by Sandra Heath
Above the tureen, just beyond the arc of candlelight, there was a portrait of a young woman, but she could not make out who it was, except that there was something familiar about it. Then she again became aware of the candlelight as someone approached the bedside.
“No, you mustn’t light candles during the day, for it’s unlucky!” she gasped. She didn’t know why she said it, for it wasn’t a superstition she had ever known before, but for some reason the words came immediately to her lips.
“But it’s night, my darling bride, so there is no need to fear,” said a soft male voice.
She looked up. Athan was there, wearing a long silky maroon dressing gown that was so loosely tied at the waist that she could clearly see that he wore nothing else beneath. His nakedness seemed the most natural thing in the world ... and the most beautiful. Everything about him was beautiful, from the lazily loving light in his gray eyes, the sensuous smile on his lips, and the way his hair was boyishly tousled, to the paleness of his skin and the lean perfection of his body.
In a few moments now she would surrender her chastity and her very soul. She remembered she was without clothes, her light brown hair brushed loose, her breasts peeping above the coverlet, but she had no will to hide herself from him.
The anticipation of his lovemaking was so wonderful that excitement threatened to engulf her completely. This was her wedding night, and soon their bodies would be joined in her first act of love. She wasn’t afraid, she loved him too much for that, but she was eager ... so eager. She longed for him, desired him above all else, and was impatient for the gratification she knew only he would ever give her.
Was that wrong of her? Was it lacking in demureness? Oughtn’t she to be fearful, an innocent upon the altar of marriage? No, she could never be that. Not with him. She was too honest, too in love, too passionate. He had kindled emotions in her that ought to be shocking, but were not.
He came to the bedside, and set the silver-gilt candlestick on the nearby table, where a crystal bowl of sweet-smelling roses filled the room with fragrance. “You are my bride and I love you, Ellie,” he whispered.
“Do you? Do you really?” Her sudden insecurity was almost unbearable.
“My ring is on your finger, my darling, so how can you doubt? You are my life from now on, Ellie.”
“Do you swear it?” she whispered.
“Upon my very soul,” he breathed. “I am going to make sweet love to you, Ellie. Before dawn I will have proved my adoration over and over, and will have shown you ecstasies and delights that you have not dreamed existed.”
“Are there truly such delights?” she asked.
He smiled, and slipped into the bed with her. The candle flames swayed seductively, sending warm shadows over her skin. He leaned over, kissed her on the lips, and drew her down from the pillows so their bodies touched.
The delicious sensation of his skin against hers sent her pulse racing. Her entire being yearned for all of him, wanted to rush toward satisfaction, but she was afraid her utter innocence would disappoint him. “I may fail you, Athan. I’m so green, so ignorant of—”
“I will teach you.” He kissed her mouth again, and her lips softened and parted. Oh, such a kiss, slow, luxurious, enticing, and filled with such promise that she thought she would die of anticipation. Kiss followed kiss, and caress followed caress as they explored each other for the first time. Her need for him made her feel as if she would ignite, but at last they were one, her virginity stormed and then vanquished.
“Look at me, Ellie,” he whispered. “Look at me for this one moment.”
She obeyed, her eyes dark with such fierce desire that she would have done anything he wished of her. He smiled, and began to move inside her. “This is love, Ellie. This is true love.”
She gazed into his eyes, loving him so much that she thought she would die of ecstasy. Joy tumbled wildly through her veins, and her soul seemed to melt into such a wild storm of gratification that she felt she would drown in its fiery waves.
It was too much, too much.... Her eyes closed, and she floated away on a sea of pleasure that seemed to stretch to every horizon. This truly was love, the most beautiful love, and it was theirs to share forever, forever, forever....
“Are you all right, Miss Rutherford?” Mrs. Lewis’s concerned inquiry intruded upon Ellie’s blissful reverie.
“I beg your pardon?” Ellie’s eyes flew open. Athan had gone, and the room was filled with bright daylight. There was no marriage bed, no gilded plasterwork, and no fragrance of roses.
“Are you all right? I spoke to you several times but you didn’t answer.”
Ellie managed to smile, for her senses were still whirling in all directions. She could feel the flush on her cheeks and knew that her eyes were bright. The exquisite pleasure of lovemaking was still with her, sparkling through her skin and shimmering through her blood like sunlight through a canopy of summer leaves.
“Yes, I ... I’m quite all right, thank you,” she answered a little weakly.
The housekeeper looked at her face and then smiled. “Dreams are very private, are they not?”
Ellie returned the smile as best she could, but didn’t say anything. There had to be a logical explanation for what had just happened, and she guessed that it was simply and solely the manifestation of wishful thinking.
Whether or not Athan was a director of the hated Unicorn Bank, she remained so fiercely attracted to him that her mind’s eye had conjured an impossibly idyllic scene in which there were pleasure and happiness without adversity.
It was a fairy tale, brought to life by the fact that in spite of a good night’s sleep she was still very tired, not only from traveling, but from everything else that had happened to her during the last year.
Mrs. Lewis got up. “Dreams are what one makes of them, Miss Ellie.”
Ellie held her gaze, a trace of superstition still lurking in the shadow of her logical explanation. “Do you promise you didn’t see anything just now?”
“I promise. All I know is that it has brought a glow to your cheeks and a sparkle to your eyes. What you saw was good, and I am glad.”
When the housekeeper had gone, Ellie leaned her head back against the pillows. Oh, how wonderful such a future would be. She closed her eyes, cast her mind back a few minutes, and relived every wonderful moment.
“This is love, Ellie. This is true love....”
Chapter Eight
A little later, dressed in an old green fustian gown that had survived the journey from the Isle of Wight with remarkable fortitude, Ellie went down to the kitchens for breakfast. She was still unsettled by what had happened with the tea leaves, but satisfied that Mrs. Lewis had told her the truth about not having seen anything. It would have been too embarrassing for words if the housekeeper had been a silent witness.
Ellie expected to find her uncle taking breakfast, but there was no sign of him. Mrs. Lewis ushered her to the scrubbed table where supper had been served the night before. White geraniums bloomed in pots on the window sills, the red-raddled floor was bright and clean, and four cats sprawled by the hearth, luxuriating in the heat.
Fruit bread had just been taken from the wall oven and was cooling on a rack on the table. Blue-and-white crockery—not the work of John Bailey—adorned a great dresser against one wall, and the clock on the mantel had stopped at four, which was when Gwilym had left to commence his daily duties at the Castle Griffin stables.
“Where is my uncle?” Ellie asked as Mrs. Lewis set about cooking her breakfast.
“Oh, he’s been hard at work these past two hours,” the housekeeper replied, looking around from the pan on the hearth and pointing to a door at the other end of the kitchen.
Ellie had been told the night before that beyond the door there were stone steps leading down to the cellars, from where access could be had to the canal and wharf. Her uncle’s few employees worked in the adjacent outbuildings, but he remained mostly in his workroom, which no one else dared to
enter because it was where he decorated and gilded the successful porcelain, and mixed together the secret ingredients of his soft-paste formula.
Mrs. Lewis brought Ellie’s breakfast of scrambled eggs and fried bacon. “There, that will set you up for the day,” she declared.
“It certainly will,” Ellie replied, thinking that such a mound would probably set her up for tomorrow as well.
“Mr. Bailey said that as soon as you finish, he would like you to go down to see him in his workshop.”
“In his workshop?” Ellie was startled.
The housekeeper raised her eyebrows and nodded. “That’s what he said, miss.”
“I’m being honored, aren’t I?”
“Well, you are family.”
After eating rather more of the breakfast than she’d expected, Ellie left the table, but as she approached the door to the cellar, Mrs. Lewis hurried after her with a candle she’d lit hastily from the fire.
“Take this, Miss Ellie. It’s terribly dark down there when the doors to the wharf are closed, and the stone steps are a very steep spiral. They’re well-worn too, so please be careful.”
Ellie accepted the candle. “Thank you, Mrs. Lewis.”
The housekeeper opened the door for her, and a waft of freezing air swept up into the warm kitchen. Or was it that the warm air swept down and left a chill behind? Shielding the flame with her hand, Ellie began to descend.
At the bottom there was a large windowless room, deserted except for careful stacks of unglazed, unpainted porcelain that she would soon learn was termed biscuit ware. At the far end were double doors around which she could see daylight. Beyond them lay the busy canal. Clogs clattered on rounded cobbles, people talked in Welsh, and now and then a horse whinnied, presumably a tow horse belonging to one of the barges.
Ellie crossed the dark cellar room with care, for it too was cobbled and therefore very uncomfortable to walk on without clogs. She didn’t open the doors, but peeped out through a knothole. She saw the tow horse beside the sixty-foot-long barge that had been waiting overnight, and leaning against the trunk of one of the nearby evergreen trees, the man and boy that crewed the barge. They watched as a cargo of finished chinaware was carefully loaded.
Another barge had arrived an hour earlier, to discharge its cargo of what Ellie was to learn included bone ash, Lynn sand, potash, borax, whiting, niter, lead oxide, alum, gypsum, salt, and glass. The wharf was piled with barrels, and men with wheelbarrows took things in and out of a nearby storage shed. The kilns had been fired, and smoke drifted on the air as her uncle’s workers—the oddly named turners, lathemen, throwers, squeezers, and saggermen—went about their business.
There was a great air of industry, as if Nantgarth porcelain was selling like the proverbial hotcakes, but Ellie knew that there was only such activity when barges came and went; in between it was too quiet to tell of profit.
The tow horse whinnied again, and she heard hooves in the alley that led down beside the canal bridge. By straining a little she was able to see that it was Gwilym on one of the white Castle Griffin horses. People shouted greetings to him, and he grinned back as he slipped lightly from his mount. Hardly had his boots touched the cobbles than there was a cry of dismay from a worker who was just lifting some finished porcelain into the barge.
The man’s clogs slipped on the cobbles, and he began to lose his balance. Gwilym turned in a moment, and looked intently at the unfortunate man, who seemed to hover in midair, then, impossibly, regained his equilibrium. There were shouts of approval from the workers, who were all clearly accustomed to Gwilym’s powers.
Ellie was shaken, for by all the laws of physics and gravity, the man and his load of porcelain should have fallen from the wharf into the barge, but somehow he had avoided calamity. Mrs. Lewis’s strange son had used sheer willpower to prevent the accident. Fey was indeed the word to describe him.
She drew back from the knothole, and turned to the darkened cellar behind her. For the first time she noticed there were several doors into adjacent rooms, but nothing to indicate her uncle’s whereabouts. “Uncle John?”
“Here, Ellie!”
His muffled voice emanated from the door to her right, so she opened it and went inside. To her relief, the small room inside was warmed by a fireplace, and was quite cozy after the chill and drafts of the stairs and outer cellar, but as she entered, her uncle almost leapt from his tall stool to seize her candle and extinguish it.
“Never light candles during daylight, Ellie! Never! For it is very bad luck and an omen of death.” There was a frightened note in his voice, an edge that told of total belief in what he was saying.
Shaken to hear words she herself had uttered during the reading of her tea leaves, Ellie stared at him. “Uncle?”
“Nikolai did that too, you see, and within a week—” John broke off, biting back the rest of what he’d almost said.
“Who is Nikolai, Uncle? And what happened within a week?” Ellie was a little frightened by the intensity of his emotion.
He took a deep breath to steady himself, then forced an apologetic smile. “No one, my dear, no one at all. Forgive me, I fear you caught me in a superstitious moment.”
“I’ve never heard of it being unlucky to light candles during the day.”
“No? Oh, it’s the same as never walking under a ladder. You know the sort of thing.”
Yes, she knew the sort of thing; she also knew that he had meant every word of his instinctive warning.
Placing the candlestick on one of the cluttered trestle tables that lined two walls, he wiped his hands thoroughly on a clean cloth, then kissed her on the cheek. “I trust you’ve slept and eaten well?”
“Yes to both.”
He beamed, then waved an arm to encompass the little room. “Welcome to my lair.”
Ellie looked around. Samples of soft-paste porcelain were everywhere, stacked on the floor, lining shelves, and even higgledy-piggledy in a wooden crate in a corner. One of the trestles was taken up with his painting and gilding equipment, the other with brushes, oils, cloths, dishes, knives, turntables, and sundry other things necessary for his specialized work. This included metal oxides for all hues, copper to give green, cobalt for blue, manganese for purple, and antimony for yellow.
Her gaze rested on the item her uncle had been working on before she interrupted him. It was a glazed but as yet undecorated soup tureen, twelve inches high, wide, and deep, of the same size and shape she had seen on the unknown mantel when Mrs. Lewis turned the tea leaves.
To one side of it, also awaiting painting, lay an elaborate stand, and a high-domed cover with a pinecone knob. She noticed two more tureens set on another trestle, both in the same untouched state, the delicate waxy hue of soft-paste porcelain so fine and fragile that it was only a few steps away from glass. But she had not long since seen one of these beautiful things in its finished state.
Somehow she managed to hide her shock. “Good heavens, Uncle, how many gallons of soup do such tureens hold?”
“Enough to fill Cardiff Bay,” he replied dryly, then answered more seriously. “Actually, it’s two gallons. Look kindly upon these elegant receptacles, my dear, for my hopes for the future rest upon one of them. I know not yet which,” he said quietly.
“Really?”
He went to the table, sorted through a pile of papers, then drew one out. “This arrived just before Christmas. Read it.” He thrust it into her hand. “It’s from a Prince Valentin Andreyev in St. Petersburg.”
“Who is he?”
“I have no idea, except that he appears to be aide-de-camp to Czar Alexander, but I do know his communication pleases me immensely. It’s in French, but I’m sure you will have no trouble with that. Read on, read on.” John waved a hand at her.
She began to read, then looked quickly at her uncle. “A commemorative tureen for the czar?”
“Yes, my dear, an order for royalty, to be given to the czar early in July, on the Russian day for celebrating
the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. We celebrate it on June twenty-ninth. Be that as it may, I have to have a fully completed tureen ready to leave here sometime in May, to allow for the voyage to Russia.
“Have you any idea how important such orders as this are to china manufacturers? Just think how Wedgwood benefited from Catherine the Great’s commission for a huge dinner service. They have not looked back since. Whichever of these tureens is eventually selected for decoration, it could be as beneficial as that to Nantgarth. And furthermore, somewhere in Prince Valentin’s letter he states that I am to bring the tureen to St. Petersburg myself, so that the czar can meet me.” He paused then, as if in this he perceived a hidden drawback.
“Uncle?”
“Well, I vowed never to go there again.”
“Again? So you’ve been there before?”
“Yes, my dear, I’ve been there, and it is a place that holds only sad memories, I fear.”
Ellie wanted to ask more, but something in his demeanor prevented her.
“Anyway,” he went on briskly, “this order from the czar is what I meant yesterday about you seeing the Russian capital, for if I go there, then you, my dear, will most certainly have to come with me.”
“Really?” Ellie’s eyes shone and her lips parted in a delighted smile. “But how on earth has the czar heard about this little china works?”
For a second she again thought she saw something odd in her uncle’s eyes; then his smile returned. “I believe I have Lord Griffin to thank.”
She was happy for him. “Oh, I’m so pleased to hear this, Uncle.”
“I am, too, believe me. And I’m relieved that I have actually managed to produce three perfect tureens. I made twenty-five before I succeeded.”
“Twenty-five?” Her eyes widened.
He drew a heavy breath. “They all failed, turning almost to glass, crumbling, distorting, shivering. Oh, anything that could go wrong did go wrong. But here are three bites at the cherry, eh?”
“How are they to be decorated?”
He shrugged. “Well, believe it or not, that is being left up to me. The only stipulation is that it must be lavish with gold.”