chesterfield only reminded Rhia of the night of the fire. This room was where all of the public business of Mahoney Linen was conducted.

She wandered to the wall opposite the door, which was lined with deep shelves, bowed under the weight of rolls and rolls of damask, jacquard, chintz and cambric. She ran her hands over plain and patterned linens of different ply and quality; some woven, others printed. Prints were the Mahoney mainstay and Rhia loved them all; tea party florals, Indian paisleys, modern abstracts, this riot of pattern and colour had always delighted her. She’d gazed at prints for years without realising that she was learning composition. Later, for detail, she went to
Culpeper’s Herbal
. She became preoccupied with the way that quality of light changed the natural world, from the silvery Greystones shale to Dublin’s flaxen autumns. She had a portmanteau full of designs for repeat patterns. It was an amusement, though. Designing textiles was not a woman’s occupation.

Brigit was standing in the middle of the room looking at the shelves with her hands on her hips. Rhia made herself sit on the Chesterfield and fidgeted with her sleeve. She took in the lay of the room as though she had never before noticed it. Memories paraded before her. The entire front of the house always smelt of flax, and she had spent her days here for as
long as she could remember. As a child she had sewn pretty scraps of cloth into miniature quilts for her dolls while her parents ran the business. Sometimes she’d sat quietly in the corner with her paintbox and tiny easel, listening to the clip of Brigit’s shears and the scratch of her father’s fountain pen. Thomas had made the paintbox and easel for her, only then he became annoyed when she started to copy from Culpeper instead of walk with him. Still, it was years before any of her botanicals were recognisable.

Brigit was still gazing at the shelves as if trying to decide something. Rhia stood up and walked the length of the room and back, twice. She wanted to ask about the letter, but her mother seemed too deep in thought. When Brigit turned round, she looked wretched.

‘Rhiannon.’ She only called Rhia this when something was wrong.

‘I know about the letter. I read it,’ Rhia said.

‘I knew you would. Today I asked your father to tell me the truth. We were in debt to several creditors before the fire, which is why the rather expensive assurance policy was cancelled. A false economy, as it turns out. The loss of the stock and storehouse has ruined us. We have agreed that we must sell this house and move permanently to Greystones.’

Rhia was not prepared for this. She walked over to the window. The fog had lifted and the Green was lively with costermongers and nannies with black hooded prams. Her composure fell away. ‘Why didn’t he tell us?’

Brigit looked at her imploringly. ‘Don’t be angry. He was ashamed. He believes he has managed the business badly, but it is simply a result of the times. Our methods are becoming old-fashioned. It is not so awful. We are blessed to have Greystones. You always wanted to spend more time there.’

Rhia tried to grasp what this all meant. ‘But how will we live?’

‘We will manage. You forget that I spun wool before I met your father; I still have deft fingers and there are Mamo’s sheep. Thomas Kelly can weave a broadcloth as fine as any I have seen, and Michael will have served his sentence by next summer.’

Rhia struggled to take it all in. It was now clear why her father had been so angry over her broken engagement. She felt like a criminal. ‘And I turned William O’Donahue against me.’

Brigit shook her head firmly. ‘A man such as he would probably have dishonoured the engagement once the state of our affairs was known. You were lucky to escape that, though I would never say so in front of your father.’ There was little she would dare to say in front of her husband. Mamo had always been disgusted by it.

Brigit had said nothing of Ryan’s proposal. Surely she wouldn’t want Rhia to go? She would want her to stay and spin wool. The offer was tainted, anyway, by the governess thing, and besides, she was not nearly clever enough. The only Latin that interested her was the names of plants, and her French was poor. ‘What about London?’ she ventured.

‘You would have to spend a night and a day at sea to reach Holyhead.’

Rhia shuddered. It was settled, then.

Brigit kissed her on the forehead, then left her alone to wrap herself in whatever cloth this day of change might represent.

Rhia absently rolled up a bolt of pretty jacquard that was on the cutting table and picked bits of thread from the floor. She glimpsed herself in London. She had always dreamed that she would visit the capital with her husband, travel being one of the few advantages in having a husband at all. Of course, the
likelihood of marrying was increasingly remote, and her dreams always conveniently overlooked the inevitable sea crossing.

As to love, it was clearly a condition that had originated in the minds, rather than the hearts, of poets. Everyone knew that aside from a dowry and annuity, husbands preferred a tepid nature and an agreeable tongue. Or a tongue that always agreed. These were graces that Rhia neither possessed nor could become interested in fostering. What was to love in that? Perhaps she was destined to be a governess living in the house of a Quaker after all.

Satin

On the way to Pudding Lane, Antonia Blake was inconveniently overcome by emotion. She took out her handkerchief, neatly side-stepping some unidentifiable filth in the street (one advantage in having one’s gaze cast down).

On certain days it seemed that she had only just received the news of Josiah’s death. Today was such a day. She focused her mind fiercely on short ends of ribbon and bias binding. The theatrical costumer had seemed pleased when she first approached him. Not because he had heard of prison reform or Elizabeth Fry’s charitable works, but because it relieved him of the extra bother of disposing of unusable cloth. All the better of course, he said, if it was put to some purpose beyond rag picking.

The Pudding Lane costume workshop was a cluttered front room, in the corner of which was a trestle table and a huddle of straw and cloth mannequins. Onto these was pinned and stitched all manner of regalia; the buttons and braid of a Napoleonic tunic, a cascade of scalloped flounces for a Shakespearean heroine and an ass’s head made from horsehair.

Antonia always felt acutely plain when she visited the costumer. He made no secret of his fascination with the lack of ornament on a woman of means, and his eyes usually roamed unashamedly over the cut and cloth that she wore. She imagined he was, over time, working up the courage to enquire after
her faith. Quakerism was clearly something of a mystery to one whose living was derived from the decorative and theatric. He would know that those of her faith refused to bear arms, pay tithes on church land, or take the sacraments, and as such were heretics of a kind. He would also know, as all seemed to, that the Society of Friends excelled in business and were amongst London’s richest bankers and wealthiest merchants. This was all Antonia herself had known about the Friends before she met Josiah Blake.

It was not to be the day for a conversation of this kind. The costumer was in a state of distress, which was not unusual. He was habitually fearful that he might not complete some assignation or other before a dress rehearsal. Today, a bodice had been cut for an actress whose waist had expanded, following her recent success in Drury Lane. She was, he explained mournfully, sustaining herself on suppers of meat pies and cream cakes rather than the bread and tea she had used to make do with. The costumer gave Antonia her sack of cloth with only a cursory glance at her grey linen and starched white collar. As he did, he complained of the complexities of inserting a panel of satin so that the elegant line of the décolletage was not lost. She could not help but take a step closer to his table and look at the pieces of the troublesome bodice. She was relieved to have something, a salve, to occupy her mind.

‘It might be that you could insert two narrow panels here and here instead,’ she suggested, ‘then it would look as if you were deliberately making something of the new seams.’ The sweaty little man was staring at her with utter disbelief. She did not look like she knew a thing about the cut of a corsage. Antonia laughed at his expression. ‘My father is a mercer,’ she explained. ‘There are often shirtmakers and seamstresses in
his showroom, measuring silk around their paper pieces so as not to waste an inch of precious cloth. I no longer take an interest in fashionable clothing, but I hope that I still have an eye for silhouette and … contour.’

‘You have indeed. You are most gracious to share your expert eye with me, Mrs Blake. Why, I believe you have solved the riddle of the thing! Is your father a London mercer?’

‘His emporium is in Manchester.’

‘Then you will have come to London when you married.’ It was a clever means of extracting information without appearing to enquire.

‘Yes. My late husband was a cotton trader. The trade was how we came to meet.’

The costumer looked embarrassed. ‘I am sorry for your loss. I did not realise.’

There was no salve. Why, today of all days, should she have to be reminded? ‘You could not,’ she said quickly. ‘And I must be getting on. As ever, our organisation is most grateful.’ Antonia hurried away before her composure was undone by a conversation with a relative stranger. She was overcome by small things. She could still not completely believe him gone. How could he be gone?

Josiah had upheld the excellent reputation of Quaker merchants and was a man of his word. He had been among the first to voice an opinion on the trade ban with China. It was a Quaker ship that had triggered the sea battle that now raged near Canton. The captain of the
Thomas Coutts
had refused to acknowledge that the British Navy’s blockade of the Pearl River, preventing Chinese trading vessels from passing, was legal. The Pearl River was the only means of reaching Canton, the most important port in the East. The Blakes, like all Quakers, considered themselves outside of the dispute between
the Emperor of China and the British East India traders. They were bringing cotton and wool into Canton, not opium.

When she was seated in the privacy of a Hackney cab surrounded by her bags of cloth, Antonia leaned back and wept. She had been mercifully distracted at the costumers, but in the dark privacy of the carriage there was no longer the need to pretend. She need only be composed by the time she reached the Montgomery emporium, her next appointment. Composure, like charity, whether heartfelt or not, was her shield. Beneath it skulked fear and loneliness, always measuring her faith and her strength.

When her handkerchief was wringing wet and her eyes dry, Antonia felt calmed. She straightened her back. There were women in far greater misery than she, locked away in pitiful conditions in dank, subterranean cells. Some waited to be hanged, and others to be sent far away from their children. It should fortify her to think that, by her hand, the suffering of another might lessen.

Antonia was cheered to find Mr Montgomery on the shop floor in his shirt sleeves. Mr Beckwith was up a ladder arranging bolts of pearly silk and sleek cashmere. Grace Elliot, the assistant, was behind the counter, her face drawn as tightly as her stays. Antonia was accustomed to her airs. It was a peculiarity of Londoners that they were affronted by appearances to the point of prejudice. Northerners were more robust in their judgement, and not so easily fooled by a myrtle green petticoat or a candy stripe bonnet.

Mr Montgomery smiled so warmly when he saw her that she felt her heart lurch.

‘Mrs Blake! What a happy coincidence that I should be here for your visit. I have asked Miss Elliot to put aside some remnants for you. Is your carriage on Regent Street?’ He turned to
Mr Beckwith, who had come down the ladder and was smiling shyly at Antonia. ‘Francis, would you bring the sacks from the storeroom?’

They were as unalike as two gentlemen could possibly be. Mr Montgomery was tall and lean with an abundance of pewter hair and a fondness for Savile Row tailors. It was unusual to see him without his coat and, in spite of herself, Antonia admired the breadth of his shoulders. Francis Beckwith was slight and balding, his mud-coloured suits always ill-fitting. Josiah had considered Beckwith the cleverer of the two; he’d thought that, without Beckwith, Montgomery would not be known as king of the mercers.