The Medici Mirror

by Melissa Bailey

  I can hear your quiet laugh as you read this and the gentle reprimand you might utter to me. ‘You must concentrate on the task in hand. You must learn what you can. It is, after all, only a few days that you will be gone.’ As I remember this, that we shall not be parted for very long, I can once more breathe without you. I can think clearly and still my heart. And in this short-lived space of calm, I can take pause, write of things other than you and recount a little of what I have seen here. I know, after all, that you long to be privy to what I am seeing.

  Well then, I must write of Signore Pietro Yanturni. I imagine you sighing at the mere mention of his name and the fine creations it conjures in your imagination. While he has not proved himself to be another Giovanni Voltan in his welcome, I have to confess that I am not much surprised by this. His reputation as a recluse precedes him and I did think that perhaps my introduction by our own dear Henry seemed a little tenuous. Nonetheless, he has been cordial to me and opened up his enterprise without suspicion. I suppose that even the most mistrustful of individuals must be aware that our ventures are so different that it is clear there is nothing to fear from me. My products are mundane in comparison with his and any ambitions I might have pertaining to truly exclusive handcrafted pieces remain just that, whereas his ambitions have already taken off and gained flight. As you know, Pietro works alongside the designer Jacques Doucet, of the fashion house of Doucet, and his works are masterpieces of intricacy and finery. But to see them first-hand, rather than in sketches or photographs, and appreciate the materials used is enough to make you reel: eleventh- and twelfth-century velvets, Renaissance silks, rare feathers, brocades of gold and silver. His creations are incredible extravagances and I have come to understand that his customers have no say in what their shoes will look like or even what materials will be used. It is a matter for his discretion alone. And yet he has a clientele clamouring to pay him $1000 per pair and to wait two to three years for delivery! He has created a truly astonishing enterprise and it makes me laugh to even think of trying to replicate it at home.

  His approach to his clients is also novel. Today, having allowed me (after a little hesitation) to be present during a fitting with a customer, he requested that the woman walk up and down the room in front of him in her bare feet so that he could see how she moved. This was crucial, he told me, in assessing what kind of shoe would be appropriate for her. I assumed he took into account her height, her ordinary sway and motion, the natural incline of her feet, although he didn’t give me any detail about what he took from the exercise. For perhaps fifteen whole minutes we watched her feet rising and falling as she walked, slightly self-conscious at first, then more confident as time went by. After this exercise, the woman was instructed to sit down and Pietro began to make plaster models of each foot. I knew that they were the first step towards production of his exquisite shoes, ‘lasts’ upon which he would mould his delicate fabrics and materials.

  I watched Pietro work his magic, his youth suddenly dazzling to me – twenty-four years old and already shining. Focused on the plaster, drying around the small, tender foot of the woman, I suddenly caught a glimpse of myself, saw my reflection, as if in a mirror. I was a dark shadow and, while I appeared virile, when I looked closely everything vital was stripped away. I was desiccated, a shell, and in the place of my heart sat a deadened empty space. My mind was flooded momentarily with dark imaginings. I was overcome by anger and fear.

  A sudden desolation possessed me in that moment, incongruous in my opulent surroundings, watching a young woman’s dream come alive. I felt that I, by way of distinction, was trapped in a nightmare, heading towards loss and death.

  I cannot explain it. But in that moment I felt utterly bereft.

  It is perhaps bizarre, having sampled the extravagant delights of this Paris fashion house and admired the exquisite craftsmanship executed within its walls, that I long to see my more humble factory once more, to walk along its floors, inhale the fragrance of wood and leather, hear the familiar whirring of its machinery and explore its depths once more with you. In short, while I have enjoyed my experiences here, I am plagued by bleak visions and I ache for what is familiar to me.

  Perhaps it is only my mind, my imagination, susceptible and sensitive in its parting from you. I try to shrug off this melancholy but know that I, jealous of everything that is near you, the air that you breathe, that hangs around you and touches your skin, long to be with you again.

  Until then, I remain your most devoted

  James x

  THE DARKNESS OF the winter’s afternoon had closed in, pressing against the French windows of my kitchen, against the brightness of the overhead lights.

  Sitting at the dining table, I had just finished rereading the letters. I looked down at the sheets of intricate script, the green ink on the yellowing white of the pages, the faint smell of mouldering age loitering in the air around them. The letters were real. Still, I found it hard to believe. They were miraculous, an unexpected prize, another window into the world of James and Amelia. His passion for her was intense, consuming, as were the unsettling emotions he suffered as a result of his absence from her. So James had bought the mirror as a gift for Amelia. When he got it back to England, he had, presumably, taken it into the factory’s basement where it seemed their secret trysts took place. I thought of the mirror on the wall in the darkness, the green script of the letters and the same green script of the note floating on the mirror’s surface. So it too had been written by James.

  I stood up, turning to look out of the French windows. I tried to see the dull green of the grass through the darkness, the boundary wall beyond it. But I couldn’t make out either. The only thing I had a clear view of was my own reflection in the window pane, dark against the artificial lights of the kitchen. I stared at myself: black hair uncombed, deep circles under sagging eyes, stubble flecked with grey. I looked wrecked. Rubbing my cheeks and staring at myself in the glass, I thought about James’s vision of himself as he watched the plaster dry on the foot of Yanturni’s customer. The stretched skin, the dark, skeletal face. I was instantly catapulted back to the underground room and what I myself had seen, or thought I had seen, in the mirror. I wondered if James, like me, had caught this image of himself in the mirror’s depths and whether that had triggered the anxiety he had so clearly felt in Paris.

  I turned my back to the window and stared once more at the letters in my hands. The dates were imprecise, only the year ascertainable – 1898. So had their affair begun then? Or even earlier than that? In 1897, perhaps? The tone of the correspondence indicated that there was history, attachment between the two of them. Whichever it was, did it really matter?

  I folded the pages and placed the letters back on the dining table.

  32

  OPHELIA’S GREEN EYES were looking at me. I smiled and closed mine again. For a moment I thought of nothing, the dull stupor of sleep still hanging over me. Then, as consciousness crystallised, I remembered. I hadn’t gone to Ophelia’s tonight. She was on her photo shoot in Yorkshire. I had come home to my flat and spoken to her about the letters from here. So the green eyes looking at me didn’t belong to her. Which told me instantly where I was and who was facing me.

  ‘Hello, Amelia,’ I said and opened my eyes.

  Her shy but smiling red lips greeted me. ‘Hello, Johnny. It’s very nice to see you again. I hope you don’t mind me disturbing you.’

  I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t mind,’ I said, sitting upright, noticing as I moved that I was back in the low-ceilinged dark room, in the armchair, dressed once more in the old-fashioned three-piece suit. The tie was unbearably tight at the neck and I reached for the knot, trying to make myself more comfortable. Amelia watched me in silence as I struggled. The candle, flickering on the floor beside her, cast shadows across her face. Tie loosened, I relaxed a little, and looked at her properly.

  She was sitting opposite me, just like the last time I’d seen her, but now her feet were curled under
her body. Her dark hair was tied back at the nape of her neck and she was wearing the same black dress as before. It was the dress that I now knew she had worn day after day – her factory uniform, if you like. The dress captured, beneath a white apron, in the photograph of the workers from the wall of the factory.

  ‘How are you feeling, Johnny?’

  I looked down at the three-piece suit and the tie once more. ‘Uncomfortable,’ I replied. ‘But I think I know where you’re going with this. I’ve thought about it a few times since I was last here. I am literally in James’s clothes right now, right down to his factory-made footwear.’ I jigged my feet vaguely, eyeing the elegant beige brogues that they were modelling. I tried to remember, and couldn’t, whether I had been wearing them the last time I was here. Dragging my gaze away from my feet, I looked back at Amelia. ‘I’m in James’s shoes, I think you’d say, in both a literal and a figurative sense.’

  ‘Indeed,’ she said, and smiled. Then, suddenly serious, ‘And so you’d better tread carefully. You know what happened to him.’

  I thought about it and realised that technically I didn’t. I only knew the ultimate result: that he’d died in suspicious circumstances, not how it had happened. That remained unclear. But what I did know was that I didn’t want to go out the same way.

  ‘No, indeed,’ said Amelia. ‘So you need to keep going, keep uncovering information.’

  I nodded but I felt suddenly disheartened. What I’d found out so far seemed pretty bleak.

  ‘You’re right.’ Amelia cut in on my thoughts yet again. ‘But let’s concentrate on what you know. That will help.’

  I paused for a moment. ‘Well, I know you went to work for James Brimley in May 1897. After the death of your mother.’

  Amelia looked down at her lap, smoothing her dress across her legs. I looked again at the rough redness of her hands, so incongruous with the perfection of the rest of her. No doubt about it, it was not the destiny her parents would have chosen for her, nor the destiny perhaps that she would have chosen for herself.

  ‘I had celebrated my eighteenth birthday the month before I went to work at Brimley’s. On 3 April, in fact. My mother was still alive then and she had baked me a cake.’ Amelia smiled and looked at me, the twinkle in her eyes almost childlike. ‘A towering sponge filled with cream and jam. A Victoria sponge, I think you call it, after Queen Victoria. I remember that more than anything. My father carried it into the front room of the house, my mother following behind him. Her steps were short, like her breath, while her hair and her skin were grey. She was very ill by this time.’ Amelia’s voice cracked and she waited a few moments before resuming. ‘The cake was laden down with candles and I looked at them so that I wouldn’t have to look at her illness. I wanted to cry, seeing her so weak and shrunken, but instead I smiled. I tried to look happy to give her some comfort. She died soon afterwards. On 14 May.’ She stopped again and swallowed. Her voice when it came was ragged. ‘I was close to my mother. I loved her very much. But grief was hard for me. With so many younger brothers and sisters around, it was difficult to show it. The eldest, Betty, was ten when my mother died. And Bertie, my youngest brother, was only two. So I didn’t get to express how I felt that freely. I couldn’t walk around weeping or shouting, giving vent to my sadness or anger. The children would have become too upset.’

  A tear fell silently onto her right cheek.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She nodded. ‘But at the time I wasn’t. And I had to push it all down, inside, everything I felt, and only examine it briefly in the quiet time I had alone. Which wasn’t much, I can tell you. I had to step – or jump, rather – into my mother’s shoes, into the role of carer for the children. So, naturally, I didn’t have the luxury of proper mourning. And holding on to, suppressing all those feelings of sadness, made me miss her presence all the more. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Amelia paused. ‘Anyway, my first day was 30 May 1897. I remember it so clearly, the feeling of desolation. My mother’s death was still raw, still weighing down upon me. And in this frame of mind I arrived at Brimley’s on an unseasonably cold Monday morning.’

  She paused again, holding out her palms, raised, for me to see. ‘It might seem an odd choice, a shoemaker’s. Hard on the hands for one thing, constantly cutting and sewing by hand and machine. I had wanted to be a governess. I loved reading, you see, wanted to teach. But after my mother’s death none of that seemed to matter. Family friends tried to interest me in other positions – maid, domestic servant, seamstress. And others said any menial role was nonsensical for a girl of my obvious talents.’ She turned her head to the side, narrowed her eyes and batted her eyelids. ‘But I wouldn’t listen to anyone. I had made up my mind. And the one thing that Brimley’s had that the others didn’t was that my mother had worked there. So in an odd sort of way I felt that I would be connected to her, would be closer to her even, if I was there. That somehow I would be happier. And they were delighted to have me, to help the family. She had been so well liked and regarded, you see. My dear mother, Gracie Branwell.’

  Amelia smiled palely and then took a deep breath. ‘So, frozen to the bone by grief and weather, I arrived. I opened the door of the dispatch room in a flurry of wet wind and half stumbled, half ran inside, my hair streaming around my face, my clothes sodden. I must have looked a fright. Like a banshee or something similar.’ She laughed, girlish all of a sudden. Her eyes were bright, shining with recollection. ‘And that was the first time I saw him. He was talking to Miss Perkins – Minnie, the bookkeeper – who worked closely with him. They had their backs to me but when the door clattered open and then slammed shut, they both turned, startled by the noise, and simply stared at me. Miss Perkins was a shy thing, pretty and dark-haired. She looked horrified by my arrival, bursting into the factory like that. No words were exchanged between any of us and for what felt like the longest time they simply looked at me.’

  Amelia halted briefly, as if she was remembering it. ‘Mr Brimley’s was a deep, penetrating stare. As if he had peered into my soul and seen everything exposed that I had hidden there. He looked at me with those dark, serious, deep-set eyes of his, and then he smiled, walked towards me and began to speak. Not about anything in particular – the weather, the wet, the state of the buses. It was mere chit-chat, entirely banal. But he said it in a way which was very soothing. Then he steered me towards Minnie and asked her to take care of me, to see that I didn’t come down with a cold on my first day. I think those were his exact words. She did as he said, but reluctantly. My appearance shocked her that day and she would have liked nothing more, I am sure, than to send me on my way again. But if we were not allies in the beginning, we became so later.’

  She smiled but with a sad look in her eyes. ‘But from my first moment there, Mr Brimley – James – looked after me. Without fuss or overdue concern, he quietly took control of my welfare. And looking back, as I did many times later, I think the connection between us was forged then. In that first moment of meeting. Maybe something in him recognised the deep well of pain inside me. Maybe something in him tapped into it and felt a little kinship with it. Whatever it was, he never made reference to it explicitly.

  ‘But he told me later, much later, that, even though he didn’t know it then, looking back his heart was lost at that point, in that moment when he turned, amid the wind and the rain, to see that a beautiful, desolate girl had washed up on his shore.’

  33

  ‘WE DIDN’T SPEAK about my mother much. But every day he would come and talk to me. Quietly, in that reassuring way of his. And gradually, over time, I came to depend on him and would look forward to exchanging a few daily words. I would hear him first, his firm, confident step moving across the assembling room; the solid rhythmic click-click of his heels against the floorboards.’

  I thought of the photograph of Amelia that I had found, the image of her gazing towards an advancing man. I smiled.

  Amelia
smiled back at me and nodded. ‘Later I began to notice a change in the way I felt. It wasn’t a sudden change of mood, more a gradual happening. But I began to notice that when I heard his footsteps my heart would flicker slightly, lightly, the merest murmur of butterfly wings in my chest. That was the beginning.’ Amelia’s eyes shone and her cheeks had become a little flushed. ‘And then later still I found out that James felt the same way.’ She paused, clearly revisiting the moment in her mind. ‘It was one evening when I was working late for some extra money, hand-stitching a pair of bespoke shoes, the only person still at work in the assembling room, or even on the third floor. I became aware all at once of the sound of James’s approaching footsteps. It took me by surprise. I was not expecting him at this hour and, for the first time in our history, I was overcome with embarrassment. I didn’t look up, struggling to get a grip on my emotions, certain that my first words – if I could get them out of my mouth, that is – would betray my passion for him. In any event, the footsteps stopped. I was still stitching, pretending to be absorbed in my work, my heart pounding furiously, the blood beating hard beneath my skin.

  ‘I became conscious of James speaking, saying my name quietly, once, then again. And so eventually I had to look up. I remember that he seemed far away. He was very tall, you see, and he towered over me as I was sitting on my chair. He must have felt the distance too because he knelt down almost immediately, still looking at me as he did so. And for the first time since the day of our meeting, I felt that his eyes were burrowing into my soul, looking into the depths of my being, unearthing my secrets. I was aware that he was speaking to me, but I don’t remember anything he said. I was only conscious of his lips moving, seeing their pallor, their dryness. He kept pausing to lick them and his eyes had an uncertain, wide look to them, as if he was a little afraid. It occurred to me then that he was nervous. I had never seen him like this, in all the time I’d known him and so I knew that whatever he was saying, it was important, definitive. That it would somehow change things between us.