The Thief on the Winged Horse
Page 15
“She can. That will increase the turnaround time to two weeks, and you must pay her the cost of the wax when you collect the doll, otherwise we will withhold it.”
More expenditure. Doubtless an outlay was necessary, but she resented being ripped off. “We’re working together on this; no need to withhold anything. Now – how much is the wax?”
“Five hundred pounds,” he said without hesitation. Hedwig doubted he had based the number on the likely cost. He just knew she was in haste to get the job done. “The ageing of it will be a complex process – the crazing must be meticulous—”
“I look forward to seeing it,” Hedwig interrupted. “When I return I’ll bring the outstanding cash. You have the wood and the previously agreed payment. Scarlotta can source the wax and get started.”
The butcher smiled smugly as he counted the money in the bag.
“I’ll be back two weeks from today,” Hedwig said.
*
When she arrived back on the eyot, she went directly to the Tavern. It was a Kendricks Collectors’ Society night, which had taken place regularly at the Tavern for the past hundred and fifty years. Attendees paid an annual membership fee to handle a range of dolls, with no need to purchase, on the designated dates. On those evenings the Tavern was closed to the public. Hedwig entered by the main doors, around which Cosima had pulled a velvet curtain. She was there to verify the members’ admission and take their coats.
“I need a quick word with Mama,” Hedwig explained.
“Go through,” Cosima said. “She’s popped to the cellar to change a barrel.”
Cosima parted the curtains for Hedwig. The divider between the main bar and the saloon had also been folded back, creating a long room where some hundred men were individually seated. Despite the high attendance there was no conversation; only the sound of Imogen Strange playing the piano, and the occasional cough. The atmosphere differed from an ordinary evening. This was where rich men, for they were always men, came for a few hours of oblivion. Candles adorned each table, lending the Tavern a shabby glamour.
As unobtrusively as possible, Hedwig wove through the armchairs in the direction of the stairs. A man in a brown bowler caught her arm as she passed.
“Yes?” she responded quietly, with a slight smile. “Can I get something for you?”
His pores were large and his colour ruddy. At his feet lay a sleeping black Labrador.
“No, my love.” The man released her sleeve. His lips glistened. “I just hoped you’d be enchanted.”
Hedwig shuddered.
“Is he bothering you, Hedwig?”
She turned in surprise. It was Stanley who had spoken; and he was in uniform.
“No,” she said, to avoid an escalation. Gently she ushered him to the bar, away from the customer’s earshot. “Whatever are you doing here? Surely you haven’t taken up collecting.”
He shook his head. “It’s work. I’ve been taking names. Checking no one was playing silly beggars at Kendricks Workshop in the middle of last night.”
“A break-in?” she asked, feigning alarm.
“Yes. I was looking for you earlier.”
“I’ve just got back from London. Shopping.”
“And were you there all last night, too?”
“No – at home, as normal.”
“Anyone back that up?”
“I sleep alone.” She smiled ruefully. “Does this put me on your list of suspects?”
He sighed. “Maybe if you’ve left fingerprints at the scene of the crime. Or you’re carrying several pounds of wood on your person.”
Lest her voice shook she didn’t reply. She reminded herself that the wood was now far away and off the eyot – and that she had taken care to leave no fingerprints, or so she believed. But anyone can slip up, she thought.
Misinterpreting her look of worry, Stanley said consolingly: “Hey. We’ll get whoever did it. I know who my money’s on. And we’ll get him for the Paid Mourner, too.”
“I need to go talk to my mother,” Hedwig said.
“You do that. Maybe stay the night, if you feel too spooked in that big empty house.”
Hedwig nodded, wondering if he expected an invitation back to hers, and choosing to ignore that possibility because she just wanted to get away from his questions about break-ins and his assertions he would catch the culprit.
She pushed through the staff door and took the stairs to the lower floor. Every creak was one she remembered from her childhood. The rail was cold to the touch, and the room still smelt of cold brick.
“Good,” Mama said on seeing her. “You can help with the punters while you’re here.”
“I have to disappoint you, Mama. I’m not stopping long. And I’m terribly afraid you won’t like what I have to say.” The conversation with Stanley had put her on edge, interfering with her ability to sugar unwelcome messages.
“What’s new?” Mama said, brushing dust from her palms.
“I can’t keep giving you money.”
“Giving? You’re loaning me. A nice kind of threat. I’ll go under without you chipping in.”
“I really think it will be better for your self-esteem to stand on your own two feet.”
“You’ll see me on the streets.” Mama caught Hedwig’s eyeroll. “Of all the selfish—”
“Selfish? No, Mama; I know you can’t mean that, not really. Ever since I was a child, haven’t I kept your finances in order? Would you really have me sacrifice myself till there’s nothing left?”
“Don’t make me laugh. You love it when I ask for a loan, and the more I beg the better. Is that what you’re up to now? Trying to make me beg harder because it gives you a kick? What’s that if it’s not selfish, eh? Worrying your mother just so you get to feel superior.”
“Oh, Mama! There’s no talking to you when you’re like this, there really isn’t.”
“Stuck-up mare.” Margot shoved her daughter by the shoulders with a strength that Hedwig hadn’t anticipated.
“I’m going,” Hedwig said. “I’m sorry, Mama. You’ll thank me eventually.”
The piano was silent when Hedwig returned to the bar. Their voices must have carried from below. She kept her head high. Did no harm if people heard her standing up for herself. Stanley, who had been talking with Cosima Botham near the door, said as Hedwig passed: “Do you need walking home?”
“No. Thank you. I don’t want to distract you any longer this evening. It’s so important, what you’re doing here, Stanley. Keeping the eyot safe for us. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”
She left the pub, without looking back.
26
When Persephone was fourteen, she saw a person die: her grandfather, Felix Kendrick. Persephone had never been close to him. She saw him often enough – there was no avoiding him; despite advancing years and two strokes, he never relinquished ownership of the workshop. A nurse was employed to administer his medications and wheel him round Kendricks in his bathchair. He presided over every family event. Yet Persephone could never recall him speaking to her. At first it bewildered her to be ignored when she made childish attempts at conversation.
“He thinks children should be seen and not heard,” Briar said.
“He doesn’t even see me,” Persephone pointed out. “He looks in any other direction.”
“It’s not just you,” Briar said. “Does he speak to your cousins?”
No, she had to admit he did not. And once she reached adolescence, she began dreading the day when he deemed her fit to address. But in his final weeks he developed pneumonia, and with his death so clearly on the horizon with never a word passed between them, she suspected he would go to the grave without acknowledging her existence.
On his last day, Persephone was at home with her father, when Dennis knocked at the door to say they should come, quickly, to say goodbye.
“Go along with Dennis,” Briar told his daughter. “I’ll follow after you. There’s a few things I have to do first.”
“It’s not polite to talk about your father that way, Seph.”
“Polite?” Persephone struggled with the idea that stating something which was mere fact could be offensive.
“Maybe Briar needs some fortification. You can’t know, yet, what it is to watch a parent die.”
“But he doesn’t even like Felix.”
“He said that, has he?”
“No. He just looks at him like he hates him. It spreads, too. Daddy always argues more with Uncle Conrad if Felix is in the room.”
“All the more reason for him to need preparation before he joins us. Listen, Seph, maybe he doesn’t like Felix, but a father’s a father, even a bad one, and it’ll hurt Briar to see him gone.”
They had reached the big Kendrick house. The front door was open, and even from the garden gate Persephone could see the hall was crowded with cousins there to witness Felix’s passing.
She expected to wait along with them, taking their huddles for a form of queue. But Dennis told the others to make way, because Persephone was of Felix’s direct line. The cousins were not waiting to see Felix – how could they be? There were over a hundred of them, which would be an unreasonable demand on a dying man. They had simply gathered in his house, to be with each other, because Felix’s death would mark the end of their community as it had been.
Persephone felt Dennis’s hand in the small of her back, pushing her towards the stairs. But he let go as her hand touched the banister.
“Aren’t you coming?” she asked.
“I’m a Botham,” he said. “I’ll show my respects down here with the rest.”
“Then I wish my godfather was a Kendrick.” Persephone ground her teeth in anger. Her mother was hundreds of miles away; her father was a coward and a drinker. She had at least assumed that Dennis would accompany her all the way to the death bed.
She turned her back on him and walked up the stairs. The exact location of Felix’s room was a mystery to her, as she’d never had any reason to venture into this part of the house. Her ear caught voices, and she followed them to an open door at the end of the corridor. The room inside was dimly lit.
Conrad was at the bedside, in a grey suit and a wide-brimmed feathered hat. Beneath the stiff white sheets lay her grandfather, thinned by illness into a greater resemblance with Briar, which made Persephone deeply uncomfortable. An acidic smell pervaded the room. As Persephone moved closer to the bed she suspected the source was Felix’s breath. His rasps were short and painful to hear. At first his eyes were closed, but they fluttered open when he heard her. Alarmingly, the white of his left eye had turned red, bright and bloody against the grey of his iris.
“Remind me of your hex,” Felix said to Conrad.
Conrad’s eyes flickered to Persephone. He clearly didn’t want to reveal it in front of her, but nor did he want to disobey his dying father.
“Rivalry,” he said.
“Rivalry,” Felix breathed. “Yes. That served you well. Is your brother here?”
“No. He’s in the pub,” Persephone supplied.
“Running the workshop will straighten him out,” Felix said, to no one in particular, his eyes closing again. Persephone watched for Conrad’s reaction. Her uncle silently tapped the arm of his easy chair. Felix frequently changed his intended heir, even within the space of a single conversation.
She was jolted from her thoughts by Felix grabbing her arm.
“You,” he said, speaking directly to her for the first time in her life. “You’re the one who’ll run Kendricks.”
Her uncle tutted. Felix laughed wheezily until his chest went into spasm. The coughing gripped him and went on and on till Persephone thought he would vomit.
Then it stopped; for Felix, everything stopped. His eyes, the bloody one and the white, stared through her.
Conrad stood up. He pressed Felix’s neck in search of a pulse.
“Persephone. Go downstairs and let the others know.”
“Know what?”
“That it’s over.” Conrad closed his father’s eyes with one beautifully manicured hand.
She was glad to leave the room. Conrad’s order suggested she should make some kind of announcement, but she told only Dennis, as soon as she located him; and the news made its own rapid journey through the house. Persephone received a series of handshakes and embraces, because Conrad was still upstairs, Briar wasn’t there, and she was the next most immediate relative. The encroachment on her space made her want to run home screaming. Why was she there at all? She wasn’t going to grieve Felix. The man had spoken one sentence to her in her whole life; and it was a joke at her expense, a laugh at the very idea she might be a worthy successor.
*
The day after Persephone and Larkin agreed to collaborate, she spent in tension at the thought of sharing her work. She had chosen a maquette that she would take to him, a kind of early draft using wax and pine, so that he might advise her of improvements. Her work sorely needed some guidance, but this didn’t lessen her anxiety that he would tell her to give up. Might her work be that bad? Had she, for years, been cursing Kendricks for failing to train her, when really the problem was her own lack of talent? Throughout the afternoon she rehearsed telling Larkin: any expertise you could offer would be wasted on me. She even took the paternoster to the top floor to tell him there and then, but she saw him through the grille, and changed her mind. He was wholly absorbed in his carving, oblivious to her watching him; and her longing to be in his position eclipsed her fear of failure.
So, after dinner that night, she knocked on the door of his bedroom, and entered at his soft come in. He was seated at a small table, with paints and wooden blanks arranged upon it. A very bright lamp cast a white circle in which to work; and the room was otherwise dark.
“Hello Persephone,” he said, and smiled.
She liked him saying her name. By means of greeting, she thrust the maquette she had made towards him.
He took it from her. The doll was dressed for the eyot masquerade, in a tiny frock coat, his wax face concealed by a mask.
“Sit down,” Larkin instructed, and Persephone accepted the empty chair. Muted music and voices rose from the bar downstairs. She glanced at the room around her. He had made it his own. The shelves were lined with an audience of dolls, varying in size from an inch high to a foot and a half. The faces had a similar snap to each other, sharing some signature that was identifiably Larkin’s – an insolent thrust of the chin, perhaps, or the suggestion that the dolls possessed some tantalising secret. Stacks of art books, thicker than Bibles, stood at the foot of his bed. There were a few novels there, too; the children’s books of Rumer Godden, and Paul Gallico’s Love of Seven Dolls.
Larkin was closely attending to the details of the doll – removing the clothes carefully to examine the joints, and finally slipping the mask off. He half laughed when he saw the waxen face, and Persephone thought, oh fucking hell, he thinks it’s dreadful.
He saw her flinch.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s good. Tell me your thinking.”
“I wanted to make a character from the Commedia dell’arte – the characters roughly fall into four groups: the servants, which includes the clowns; the elderly men; the lovers; and the captains. This is a servant’s mask. The servants interest me most. They have the biggest need of masks. Of all the characters they are the ones with the biggest gap between who they are and how they must appear.”
“Not the lovers?”
“I don’t know about lovers. I know about service.”
Larkin looked closely at the mask on the tip of his finger. “Did you consider, instead of the Commedia dell’arte, making characters from our own masquerade?”
“Yes. I almost gave him a Volto Larva, like the man who took the Paid Mourner. But I
didn’t want to.” Because she would have to carve the face beneath; and it would be Briar’s face. Anyone who removed the mask would see who she thought was guilty.
“Then you’re being too timid. The man in the Volto Larva mask has wrought a great change in your life – the life of everyone on the eyot, really. You’re teetering around making masked dolls but ignoring the masked man everyone on the eyot has been affected by.”
“I don’t understand. You said it was good work.”
“The joints are perfect; they allow for some very nuanced posing. That’s important, and difficult to get right with minimal training. You must be a natural.”
The compliment warmed her. “But?”
“There’s not really a but, only things to consider when you start your next maquette. You need a more compelling character. I also think the mask is obscuring a lack of confidence in painting faces.”
“I knew the expression was wrong.”
“The carving beneath is sound. It’s the painting that needs work. You’ve tried to mimic a real face too closely, and it won’t scale. A flaw in the face will always be more noticeable than any other flaw in a doll, because brains are typically wired to pay more attention to faces.”
“What can I do to make it better?”
“Simplify. Aim for as neutral an expression as possible, so that people can project emotion onto it. It’s best to convey emotion through the doll’s posture rather than their face because posture can be made flexible – you can change the emotion then by repositioning. You can’t, in the normal way of things, alter a doll’s face in a matter of moments. Because your joints are so good it is very easy to make this doll express emotion through posing. Have more faith in that. Let that take the strain more; you don’t need the distraction of an overly worked face.”
Persephone nodded, relieved that there was something positive to take from his comments.
“Shall we start again then?” Larkin offered her one of the blank wooden doll heads that lay on the table. “We can work side by side companionably, I think, and you can ask me questions as you go.”