The streets narrowed and grew crowded as traffic was squeezed between the wharves and loading-cranes along the river. Mr. Thornfax nodded to our left. “That’s my store-house there, on the ground floor.” I craned my neck to read the words in white paint at the top of the tall building with its dozens of stacked windows: NICHOLSON’S WHARF. “Your brother-in-law’s laboratory is housed inside, too, now that I won’t be dealing with such large shipments.
“Ah, that is lucky—there’s our boy Rampling.” He thumped the carriage bonnet for Curtis to stop and hallooed out to Tom, who looked up from locking the warehouse door.
“Good day, Mr. Thornfax, Miss Somerville.” Tom’s black cap had been turned backward; when he finished making his bow he replaced it right, keeping his eyes on Mr. Thornfax.
“I wonder, Mr. Rampling—would you be willing to accompany us aboard my new clipper, docked just downriver? Miss Somerville has expressed her interest in a tour.”
Tom’s eyes flew to mine and away again. “Of course, milord.”
“Climb in, then. Dewhurst trusts you. He’ll take your word I kept the lady safe.”
Tom climbed into the carriage beside Mr. Thornfax, filling the space with his clean, familiar scent, now tinged with salt air—a confusing contrast with Mr. Thornfax’s aura of boot polish and tobacco. We drove past Billingsgate and along the tight avenue in front of the magisterial Custom House, bustling with sailors and militiamen, and Mr. Thornfax did not seem to notice the strain between his companions as he talked of his new ship’s capabilities. He’d christened her Heroine, he told us, though they’d not yet had time to paint the name on the hull or finish the gilding on the figurehead. This trip to London was her maiden voyage; she’d been crafted to his precise specifications in Aberdeen. “She’ll carry tea and wool with the best of the clippers, of course, but she’ll also keep Dr. Dewhurst supplied more efficiently and discreetly than before. She will be faster and more seaworthy than any vessel in the Empire.” Mr. Thornfax was beaming. “The Heroine’ll give even the Cutty Sark a run for her money, I’ll wager!”
“W-w-will you r-race her, then?” I was self-conscious with Tom listening to our conversation, and my stutter became more pronounced.
“As soon as may be,” Mr. Thornfax said. He shifted to the seat beside me. “Shall I teach you to sail, Miss Somerville?”
“Oh yes, p-please.”
“You won’t take her to sea!” Tom exclaimed.
“Whyever not?” Mr. Thornfax looked surprised at Tom’s vehemence.
“She ... Miss Somerville would not be comfortable.” Tom was very red in the face.
Mr. Thornfax spread his arm across the back of the seat, brushing my hair with his sleeve. “Of course Miss Somerville’s comfort is paramount,” he said. “But you know, Leonora, when we are married you needn’t even leave Hastings House, if you like. I’ll be often at sea, but I’ll visit whenever I come ashore.”
Now it was my turn to blush. His use of my Christian name, the mention of marriage—it was very unlike Mr. Thornfax to be so familiar with me in front of others. I realized at once that this casualness was pitched to unbalance Tom Rampling. A lesser man might have reprimanded Tom openly for his impertinence. Mr. Thornfax, with characteristic deftness, hadn’t swayed from his friendly enthusiasm but had nonetheless managed to remind Tom of his place in relation to a lady and a future lord.
And judging by Tom’s dark expression it had worked. “Forgive me, milord,” he said. “But I understood that you’d sold your shipping business?”
Mr. Thornfax shrugged. “I can only be on one ship at a time, can’t I? There!” He pointed at the river and shouted at Curtis to stop.
TWELVE
The Heroine, tall, trim, and gleaming, was tethered by a steep gangplank to the pier. Mr. Thornfax leapt from the carriage after Tom and, in his enthusiasm, strode directly down the dock, so that Tom had to come round and hand me down. The lapse of manners amused me—it was so rare to see something break through Mr. Thornfax’s perfect civility. His love for his boat, like his sadness that morning in the carriage, made him more human in my eyes. I was falling deeper in love with Francis Thornfax by the hour today, it seemed.
I was still smiling when I took Tom’s hand, but I stopped when I saw the fearsome scowl on his face. He noted my surprise and checked himself—a marble-pale politeness replaced the anger and scorn—but I’d gotten quite good at reading Tom Rampling’s eyes. Right now they were all the roiling grey of a tempest. “W-what is it?” I said.
He shook his head, glanced at Curtis, and toed a gobbet of seaweed with his boot.
“You n-needn’t be so s-surly with him, you know,” I said.
“But you shall marry him.”
It wasn’t a question, exactly. Nor was Tom’s tone derisive or angry. Yet I felt accused, and I bristled at the notion that Tom should accuse me of anything. “He has n-not asked for me, yet,” I said, a touch stiffly.
He let out his breath. After a long moment he said, “You’re not dressed for the Docks, milady. That’s a chill wind.” The stormy eyes had softened to concern, and there was pity there, too—he felt sorry for me.
Tom Rampling’s pity was a good deal harder to take than his anger. I flounced past him, hurrying after Mr. Thornfax, who’d finally realized his mistake and turned back for me.
The gangplank arced and swayed in the wind. I clung to the ropes despite Mr. Thornfax’s steadying arms on either side of me, and I fixed my eyes on the brass post above us, trying to ignore how my toes caught in the hem of my skirt. At last Mr. Thornfax grasped me round the waist and hoisted me up over the lip and onto the deck of the Heroine. He jumped down beside me and threw his arms wide. “My first visit aboard!” he crowed.
I laughed. “I’m honoured to sh-share in it, then.”
“Yes,” he said, and took my hand. “Come, Miss Somerville, let’s explore.”
When we crossed the polished deck, though, we found the midship house was locked. Mr. Thornfax looked round at Tom lingering at the top of the gangway. “What do you say, Mr. Rampling?”
Tom came over, and Mr. Thornfax stood back and waved him toward the brass keyhole. “I’ve no key, you see. They must have sent it direct to my office.”
“I’m sorry, milord. What can I do?”
“Can you get us in without damaging the lock?”
Tom reddened.
“I do my research, Mr. Rampling. You hadn’t been at work in my warehouse six hours before I had your whole history. Now what will you need to work your magic here? Wire? A blade?”
Tom could not look at us. He had to clear his throat to speak. “Neither, milord.” Very reluctantly he took a little leather sleeve from his pocket and unrolled it to reveal a set of tiny iron picks. His ears were crimson as he bent over the lock, but he had the door open in a trice, and Mr. Thornfax whooped and thumped him on the shoulder.
“This is the whole trouble with England,” said Mr. Thornfax, as he took the narrow steps down and reached back for my hand. “Our country is like an enormous fishbowl. Each man strives to swim faster than his countrymen, or to appear bigger and more colourful, but if you stop to notice you’ll see we’re all just swimming round and round in circles—keep with us, now, Mr. Rampling, and light that lantern so we can see the cabinet-work in the galley,” he called.
We passed through the skylit mess room with its iron-footed table and filed through a narrow door along the corridor of sailors’ berths. I pressed my skirts to my legs to stop them catching on the rows of hooks and handles. The galley was already outfitted with neatly hung copper pots, griddles, ladles, and kettles. Mr. Thornfax pointed out how the dishes were stowed behind special rails so they wouldn’t jostle in rough seas.
Mr. Thornfax tried the door of the second deck house and whooped again to find it unlocked. Inside the saloon he ran his hands lovingly over the surface of the mahogany dining table. Here the chairs were upholstered in leather, and the transom was fitted with a semicircular velvet so
fa. After a few minutes of looking round the room, Mr. Thornfax returned to his theme: “What nobody ever tells us, growing up in England, is that the world is much wider than we realize. In fact it isn’t a fishbowl at all. ’Tis an ocean!”
What was it my aunt had said at lunch? In the right sort of legend every pond dweller might be a dragon. Poor sad Tom Rampling with his lies and his bad conscience, I thought. No wonder he was surly. His life was lived in the murkiest depths of the pond, while Mr. Thornfax could range across the whole of the Empire.
As if his thoughts had run along the same lines as mine Mr. Thornfax put a kindly hand to Tom’s shoulder. “Here is the truth about most men, Mr. Rampling. Most men—the vast numbers of men in England, the multitude of clerks and cobblers and doctors and fishmongers and, yes, the politicians, too—most never dare to stop swimming in little circles, no matter how easy it might be simply to break from the crowd and make for the open sea. Take yourself, now. You seem a clever lad. Cunning, even.
“But most men—they may be clever or cunning, they may dream their whole lives of better, broader prospects, but they cling, terrified, to what they know. And so they are forever doomed to a life of servitude, drudgery, and petty crime. Of lock-breaking, say.”
He led us into the master cabin, dominated by a massive, velvet-covered bed piled with silk pillows. The three of us stood just inside the doorway, awestruck. Panels of bird’s-eye maple were trimmed with satinwood and set with reliefs of teak, rosewood, ebony—there were more varieties of wood inlaid here than I could name. These were interspersed with panels of mirror and surmounted by enamelled cornices edged with gold. It was all so beautiful that I forgot what I was looking at until Tom coughed into his fist and mumbled that he thought perhaps we should continue our tour elsewhere, if his lord was amenable?
It was my marriage bed we were looking at, of course—or at least a bed in which I might someday find myself sleeping, now and again, with my husband when he was docked in London. The blush that rose to my cheeks was stoked warmer still when I looked up to find Mr. Thornfax watching me with an open question on his face: What do you think? My suitor looked almost anxious for my reaction, and I allowed my smile to answer him with equal openness: ’Tis more than I could have imagined.
Tom cleared his throat again. “We should go.” This time he didn’t bother to hide the anger on his face. His hands were clenched fists at his sides.
Alarmed at this display of churlishness I glanced from him to Mr. Thornfax, but the taller man only laughed and nodded. “Of course. Of course, we shall go, Mr. Rampling.” He waved him ahead and, except for pointing out a water closet and the library, allowed Tom to lead us at a brisk clip through the cabins and back onto the deck.
He made no sign of noticing Tom’s sullen behaviour as we disembarked, and he kept up an affable commentary all through the ride back to Hastings House, where Tom had said he was expected in Dr. Dewhurst’s surgery. But at the door, after Tom bade us a curt goodbye and was about to circle round the house, Mr. Thornfax stopped him gently by the arm. “As I was saying earlier, Mr. Rampling,” he said, “England’s prisons are filled nearly to bursting with ambitious and clever young men exactly like yourself.”
Tom scraped his heel along the stones and looked off across the drive. “And what do you suggest, milord?” he said finally.
“Only that you put your various talents to better use. My man tells me that those nimble fingers of yours can build anything he asks of you, almost before he asks it. To speak the truth I suspect you’re a good deal cleverer than he is. You could go far with me, Mr. Rampling. You really could.”
“Thank you, milord.” The low voice was wretched.
I exhaled, realizing I’d been holding my breath. Mr. Thornfax should have been stern with Tom—would have had every right to discipline him for his behaviour—and instead he was offering him the promise of advancement. I hoped Tom felt as wretched as he sounded. I hoped he was thoroughly ashamed of his bad temper.
THIRTEEN
Lord Rosbury’s funeral service at St. Paul’s Cathedral that Saturday was overseen by a cheerful sun high in a cloudless sky. Holding Daniel by the arm, Christa lingered on the steps to toy with her new ebony fan and wave about the little black envelope containing our invitation to the private reception to follow. “Operas and other amusements are one thing,” she’d trilled when the card arrived, “but to have you publicly at his side at such a solemn, formal event! He will be introducing you to his whole family, Leonora!” A new mourning ensemble had been ordered for me at once, complete with lace and ruched satin overskirts.
“You ladies are a perfect match for the parade horses,” Aunt Emmaline commented, steering us to our seats. “I think you must share a milliner.”
I, too, had noticed the similarity between our bonnets’ trimmings and the arrangement of black bows and ostrich feathers decorating the horses’ bridles. The politician’s crotchety conservatism was forgiven now that he was gone. It seemed all London had arrived to pay tribute, arrayed in a morbid splendour of which, my aunt remarked, Lord Rosbury himself would certainly have disapproved.
Mr. Thornfax was seated at the front of the church with his family. I examined the back of his head—the trimmed blond hair, the stiff white collar above the black suit. Next to him was a thin woman with stooped shoulders. “His spinster cousin,” Christa informed me in a loud whisper, drawing a glare from our aunt.
The domed cathedral was hushed and cool after the excitement outside. Sir Christopher Wren’s ingenious architecture ensured that sound would carry across the pews no matter how soft-spoken the cleric, and this one read in crisp diction and in ringing tones. There was a boys’ choir in red robes, and a trumpeter, and a scholar down from Oxford who read from Milton’s Lycidas.
This is how death is beaten, I mused, gazing up at the jewel-toned window where Saint John the Divine raised his hands to the four horsemen. Death may come to claim our individual lives, but it cannot do away with art and beauty and wealth so abundant. This is how we build our immortality.
The funeral cortège through the city streets was hemmed in on all sides by spectators. Everyone doffed his hat and fell silent as we drove by, for custom dictated it bad luck not to watch the hearse disappear. And then, too, London of late had been racked with anxiety about the Black Glove. Scanning the plain, scrubbed faces in the crowd, the Sunday-best clothing, and the carefully shined shoes, I wondered how many wives must be afraid when their husbands went to work in the morning, how many parents must fret when their children skipped off to play outside. Perhaps it wasn’t the Lord Rosbury they had come to mourn, exactly. Perhaps we were all gripped by the feeling that at any moment the axe could fall.
The funeral procession was not headed to a cemetery at all. Despite his entitlement to a plot in Highgate, Lord Rosbury had stipulated in his will that his body be transported north to be laid next to his wife’s, once the London formalities were concluded. Also in accord with the will, the funerary reception was being held at the deceased’s own house in Sloane Street. Mr. Thornfax had already had half the rooms cleared of furniture—“Horrible, dank clutter everywhere!” I’d heard him complain to Daniel—and planned to sell the property as soon as he could. It was an imposing house, with a narrow front door and many pairs of arched windows like eyes glaring over the road. Inside it was dim and smelled of vinegar despite the vases everywhere brimming with lilies and white roses.
Mr. Thornfax’s few London relations appeared pleased enough to make my acquaintance but, beyond that, not particularly interested in conversation. He put me by his side for a tour of the room—“Come along, please, and redeem me in their eyes,” he said—but the trio of aged aunts merely nodded dimly at his introduction, and the spinster cousin clutched her prayer book and kept her eyes on the floor. Mr. Thornfax rolled his eyes when I asked him if there was anyone to whom I should especially pay my respects. “We shall never see any of these people again, if I have a say in it,” he said, and wi
nked at me as he added, “and I do.”
Still, he was attentive and gracious to everyone in the room. “Oh, but you have the look of your father!” said a sorrowing old man who’d once been Lord Rosbury’s solicitor. Mr. Thornfax grasped the man’s hand with both of his own and declared that he was most honoured by the compliment. The old ladies cooed and flocked around him and called him a poor, poor boy, and Mr. Thornfax ducked his head and dashed tears from his eyes. Parliamentary men tried to take him aside and convince him to take up his father’s stance against the opium ban, and he would tell them, “No politics today, sirs. Today is my father’s day.”
Being on Mr. Thornfax’s arm in public was like finding a bubble of sweeter, more breathable air in the pall of gloom. Wherever he went he drew round himself a circle of charm. And in that circle, I found, there were no prying questions, no cruel opinions, no patronizing words of advice. No one so much as looked askance at me. Every time Mr. Thornfax introduced me he would touch my collar or my nape with one smooth fingertip, and once people saw what I was to him ’twas enough: I was beloved, too, and therefore utterly, instantly immune from social scrutiny. On Mr. Thornfax’s arm in public I could breathe.
Christabel by contrast grew more and more agitated as the event wore on. She drank glass after glass of brandy. She kept telling the guests how she’d witnessed the Lord Rosbury fall from the balcony, even after Aunt Emmaline took her aside to say we ought to remember him in life not in death.
“Did you bring nothing for me at all?” she said to Dr. Dewhurst, more than once, and, “Have you sent word? Will it be delivered soon?” She darted to the window repeatedly and kept fiddling with her fan until she knocked a lady’s punch glass from her hand. My own drink was spilt when she tugged my arm violently and exclaimed, “Oh, look, Leonora darling. What a surprise: it’s your dear nephews come to pay their condolences to Mr. Thornfax!”
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