‘Yeah, I guess. But it’s her way, with me at least. I guess I don’t quite have your gravitas.’ While I didn’t mean it to, this came out sounding somewhat snide.
Richard frowned. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing.’ I laughed. ‘Seriously, Richard. Like Tara said, it was just a misunderstanding.’ As I thought about opening up fully about it, I realised that I couldn’t. Or, at least, not without telling him about the underground room or that I’d asked Tara not to tell him about it. And I really didn’t want to disclose either of those things. I closed my eyes, wondering how it had grown so complicated.
‘And who’s Ophelia?’
I thought about that for a second. ‘She’s my girlfriend,’ I responded, seeing how the words rolled off my tongue.
‘I see. And Tara has a problem with her?’
‘No, Richard, it’s not like that.’ Although, strictly speaking, it was a little like that.
‘Is there anything going on, Johnny?’
It was then that I knew for certain that he was jealous. The argument between Tara and me smacked to him of something more than it was. And being vague about its cause only compounded that for him. ‘No, Richard, there’s nothing going on. Nothing at all. It’s purely a misunderstanding about work and that’s it. It won’t happen again,’ I said with finality, more finality than I felt. But I wanted more than anything to kill this thing and get out of there.
Richard stared at me for a moment. ‘Okay,’ he said, clearly also wanting to move on. ‘Sounds like we’re all overreacting.’ He smiled then but there wasn’t any warmth to it.
I had almost made it to the door when he called out.
‘Johnny.’
I turned to face him.
‘We’re not going to have a problem, are we?’
I stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Any flaky behaviour. The kind of stuff we’ve seen over the last few months.’ Pause. ‘Because this project is too big and important for any fuck-ups. And there are loads of other people dying to work on it.’
As I looked at him then, I felt my heart turning cold. ‘No, Richard. There’s not going to be any problem.’
I turned on my heel without waiting for him to respond, hating him in that moment for his thinly veiled threats. He reminded me so vividly of my brother, the last few times I had seen him, his reproaches and criticisms springing from an underground well of jealousy. I tried to focus on the rhythm of my feet crossing the office floor, pounding down the stairs towards the exit to the street. But my head was already filling with thoughts of my wife and her infidelity. I remembered the way it had touched and polluted every part of me, made me crazy and erratic, questioning myself and everything around me. More than anything I didn’t want to feel that way again.
But as I pushed open the office door, heading out into the grey wetness of the day, that almost forgotten feeling – sick, powerless, evil – rose in my stomach once again.
14
I MADE A detour on my way back from the office to the factory. No doubt about it, I was putting off having to face Tara again. But, more than that, it was something that I felt I needed to do.
Instead of heading north off Old Street at the junction with Clerkenwell Road, I carried on walking. Dense clouds bloomed across the sky and rain was falling, cold and continuous. Cars sped through murky puddles, rearranging dirt across the city, and double-decker buses belched diesel fumes into the day. Dilapidated hoardings flapped with remnants of out-of-date adverts. They looked as grey, as jaded as the landscape. I shivered, buried my head further into the lapel of my coat and picked up the pace.
Reaching Hatton Garden I took a swift left turn and about halfway down headed right towards the familiar shopfront. The copper bell jangled from a string above my head as I pushed open the door. Stepping inside, into the dim interior, I was assaulted by the smell of beeswax and mothballs. The air was stuffy and smelt of age but after the chill of the outside and the cold discord of my morning it was homely and comforting, a welcome relief. As every conceivable space was crammed with furniture, I picked my way slowly across the shop floor, stepping behind a Louis XIV dresser, in front of a luxurious chaise longue, past a nineteenth-century washstand. I walked under Venetian crystal chandeliers, past the terrifying stuffed head of a wild boar, over mouldering Turkish and Moroccan rugs and eventually made it to the counter. That too was hidden beneath a jumble of paper and pens, numerous books and old tomes, a prehistoric-looking computer which I knew doubled as a cataloguer. Directly in front of me, a pile of cards to the side of the cash till told me that I was in the establishment of Alexander & Sons, Quality Antique Furnishings since 1919. I looked around, waiting, taking in the beautiful and eclectic pieces this place had developed a reputation for. Their style might be chaotic but the Alexanders could find you practically anything you wanted. And the knowledge of old Mr Alexander, not the founding father but his son, was unparalleled. When after five minutes there was still no sign of anyone I rang the bell, also located on the desk in front of me. Before the echo had rung itself out I heard sounds emanating from the back room: the screech of a chair moving against floorboards and a subsequent scuffle of feet.
‘Just a moment.’
Even though I’d been expecting it, the tone of the voice still surprised me, sounding as it did like that of a man at least a hundred years old: soft, slightly cracking around the edges, yet at the same time imbued with a certainty and knowledge.
The second time it came, it was no more than a breath or a whisper, as if said more to himself than to me, ‘I’ll be with you in a moment.’
The shuffling grew louder until it reached the open doorway connecting the front of the shop to the rear. Then I heard the tinkle of the strings of glass droplets marking the partition and suddenly a tiny man stood in front of me. He couldn’t have been more than four feet, ten inches tall and his frame was incredibly slight. Even clad in an old khaki cardigan and trousers, his arms and legs looked like matchsticks. His wrinkled head was almost free of hair, except for long wisps of white at his temples which were combed back around his ears. He looked ancient, and yet his eyes, magnified as they were by a pair of thick-lensed round spectacles, shone brightly even in the subdued light of the shop.
‘Well, hello there.’ The quiet tone was soothing. ‘How nice to see you again, Johnny. It’s been a while. How are you?’
‘I’m fine, thanks, Mr Alexander. You’re looking well.’
A small laugh. ‘I can’t complain. Keeping busy. As I’m sure you are.’ He raised an eyebrow towards me. ‘I take it you have a new job.’
I nodded.
‘So how can I help you this time?’
Mr Alexander had become somewhat indispensable to me over the years. I’d met him early on in my career when I’d been sourcing Regency furniture for a renovation project. Ever since then I had used him regularly – whenever I needed to buy or get advice on antique fixtures or fittings. So I told him briefly about the mirror and its markings. ‘I was wondering if you could help me identify where it’s from and perhaps who made it and for whom. I’ve tried some searches of my own on the lettering but they didn’t reveal anything. So I took some pictures of it.’ I removed the camera from my bag and placed it on the counter.
The old man looked at it and then back at me. ‘Well, that all sounds very intriguing. Yes, let’s take a look, shall we?’
I nodded, then clicked on the camera and flicked to the first image. ‘So, this is the whole of the mirror. I know the background as well as the mirror is pretty dark, but I think you can make out the frame and the glass.’
The old man nodded and repeated ‘Yes, yes’ a couple of times.
I flicked through the next couple of photographs of the corners of the mirror containing the letters.
The old man leaned in to look more closely at the camera screen. He scrunched his eyes, scrutinising the images. Then steadily, softly, he said, ‘I think that perhaps, Johnny, you have stu
mbled upon something very old indeed. If you could show me the rest of the photographs, just to be sure, then I can tell you what I think.’
‘Of course.’ I flicked through the images as the old man made quiet noises to himself. When I’d finished, he asked me to go back to the close-up shots of the lettering.
‘Like I said,’ he began, ‘I think this mirror is extremely old, Johnny. I would guess that it was made towards the end of the sixteenth century.’ He nodded. ‘The reason I say this is twofold. Firstly, the extent of the degradation of the glass and frame. Secondly, the TM which you quite correctly identified. I believe these letters stand for Theseo Mutio.’
I tried to recall the name. Theseo Mutio. But I had never heard it before.
‘Yes, yes. This is quite something.’ The old man was squinting once more at the camera frame. ‘Johnny, do you know anything about the mirror-making business in Venice?’
I racked my brain for a moment. ‘I remember that Murano glass was highly sought after. It was the combination of elements in that particular area, I think – the seawater from the Venetian lagoon, the local wood for the firing process and the proportions of salt and soda that they used. It all led to a superior quality of glass and to Venice gaining a reputation ahead of competition from places like Germany and France.’ I paused, my knowledge exhausted.
The old man nodded. ‘Yes, yes. And it was a very lucrative business. So the Venetians, quite understandably, guarded their knowledge and their monopoly closely. It became a very cloak-and-dagger business,’ he said, his enormous eyes winking from behind his glasses. ‘Literally a matter of life and death. The Venetian authorities tried to prevent the movement of its glassworkers to countries that competed with the city. Of course, skilled craftsmen still managed to get out, to France for example. But the Venetians didn’t let them go without a fight. There was blackmail, duplicity and murder. Corpses turned up from supposed bizarre accidents, there were rumours of poisonings and sabotage.’ Mr Alexander nodded again. ‘And it was during this period of much upheaval and unrest that Theseo Mutio went to France to work for King Henri II. He was commissioned to produce mirrors and other sorts of Venetian-style glass. A few years later his brother Ludovic joined him and together they made rather a success of it. For a time, at least. They had a factory in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, I believe, and their products were judged to be of the same beauty and excellence as work bought in Murano. However, in spite of the patronage and protection bestowed upon them by the King and Queen, the Mutio factory eventually faltered.’
‘So what happened to them?’
The old man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Impossible to say for sure. There’s no mention of them in the last third of the century so no one really knows how long their experiment lasted or what ultimately did for it. What is clear, however, is that the Queen commissioned a not inconsiderable number of items from them.’
My brain tried to focus on the little French history I had once known. But I couldn’t remember anything about Henri II, let alone his wife.
‘The Queen was Catherine de Medici,’ said the old man without looking up. He was frowning and pointing to the interlinking letters. ‘You are quite right that there is a letter H here. And I think there are letters between its vertical strokes. Perhaps a letter C, for Catherine, facing the correct way, with another C, back to front, like a mirror image of the first. Two Cs, perhaps.’
I looked at the camera. Yes, it could definitely be a combination of H and C.
‘Well, Johnny, I would love to take a look at it sometime, if you would permit me.’
I nodded but for some reason I didn’t want him to. ‘Of course, of course,’ I lied. ‘It’s not clear what’s going to happen to it yet. Whether it’s going to be sold or kept or what. But I’ll keep you in the loop and you can come over and see it. Sometime,’ I said, fudging.
Mr Alexander nodded again. ‘Well, any time, Johnny. Any time you want. It could be worth a fortune, you know. Something of this age and heritage.’ And he winked at me. ‘Where did you come across the piece?’
‘In an underground room in the factory where I’m working.’
‘Hmm. Underground.’ The old man looked at the photographs again and then back at me with his wide eyes. ‘That’s a curious place to uncover something like this. But then again, it is a curious object. Are the pictures truly representative of it?’
I cocked an eyebrow at him, not really understanding what he was getting at.
‘By which I mean is the glass really this stained?’
‘Ah.’ I looked down at the image on the camera and the darkness of the mirror’s surface seemed to ripple under my gaze. ‘Yes,’ I said, nodding.
‘Hmm. Such deep mottling of the glass is fairly unusual – even in a piece as old as this.’
I looked at the image once again and felt faintly uneasy.
‘It hardly even resembles a mirror any more.’ He frowned, then clicked the camera off abruptly and pushed it back to me.
An uncertain silence hovered between us. I wanted to speak but didn’t know what to say.
‘Well.’ Mr Alexander coughed lightly and rubbed his hands together. ‘It’s certainly a very interesting piece. And if I’m right then it’s over four hundred years old. Quite remarkable. And do you know nothing of its history, Johnny?’
‘No,’ I replied quietly. ‘Well, I know that the factory opened in 1864, so I guess it could have been there since then.’
‘That still leaves three hundred years unaccounted for.’ Then he fixed me with his big eyes and murmured quietly, ‘Makes you wonder who’s been looking into it all that time – and what they’ve seen.’
On my way back to the factory I made a diversion to the coffee shop. Sitting at my favourite spot, the fourth table back out of the five that ran along the length of the front window, I turned over Mr Alexander’s parting words in my mind. They had touched on something that I had also thought. Or more than that, perhaps: something I had felt. What did you see when you looked into this mirror, this mirror that hardly resembled a mirror any more? I closed my eyes briefly as I tried to understand it. But all I saw was an ever-shifting blackness.
My mind moved away from the mirror and came back to the old man. As we were winding up our conversation, he had said that it might be difficult, given the age of the piece, to find out much more about it. Nonetheless, he would do his best. A personal interest, he called it. He still had contacts in the business that he could call upon and the markings would assist in tracking the mirror’s movements before it came to the factory. I thanked him but secretly I knew it was a long shot. And besides, what would be the point?
As I waited for my coffee, I thought about the mirror maker, Theseo Mutio, making an object fit for a Queen. I imagined tin and mercury, lime and potash heated in a furnace until they formed a ball of molten glass. Then I saw the hands of Mutio, the alchemist, magically transforming them into solid crystal that produced reflections. But then, somehow, the glass grew almost too dark to produce an image. The mirror maker’s initials shifted around in my mind. TM. Then they were joined by the intertwined letters, H and C, if that was what they were. The marks of a King and Queen. They too circled my mind, melded with the darkness of the mirror, and finally disappeared.
15
THE FOLLOWING EVENING I was standing next to Ophelia in her darkroom. The red safelight cast a deep, hypnotic glow over the central space but barely penetrated the darkness at the edges of the room.
Ophelia took a negative and inserted it into the negative carrier. Then she placed the carrier in the slot below the light source of the enlarger. This was a strange piece of equipment on the edge of her workbench, which projected light through the negative onto photo paper on the bench below. With a click she turned on the enlarger and an image was reflected downwards. I saw her look at the timer before turning to face me.
‘Well, the poisonings I knew about. Catherine de Medici was quite infamous in that department, wasn’t she?’ Opheli
a checked the levels of liquid in the three trays in front of her and then her gaze shot back again to the timer. ‘Yes, there were the famous poisoned gloves by which she dispatched her enemies and wasn’t there once a decorated apple infused with poisonous vapours? It killed a dog, I think. By accident.’
I smiled into the darkness. ‘I don’t know about that.’
‘And what about her chamber full of deadly poisons? Weren’t lots of secret cabinets found in one of the rooms of her chateaux?’
I shook my head. I had no idea. But it seemed to fit with the general picture I’d been uncovering of her. Unable to get my conversation with Mr Alexander out of my head, I’d gone to the British Library and done some research of my own. ‘I focused on sorcery,’ I heard myself say. The words coming out of my mouth sounded bizarre.
‘I think they omitted that part at school.’ I heard the timer click off and the enlarger light went out. Ophelia took the exposed photo paper and placed it in the first tray. Deftly handling a pair of tongs, she gently pressed the paper in several places until it was covered by the liquid. Then she turned to me. ‘So what did you discover?’
‘Well, Catherine had been married off to Henri, the second son of King Francis I of France, when she was only fourteen years old. Only a few years later Henri’s brother died, leaving him Dauphin, heir to the throne. So, as Dauphine, she was under great pressure, even more so than before, to conceive a child. And it didn’t happen for her for a while. She tried everything, including pagan remedies and ancient magic. Eventually she did get pregnant. But who knows if it had anything to do with that.’ I paused, watching Ophelia continue to move the photo paper beneath the liquid in the developing tray. ‘So it seems that the origins of her interest in magic started there. But they certainly developed somewhat. Part of her entourage were the Ruggieri brothers, Tommaso and Cosimo. They were renowned astrologers but also practised the dark arts – black magic and necromancy. That kind of stuff.’
The Medici Mirror Page 10
