by Sophia Tobin
He smiled at her and she looked away. In that shadowed room, the board before him, his hair a little ruffled and his jacket cast aside, the ghost of his handsomeness had risen in his face. His beauty was like a thorn she kept catching herself on. He looked worried this evening, and the contrast between his arrogance and his vulnerability magnetized her to him. She pushed a piece softly across the board as they discussed what she had read in the archive that day.
‘Dale-Collingwood was greatly concerned with safe specifications,’ she said. ‘There were several. There was one built into the back of the fixed cabinets in the News Room. I mentioned it to Peggy, but she’d never heard of that one – the others, yes; before the war Miss Hardaker used to have to cash everything up.’
‘A hidden safe?’ he said. ‘I’ll have to look.’ He pushed his king over with his index finger, in sudden surrender.
She watched in alarm as he got to his feet. ‘You can’t go up there now,’ she said. ‘The News Room is dangerous enough as it is – it’s half-destroyed.’
‘It really doesn’t matter,’ he said as he shrugged his jacket on. She saw the look on his face: a hard recklessness. They had been talking quietly, calmly, almost as friends. Now, the air had shifted and changed.
She got up. ‘I’m coming with you,’ she said.
*
They went up through the building side by side, Jonathan pointing the torch at the floor, so that no stray scrap of light would escape from the Club’s blacked-out silhouette. They walked through the Stair Hall and up the stairs. The demilunes were boarded up now, but light seeped through the seams of the boards like smoke. The air smelt metallic, like the moment on a hot day before a storm breaks. Soon, the air would thicken with the black smoke from many fires.
They took the right branch of the staircase for once, ignoring the door to the back of the Dining Hall on the left at the top of the stairs. The News Room ran the length of the building from the end of the Dining Hall to the front, in parallel with the Hide and Committee Room on the opposite side of the building, then an anteroom attached it to the shredded Red Parlour, which you walked through to reach the other side of the Club, and the Committee Room. This side of the first floor had been left alone since a bomb had blown a hole in the top corner of the News Room. A pile of tangled wood represented a makeshift barrier put there by Bill. They climbed over it easily enough.
Jonathan pulled at the door to the News Room. The door grated on the floor. Something was out of joint, the structure shifted by the bomb shock. He forced it open.
‘Turn the torch off,’ said Livy.
They stood looking at the turmoil of the room. The ceiling was down, as it was in the Red Parlour, but the difference here was that on one side of the room there was a large hole, open to the night. The damage joined with a window, which had lost both its blackout and its panes. They stared together out at the flickering sky, at the red and yellow light: fire and starlight. Searchlights scraped the sky. Water poured down past the hole, and for a moment it was as though they stood behind a waterfall, watching light refract through the water, the glimpses of the blue darkness beyond.
‘It’s the firewatchers,’ said Jonathan. ‘They’re keeping the building damp so that it doesn’t catch.’
‘The safe was over there according to Henry’s notes,’ said Livy. ‘Not behind the bar, but in the back of the cupboard where the older papers were stored. I’ll go.’
Before he could stop her she left his side, scrambling over heaps of debris. He put his hand out, but he said nothing. He watched her go. A nearby explosion shook the room, and he saw in the strange waterlogged light the dust rise like ghosts from the ground. It filled the air, stinging his eyes. He had let her go into this room, putting herself at risk. He couldn’t see her for a moment – what was that shape in the corner, in the darkness? Was it her? He knew he should go himself in the direction she had gone, should try to find her, and yet he did not. He stayed there, in relative safety, clinging to the jamb of the door, his eyes filling with grit and water.
Then he saw her, her head edged with light, as she climbed over something – was it a table? Covered in plaster and wood. She reached him. He put his hands to her waist, pulled her to him.
‘I’ve got a hundred splinters,’ she said into his ear. ‘But there’s nothing in there. The safe is open, and it is empty.’
*
They sat together in the doorway of the News Room, each propped up against one side, opposite each other, listening to the scream and sail of bombs, distant and close.
‘We should go downstairs,’ he said to her.
‘I want to stay here for a while,’ she said. ‘Go down there if you want.’
He put his hand on her knee. She turned her head as another stream of water passed the gap where the window had once been. Stared at the glittering fall of light through water.
‘How do you know that Ashton didn’t simply buy a fake diamond?’ Livy said.
He shook his head. ‘Impossible. Ashton would never have bought a fake for Charlotte. He was a clever man. It wasn’t just a gift for her, it was part of his collection, and his collection meant everything to him.’
‘More than his wife?’
Jonathan glanced away. ‘These things cannot be compared. With the documentation for the diamond, the invoice and suchlike, there was a letter from my great-grandfather’s solicitor. He seemed to indicate that the diamond was kept in the Club for a period. In the past we had dismissed it as a temporary thing – after all, we thought we had the diamond in the safe deposit – but now, that letter takes on more significance. Especially when you pair it with the idea that this building was linked to the family’s unhappiness in some way, as my grandmother hinted.’
‘What were they like?’ she said. ‘Charlotte and Ashton? Henry, I feel I know. But I can’t grasp them, somehow.’
‘I know most about Ashton,’ he said. ‘He was a difficult man, I think. A patriarch. But life was about duty for him – I have some sympathy with that.’ He paused. ‘He bent things into the shapes he wanted: Redlands, his children. That was his right, his prerogative. My grandmother – his daughter – once said she never had a word of kindness from him after she was out of the nursery. That he considered her a burden to be got rid of. She only spoke about him once – a little too much wine at dinner. My father hustled her away. exposing family secrets, he said, and everyone laughed. If I had to describe Ashton, from all that I heard, I would say: he was a collector of things; he had to control things; and he were a kind of genius, completely single-minded. He made the family business yield more than anyone before or since. And Redlands is utterly his.’
‘What is Redlands like?’ Livy thought of the landscape in the portrait, just glimpsed behind Charlotte: green hills and trees, lit by the softest light imaginable.
She saw the twinge of pain in his face: homesickness, she thought. ‘The estate itself is beautiful. Although I suppose I am biased. Acres and acres of parkland, a very beautiful coppice. Ashton had the house remodelled and it’s rather strange inside, a mixture of styles. I’m so close to it, I hardly see it: it’s just home to me.’
‘And Charlotte?’ she said.
‘She was beautiful, as you know. That’s her chief characteristic as far as I’m concerned. The daughter of a wealthy man. Had three children with Ashton, two that lived to adulthood, and one that died. I don’t know anything else, or even if she had any part in designing Redlands – so strange.’ Jonathan paused. ‘I didn’t realize there was such a gap in the record, in what I know of her, until I started talking.’
‘A child that died.’ Her face had stilled. He tapped her knee, and she blinked and looked at him. ‘There are gaps here, too,’ she said. ‘I came across a letter today. It was from Ashton, asking Henry Dale-Collingwood to stay at Redlands. Perfectly conventional. But at the bottom of the page a fragment is cut out. Not cleanly – the person who cut it has left the margins there, and simply cut out a section. The end of t
he letter. editing the record, Miss Hardaker would say.’
Jonathan thought of red lips, and red nails, and looked at the floor with a sigh. He moved his hand up Livy’s knee, beneath her dress, to her thigh. She sat there, as though he were doing nothing at all. He leaned forwards, drawing her to him with his other hand, and kissed her hard on the lips. She yielded, but without the passion he had expected. When he drew away from her, her face was blank, her eyes cool. It sent a shiver through him.
‘Not quite the same as the other night,’ he said, trying not to sound harsh, and failing.
A ghost of a smile flitted across her face. ‘I didn’t promise to be here at your beck and call,’ she said.
‘Not when Mr Taylor calls so frequently,’ he said. ‘Are you hedging your bets, Miss Baker?’
He saw the line of her mouth harden. ‘I wouldn’t bet on you if my life depended on it,’ she said. To him, in that moment, she did look like Miss Hardaker. She looked like almost every other woman he had known before. Apart from Stevie.
As he was thinking, she leaned towards him, and kissed him again. Her choice, this time. As the kiss lengthened she felt her heart begin to beat hard. A drumming in her chest, the heat rising in her cold blood, she felt intoxicated, as though she were drunk.
But even in the midst of their embrace that frozen part of her mind was analysing, analysing. He was utterly strange to her: and what she felt was thrilling but not dangerous, in that it was not of the soul – it was simply of the body. She knew, absolutely, by the way he responded to her, that with him she could surrender absolutely to pleasure. In the morning there would be nothing but his cool stare and the turning of the cigarette lighter in his hand. There was none of the loaded familiarity that lay between her and Christian: the tenderness in his gaze, a kindness which seemed to lead to all kinds of complications. In the moment when she had stood with Christian, in the darkness of the shut-off rooms, she knew that had he kissed her he would have set in motion something infinitely more dangerous than lust. His expectation was a burden that she could not carry.
A nearby explosion broke them from each other. They each sat back against the door frame. Livy turned from him, and caught her breath.
‘Tell me more about the diamond.’
She saw the vulnerability in his eyes as he looked up at the ceiling. ‘It is called Le Fantôme – the Ghost Diamond. Pear-shaped. Thirty-five carats.’
‘Why was it called the Ghost?’
‘An inclusion in it meant that there was a kind of an illusion, a little flicker in the heart of it, which gave it its name. Ashton gave it to Charlotte. We know that: we have an invoice from a London jeweller. After that, it was known as the Kinsburg Diamond.’
‘I thought stones had one name, and that was it.’
‘He was a determined man. If he wanted it to be called something else, he had only to wish it.’
‘Ah, I see it.’ She looked askance at him. ‘The family resemblance.’
Jonathan clasped his hands together, and rested them on her knees. There was nothing sexual about the way he did it; that mood, it seemed, had passed. It was an admission of something, and it moved her in a way his kiss never could. ‘I need the diamond,’ he whispered to her. ‘Not just for my sake, but for Redlands, and for my wife. I know it’s here somewhere.’
Livy nodded, her eyes bright, pressed her hands to the floor, and rose to her feet. ‘We’ll find it,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry.’
She held her hand out to him, and he took it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1839
Henry received the note at just past seven on the clock, pushed noisily under his door by an enthusiastic Foi, who hummed loudly to herself as she did so. Henry found himself tiptoeing to the door, sure that she was there and waiting for an excuse to speak to him. As he leaned over to pick up the note, he heard the unmistakable sound of her heavy-footing it back down the corridor and realized he was holding his breath. He smiled, and only stopped when he opened the note and read who it was from.
Ashton Kinsburg was to pay an impromptu visit to the building site that morning, and he hoped that Mr Dale-Collingwood would join him for dinner.
Henry said every curse that his memory held. Not only had he fought long and hard to clear his mind of Mrs Kinsburg, but also to calm the annoyance he felt at her husband’s interference in the project, for Ashton’s letter outlining various concerns had been followed by almost identical letters from other committee members, clearly incited by him. Henry itched to write to Kinsburg and tell him that he, Henry, was not open for business. The plans had been approved long ago, the foundations were being dug, the walls would soon be raised, and no consultation was required. Although, if Kinsburg wished, Henry would be happy to consult him in due course about the colour of the drapes.
Another option was to invoke the gentleman clause. Showing offence at the interference. Brandishing the long-forgotten duke in his background. It was hardly possible that they would have him taken from the building site – hardly possible, but just. And it did matter to him. A building such as this, which would surely stand, unshaken, for centuries; a kind of palace that he was building. A tribute to all the architects that had gone before him, particularly the masters of the Renaissance; an equation of balance and symmetry which would hold as the disorder of time crumbled his bones. But above all, his own monument, or, he thought, perhaps it will be the railway station which is my monument.
He laughed, and rubbed his prickling eyes. He was slightly pained by his own vanity. He had long been a relaxed man, with an eye for detail. Now detail was all that he saw, his mind thronged with detail upon detail from joins in wood to the shape of a clock hand. Mrs Kinsburg’s appearance in his life had been a moment’s distraction; a shadow across the sun. Now he was in the full glare of the committee’s attention, and working for his life and his place in eternity. This was what he told himself.
A knock at the door brought one of the manservants with water and a fresh shirt. Henry washed, was shaved, and dressed, and he did not eat breakfast. He went out into the London streets in a daze, and walked for half an hour before he thought of hailing a cab. ‘My head is full of marble samples,’ he said to his clerk of works, Brokes, when he arrived, and the man laughed awkwardly, trying to keep in favour with him.
The pattern of the new Club lay before him, men swarming over the site, horses departing every moment with carts full of rubble and London clay. Under bright blue skies the small patch of the City of London was alive with effort and labour. Henry went to the lodge, and was brought tea, ‘strong, please’, was all he said, and he took the chair that Charlotte had taken weeks before, drawing up his small table before it. He unfurled scrolls of paper and looked upon the decorative scheme he had worked on the night before, that of the Dining Hall. Mirrors would be key in such a building, of course, for the Mirrormakers’ Club depended on seeing the glory of glass. He carefully considered his designs for coffering, the neoclassical motifs, the amount of gold leaf that would be required.
His mind was so engrossed in the drawing, and in considering each implication of each detail of the design, that he noticed nothing else around him, save occasionally the cup of cooling tea beside him, which he drank, and then another, brought to him by an indulgent housekeeper who interpreted the wave of his hand. It had always been so, ever since he was a boy: the intellectual focus of drawing and designing, of calculating, took him outside of time, making the clock hands move faster than anything else.
‘Mr Dale-Collingwood, sir.’ It was one of the foremen on the site, his cap in his hand. ‘Mr Brokes said you should come quick. We’ve found something that you’d like, he said.’
The man seemed resolute and cheerful, so Henry came without agitation, save the slight irritation of leaving his drawing. He and the man walked the lines of the footprint until they came to the south-east corner of the building, where Mr Brokes stood, looking down, surrounded by a group of labourers who had downed tools. They w
ere standing on the edge of the outline of the building, Henry noted in the back of his mind: one day, this would be the moat, a passage running the perimeter of the basement, protecting it from damp.
‘What’s this?’ said Henry, and followed Brokes’s pointing hand. One of the labourers down in the pit lifted a large stone chunk in his burly arms. They had scraped the dirt off it, and one of them had tenderly poured a bucket of water over it, so it was damp. On the face of the stone Henry could just make out the figure of a woman, decisively carved, of evident antiquity.
Mr Brokes, who Henry knew was an antiquarian of sorts, gave a laugh of astonished joy. ‘It’s Roman, I’d say, Mr Dale-Collingwood. Likely something to do with a local deity. Harry here found it when he was digging.’
‘And hauled it out like a lump of rubbish,’ said the labourer, putting it down with more tenderness than he’d evidently recovered it with. ‘Is it worth any money?’
‘Not to you,’ said Brokes. Henry had to admire the man for asking, and felt in his pocket for some coins to slip him later. Not in sight of the other men, otherwise they’d be turning up at the lodge every five minutes with shards of pottery and clay pipes. London had lived many lives; she gave up her layers of stories to those who laboured for them. The men who recovered her occasional treasures deserved something for their effort.
‘We can keep it in the building when it is up,’ said Henry. ‘For now, Harry, take it to the lodge, will you? And I will arrange for it to be stored somewhere.’ He gave the man a meaningful look as he passed, hoping that it signalled to him he would have payment for his trouble. ‘And don’t drop it. She’s survived this long, and we don’t want her haunting the place if we break her altar.’
There was a hallooing from near the road. In that moment, Henry loved his workforce, troublesome as they sometimes were, for they had that habit of signalling like a pack of hounds. He always knew when something was afoot on the site. He turned to see Ashton Kinsburg picking his way over the earth, his eyes fixed on his boots.
