The Silver Touch (7 page)

‘Honour!’ she exploded, leaping to her feet, her temper unleashed. ‘What of your honour towards me?’

He sprang up to face her, his cheekbones standing white. ‘I should never have spoken of love to you until I was free to do so!’ Having admitted his fault the forest fire was almost upon him. He could feel its awful crackling coming up through his veins to break into flames in his head. ‘It was a terrible mistake on my part!’

‘So you have regrets now!’ Deeply hurt, feeling torn inside by his words, she couldn’t stop herself from hurting him. ‘Maybe I have them, too! I can see I’ve been mistaken about you in every way. You are still fonder of Caroline than you would ever have me believe.’

His self-control snapped and his fury burst forth: ‘What if I am?’ He waved his arm about. ‘She hasn’t changed. She’s still the same person I admired for her looks, her cultured mind and her educated attitude to life.’

For Hester it was too much to be borne. He could not have said anything, however unwittingly, to strike harder at her. All her vulnerability about her own intellectual shortcomings had been delivered a dreadful and humiliating blow. Her pride could not endure it.

‘Stay with Caroline then,’ she raged, backing away from him. ‘It’s what you have really wanted to do all along if you had only dared admit it. It is I who have been in second place, not her. Marry Caroline! Spend the rest of your life with her. I never want to see you again!’

He roared back at her: ‘If that’s your decision, so be it!’

In the heat of his fury he let her run from him. He did not even watch her go, turning instead to stalk away in the opposite direction. That evening he went with Tom and Robin to the Blue Boar Inn where, for the first time in his life, he drank himself into a stupor and had to be carried home.

It took an early-morning dousing under the yard pump to get his head clear and ready for work. Still shaky, plagued by a thumping headache and with his face chalk-white, he took his place at the work-bench. By ill chance his task that day was to raise a silver bowl by beating on the outer convex side until it was moulded over the steel head from which it was taking its lovely shape. Every tap of the hammer jarred up his arm into his aching head. It was a relief to take a break when he was told that Master Harwood wanted to see him in the office. He felt no trepidation. Both Robin and Tom had assured him that he had not been seen by anyone in the establishment in his drunken state. His guess was that he was to be given something special to do again; the presentation salver had been much admired.

In the office, Stephen Harwood paced the floor as he waited, hands clasped behind his back, fingers flicking impatiently. The previous evening he had taken a theatre party of friends to supper at the Heathcock and, when he had settled the bill, Mrs Needham had invited him aside to put a word in his ear. He had listened without expression, nodded his thanks to show that her considerate warning had aroused no personal ire in him against her or her husband, and mulled over what he had learned going home in his carriage.

‘Ah, Bateman,’ he said, when his apprentice stood before him. In his own residential quarters on Sundays he called John by his Christian name, but here in the business regions it was a different matter. He lowered himself into his chair, taking his time and settling his elbows on the polished arms as he put his fingertips together. It would do no harm to let the young fellow sweat a bit.

John’s first thought was that his drunkenness was known about after all. He was not unduly alarmed. It would be his first black mark in nearly six years and he would not get booted out for that. ‘Sir?’

‘There comes a time in most apprenticeships when a young man needs to be reminded of the rules governing his behaviour as laid down in his indentures. If they have been flagrantly broken, then penalties are not enough and he must go, his chances of master-craftsmanship lost beyond recall.’

‘I know that can happen.’

Stephen Harwood watched him under his black brows that were at odds with the brightish hue of his brown periwig. ‘You’re a good craftsman. From the start you showed the makings of an exceptional talent and you’ve gone from strength to strength. I’ve never once had cause to be disappointed in you. As you know, I’m not a man to give praise lightly, which should encourage you to grasp fully the significance of all I have said.’ He shifted his heavy weight forward in the chair and lowered his hand on to the desk in front of him, gold rings gleaming, an emerald blinking green fire. ‘Since you have such skills in you, it is nothing but folly on your part to put your future in jeopardy by pursuing a tavern-maid.’

It was not what John had been expecting to hear. His eyes narrowed and his face tightened. All the rawness of the parting quarrel twisted like a knife in him. As always when he lost his temper he felt drained afterwards, his equilibrium shattered. And it was that, as much as the after-effects of drunkenness, that was weighing him down today. In his numbed state his loss of Hester had yet to make its full impact.

‘That pursuit is at an end,’ he stated bluntly.

With a relaxed air, Stephen Harwood sat back in his chair. Having misinterpreted the cause of the words he had heard, he thought simply that his warnings had gone home quickly and effectively. He had been young himself once and remembered the frustration of never being alone with his closely chaperoned betrothed before he had married her. Seeking release elsewhere was natural enough, but the sin was in being found out. In this case matters had reached a peak where the tavern-maid’s own relatives had pleaded for him to intervene, being aware, as he was, that girls who lost their heads could make a nuisance of themselves, something that John Bateman obviously had yet to learn.

He was grateful for Mrs Needham’s timely whisper. She had understood that at all costs he would want to protect Caroline from gossipy hearsay. His own well-chosen words had brought this otherwise excellent young man to heel. It bore out his conviction that John Bateman, with his even disposition, would always be malleable enough to be guided in all things by his future father-in-law, which in turn would ensure in time that the business would never leave the solid path on which he himself had set it. Caroline could easily have made a better match if money had been all there was at stake, but this craftsman would always be worth his weight in gold in the workshop — a simile that amused him — and that was not an asset to be easily turned aside, combined, as it was, with gentlemanly origins, which put Bateman on the necessary plane. Nevertheless, an apprentice of any standing could not be allowed to escape scot-free from a misdemeanour without some retribution to drive the reprimand home.

‘There’s no more to be said then.’ He could guess at Bateman’s sense of relief. ‘I’ll consider the matter closed.’ Deliberately he checked a gesture of dismissal even as his hand was in the air. ‘I have just remembered there is a man short on wire-drawing. Leave whatever workpiece you are engaged upon and take the absentee’s place until further notice.’ His shrewd eyes saw he had delivered a sentence that fell hard on its recipient, even though it was received in stiff-necked silence. ‘Now you may go, Bateman.’

As John went to put his tools away and wrap up his half-finished workpiece, he thought he had rarely had a worse day. On top of everything else he was being returned to work he had been through during the early days of his apprenticeship and to which he had never intended to return. It was a branch of goldsmithing that held no interest for him, wire-drawing being the method by which gold-coated silver bars were drawn through dies with each hole being smaller than the last, until finally wire was produced that could be made into gold and silver lace, as well as thread, for embroidery on ecclesiastical copes, royal robes, elaborate uniforms and the richly ornamented garments that fashion decreed for those who could afford them. It was a noisy process with the rattle of wheels and pulleys, the hammering of the forged bars, the thump of bellows and the grunts of effort that came from the amount of physical pressure needed in the processes. It was no wonder that qualified wire-drawers were sometimes granted admission into the Blacksmiths Company. He cursed long and loud as he took his place by a pulley. In the general din it went unheard and he felt no better afterwards.

Before the day was out, the full realization began to sink in as to what a future without Hester was going to mean to him. That evening he sat on the edge of his bed, his head in his hands, having refused an invitation from Tom and Robin to go out with them again to cheer himself up. It was not drink he needed now but a clear head to assess what had happened and to find a means by which to accept it. He had never supposed they would be split apart forever by a final and terrible row. Yet now that he was free of Hester — the thought wrenching at him with a force that made him groan aloud — he knew it was going to be easier to speak to Caroline of his self-doubts about their future alliance. Why that should be he could not comprehend, but that was how it was.

On Sunday Caroline, coming to meet him at the head of the stairs, saw at once that there was a change in him. With the sensitivity of a woman in love, she had been able to tell weeks ago that there was some new distraction in his life that had come between them. There had been times when she felt herself to be on a precipice as if some word from him might plunge her down into emptiness without him and it had needed all her alertness to keep matters in hand.

Now he was different again; no vagueness in his glance or absent-minded smile on his lips, but a purposeful air about him and a set expression in his face that alarmed her far less than all those signs that had indicated he was falling in love with someone else. She felt she could cope with whatever came now.

‘I need to talk to you at some length without being overheard,’ he said at once.

She knew they were being observed through the open door of the drawing-room and drew away her hand which he had caught tightly in his to emphasize the importance of the request. ‘The chance will come. Not today, I fear, but somehow I’ll arrange it.’

It came about the following morning. When her father was out, she went down to his office and sent for John. He answered the summons with some misgivings, wondering if further trouble awaited him, and his whole face lit up at the unexpected sight of her.

‘This is a pleasant surprise!’

‘We have our chance to talk now.’ Her ravishing smile gave nothing away of the turmoil of anxiety within her. She could guess what he planned to say and needed to gain the advantage while there was still a chance. ‘I should like to speak first.’

‘Say whatever you wish,’ he encouraged, resting his weight on the edge of the desk.

She did not sit herself. Instead she stood a little distance from him, the linking and unlinking of her tapering fingers the only sign of some stress. ‘You have fourteen months of your apprenticeship left,’ she began, her voice firm. ‘I should like to suggest that once you have been granted the Freedom we start to know and love each other all over again. The restrictions imposed on your Sunday visits have put unnatural fetters on our relationship. I would go so far as to say I feel we have lost each other along the way.’

His expression of relief confirmed her deepest fears. ‘I see what you have said as yet another example of how well we have always understood each other. Remember how often we have thought alike on many matters.’

‘Then you agree to my idea of making a fresh start?’ She gave him no chance to reply, hurrying on with what she had to say. ‘Once you are a master craftsman in your own right, my father will no longer control your life, even though you’ll still be in his employ. Everything will be quite different for us.’ As he opened his mouth to speak, she put a hand forward. ‘Let me say just one thing more. I’m asking you to release me from all understandings of the past, just as I’m willing to release you. Only in that way can we begin again.’

He shook his head in wonderment that she should show such wisdom and yet it confirmed once again what an exceptional person she was in every way. ‘I agree to all you have said.’ His face was etched deep with the seriousness of his mood. ‘Much has happened to me in the past weeks. I have to tell you that at the present time I can’t see that anything can ever be between us as it was before.’

It was all she could do not to cry out in anguish. Somehow she kept her expression under control. ‘That will sort itself out one way or another.’ Inwardly she was sick with dread that she might have made a terrible mistake in releasing him, but to have held him to old ties would have strangled whatever feeling he still had for her. Now, at least, she had a fighting chance. ‘There shall be no looking back for either of us and the future will be allowed to take care of itself. Is that agreed?’

‘Agreed.’ The sensation of being liberated swept through him, bringing a wave of warmth and admiration for her. She saw it in his face and knew then that she had made the right move.

Their subsequent meetings were always pleasant for him, for they met as good friends. No longer troubled by his conscience towards her, the Harwood dinners lost their strain and he was back to lively participation in the conversation. In the workshop he was soon back again at his own work-bench and engaged daily in the intricate work he enjoyed.

Everything would have been agreeable for him if the loss of Hester had not persecuted him every hour of the day and night. It seemed as if there was a grinding emptiness in his existence, the pain getting worse daily instead of better. She was never out of his thoughts. Even at the work-bench she was always at the back of his mind, ready to leap forward at the slightest reminder of her. Knowing her strength of pride and independence, he doubted whether she would consider letting him back into her life. There were times when he tried to be rational and think it was all the better for him that it was over. In the end, after several weeks of agonizing, he took a pen and wrote to her.