Romancing the Past

by Darcy Burke

  “What have you brought, Mr. Allsop?” Sophie crossed to William’s side and folded back the lip of the sack so she could bury her hands and face in the soft feathers. “Are these goose?”

  “Just so. I’ve told Cook to set them aside for you whenever she slaughters one of our flock.”

  “For quills?” Julian asked, behind her now.

  Feathers fuzzing her voice, Sophie answered, “That’s right.”

  “Why not use steel nibs? I hadn’t taken you for a backward-looking sort.”

  “Steel corrupts gall ink.” Sophie stood so she could watch Julian’s Hessians as he approached. Even his calves were perfect. Manly, thick, and rounded at the middle. “Makes the ink less permanent. Gold or glass nibs solve the problem, but they can be expensive.”

  “And Frogger has been lending a hand?” Julian reached past her, plucked a feather from the sack, and waggled it under William’s nose.

  William dropped his cargo and windmilled backward, cheeks puffing out as he blew the white filaments away. Julian smirked, slanting a glance at her as though they’d conspired to embarrass William, who flushed dark as a plum.

  “Stop it!” Sophie crouched down and reached for the sack. She tucked the feathers back inside before they blew away. “Thank you, Mr. Allsop,” she said. “I can use these.”

  “I had no idea you took such an interest in ink, Frogger,” Julian drawled. “When did you start coming by, bearing gifts? About a month ago, perhaps?”

  White streaks mottled William’s flushed cheeks. It had been about a month. Ever since gossip about the old duke’s will began to circulate, he’d visited once or twice a week.

  “Mr. Allsop is a friend and neighbor,” Sophie said firmly. “He doesn’t need a reason to visit, or to do me a kindness.”

  “Is that right? You’ve been the faithful friend all these years? Looking out for Sophie after I abandoned home and hearth for London? You must think me a blackguard of the worst sort.”

  “I’ve never said—I don’t think any such thing!” William cleared his throat. “You had your reasons.”

  “I had my reasons,” Julian agreed. “And so do you. Counted in pounds sterling, I’m guessing.”

  William gaped.

  Sophie rose to her feet and held out the bag so William could reclaim it. “Why don’t you take the feathers into my workshop?”

  William cast a reproachful look Julian’s way and disappeared into the cottage.

  “You must have a busy day ahead.” Sophie slapped at her skirts, clearing away filaments of feather. “Perhaps you should be on your way.”

  Julian didn’t answer for the longest time. When he did, the mockery had dropped away. “You’re letting Frogger court you.”

  No, William didn’t take her breath away. But he was easy to spend time with, and it had been a long time since a man stopped by bearing gifts. “He’s a decent man.”

  “And I’m not?”

  “I thought you were.” Sophie touched her scar. “I was wrong. Good day, sir.”

  She turned her back on Julian and entered the cottage. The large front parlor, spanning the whole width of the cottage, had been set up as a shop, though very little of her business originated in Padley and few of her customers ever saw her front door. Her assistant, Max Dawe, looked up from an inventory list as she entered.

  “Mr. Dawe,” she greeted him.

  “Miss Roe.” Max flicked a glance toward the passage into the back rooms. “I take it you asked Mr. Allsop to wait in your workshop?”

  “He’s brought some quills.”

  “Another gift.” Max produced the sort of close-lipped smile with which subordinates signal obligation rather than pleasure. “How generous.”

  Sophie bit back a scold. Max had just turned nineteen, and she had to stop treating him like the child he’d been when she hired him. And anyway, he was right to be skeptical. “The Foreign Office wants another dozen sixteen-ounce bottles of black ink. Why don’t you take care of that while Mr. Allsop and I talk?”

  Max’s lips thinned but he reached for the appropriate cupboard. Sophie progressed into the corridor. When she looked in at the open door to Charlotte Dawe’s small workshop the girl looked up, file in hand, a magnifying lens strapped over one eye with a leather band that ruffled her oak-brown hair. She tipped her head in the direction of Sophie’s workshop and rolled her eyes.

  Charlotte didn’t like William either.

  Sophie shrugged, her smile lingering as she continued past the storage rooms into her workshop. Like the parlor up front, Sophie’s workshop spanned the entire width of the cottage. Narrow tables lined the wall, cluttered with the tools of her trade, while shelves on the wall held racks of ingredients in carefully labeled tins.

  William leaned sullenly against the wide table that filled the center of the room, bare except for the sack of feathers. Behind him, through the large picture window, a pale sun had just crested the craggy mountain peaks. Day after day, the view always seemed new to her.

  “You couldn’t have done a better job if you’d set out to humiliate me,” said William.

  Sophie sighed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Allsop. You know that’s the last thing I want. I haven’t used your old nickname—haven’t even thought of it—in years.”

  “I know that. I do.” His sour, mistrustful expression suggested the opposite. “Julian was always obnoxious. Of course he’ll be unbearable now he’s inherited the title.”

  Spot on, if by unbearable William meant suspicious and angry. “Unfortunately, he has come into the title. As Duke of Clive, he has influence over you. Me. Everyone in Padley. Now’s not the time to make an enemy of him.”

  William fiddled with the feathers. “I hope you won’t allow him to dictate your opinions.”

  “Of course not.” Sophie smiled. Not her warmest smile, but an honest one. Julian hadn’t told her anything she didn’t already know. William had made himself scarce during the hard years. Now that her fortunes had turned, he—and others from her old life, when she’d been a genteel young lady with a fat dowry and no knowledge of commerce—had started coming round again.

  A part of her longed to clear away all the friends who’d proved themselves fickle, the family who begrudged their every charity. But the only person to stand by her through it all had been Clive. Clive the Ninth. And he was dead.

  She could be lonely, or she could forgive. Neither choice pleased her, but she’d made the practical one.

  “Thank you for the feathers, Mr. Allsop.” Sophie closed the distance between them and gave the bundle a fond pat, her fingers only a few inches from his. “And please bring more when you can. You’re always welcome here.”

  William swayed in her direction. Sophie took a quick step back, and he recovered by covering his mouth and pretending to cough. “Anything I can do to help.”

  After William took his leave, Sophie opened up her leather-bound diary and recorded everything she could remember about the confrontation with Julian. She’d already forgotten some of the details—had Julian told her that he had what she wanted? Or that he knew what she wanted?—but didn’t fuss over the gaps. Some people kept journals for pleasure. Sophie had taken up the habit out of necessity.

  When she was just twelve, her parents had died in a boating accident. By the time she turned thirteen, she’d already started to forget them. Every year, she lost a little more of them.

  Memories faded. Her ink did not.

  Julian was wrong. He hadn’t held Clive’s hand at the last, nor looked into Clive’s blind eyes. Sophie had. If he’d been murdered, she would know.

  A familiar flash of uncertainty followed hard on her attempt to reassure herself. She flipped through her journal to the page where she’d made a copy of Clive’s note and reread it, scanning until she reached the words I meted out the poison and I drank it of my own free will.

  She breathed a sigh of relief. She wouldn’t believe that Clive the Ninth had used his last words to tell a lie.

  Ch
apter 3

  “Two gentleman callers before ten o’clock in the morning,” said Charlotte from the doorway. “Who was that first one? A client? He looked like he had a few coins to spare.”

  “The new Duke of Clive.” Sophie shut her journal with a whomp.

  Charlotte whistled low.

  “Cor.” Max kicked at his sister’s skirts so he could fit in the doorway beside her. “And he came down from the mountain to see you?”

  “Have you packed up the ink yet, Mr. Dawe?”

  “Course, miss. Ready for the post.”

  “Why don’t you go send it off?”

  “Little tetchy, aren’t we, Miss Roe? But here I go, agreeable as always, not a rebellious bone in my body…” Max retreated and a series of shuffling, scraping noises echoing down the corridor indicated that he’d obeyed.

  “Do you need any help, Miss Roe?” Charlotte asked.

  “Not just now, Miss Dawe. Thank you.”

  Sophie picked up a pair of leather gloves and drew them over her hands. After the morning she’d had, she knew better than to tinker with her new formulas. They required more attention than she had to spare. Instead, she’d make up a batch of her signature iron gall black. Aside from all the shops that carried her inks (over a dozen, now, in eight cities), she’d been an exclusive supplier to the Foreign Office for four years. Other government agencies had begun to follow suit, purchasing her inks for official record keeping.

  She’d built her reputation on a permanent black gall ink, thin enough for handsome penmanship, clump-resistant in the bottle and of deep, consistent color. It dried quickly, it didn’t fade in the sun, and best of all, it resisted the application of certain chemicals known to forgers.

  Like herself.

  She went out the back, into a small greenhouse—about the size of a shed, and not much taller than an average-sized man—she’d had built in the yard. Racks of shelves lined each glass wall, holding rows of large glass jars full of dark liquid. Sophie made her rounds, checking for mold. A nice thick mold promised a strong gallic acid, and strong gallic acid made ink bite deep into the paper.

  Satisfied with the current crop, she carried a three-month-old jar back into her workshop. She strained it through layers of cheesecloth into an enamel pot while the charwoman built up the fire. The liquor smelled frightful, eye-watering and rotten. Breathing deeply to clear her nose, Sophie transferred the pot over to the stove. A film of moisture condensed on her cheeks and her hair went limp around the temples as the gallic acid heated and began to bubble.

  She’d learned to make ink from her aunt, after her parents died. Jenny thought busyness a good cure for grief and assigned Sophie an endless roster of chores, but her household recipe had produced a thin, brownish ink that blurred when wet. Sophie had cried so often in those days that everything she wrote turned into an indecipherable puddle. She couldn’t stop the tears, so instead she’d set about finding a better recipe for ink. And then a better one, and then another, until it became an obsession.

  Julian had worked his way through the household staff, oozing charm and begging favors in order to secure her access to High Bend’s distillery, where she had more space and better equipment. After all the help he’d offered, she hadn’t been able to turn him away when he showed up to watch her work. They’d spent hours in that windowless cellar, mostly just talking.

  Mostly.

  Sophie closed her eyes, trying to call an image of a younger Julian to mind, but her memories were wispy and vague. After the morning’s encounter, all she could remember was the man she’d seen an hour before—bigger, harder, more beautiful than ever.

  She shifted the pot onto a waiting trivet, measured out the copperas, dumped it into the boiling brew and slowly sprinkled powdered gum arabic in after it, stirring with a wooden spoon all the while.

  Done.

  She stirred in a handful of cloves and covered it. Tomorrow morning she’d decant the ink into bottles. Pinching the fingers of her gloves to loosen them, she pulled them off and set them aside, then set about tidying her workshop.

  She hoped Julian wouldn’t stay in Derbyshire long. She hoped she wouldn’t have to see him often.

  Sophie sent the charwoman to the well to refill the cauldron. She checked that the coals in the stove were still hot and added a fresh lump. While the water heated she filled a small basket just the right size with Aleppo galls from a barrel she kept in her storeroom and set about crushing them with a mallet.

  She’d been using Aleppo galls for five years now. Before that, she’d gathered galls by hand from local oak trees. British oak galls produced less tannin, made weaker ink. Her first order for Aleppo galls, hard little wooden marbles shipped all the way from the Ottoman Empire, had been one of her proudest moments.

  Nobody had stopped her. Nobody had second guessed her. She controlled Iron & Wine’s expenditures, and she collected the income. She’d never again have to sit and listen quietly while the trustees tasked with managing her assets told her that all her fortune was gone. Never worry that her life was crumbling around her while she carried on in blissful ignorance.

  A loud bang echoed in her ears. Her forearms vibrated, her wrists ached from holding the mallet steady. Sophie let it clatter onto the table and shook out her hands. She shouldn’t dwell on the past. It only made her angry, and anyway, the water had boiled.

  She scalded the jar she’d emptied to clean it, then filled it almost to the brim with water and added the crushed Aleppo galls. The lid screwed on, the old label came off, a dab of glue attached a new, pre-cut square of paper upon which she scrawled the current date, and she was done. In a few months, she’d have gallic acid for a new batch of ink.

  Why hadn’t Clive written his own note?

  Julian had been right about one thing: Clive the Ninth’s meticulous nature. Even these last years, when his moods had swung between extremes so frequently, he’d remained meticulous, fussy.

  Hadn’t he known the poison would blind him?

  And yet.

  She’d had the impression, in the grand study with Clive during his last moments, that he hadn’t wished to die. That he’d been just as shocked as she, just as unwilling to let go, raging against the inevitable.

  Sophie shivered and reached for a dry cloth. By the time she’d wiped the table clean, the sun had begun to set. Days always flew by in spring. Sophie untied her apron, hung it from an empty hook, and donned her coat and hat. She said good-bye to Charlotte Dawe—still in her small workshop, wielding a pair of calipers now—and then Max, idling against the counter, waiting for his sister to finish so they could go home together.

  “I wish you wouldn’t walk all that way in the dark, miss,” said Max.

  “The light stays longer every day.” Sophie eased a pair of wool-lined, leather gloves onto her hands. “You have a good evening.”

  The wind blew hard at her back all the way home, a mile’s walk along a dirt road pale enough to keep her on track. She’d lived with her uncle, Malcolm Roe, and his family ever since the death of her parents in the fine old house known by everyone in Padley as Broadstone Cottage. The footman opened the door as she hurried up the walkway, reaching out to collect her heavy outer things. Her cheeks burned from the sudden rise in temperature.

  “You’ll find the family in the parlor, Miss Roe,” he advised, smoothing her coat. “They’ll be wanting to see you.”

  Sophie followed the sound of voices to their source. She heard the somber cadence of her uncle’s baritone, her cousin Peter’s light tenor, an echo of feminine laughter. A snatch of melody from a piano rippled the air just as Sophie reached the doorway.

  Her uncle, usually so pinched and severe, stood with his arm slung comfortably over his son’s shoulders. Peter grinned and squinted, his silly hair stiff as a brush and sticking up in every direction. Her Aunt Jenny sat on the sofa, pillowed by the deep sapphire of her silk skirts.

  Sophie’s younger cousin, Bettina, had settled at the piano bench. She was dar
k-haired, blue-eyed, as lovely as her mother and as elegantly fine-boned as her father. She welcomed Sophie with a grin, still absently picking out the phrase of melody on her piano.

  A cart stacked with tarts and biscuits had been stationed at her aunt’s knee. Their best silver gleamed in short stacks beside their best china.

  “Goodness,” Sophie marveled. Bettina and Jenny had even put on jewelry, gold drops at their ears and throats. “What’s the occasion?”

  “An engagement,” announced Jenny, beaming.

  Sophie considered her uncle, aunt, and cousins in turn. All of them flushed, triumphant, proud. The treats. The good china. “Oh, Peter. Is it possible?”

  “Yes!” Peter rushed across the room, grabbed her by the waist, lifted her high and spun her around in a circle. Her gray skirts, muddied about the hems, flapped against her calves. “She said yes!”

  “Lady Honoria?” Sophie asked. She could hardly believe it.

  “Lady Honoria,” Peter confirmed. “Lady Honoria. We are to be wed.”

  “Why, that’s…” Sophie shook her head. “I am…” She couldn’t think of any words big enough. For as long as Sophie could remember, Peter had been in love with Lady Honoria. Clive the Ninth, her father, had opposed the match. “So happy for you.”

  “Of course it’s awful to think that any good can come of Clive’s death,” murmured Jenny. “But I can’t help but feel that a terrible wrong has been righted today.”

  “I never did understand why he objected,” Sophie admitted. She’d hesitated to say even that much while he was alive, out of loyalty. Much as Clive had coddled her, he’d refused to discuss Peter.

  Her uncle laid one hand on Bettina’s shoulder and smiled fondly at Sophie. “We can’t blame him for being ambitious on his daughter’s behalf.”

  “You always defend him, Papa.” Bettina glared at Sophie. “He was horrid.”

  “Clive was a good man,” Sophie protested, on cue. They’d had this conversation so many times that all the emotion and spontaneity had leached out of it.