by Tobias Hill
‘I say we keep it.’
June, 1837. The newspapers talked of cholera. The residents of the slum courts reported beggars whose skins had grown thickened, like the scales of fish, On the night of the nineteenth King William the Fourth died, propped upright in a leather chair to help him breathe as his heart stopped. And at nineteen years old, Victoria Guelph was declared Queen of England. The contract for her coronation was given to the most respectable of jewellers, the old king’s Crown Goldsmiths, Rundell and Bridge’s of 32 Ludgate Hill.
Rundell and Bridge’s. Vinegar and Oil. It wasn’t the most fashionable of choices: that would have been Garrard’s, a name that was never spoken in the dull gilt showrooms uphill from the King Lud. It wasn’t the choice that the young Queen might have made herself, given the chance. It was a commission made by old men – Keepers and Chancellors – and given to old men – Edmund Rundell and John Gawler Bridge, still known in the trade as the Young Vinegar and the Young Oil. Their company had been Goldsmiths to the Kings of England for decades before the Queen was even born.
Black crape hung in the curved glass shop window. It cut off the showrooms from the street where Salman had once stood, watching. Mr Rundell liked it like that. After the last of the workers had gone – Mr Bridge to his wife and child, George Fox to the King Lud and his bottle – Edmund sat alone in the unlit shop. The dark allowed him space to think. He thought of the company and how long it could take to die.
The jewel displays were imperceptible around him. It didn’t matter. Edmund knew their positions off by heart along with the price of every Jew’s spoon and lady’s watch that they contained. He thought: This is the twelfth night of Victorian England. He tasted the new word in his mouth. It clicked against his dry palate.
He was seventy-seven years old and still handsome, with the hair on his head dyed black and oiled blacker. Even the whores on Haymarket said he was a pleasure to do business with. As far as Edmund was concerned there was enough life left in him for the lot of them. In the firm they still called him the Young Vinegar behind his back, and he liked that too. He leant forward in the pitch dark, the bones of his elbows digging into the ligaments of his thighs.
He thought of Rundell’s. He knew it like the back of his hand. Better, even. Outside the company his life had always felt thin and unnecessary, and he had never regretted that. He remembered George Fox, years ago at the Dean Street workshops. Talking them up to the new apprentices.
‘Now, mark you! This here is what you’ve sold yourselves into. This is Rundell and Bridge’s, the object of envy to all the Trade and the wonder of almost the whole world.’
And it had been true. Even ten years ago there had been truth in it. There had been Rundell agents on three continents when Edmund joined the business of stones. Usher in Smyrna, Sidney in Constantinople, men whom Edmund directed and ordered and never met. Powers at his fingertips. They had delivered company jewellery to Catherine the Great and the Pasha of Egypt, and in London Mr Bridge the Elder had once served the American ambassador and Lord Nelson. For years, they had sent annual shipments of jewels via Manila to the ruler of the Celestial Empire. But there were no more orders now, and no more jewels to send.
The wonder of the world. Now it was a lie, and not even a crown commission could make it less of one. It was not demand which made a great jeweller’s, but what one could supply. But there had been wonders. The company founders had once sold the Pigot Diamond. Edmund remembered holding it in his hand. Its impossible worth. A hundred and eighty-seven carats of pure watered stone, a perfect oval long and broad as the top of his thumb, with no discolouring except for one minute red foul near the girdle. Like the spot of blood in a good fresh egg. He’d thought it would be the first of many great stones. Three decades older, he knew he would never touch anything as beautiful again.
He was a jeweller by profession. Salesmanship he left to Mr Bridge. Each had learned his trade from his uncle before him, and as the older men had died each nephew had stepped into his shoes as smoothly as a shadow. They were as good as the founders, Edmund thought. Better. The decline of Rundell’s was nothing to do with them. It was greed which had done it, the inability to let things go. The possessiveness of anyone who worked with stones for too long.
A horse went by outside, shoes slipping heavily on the damp cobbles. Edmund sat quite still, listening. He thought of his uncle, Philip Rundell. Old Vinegar. Out on the hunt with the lords and ladies, or down at heel at the diamond table. He had been a hard man, certainly, even violent, but hardness was admirable in business. Edmund had always thought it quite admirable. The old man had lived to eighty-one. Edmund could live longer. He felt it.
‘What are you after, boy? A partnership?’
That was the first thing Edmund could recall of his uncle. The voice, thick and crass as grit on a wheel. It was the first time he had come up from Bath to London. Looking for work, certainly. He had shaken his head. The smell of too much powder and pomatum clinging to his coat and hair.
‘No, sir. An apprenticeship would be more than I’d hoped for.’
‘Well then.’ And the old man had leant towards him. One Vinegar to another. ‘That’s as well. But we want no fops or gentlemen here. Eh? What we want is plain jog-trot men of business.’ The stink of his breath. ‘What are you, boy?’
*
He was a man of business. Philip’s shadow, that’s what he was. Not that he had ever liked the old man, only that he admired him. Edmund even admired what others had criticised. There had been his uncle’s sideline as a banker for whores, although he’d always paid them near enough fair interest. And there had been the Old Vinegar’s purchase of diamonds from French refugees in the Napoleonic Wars. Stones bought for nothing in a glutted market. Diamonds picked up from families with no homes or food, only cold stones. But then buying low to sell high was never a crime. If there were skeletons in Philip’s cupboards then the company had been stronger for them.
It was the French diamonds which had made the company’s fortune. The ones Philip had used in jewellery had made Rundell’s famous, but the last of those stones had been gone a long time. The founders had taken them with them. The Old Oil had left rich, but Philip Rundell had done better than that. It was a decade since he had died, willing away one and a quarter million pounds from the company. Sucking it dry.
He looked less like his uncle every year. For a while they had been similar as siblings, Edmund and Philip. Their faces seamed and lined and hooked. Features clean as forms etched with acid. But when Philip had been old his eyes had been younger than his face. Edmund knew his own were not. Failure had done that. For Rundell’s, decline had been a slow business. Alone in the dark room, Edmund wished it was done with. The firm wound down and bankrupted for good.
He had been young when he became a partner. Forty-four, in his prime, and the company with him. Now he could smell its rot in the night air. Philip’s business. Edmund cleaned his tongue, rasping it against his teeth. The showroom and workshops lay motionless around him. On the shopman’s desk beside him, the Commission lay waiting to be executed. Edmund didn’t need to read it again.
He wished it was done with. Edmund sat in the dark and began to cough, a dry sound in the airless room. He knew it like the back of his hand. Better – much better. A jeweller’s without jewels, lodged in the mausoleum shadow of St Paul’s. He thought of stones, like Salman. Like Katharine, he closed his eyes and pictured diamonds.
‘Mister Rundell.’
He woke instantly and kept his eyes shut, listening. It was something he did automatically, like the deafness he feigned in order to hear who spoke what of him behind his back. From outside came the sound of late-morning traffic. Nearer, the small talk of shopmen and apprentices. They kept their chat down. Edmund noted that.
It was too late to be sleeping. The shop should have been open hours ago. They are waiting for me, Edmund thought. I am an old man, dozing in his chair. He went on listening, his own informer, until the voice call
ed for him again. ‘Mister Rundell?’
It was closer than he would have liked. Smooth and insistent. Edmund had put up with it for seven years.
‘Mister Bridge.’ He opened his eyes, mouth curving upwards. A stranger would have thought he was smiling. John Gawler Bridge stepped back.
‘My apologies, I had no intention of – you were sleeping, sir?’
‘Sleeping? What did it look like I was doing?’
‘As you say …’
Edmund watched him hesitate. John Bridge with his brown velvet coat and bloodhound eyes. He smelt of oil, Edmund thought. Of old oil and anxiety. Too many years of servility had made him rancid.
The room was unnaturally dark. Edmund pulled himself upright, sockets clicking, and fingered back the funeral drapes. Making the salesman wait, as he should. Uphill, the tall houses of Ludgate were overshadowed by the bulk of St Paul’s. Its walls were stained with long stripes of grime, its cupola rising into the city’s yellow upper air. The streets below were thick with people. A coalman’s horse had fallen outside St Martin’s-within-Ludgate, tipping anthracite into the gutter. A crowd fought over the spillage, as if the accident had made it common property.
Edmund leaned against the curved glass frontice. ‘Look at them.’
‘Which, sir?’
‘The crowd. The common crowd.’ He whispered the hard consonants. Bridge raised his eyebrows, reflected in the glass.
‘All customers.’
‘Customers? They couldn’t afford a Jew’s spoon from us. They are nothing but the city, and the city is a lie, Mister Bridge. It tries to tell us that there is a commonality between us. That we are all the same at heart. The mediocre and mundane take comfort from it. I do not.’ He stepped back. ‘You look as if you mean to shit yourself, Mister Bridge.’
‘Ah. There was something I wished to discuss with you, sir, if I may.’
‘Out with it.’
‘I’ve been considering our Commission, sir.’
Edmund nodded. ‘You’ve costed the order. And?’
‘And we cannot do it. We lack the funds and the stock, were the finest stones available. Our competitors possess better supplies. They are quicker on their feet–’
‘Aye. Then we get payment in advance. For better or worse the order is ours. No one else’s. I won’t see it go to some jumped-up West End pimp.’
‘Quite. However, I have spoken to the Chancellor and to Mister Swifte, the Keeper of the Regalia. There will be no advance. In fact,’ Bridge glanced towards the backroom door, ‘this is more delicate – Her Majesty may see fit to honour us with the empty frames of several older state crowns.’
‘As payment? How many?’
“Three. As part payment. Naturally, we would be expected to keep those frames intact. Not to sell them, for example, to buy new stones.’
‘Then we borrow.’ Edmund went back to the chair and sat. Mouth shut against the pain. When he looked up, Bridge had the order in his hand.
‘You have read this?’
He scowled. ‘Of course I’ve read it.’
‘A hundred and seven new items to be made. Fifty-six additional refurbishments. The Imperial State Crown to be reworked. An offering sword. A ruby ring. A twelve-ounce wedge of gold. An ebony stick with gold head and ferrules. Twenty gold staves, five coronets, five cushions, seventeen badges–’
‘I said we’ll borrow.’
‘Twelve Morocco cases, eight collars, twelve new Sovereigns, one silver basin, the resetting of the whole of the Diamonds and precious stones of the old Crown into the New–’
‘Enough!’ He stood. Quick as he’d ever been. Leant in towards his partner. The workroom door opened before he could speak. A shopman with his hair unpowdered walked in, looked up, backed out again. Edmund shouted before the door closed. ‘Mister Bennett!’
‘Sir?’ The shopman came back. He looked young, and lax. Edmund tried to remember if he was a relative. They were everywhere in the company now, symptoms of the firm’s demise: in-laws of nephews, inbred cousins, bastards of in-laws twice removed. All of them lax. Edmund talked to family as he did to anyone else. The shopman watched the door as if it might catch him, like a mousetrap.
‘Get those drapes down and open up. It’s high time we were doing some business.’ He started towards the back door. ‘And Mister Bridge? We will fill this order. Cost it again. Where is Mister Fox?’
He shouted it as he stepped from the shop into the workrooms. Down from the face, into the guts. The veins stood out on his neck. To his right were the company offices. Straight ahead, down the steps, the workshops were stripped-down basements. There was nothing comfortable in them, no softness. Only things which could scour stone, he thought. Things which could melt metal. The workshops made him feel better. The shouting too.
‘Fox!’
‘Here, Mister Rundell.’ George Fox, shopman and smith, came up beside him. ‘Just getting cleaned up for you. Are you well this morning, sir?’
‘My wellness or not is my own business, Fox. You mind my wealth and leave the rest to me.’
‘Yes, sir.’ When Fox smiled Edmund could smell wine on his breath. He is starting on it early today, he thought. And then: I could do with a drop myself.
The shop around them was lit with the white heat of crucibles. To one side, a second hall and forge stood boarded up. These days, most jobs were done at 53 Dean Street. The tables here were of more sentimental value than anything. Philip had always managed the jewels himself, even after everything else was beyond him. Especially the diamonds. Edmund could understand that. He walked on down the aisle. ‘How many are working here today?’
‘Myself and young Bennett, that’s William, and three of the apprentices. Learning all sides of the trade, they are. It’s the cistern, sir.’
Edmund stopped by the lapidaries’ wheels. George Fox beside him, already pulling papers from his apron pocket. ‘Cistern?’
‘The Duke of York’s. I’ve the order here, let me just… The Duke of York’s Cistern. To be 18 and a half inches diameter. To use no more than 810 ounces of burnished silver. Figures and relief in gold matt. The neck and lip enwreathed with vines etcetera. Scenes of Romans etcetera, and two tri. Tri?’
Tritons.’
‘Tritons peering in. That wasn’t my idea. Mister Bigge’s idea, they are. Four more Tritons to support the cistern base. They’re on the design here. Men with scales, they seem to be. That’s what we want, is it?’
Edmund began to walk again. ‘We begin the Royal Commission soon, George. The coronation is to be set back a year. The Whigs will spare no cash and time to crown their young monarch. It will be a great event, so they say. Shall we be ready, do you think?’
‘No one else is readier.’
‘No one else has the Commission.’ They reached the end of the workshop. Edmund looked back at its wheels and benches. A place built for nothing but jewels. He felt at home here. He tried to recall if he had ever loved anything else as much. ‘Any other news?’
Fox crumpled the papers back where they came from. ‘Not to speak of. The King is dead, but I expect you know that by now. There was two Jewish gentlemen here this morning about selling jewels. They came to the showroom door. I told them to come back at closing time.’
‘Not to the showrooms.’
‘No. I explained that to them clear enough. They’ll be by the Creed Lane door at seven or not long after. Will you see to them yourself?’
‘Aye.’
‘Mister Rundell?’
He was already walking back, up past the tables and wheels. He hadn’t even realised he was doing it. My body is wandering, he thought. But not my mind. ‘What is it?’
‘I’ll see them with you, if I may.’ It was less a question than a statement of fact. Edmund turned away from it before he answered. His mouth curved upwards. A stranger might have thought he was smiling.
‘You think I can’t manage them myself?’
‘I think you can jew any pair of Jew dealers in
London.’
‘Good, George!’
Eighty-one, he thought. I can do better. As he walked back to the offices he muttered the words to himself, like a mnemonic or a penance.
Seven o’clock. Two Jews. The Creed Lane door.
They were an hour early by Daniel’s watch, and the watch itself had always run fast, ever since Salman had bartered it from the marshlanders, stripped and reassembled it like the mechanism of a gun, and given it to his brother because they had become traders together, because he had wanted to give him something. Anything would have done. Now they sat on the green ground beside St Paul’s, waiting until the end of the day.
He opened the watch. Wound it, turned it back. On its face the litany of English words, divided by numerals.
Rundell & Bridge’s
He closed the lid. Salman shifted beside him. ‘Time?’
‘Almost.’
‘By tonight we shall be rich. Tomorrow we start afresh. Fresher than afresh. Gold enough to ship Rachel here, house and all.’
The late sun was hot on Daniel’s face. He listened to his brother, nervous. Talking of nothing, as if scared of the alternatives of quiet.
‘Lives of pleasure. Think of that.’
‘Is that what you wish for?’
‘Pleasure? Aye. And money. Through commerce money becomes everything.’ His voice rose a little. ‘Your wishes are no purer.’
‘No.’ A mailcoach went by towards Ryder’s the apothecary. The horses blinkered, three chestnuts and one gold bay. Daniel tried to imagine his wishes. Green turbans, he thought. It felt like years since he had wished for anything physical. If anything, he felt the opposite. He wished to be without goods, stock, cargo. Without the ballast weights of stones and gold and the smell of ink that clung to him, always, making him something he was not. Without Hardwick Place. Too many wishes, he thought. He shook his head, vaguely alarmed, as if he had found a bill he had forgotten to pay. ‘No. You always meant to change things.’
Salman didn’t reply. Daniel turned again and saw that his brother’s eyes were closed, the light whitening the flat blades of his cheeks. He stirred. ‘But perhaps I can’t. All the miles I have brought us. All the work, and nothing has changed. We are no richer, no greater. I thought we would be great.’
