The Gilded Lily

by Deborah Swift

  Jay’s stomach sank. He grasped immediately the implications of that confession. ‘What’s in it?’ Allsop shifted in his chair. The man was red in the face and sweating even more profusely under his full-bottomed wig. A drip ran down his forehead. ‘Is my name in it?’

  ‘I think not. But you see, I cannot exactly recall. But I’m afraid it—’

  ‘You know what this means. We’ve got to get it back before it reaches someone who can read. What does it look like?’

  ‘Well, it’s a small leather-bound book—’

  ‘I know that, how the deuce am I supposed to—?’

  ‘– about a handspan tall and four digits wide. Buff calfskin, gold-tooled binding . . .’

  ‘For God’s sake.’ It had just started to sink in. ‘And you say it gives details of our transactions?’

  ‘Not just yours. I write them all down, see, afterwards. The doxies. So I can read it over again another time for my own pleasure, and you know my tastes are not straightforward. But it’s not just that – if anyone read it, I would be finished.’ Allsop clutched Jay’s arm and looked up at him through panicky eyes.

  ‘Now look here, you’d best level with me, if my name’s in it and my neck’s at stake. What else?’ Jay lowered his voice. ‘Is it . . . gentlemen?’

  ‘Of course not. What do you take me for?’

  Jay looked at him coldly and stood up. ‘I will need ten pounds to pay my men to track it down. And you do not need me to tell you how urgent that is.’

  ‘Ten pounds? No. That is outrageous. You know I cannot pay that.’

  ‘’Tis cheap enough in this circumstance. Why did you not have the damn thing under lock and key?’

  ‘How was I to know I would be turned over like that in the night?’ He looked sulky. ‘I sacked the porter; he must have been sleeping on the watch.’

  ‘Well, do you want it back or no? Ten pounds and I guarantee you it will be back in your hands by the end of the week. But I need to know what’s in it first.’

  ‘No, it’s private. I can’t tell you that here. Just get it back to me, that’s all.’

  ‘When I locate it, I will read it anyway. So why this pretence at coyness? That is, unless you want it left abroad and your rutting habits bandied about the city.’

  Jay watched him squirm. He usually enjoyed playing this game. He knew its rules well, like a game of chequers, he understood the unspoken patterns of advance and retreat. But this was something different entirely. He was uneasy, sensing his own neck at risk. Damn Allsop. He was becoming tedious. He leaned in and fixed Allsop with a stare. ‘Tell me what’s in it. It will be safe with me,’ he lied. He knew half of London’s underworld would have to hear of it for him to stand any chance of tracing it. Books were risky because they always crept their way upwards to the learned, and therefore the more influential. They were of no value to most folks except as fuel. ‘Tell me,’ Jay said.

  ‘Stop pressing me! I said no.’ Allsop thumped his fist on the table.

  The molly arrived and set down a steaming pot of coffee and two porcelain bowls before them. The occupants of the stalls behind peered over the tops of the partitions to find out the cause of the sudden noise. Jay smiled thinly at them to reassure the curious faces there was nothing amiss, and poured a thick sooty stream into the bowls before turning his attention back to Allsop. Jay flicked his head to the side and the molly took his signal, swung her tray under her arm and sashayed away.

  ‘It’s a catastrophe. I will be ruined,’ said Allsop. Jay waited as he twirled the spoon in his bowl. Allsop finally whispered, ‘It has my accounts in it, my debts, all listed in the back. They can see I am not worth a penny pittance. I’ll be a laughing stock. You will find it, will you not?’

  ‘If it mentions my name, I’ll find it all right. And burn it.’

  For a moment Allsop looked as though he might crumble into his own boots, but then he stood up as if catapulted out of his seat, his face the colour of cochineal. ‘You will not. It’s my property. When you find it, you will return it to me. Or I will let loose my tongue.’

  A childhood in the East End of London, where he had been bullied within an inch of his life, followed by an even more brutal spell at St Paul’s School had left Jay impervious to threats or violent behaviour. He pulled his hat further down on his head, and opened the door as if preparing to leave.

  ‘And who would believe you, eh?’ he hissed. ‘A bankrupt with a whore and gambling habit, against the son of Fair Square Walt Whitgift of Friargate.’

  Allsop, who had followed him, grabbed him by the sleeve. ‘I do not trust you, Whitgift. So help me God, if I’m going down, you’ll be dragged down with me, so you’d better play straight and return my property to me.’

  ‘No one is going down,’ said Jay quietly, removing Allsop’s hand from his arm. ‘Threaten me all you like, but it will not bring you back your book. May I remind you of your obligations as agreed. You have thirty days. Should the required amount not be forthcoming, I will send a friend to help you reconsider. And when I find this scurrilous diary, which I assure you I will, then, after a little pruning, I know of a very good printer in Whitechapel. Good day.’

  Jay held onto the brim of his hat and ducked under the doorway, leaving Allsop to pick up the bill in the Pelican. His mind was already working. If there was to be any sort of scandal, he must be in control of it, make sure it fell to his advantage. He would find that notebook and remove any reference to himself. He was always careful to cover his own tracks. Damn Allsop, the pudding-brained simkin. Men like him deserved their comeuppance.

  He would make some enquiries straight away. Then when the damnable thing was safely in his chambers, he could contact Allsop again, by which time he might be more than ready to find the wherewithal to pay.

  Jay took a sedan back to the shop on Friargate. He tipped the bearers and strolled in through the double gates under the old hanging emblem of the three brass coins. It creaked a little in the breeze, for it was also a weathercock, the iron tail feathers swinging round to point to the west, the ever-open beak crowing eastwards. The weathercock had been his own idea. It was clever to make the pawnbroker’s sign appear to be something else now the king had made such loans illegal.

  The yard was full of people as usual. Everything was wreathed in a shifting mist that rose up from the nearby Thames to cling around skirts and ankles. Over at the far end of the yard were the hackney carriages of the moneyed clients, some tethered mounts and a few well-liveried servants hanging round the mounting blocks and trough, exchanging news and watching their employers come and go.

  There was the customary queue of down-at-heel women with scraggy bundles, so many that the tail of the queue extended out of the side gate and into the road. Jay paused to wave to Dennis, who was issuing tickets above the lower stable door and passing the bundles back to where the two hired lads would sort and label them. With satisfaction he saw him draw the money from two bags nailed to the inside of the lower portion of the stable door, so as not to leave coinage or tokens on display.

  Jay walked on, giving the dismal trail of women a wide berth, until he saw one of them staring fixedly at him. She looked familiar. He paused for an instant trying to place her, until he remembered. Ah yes, one of the piece workers in the wigmaker’s. He dismissed her from his mind without a qualm, for she was of no account. She was not the winsome one, with the milky skin, who was making his peruke, but the ugly ginger-headed one. O’Malley, was she called? Anyway, the one the old boiler had tried to foist on him. Jay hurried his pace, blotting out the girl’s stare.

  The other girl, the pretty one with the wide-apart eyes and wavy hair, well, she could be useful. Women were like lodestones, drawing attention wherever they went. He had been looking out for the right sort of girl, and that girl looked simple, obviously from out of town, with a kind of fresh country charm. She was a bold one, he could tell. It was no good if they were too timid. A certain boldness was always needed for the selling and for wh
at he had in mind. The wigmaker’s girl might do.

  He turned into the main warehouse. The double doors to what had once been a loading bay were bolted back to reveal what at first glance could be taken for an open market, laid out with trestle tables on which goods were displayed according to type. Brass on one table – warming pans, kettles and candlesticks. Linen on another – starched tablecloths, lawn and lace christening gowns, pillowslips.

  Once a week the doors were thrown open so that people could buy, and today the place was warm with the press of purchasers. He squeezed past a table with every kind of pewter heaped high, closing his nose against the sulphurous smell of metal polish, then wended his way past more glinting cutlery, towards the back wall of the warehouse. He passed the tables without a glance, trying not to brush against anyone lest he soil his fine suit. He had no interest in these goods, for all the fine or valuable stock was in his father’s quarters. All that is, except for the very best, the most exquisite. Of these treasures his father knew nothing – Jay hoarded them in his own secret hiding place in his upstairs rooms.

  A notice above the stout iron-bound door read: Walter Whitgift. Privatus. By Prior Appointment Only. Jay pulled on a trailing rope. A dusty bell on the wall clanged. Its tone was peculiarly tuneless, as if the note had been squeezed out of it. The bell had once hung in St Stephen’s Church but had been pawned against the more urgent roof repairs. It had been at Whitgift’s four years now, and rang for a different kind of service.

  Jay wished his father would make haste. At the table next to the door a barefoot woman was weeping over a pile of shoes, clogs and slippers. It was a common enough sight, but still he did not like the disturbance to be so close to him. He turned his back to shield himself from her tears, suppressing his natural urge to somehow make her stop. It made him uncomfortable, for he did not know where tears came from – they were mysterious and uncontrollable, and when women cried it made him angry. He felt it personally, as if he should be able to fix it. Women were always subject to these strange moods, he thought. Unlike men – you knew where you were with men. The fact that he could not seem to help these women, or understand their crying, only served to point up some lack in himself, a lack he could not exactly name, only feel, like a knot deep in the chest.

  Impatient with the sobbing behind him, he tugged on the bell again. Its joyless noise rattled the rafters causing a sudden commotion and flapping overhead, followed by a shower of dust and droppings as the pigeons tried to find a quieter roost.

  To his relief he heard the bar on the other side of the arched door shunt back and his father’s wizened face appeared.

  ‘It’s you,’ said his father grumpily, and stomped off into the darker recesses of his private quarters. ‘Lock it after you.’

  He did, and followed his father, stooping under the low lintels, for he was tall and this place had been used as a dairy long ago, in Bess’s reign, when men were smaller. And even before then it had first been built for a small monastic order, now of course defunct on King Henry’s orders. It was more than a century since any monks had chanted evensong here. They passed down a cloistered corridor, through several sunless interconnecting rooms furnished with a hotch-potch of locked cabinets – the gun room, the silver room and finally the gold room, which functioned also as an office. This was the only room with daylight; a thin stream of sun slid through the tiny round window and onto his father’s desk. The walls were speckled with moving dots of light. His father was marking up rings and bracelets for sale, now that the owners had failed to buy them back by the due date.

  He sat down opposite his father on a high-backed Windsor chair. The room whirred as if alive, a hundred pocket watches ticking away inside the cabinets.

  His father did not look up but continued to examine a ring by holding it up close to his spectacles.

  ‘Saw Tindall today, outside the Pelican,’ Jay said. ‘He looked a blaggard. His coat was that threadbare I’m surprised it holds together.’

  ‘Nat Tindall the astrologer?’ Now Jay had his father’s attention. ‘I’ve not seen Nat for years. Not in all of Cromwell’s days. How does he, the old dog? Did you tell him to drop by?’

  ‘He looked a pinchbeck. I tell you, Pa, we can’t have the likes of him hanging around here.’

  ‘Why, Jay? There’s no harm in him coming in for a chinwag. He gave us good advice in the early days.’

  ‘He’d bring the business down. He’s naught but a leech.’

  ‘Hold with your judgements now, son. It was on account of him I took this place – and now look at it, it’s fair buzzing. He saw it in the stars, told me the date to sign for it and all. Happen we could do with a bit more of that advice.’

  ‘Don’t be soft, Pa. It’s our own hard work has brought us all this, not any of his quackery.’

  ‘We’ve had queer luck, though, haven’t we, son? Though I reckon ’tis you – you’re my lucky talisman.’ He smiled up at Jay, a smile that crinkled the brown skin on his forehead and around his eyes like an old leather glove. ‘’Tis uncanny the way the best stuff turns up here. Dear old Nat, he made quite a chart for it. Great big thing it was, took up half that wall. Baffled Bessie and me, it did, but he said our success was writ aforehand in the heavens. Insistent, he was. Something to do with Taurus, the Bull.’

  ‘Bull, my backside. We’ve made our own reputation. And it’s not lady luck, it’s my hard graft – working my way through the stock every day and checking the gentry’s lists in case their stolen goods turn up here.’

  ‘And they always do. I’m telling you, it’s uncommon fortune that brings them things through our door. Nat was right. Why, they could end up at any pop shop in London, but like as not they finish up here. ’Tis uncommon fortune, that.’ He shook his head with an expression almost of reverence. Jay kept quiet. He knew full well why the goods always landed up in their establishment.

  His father went on. ‘Only last week, Justice Brinkley came by to ask after his missing portraits, and before a week was out, as if by bewitchment, here they were.’ His father whistled softly through his teeth. ‘No trace of where they came from, none of the lads can remember who brought them in, but the bugger paid handsomely to buy them back. Beats me why the constabulary never catch the villains – far too slow, likely. But mark me, if it weren’t for us, Brinkley’d never have clapped ey’n on those portraits again.’ His father’s eyes watered. ‘It was a ripe old time, when we first started. Yes, I miss Tindall. I had an affection for him, he had a wise old head on his shoulders.’

  Jay remembered Tindall’s knack of suddenly looming out of the shadows, like a living gargoyle, when Jay was about to do something he shouldn’t, like light-finger a watch from his pa’s cabinet. As a boy it used to make him start, and feel guilty.

  ‘But, Pa, charting the stars is old-fashioned. We’ve got to move with the times. The king made it plain he has no traffic with astrologers on account of the church, and we can’t be seen to go against the king’s wishes, ’twould be bad for business.’

  Jay saw his father’s lips press together in an expression he recognized well, a bull-headed stubbornness. This was the last thing Jay needed, to have some old charlatan noseying around the business, putting a muzzle on his activities. He changed the subject.

  ‘Anyway, Pa, I’ve got an idea in my head that will really make us the talk of the town. Something new, that no one else has ever done.’

  His father ignored him, bending over a pocket watch to tie on one of his labels. He penned a few marks with the quill, blew on it so the ink would dry, then looked up.

  ‘Time for new ideas soon enough. You’re too full o’ them, if you ask me. Can’t sit still a minute. Always got your finger in one pie or another. No staying power, that’s your trouble. And put that down.’

  Jay dropped a watch chain he’d been winding round his fingers back onto the table.

  ‘Let the astrologer come,’ his father said. ‘There’s more to life than we can see on the surface, son.�
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  You bet there is, Jay thought; just don’t look too closely under your own two feet. He dragged his attention back to his father’s words.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like to struggle. Times are uncertain. There’s the war with the Dutch, and the last king lost his head, never known anything as cock-eyed as that in my life. Belt and braces, is what I’ve always said. That’s why I had you schooled.’

  Jay frowned. His schooling had not been a happy experience.

  ‘Come on, Jay, please your old pa, eh? Look out for Nat Tindall, and if you see him again, tell him he’s welcome. There’ll be time enough for your newfangled schemes when I’m gone.’

  His father always had that card – the one that made Jay feel as though he was standing over him, just waiting for him to die. That really was an ace, and he knew he could not trump it. But he had no intention of inviting that unwashed old goat Tindall anywhere near their premises, so he merely nodded. When his father had set his mind on anything and dug in his heels, it would take more than a coach and six to shift him. Unfortunately for him, Jay thought, his son was tarred with the same brush.

  Chapter 7

  One of Sad ie’s earliest memories was watching her father slump into sleep over the kitchen table. Ella said he was ‘neither use nor ornament’, and her face had been full of disgust. Sadie knew she herself would never qualify for the word ‘ornament’. She grasped early on that she had better be of some use, that any advance she might make in life would come through skill and not looks, so she was adept at many small crafts. Hers were the neatest stitches, the sturdiest baskets and straw hats, hers the most mouth-watering lardy cakes.

  So she had to bite her lip often, as Ella struggled to make Mr Whitgift’s wig ready for his fitting. Ella wrested it this way and that, pulled and prodded at it, tugging on the hair, as if it were the wig’s fault it would not go right. Once she saw Ella thrust the wig away in frustration and she went over to help, but Ella hissed at her.