Authors: Merryn Allingham
This time I checked the 1863 Register of Deaths, and as I suspected, they were recorded as suicides or in official parlance, the Misses Villiers had died from suspension by the neck from a ceiling beam. Aged twenty and eighteen respectively, they had hung themselves. It was a ghastly story and I would have liked nothing better than to have forgotten it there and then, but I knew I would have to tell my client. It was the explanation he’d wanted, though whether he chose to continue his project after such news was another matter. The newspaper article gave no clue as to what lay behind the women’s terrible deaths, why they had decided at such a tender age that their lives were unendurable. It was the darkest of mysteries, but it wasn’t mine to solve.
What was mine was the mystery surrounding Lucas Royde and the enigmatic Alessia. I went straight back to the newspaper library. I wasn’t sure how much material from local papers had found its way online and I was half expecting to be forced to journey to the wilds of North London but was blessed with an enormous stroke of luck: a copy of virtually every issue of
The Holborn Mercury
for all of its ten years had been uploaded into the library records.
I wondered if de Vere’s would be mentioned since they must have been one of the most prestigious employers in the Holborn district at the time. But it was the Renvilles that I was really after and I was determined to be as thorough as I could, beginning the sweep from two years before my target date with the edition dated 7 January 1849.
The Mercury
was a weekly newspaper and it proved an arduous business trawling through well over a hundred editions. Halfway through the morning I made another large pot of coffee and drank the lot. I needed it. I was already wishing that I’d started from a much later date and sure enough my hunch was correct. It wasn’t until the first week of February 1851 that I discovered anything of interest. And what interest! Not only a mention of de Vere’s but of Edward Renville, too.
Renville’s name appeared in the paper as a local grandee who was making a large contribution to the Great Exhibition. I read the tantalising paragraph over and over again, hardly able to believe my luck. All my questions answered in a dozen lines of text.
Mr Edward Renville, as readers will know, is a considerable personage in Holborn, being a merchant dealing in the finest silks and fabrics from the Italian states…
“
Yes!” I cried, punching the air in a way I’ve always disdained
.
…and having a large premises in the City. Mr Renville has commissioned a pavilion at the Great Exhibition to display the breathtaking array of beautiful materials that he regularly brings to these shores. The Exhibition Hall, currently being constructed in Hyde Park, will be opened on the first of May by Her Majesty Queen Victoria. One of Holborn’s most prestigious architectural practices has been commissioned to produce plans for Mr Renville’s display space and a most promising young architect, a Mr Lucas Royde, will act as chief designer.
Yes, and double yes!
Mr Royde has spent a number of years in the Italian states of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna and has only recently joined de Vere and Partners. Mr Renville’s wife, Mrs Alessia Renville, will be assisting with the project. It is believed that Mrs Renville’s family originates from Lombardy and this gives her a particular interest in what will be a themed display area.
So Nick was right all along. Alessia Renville was our unknown contact. And she got the task of overseeing the project because she came from Italy, again just as Nick suggested. I still had problems with that. If she had been Edward’s spinster sister or even a childless wife, I could have better accepted her presence in what must have been a flurry of project design and management. But a married woman with children? It went against everything I knew of middle-class Victorian family life. But it was there in black and white and I had to believe it.
I made a copy of this wonderful extract and closed down the computer. I knew that I should have some lunch and then set out on the job trail again, but I was too excited to eat anything and desperate to tell Nick what I’d discovered. I had no idea how long he’d be at
Art Matters
or whether he intended to come straight home after the interview. I imagined he would, either to dance in delight or lick his wounds. I didn’t have long to find out. I was half-heartedly trying to cook toasted cheese on a grill that surely predated the Renvilles when I heard him coming down the steps two at a time. Did that mean good or bad news? One look at his expression and I knew it was good, very good.
‘Who’s a clever boy then?’ His face was one enormous grin.
‘You got it?’ I was dumbstruck.
‘You might at least pretend you’re not surprised. Of course I got it.’
And he grabbed me in his arms and pirouetted around the small space, banging into table, chairs and finally the grill, sending the slice of bubbling cheese flying upward and due south. It landed on the chair that until now had sported the least stains. That was a pity. Now all our furnishings were equally disreputable.
‘I got it, Grace! And the interview was tough, no walkover. No fixing either.’ And he looked slyly at me.
‘I’ve already said sorry—endlessly. But you must have shone.’
‘I did my best.’ He let me go with a smirk on his face. I was finding his pretence at modesty a trifle annoying.
Then he came down from the heights and confided, ‘I can’t quite believe it’s happened. I know I answered pretty well, but there were a couple of stinking questions. The thing is I got the feeling early on that they were actually wanting me to succeed. They mentioned the series I wrote for them.’
‘The Gorski show?’
‘I still owe you for that—not throwing me out of the launch, I mean.’
‘You’ve just repaid the debt by getting a permanent job. It is permanent?’
‘Not only permanent, but I get my own office.’ He was like a child who’d held out his hand for a Smartie and been awarded a Sherbet Dab.
‘Anyway,’ he took a breath, ‘they were very enthusiastic about the stuff I did on Eastern European artists. It was different, they said—“radical.” How about that? And that’s what they want to see more of in the journal. Time to depart from tradition, and they think I’ll be just the man to commission that kind of writing.’
He talked on, his tongue running away with him, while I rescued the toast from its sticky resting place and started cooking another slice. He finally ran out of steam as I put two plates of slightly burnt cheese on the table.
‘Why are you home in the middle of the day? I thought you were on the job trail again.’ He had suddenly registered that I shouldn’t be there.
‘I decided to wait until this afternoon.’ I had an uncomfortable feeling that I should be excusing myself, saying sorry that I wasn’t out pounding the streets.
‘I guess there’s no rush. I start next Monday and it’s a big enough salary for us both.’
That made me feel even more uncomfortable, but I said, ‘That’s wonderful,’ and kissed him soundly on the lips.
‘More!’
‘Later, but now let’s eat. I’ve got some news to tell you.’
‘How come?’
‘I took your advice.’ That was stretching the truth only a little. ‘I did the newspaper search. I was right about the title, it was
The Holborn Mercury
and there were online records for all ten years of its life.’
‘Good,’ he said absently.
I could see that his mind was far away and the research had become a distant memory. In his imagination he was already sitting behind a large desk in an equally large chair behind a door grandly labelled
Art Matters
. When I didn’t continue, he stopped munching his toast and looked across at me.
‘Tell me, then. What’s the great news?’
The excitement of discovery had drained away, and I didn’t feel now that I wanted to share something that was so important to me but meant nothing to him. is His p
‘You were right,’ I conceded eventually.
‘
A
is
for Alessia Renville. And you were right, too, about why she was involved—well, according to
The Mercury.
Her being Italian was deemed helpful to the project.’
‘Aren’t I just too clever for words,’ he gloated. I was sure that this must be one of the most glorious days of his life, but he was getting a bit carried away. He needed a small corrective.
‘
I
found the article,’ I pointed out.
‘Aren’t
we
just too clever.’
‘Quite clever.’ I needed to keep both our feet on the ground. ‘The paper mentioned that the architect in charge was Lucas Royde and that he worked for de Vere’s. But although that backs up our research, it doesn’t bring us any nearer the plans.’
‘The plans are a complication we don’t want, particularly as I cashed the Society’s cheque today. Everything is neatly tied up and that’s the way it should stay.’
I gave up on the last morsels of my charred offering and sat back on the chair’s hard wooden slats with a sigh.
‘Shouldn’t it?’ he asked a little too insistently.
‘I suppose so.’
‘Why only suppose? You’ve found out what you wanted and now you can concentrate on getting a job.’
‘I thought there was no rush’.
‘There isn’t but I can’t imagine you’ll want to sit here and twiddle thumbs for too long.’
‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘It’s just that I have a hunch there’s more to be found.’
‘What more can there be? You know who A is and you know the house she was living in no longer exists. So what else can you do? Attempt to trace her descendants?’
‘I might. There were two daughters, remember.’
‘You’d be wasting your time. It wouldn’t bring you any nearer finding the plans and remember—we don’t, in fact, want to find them.’
He looked fixedly at me and his expression was stern. ‘You know what I think, Grace? That this isn’t about the plans any more. It’s about you.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ I truly hadn’t, but I also knew I didn’t want to. Nick had an uncanny knack of getting to the heart of things. I tried to sound sensible.
‘It’s just that we’ve come from absolute zero and look what we’ve discovered.’
‘We’ve made amazing progress, but the search is finished. By all means write an article on Royde and try to flog it to some scholarly journal. You’ve got a new angle with Alessia—Victorian women had more freedom than we thought, etcetera. But then leave it.’
My face must have registered the stubbornness I felt because he reached across the table and shook me.
‘Leave it, Grace,’ he commanded.
That was sufficient to make me decide that I wouldn’t be leaving it.
* * *
It was several weeks, though, before I returned to the story of Alessia Renville. I’m not sure why it took me so long; perhaps it was because I was feeling defeated. My professional confidence had begun to leak away, slowly but still very certainly, and undertaking research, even the most basic, seemed beyond me. Nick was in the ascendant, and against his gleam of success, the struggle to believe in myself was becoming more and more difficult. He’d started work at
Art Matters
the Monday following his interview and for the next week, I’d hit the phone or email trying to set up meetings with past contacts. I’d given up the agencies as useless. But the contacts proved no more helpful, and I began to wonder if I would ever work again. I toyed with the idea of freelance writing, but I knew how hard it was to break into the market, and how poorly paid. Failure is insidious. It rarely happens in one spectacular burst; instead it destroys gently and I was no exception. Discouragement gradually seeped through me and I began to drift.
Nick was prospering, though. It was as if he was born to wear a suit. To be fair, the work was interesting and his colleagues congenial, but I was still amazed at how well he’d fitted into a world I’d never have imagined was his. Or perhaps it had always been his and the casual, spontaneous man I’d first met had been an aberration. I suppose that in some way or another everyone is a prisoner of their family and their first experience of the world can determine the life that follows. Mine certainly had. Perhaps Nick, too, had never entirely escaped his upbringing, his bohemian lifestyle a small rebellion against conformity. Now that a way had opened to more worldly success and he could compete on equal terms with his siblings, he seemed to be having little difficulty in fitting back into the Heysham mould.
One morning after he’d left bright and early—and his willingness to put in the hours was another shock—I’d had enough of pretending to search for an invisible job and decided to do something practical by sorting out the one wardrobe the flat possessed. I wrenched open the slightly tipsy door and the chaos overflowed gently into the bedroom. Instilling order into the tumble of clothes, shoes, bent hangers and discarded carriers would keep me busy for hours and in a way that was a blessing. It was lunchtime before I could congratulate myself on a job well done and then just as I was closing the door I noticed hidden away at the back of the top shelf a small cardboard box that I was sure I’d never seen before. Out of curiosity I hauled it over the row of sweaters, now sitting neatly in line, and deposited it on the bed. It contained a pile of folded tee shirts. I unravelled the top one and held it up for inspection: I Drink Therefore I Am, it proclaimed. There was something very sad about the find. The box was testimony to the fact that Nick had discarded his former life almost completely. It made me wonder if along with the tee shirts, he’d also discarded forever the person I’d known.
I should be as ruthless myself. I was carrying a lot of stuff that had come to the end of its natural span and was taking up space, not just in the wardrobe but in my life. I needed to clear the decks, to start over. Like most women intent on remodelling themselves, the easiest thing was to begin with hair and clothes. There was a slight problem: I had no money for new clothes and there was little I could do about my hair. I was a natural blonde and would look odd as anything else; the frenzied curls were also severely limiting as to style. Nevertheless the next afternoon I marched off to a cut-price hairdressers I’d seen around the back of Kings Cross station and asked bravely for a short crop. The girl did a good job despite the modest price and for a short while at least I felt rejuvenated.