The Silk Merchant's Convenient Wife

by Elisabeth Hobbes

  ‘You appear to already be in possession of a job. You’re a messenger boy,’ Mr Langdon said. He turned to go, dismissing Jonathan.

  ‘I want a better one.’ Jonathan called. ‘I’m better than the job I have. I want a job here.’

  His voice took him by surprise. Where had this boldness come from? It caught Mr Langdon’s attention, however, because he turned back.

  ‘You look familiar. Have I seen you before?’ Mr Langdon asked.

  Jonathan bowed his head. Now was the time to be humble and polite; something he should have done from the start. ‘No. I only moved here from near Durham recently.’

  Mr Langdon regarded him with proper interest for the first time, peering closer at Jonathan.

  ‘Do I rent a house to your mother, boy? On Back Paradise Street?’

  Jonathan had never wondered who his landlord was. Mrs Harcourt had only spoken of ‘an acquaintance’.

  ‘I do live there. My name is Jonathan Harcourt.’

  Mr Langdon bit his knuckle. Jonathan tensed, holding his breath while Mr Langdon scrutinised him further.

  ‘You should have come to me first rather than wasting shoe leather running around the streets with errands. Yes, I can find you work.’

  ‘Not in the mill, if you please,’ Jonathan said. ‘Not on the machines. Here. In your office. I can read and write. In Latin, too. I’m good with numbers.’ He decided not to mention his Greek, which he still laboriously practised in his journal each Sunday night.

  Mr Langdon seemed to find this amusing.

  ‘You’ll start in the mill, not the offices,’ he said firmly. ‘Two years there. Once I’ve seen what you can offer me, we’ll discuss what I can offer you.’

  ‘One year,’ Jonathan answered.

  Mr Langdon laughed. ‘Eighteen months. And you’ll work in every area, learning what we do here.’

  Jonathan agreed readily. He held out a hand to Mr Langdon, who laughed once again and shook it. ‘I predict you have an interesting future ahead of you, young Master Harcourt. Do give my regards to your mother when you go home tonight.’

  And that was the start of what would become a long-lasting friendship.

  * * *

  Jonathan worked in the mill for the first ten of his eighteen months, moving from floor to floor, learning how to thread the silks for the Jacquard cards, plan patterns and operate the looms. After that, Mr Langdon promoted him to tallying the orders and the bales of silk and then to ordering the silks themselves. By the time three years had passed, Jonathan was overseeing the spinning floor.

  At the end of another year he was working in Mr Langdon’s office as Mr Langdon’s under-clerk, dealing with clients and working on designs for the damask cloths. By the time Jonathan was nineteen he was working as a full clerk, responsible for choosing the apprentices from the workhouse.

  In Edward Langdon Jonathan found a friend and companion who nurtured his love of learning and eventually opened his own house and library to the eager boy.

  When Mrs Harcourt grew sick and succumbed to a tumour, Jonathan discovered that she had been saving his wages for years, somehow working miracles with what he gave her to provide food and clothing. There were also assorted pieces of jewellery that, once valued, meant the grieving young man was heir to a considerable amount of money.

  * * *

  On the afternoon of Jonathan’s twenty-fourth birthday Edward Langdon invited his protégé into the office for a drink.

  ‘I have a proposal,’ Jonathan said. ‘I want to invest in the mill. Would you consider selling me some shares?’

  ‘I’m more than happy for you to invest,’ Edward said, pouring two glasses of whisky from the crystal decanter he kept in his office. ‘But I have another proposal. Join me as a partner.’

  ‘You want me to be your partner?’ Jonathan asked incredulously,.

  ‘Junior partner, Jonathan. I’ll still have the major share.’ Edward held the glass to his nose and inhaled with a long, satisfactory sniff. ‘Why not? You’ve worked for me and with me and proven your worth to me tenfold over the past decade.’

  Jonathan’s throat tightened. Whatever worth he had been to Edward, the older man had been a mentor, friend, brother and father to Jonathan.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, finding his voice choking. ‘I accept.’

  ‘In that case, let’s drink a toast.’ Edward raised his glass.

  ‘To Langdon and Harcourt.’

  Chapter One

  1850

  Aurelia Upford was cleaning the windows of the first floor when the man strode up the gravel driveway to the front door. She paused and peered through the pane she had just cleaned.

  Since the family had returned two weeks previously there had been no visitors to the house. Hardly surprising given that Sir Robert Upford and his family had been absent for five years, but just as well given the accumulated grime of five years’ neglect that would take a dozen servants to clear. She put her cloth down and wiped her hands on the white apron she had borrowed from the scullery, glad to have an excuse to pause for a little while. The sun was setting behind the man. From the purposeful way he walked she imagined him to be relatively young. It was that sense of purpose that made her stomach coil with anxiety, but as he grew closer to the house he slowed and began staring intently to his left.

  Aurelia smiled. Her sister, Cassandra, was cropping rose bushes in the overgrown knot garden to the left of the doorway. Of course she was, thought Aurelia with a shade of exasperation. Cassandra would not think to help her sisters or mother or the few servants they could afford by donning a cap and apron and cleaning the house. She would value amusing herself in the garden as an equally important form of work, despite the fact that it was late August and the garden could wait until spring.

  Cassandra was clearly the reason the man had stopped walking, but it gave Aurelia the perfect opportunity to examine him a little closer. He wore a light wool overcoat, open to reveal a well-fitting double-breasted frock coat, accompanied by a fawn-coloured top hat. His face was cast into silhouette by the sun, but the long locks that peeked from beneath the brim and settled around his collar were cast into flames around his head, giving the impression he was on fire or wearing a halo as well as a hat.

  He was tall and broad shouldered and held himself well. Aurelia assumed he must have come to see her father, but he looked unlike any of the usual creditors who came calling and threatening Sir Robert to pay the gambling debts that had afflicted the family for so long. This thought pulled her from her reverie as anger twisted her stomach. She watched the visitor shake his head and move on past Cassandra, who had either not noticed or more likely pretended not to notice. He knocked on the door and Aurelia counted to twelve in her head before it was answered. She resumed cleaning the windows, wishing they could afford at least one more maid or boy to help in the task. She scrunched the cloth and began scrubbing at the cobwebs, anger lending her vigour.

  Not more than five minutes passed before Aurelia’s younger sister, Theodora, bounded up the stairs out of breath. Aurelia looked at her younger sister affectionately. Though seventeen, Theodora still conducted herself like a twelve-year-old at times, rushing around the house and stomping as she walked as if she were a boy.

  Aurelia bit her lip. Dora didn’t know about Father’s debts and Aurelia hoped she never would.

  ‘Do you know where Father is?’ Dora asked.

  ‘Probably out walking the grounds with the dogs, trying to catch rabbits,’ Aurelia said with a shrug. ‘Send the page boy to find him.’

  Dora wrung her hands together. ‘He went already without finding anyone else. Now there is a man sitting in Mother’s morning room alone, waiting for someone to attend to him. Can you believe the silly boy let him in, then wandered off! What he’ll think of us I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t you go speak to him?’

 
‘On my own!’ Dora looked horrified. ‘Mother would be furious.’

  Aurelia frowned. Sending a seventeen-year-old into a room with a strange man would be indecent, but so was leaving a guest alone. The family had returned to the Cheshire house after five years’ absence living in Oxfordshire, and creating a bad impression on local society was the last thing Sir Robert needed, especially after the scandal Aurelia had narrowly avoided. She would have to go keep the visitor company herself until Mother arrived.

  ‘Who is this man anyway?’

  ‘I heard him say he’s from the mill. Langdon and Harcourt’s,’ Dora said. ‘I don’t know who he is, though. Who do you think he might be?’

  Aurelia smiled. ‘I imagine that as he has come to the front door, not the tradesman’s entrance, he might be Mr Harcourt or Mr Langdon, wouldn’t you say?’

  Dora grinned. ‘That’s why you’re the clever one! I suppose he must be. Anyway, please come quickly. I’m going to tell Mother now.’ She strode along the corridor and hammered on her mother’s bedroom door. Aurelia watched with affection. Dora was just as clever as she was herself. She picked up her bucket and cloth and walked downstairs to take them to the scullery, wondering what business a mill owner could have with a baronet. Leaving them on the landing would most likely result in Dora knocking them over. She would have to risk impropriety and go speak to the visitor herself.

  As she was about to go into the scullery, a voice called her.

  ‘Miss! No one has taken my coat!’

  The man was not secreted in the parlour any longer, but standing in the entrance hall, looking at her, his broad shoulders tensed. His full lips were pressed into a tight line and he seemed irritated at being left waiting. He was holding out his overcoat and hat towards her. Aurelia was about to give him a sharp answer for speaking to her so rudely until she remembered she was carrying a bucket of water and wearing an apron, with strands of hair coming down and floating around her cheeks. Mistaking her for a kitchen maid was understandable.

  Wanting to spare him any further embarrassment, Aurelia put down her bucket and held her hands out. His lips curved into a smile, softening his air of disapproval. It always took Aurelia by surprise how soft men’s lips could be. She felt hers prickle and had to stop herself reaching up to touch them. As he laid the coat and hat in her waiting arms she caught a brief scent of cologne of some sort. It was warm and sweet, but with a lingering woodiness. Very masculine.

  Immediately Aurelia spiralled back four months to her last, happy meeting with Arthur before everything had gone wrong. He had smelled different, of tobacco and brandy and sandalwood, but there had been the same hint of saltiness and depth that she decided must be the male body itself.

  Not now, she commanded herself, pushing the memory down to the bottom of her heart where it belonged. She could not think of the man she had almost married without tears of anger and humiliation threatening to spring to her eyes. It had taken the move back to Cheshire to help her crawl out of the pit of despair, but the initial pain had lessened. Now Aurelia allowed herself one indulgence a day in the form of a walk by the river where she could weep or rant at her misfortune as much as she liked. Revealing any emotion in front of a stranger would be unthinkable.

  She hung the coat and hat on the stand beside the front door very close to the parlour door that the man had just come out of. When she turned back around the visitor’s eyes were on her. He frowned, stepping forward with his hand raised as if he intended to touch her.

  ‘Sir!’ she said in a shocked voice. From his polite manner she would not have put him as the type of man who would attempt to fumble with a servant in the absence of her mistress. She stepped back out of reach and he dropped his hand abruptly, brows shooting upwards in horror.

  ‘I wasn’t...! I mean to say... Are you unwell? Should I call someone?’

  Aurelia put her hands to her cheeks. She was obviously not as in command of herself as she had believed if he thought her to be ill. She had passed a grave judgement on him with no foundation. His concern for a stranger—and a parlourmaid at that—touched her more than she would have thought. She shook her head.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  They stared at each other as if they were opponents in a game of chess, each waiting for the other to move first. He was younger than she thought a mill owner should be. In Aurelia’s mind all businessmen should be serious old men with paunches and whiskers. They shouldn’t be clean shaven and attractive with startlingly blue eyes. They shouldn’t have an easy smile like the one that was starting to return to this man’s face now he had assured himself she was not about to faint or fit.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t need help?’ he asked. His voice was quite deep, but had a trace of an odd accent about it that gave it a pleasant lilt. Or maybe it was the words of concern themselves that made it appealing.

  ‘No, thank you. Sir Robert or Lady Upford will be with you as soon as possible,’ Aurelia said.

  Aurelia lifted her bucket and made her way to the scullery, feeling only a little remorse that the visitor would believe Sir Robert would employ a servant rude enough to forget a sir at the end of a sentence.

  She checked whether anyone had asked Mrs Peters, the housekeeper, to prepare afternoon tea. Of course no one had. Hiding her frustration at her lackadaisical family, Aurelia decided against joining the visitor and went to her bedroom. After the case of mistaken identity she could hardly now appear as Sir Robert’s daughter without causing both of them embarrassment. Besides, if Cassandra could choose to amuse herself with flowers and gardens, then Aurelia saw no reason why she couldn’t spend some time pleasing herself, too.

  She knelt beside the bed and reached underneath until her fingers settled on the handle of a case. She pulled it out, sat in her favourite reading chair by the window and opened it.

  What today? she asked herself she gazed at the books inside. Her guilty secret. Her hand settled on Ovid’s Medicamina Faciei Femineae and she pulled that out, taking her Latin dictionary with it. Mother would be furious if she realised Aurelia had still kept her Latin books. If she knew what some of the subject matter was, she would have a genuine fit of the vapours.

  She had read three pages, struggling over the translation and wondering whether grinding hart’s horn into honey would improve her complexion enough to justify the inconvenience to the buck, when Dora burst through the door without even knocking.

  ‘Mother says you need to come downstairs straight away!’

  Aurelia shut the book with an audible snap and slipped it under the damask cushion that she was resting against. Dora knew about her reading and Aurelia was reasonably sure her sister would not betray her to their parents, but her instinct was always to hide the fact that she continued to study even long after her parents had told her such subjects were not suitable for a young lady.

  ‘Mother is fretting. Father hasn’t returned yet and she is now having to entertain Mr Harcourt—that’s his name, by the way, you guessed right—by herself. She wants us to join her.’

  Aurelia sighed gently. Her mother was an excellent hostess—a great part of the reason Sir Robert had married her, Aurelia suspected—and she had no need to have any company, being adept at talking at length to whomever she happened to sit opposite. This was entirely about taking the opportunity to parade her three daughters to a gentleman visitor.

  ‘I’ll come down shortly,’ she said. ‘I need to rearrange my hair.’

  Dora left and Aurelia ran a comb over her dark locks, smoothing them back under her broad ribbon. She washed her face in the basin and as an afterthought dabbed a drop of eau de cologne behind each ear, taking her time in the hope that her father would have returned and taken the visitor to his study.

  Sadly, this was not the case. By the time she got downstairs she collided with her mother in the parlour doorway before she could even enter.

  ‘There you ar
e,’ Lady Upford hissed. ‘We’ve been waiting for you and the tea hasn’t arrived. That silly girl is taking her time about bringing the tray, Aurelia, would you see to it please.’

  ‘Let me go see where Sally is,’ she said.

  Lady Upford tugged her sleeve and lowered her voice. ‘When you do join us, Aurelia, please be mindful of what topics you choose to raise. I don’t want Mr Harcourt to think I raised a bluestocking or liberal!’

  Aurelia nodded. Over her mother’s shoulder she could see Mr Harcourt was standing by the fireplace conversing with Cassandra, who was tossing her hair until her ringlets bobbed enticingly. He was giving her a charming smile and paying her all the attention in the room. Of course he would. Every man fell into raptures over Aurelia’s older sister and they made a fine pair together. With her dainty features, warm brown eyes and chestnut locks that curled at the mere sight of a hot iron, Cassandra was stunningly beautiful. Mr Harcourt was tall and broad shouldered, though he did not appear overly muscular in the way a man who laboured physically would be. His hair was a sandy brown, cut long at the sides, with a wave across the forehead that covered the tips of his ears. He was clean-shaven with neatly trimmed sideburns. His blue eyes sparkled as he listened to Cassandra.

  Altogether he was a good-looking man. Aurelia’s skin prickled and she noticed the unexpected sensation with fascination. Her heart had been so firmly broken that she had determined to harden it before she let it heal and become vulnerable again. She was done with good-looking men who thought they could charm a woman with an easy smile, so to feel her body rebelling against what her mind had decreed was odd.

  ‘I won’t say anything,’ she promised. She left the room quickly, hearing her mother begin to praise Cassandra’s paintings as she left. Sally was halfway from the kitchen carrying a tray when Aurelia intercepted her.

  ‘Let me help,’ she said kindly. The young girl bobbed an anxious curtsy, almost dropping the teacups as she did so.