The Silversmith's Daughter

by Annie Murray

  ‘You’d better get one of those buttons,’ Margaret joked. You could buy little white buttons that shone violet in the dark if you warmed them by the fire.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of those,’ Annie chuckled. She did not seem at all worried by being out in the dark. ‘I should’ve thought looking where you’re going would be a better idea.’

  Margaret watched Philip and Annie set off along the dark street. They were soon out of sight and she closed the door and stood for a moment, alone, in the pale gaslight of the hall, a smile on her face. How blessed I am, she thought, having all this, my family, and Annie close by as well – even Father only a train ride away. And when all these boys are going off to war – those mothers never sleeping well again. She sent up a prayer for them, and felt guiltily relieved that she did not have a son old enough to fight.

  Six

  ‘Daisy?’

  She looked up from the desk, realizing that her father had already said her name more than once by the expression on his face.

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ he grumbled, ‘are you with us, or not? I said, have you found order ninety-one yet?’

  ‘Oh – yes, sorry,’ she said, jarred back into reality. It was so hard to keep her mind on anything. Pa was not a difficult man, but he was exacting where the business was concerned. ‘It’s here.’

  ‘Good,’ Philip said testily, taking the sheet of paper from her. He loomed beside her in his overall. ‘It’s hard enough getting any orders these days, without you losing them.’

  ‘I haven’t lost it,’ she pointed out carefully, seeing this was not a moment to argue. Things were tense and she saw Edith, the younger of the two women who worked in the office, give her a sympathetic smile.

  The order, from a grand house in Cheshire, was for fifty silver napkin rings. Daisy had worked on some of the rings herself on her days out in the workshop. And it was true that while sitting in the office for one day a week drove her to a fever of boredom, it was she who had suggested that she should do it. She knew her mother had known about running the business, as well as seeing Margaret and Aunt Hatt involved in the office side of their gold and silversmithing businesses for most of her life. She realized it was something she needed to know.

  She had been allocated a seat at the large table in the middle. The lamp suspended over it was lit most days, except at the height of summer, its burning mantle a background hiss as it cast a pale ring of light on their papers and blotters.

  Mr Henshaw, who had worked at Tallis’s for years and, being close on sixty, was far too old to go off to war, was very much the boss in the office. He sat, enthroned on a Windsor chair, at a side desk facing into the room. All too often, Daisy would look up from her daydreams to see him observing her over his half-moon glasses, beady eyes peering from under those shaggy grey brows as if to say, I hope you’re getting on with your work, young miss? It always surprised her how hairy his eyebrows were when his head was nearly bald. Though he was not an unkind man, she always felt a great distance between him and herself. There had never been any chin tickling or teasing from Mr Henshaw as she was growing up.

  And there were two ladies. Miss Taylor, on packing, a sweet, blonde, softly spoken woman in her twenties, whom Daisy could call Edith, was walking out with a man called Arthur, now away at sea. And there was Miss Allen, who wrote many letters and was goodness knows how old, at least forty, who she definitely could not call Muriel because she was always Miss Allen and tart as a lemon with it. They all sat round the table, as did Margaret when she was there. Daisy did whatever she was asked to do by the others, and very tedious she found it most of the time.

  Her attention was even harder to discipline these days, when her mind drifted constantly towards the extraordinary, dangerously delicious things that were happening to her that she could not mention to anyone, that she just could not stop thinking about . . .

  ‘Pa?’ Desperate for distraction, she straightened up from her slump over the desk. ‘Why don’t we start making MIZPAH brooches – or rings? They’re nice.’

  ‘Huh,’ he said, meaning, Not that again. ‘Sentimental tat,’ he said scornfully, on his way out of the room. Pa was a bit of a purist – an artist at heart. He ran a commercial business because he had to, but he would have preferred to be working on his own creations in silver, instead of snatching only the occasional hour here and there when he could.

  ‘But Pa,’ she said in a low voice, having followed him out into the passage. He stood before her in his overall, clearly impatient. ‘Why not do it? You’re worried about not getting enough orders, aren’t you? Blenkinsop’s have all but closed down – we don’t want to end up like that.’

  Her father rolled his eyes as if to say, You don’t need to tell me.

  ‘Other firms are doing well with them,’ she pleaded. ‘I’m sure I could design something lovely! They’re such a popular thing – they sell ever so well. Imagine if you were having to join up and leaving Ma – you’d wear a MIZPAH brooch, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No,’ he said drily, ‘I don’t s’pose I would.’

  ‘Even if I’d made it?’ She appealed to him, looking up with her most winning smile.

  Her father softened in a resigned way, giving a sigh. ‘Well, all right – if you’d made it I’d have to, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘ “The Lord watch between me and thee when we are absent from one another.”’ Daisy felt her heart swell with feeling as she said it. MIZPAH – the emotional bond between any two people who loved each other and were parted. She thought of him, of James Carson, his eyes looking down at her. ‘It’s beautiful! Oh, Pa, let me design something! Mr Watts is doing very well with his lucky stars. And I could make something better than everyone else’s, I know I could!’

  ‘What can you do better than anyone else?’ Margaret’s voice was tinged with reproach as she came out from the kitchen. She wasn’t given to boastfulness and did not like to hear it in Daisy.

  ‘She’s on about us making some of that MIZPAH stuff,’ Philip said, trying to sound dismissive, but Daisy could already see that she had him hooked – a little bit at least.

  Margaret put her hands on her hips. ‘Good idea. We could do with rather more income from somewhere, the way things are going.’

  ‘And it is from the Bible,’ Daisy said, feeling this would win her religious stepmother over even more. ‘Can I, Pa? I could go up and design something now instead of being in the office today?’

  Outnumbered and outflanked, Philip Tallis held out his hands in defeat. ‘Well – all right then. I suppose so. You see what you can come up with.’

  Seven

  Daisy dashed up to her workroom. The lower staircase was covered with well-worn brown linoleum, but the treads up to the attic stairs were bare wood and her boots clattered eagerly to the top, taking the stairs two at a time. She felt as if she had been let out of school early to play. Now she could draw and make her own designs all afternoon if she wanted!

  This floor was now her realm in the house. She slept in the back attic overlooking the yard, but had chosen to have her workroom at the front where there was more light. She tried to stop her half-brother and -sister, John and Lily, coming up here and messing about with her things. They knew from hard experience not to touch the box her mother had made, however much Lily begged to be allowed to play with it.

  Lily was all right most of the time, Daisy had to concede. She was only seven and a sweet little thing with a pudding basin of thick brown hair and big blue eyes. She looked up to Daisy and loved it when Daisy deigned to spend time playing with her. It was quite gratifying being adored like that. All the same, she was glad to have her own bedroom and workroom up in the attic and let the rest of the family get on with it a floor further down.

  John, on the other hand, was downright annoying. Daisy found it hard to admit even now how jealous she had been when Margaret had two more children – especially when John, the eldest, had arrived. It had come as a shock to Daisy, who had
been on her own for the first twelve years of her life. When John was born, she had been afraid she would be pushed aside because their mother was not her real mother, even though she loved Margaret now almost as if she was.

  And of course he was a boy and she had felt sure he would now become the important one, the one who would inherit the business from Pa. That was how things went in the world, wasn’t it? – it was always the boys who got everything. And he looked so like Pa, solid and strong, with Pa’s big eyes and frizzy hair.

  Though angry, she was ashamed of her feelings and had never said anything about it to Pa, but she knew she had often been mean in her behaviour to John, and Pa had ticked her off for it. Sometimes she refused to play with him, or ignored him as if he was not there. Her half-brother needed keeping in his place, she felt.

  Daisy went to the table and took her design notebook from the drawer. It was nothing special, just a little brown covered notebook with lines. Instead of sitting at the desk, she took her pencil and lay on the bed leaning forward on her elbows. She flipped through the book of drawings: experimental sketches for her jug, various handles and spouts. There were the teapot and sugar salver she had designed, the bracelets and pendants, the engraved silver tray . . .

  ‘MIZPAH,’ she whispered, opening up a clean page. ‘ “The Lord watch between me and thee . . .” What would I want to wear if he went away?’ A pang went through her. This was a desolate thought. Would she want a ring? A necklace? Or a brooch? What would he wear?

  A delicious, excited feeling came over her. At last she was alone and she could give herself up to her fantasies. She knew, really, that they were just dreams. Mr Carson was a safely married man, but she enjoyed his attention, the way he looked at her with those dark, intense eyes. It might not be real but it was intoxicating being able to pretend he was hers, this romantic, artistic figure, sweeping round the corridors at Vittoria Street.

  She rolled over on to her back, inserting a finger under the edge of her corset to ease it, and breathed in as deeply as she could. Resting the notebook on her stomach she stared up at the sloping white ceiling. But she did not see the chipped paint, the bare room with its blue-and-white checked curtains at the window. She was seeing his face, wondering, Would he wear a brooch for me?

  Over the past couple of months, as she taught her two weekly afternoon classes at Vittoria Street, between two and four o’clock, he had gradually started to pay her more and more attention. Mr Carson’s afternoon classes were in advanced silversmithing and in raising, chasing and repousée. He also taught one of the evening classes which ran between seven and nine o’clock, but she was not in the school then.

  All afternoon and evening, Vittoria Street School was abuzz, the various teaching rooms throughout the building full of activity. All the day-release classes related to trades in the district: as well as the numerous skills associated with smithing metals, classes were given in clay modelling and drawing from life, as well as enamelling and die sinking, and mounting and setting jewels.

  Daisy noticed nowadays that when she emerged from the Elementary Silversmithing room, she hardly ever failed to find Mr Carson’s tall, striking figure positioned somewhere in the corridor, often walking slowly along as if he was on the way to or from somewhere and they had just happened to coincide. At first she thought that was all it was. But after a while, he just always seemed to be there. Increasingly, as well as the intense look and smile, the raising of his hat should he be wearing one – for he was the sort of person who often wore hats indoors – he would find a reason to stop her for a brief conversation.

  ‘Is everything going along all right, Miss Tallis?’ he might ask, with a smile which slightly mocked the formal way in which he was speaking.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Mr Carson,’ she would say, because in general, although a few of the students could be a bit trying, she had no real problem and she loved her work.

  ‘And how’s your pa getting along?’

  ‘He’s very well, thank you.’ If you want to know how Pa is, she couldn’t help thinking, why don’t you call and see him? But she had noticed that, since coming back from Sheffield, Mr Carson had still not been to their house. When she was young she had always found it exciting when he arrived, and in those days, he had seemed to keep popping up like a jolly rabbit rather often. Only now she was coming to realize that back then, Mr Carson had assumed he could influence her father, take him under his wing as some sort of protégé for his own glory. But Pa, proud, stubborn, mostly self-taught, would have none of it. He had dug his heels in and rejected Carson’s patronage. And in the end, there was an almost magnetic repulsion of personality between the two men.

  ‘Well, it’s still astonishing to me to see you here,’ Mr Carson would sometimes say, in a bemused way. ‘And of course a great pleasure.’

  Yesterday, he had come into her teaching room. The last of the lads were clearing up their pegs and hurrying from the room and Daisy was still supervising a slow, painstaking boy called David as he finished soldering together the two ends of a bracelet.

  ‘No, Jack,’ she called to another boy as she stood over David. ‘You can’t leave it like that. What about the person who’s going to use that peg after you?’

  She was busy concentrating on David, a serious boy for whom she had rather a soft spot, when she became aware that Mr Carson had come into the room and was ambling up and down picking up objects in what seemed an arbitrary way and putting them down again. She felt immediately self-conscious and torn between wanting him to go away and curiosity about why he was there.

  ‘All right, David, I think that will do,’ she said. ‘You can leave it in the pickle – I’ll see to it before I go. You get cleared up now.’

  She turned, as if she had only just noticed their visitor.

  ‘Ah, hello, Mr Carson?’ She spoke very formally, though her heart had speeded up and she scarcely knew why.

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Tallis.’ He glanced at David, now the last one in the room, who was stolidly tidying the tools. ‘I just wanted a quick word.’

  They stood awkwardly for a moment as David finally took himself off.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Mr Carson said, as if to fill the time.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Daisy said demurely. She realized then that she was still wearing her overall and took it off. Beneath she had on a wool frock in cornflower blue with a darker blue cardigan over it. After hanging up the overall, she patted her hair and turned to see Mr Carson’s eyes fixed on her and a look in his eyes which made her feel strangely prickly all over, and as if she was aware of every line of her body.

  ‘I’m full of admiration for your work,’ he said, as if he must say something. ‘I have seldom seen such excellence in one so young.’

  ‘But you haven’t seen any of my work for a long time,’ she laughed, gratified, but knowing he was just flattering her. ‘It’s all at home. You’ll have to come and visit us if you want to see. I’m sure Pa would be happy if you called round.’

  To her surprise he looked uncertain and glanced away from her a moment, along the room, with its windows down one side.

  ‘I’m not so sure about that.’ He laughed suddenly and looked back at her, his dark eyes filled with such merriment that it warmed her and made her like him even more. It felt almost as if they were in some conspiracy together. ‘I’m not sure your pa really approves of me. But I tell you what – how about I walk you home and say hello to the old so-and-so?’

  They walked the streets side by side in the chilly wind. Mr Carson, in his dashing black hat with a wide brim and sweeping cloak, talked about his students and made jokes, turning to look down at her when he laughed. He had a loud, full-hearted blare of a laugh which made her join in with him. And Daisy, in her sea-green coat and brown hat with a brim and a strip of peacock-green silk she had twisted round as a band, felt rather something, walking along with this dramatic, artistic-looking figure who somehow also always made her feel special and cheerful.

>   When they reached Chain Street, Eb Watts was outside his front door at number twenty-six. He looked Mr Carson’s eccentric attire up and down and disappeared inside. Eb Watts didn’t hold with these Arts and Crafts types – he was a businessman and that was that.

  ‘So, are you coming in to say hello?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Not today. I must get myself home.’ Mr Carson removed his hat, gave a sweeping bow and made a face of mock dread. ‘Or I shall be in trouble.’

  Daisy laughed and said goodbye, still smiling as she went indoors. She wondered exactly what Mrs Carson was like because he always painted her as an ogre. But she seemed a rather free lady and an artist, especially as the two of them had no children. Daisy liked this idea, of being free and not having children. She very much hoped that one day she might meet the artistic Mrs Victoria Carson.

  Since that day, Mr Carson had appeared more and more often, to exchange a word and offer to walk her home. She had been flattered, especially when he kept saying how good her work was, how talented she was – the exceptional child of gifted parents.

  She couldn’t help being fascinated by this man. He was so noticeable to look at, handsome and dashing, with a male power that seemed to have fastened on her. Yet in her innocence she thought of it in the way of two kindred spirits meeting. He understood her, her work, her artistic soul.

  But yesterday . . . She lay on her bed, feeling her heart’s forceful rhythm as she remembered. Yesterday something had changed. She had been in the room with the last few students. The slow boy, David, had not been there, the last handful of students hurried away and the workroom stilled. And there he was, standing in the shadow of the doorway as she had somehow known he would be.