Girl of Shadows (6 page)

Gellar swept across the room and presented his bottle. ‘Not much. Just off the ship but I hear it was a good year.’

Adam glanced at the label. ‘Very nice. Thank you, Jared.’

Esther arrived then, pausing in the doorway so the two men would have ample opportunity to notice her.

She wore an extremely expensive gown in cream muslin with a full skirt, billowing sleeves, exquisite green and maroon floral embroidery at hem and elbow, elaborate shirring across the bodice, and a vandyke collar in satin silk that dipped to a deep point below her tiny waist. She’d pinned up her luxuriant blonde hair with an assortment of jewelled clips and looked, Sarah had to admit, not too bad.

‘Mrs Green, may I say you are utterly charming!’ Gellar said, and presented her with his bouquet of flowers. ‘Please, do accept these unworthy blooms as a small token of my esteem.’

‘Mr Gellar, how lovely! Thank you!’ Esther simpered, and gave Sarah the impatient hand-flicking gesture that meant she was to go away and get on with whatever she was supposed to be doing.

So Sarah went out to the kitchen to prepare to serve the first course. When she heard the silver hand bell ring in the dining room, she carried in the tureen containing Esther’s mock turtle soup. After that came the chicken pie, then the vol-au-vent of pears, then the curried beef.

It was during the game course, as Sarah was serving the stuffed roasted goose breasts, that it all started to unravel.

Adam, on his seventh glass of wine and peering intently at the epergne, said, ‘Esther, why is there a rosemary bush on the table?’

Esther smiled tightly. ‘I’m not sure there is, dear.’

‘Yes. There is. I’m looking at it.’ Adam pointed with his fork. ‘See?’

‘Oh, in the epergne?’ Esther said, as though she hadn’t realised what he’d meant. ‘I often use rosemary in floral arrangements. You know that.’

‘But there’s almost an entire bush jammed in there,’ Adam insisted.

Esther’s laugh was brittle. ‘Hardly, dear. A few sprigs, perhaps.’

‘A few sprigs?’ Adam echoed. ‘Is there any left in the garden?’

Sarah stifled a smirk and placed Esther’s roasted goose breast on her plate: this could be entertaining, especially as tonight Adam had imbibed far more alcohol than was usual for him.

‘I think it looks absolutely charming,’ Gellar said. ‘Very festive.’

Smarmy bugger, Sarah thought.

Adam rather theatrically struck the back of the hand holding his fork against his forehead, causing a piece of curried beef caught on a tine to fly off over his shoulder. ‘God, I’ve just realised. This is to do with the ghost business, isn’t it?’ He reached clumsily across the table and took Esther’s hand in his free one. ‘Darling, there’s nothing to worry about, really there isn’t.’

Esther snatched her hand away, colour shooting up her neck and face, and fixed him with a glare. ‘Adam, not now!’

‘Why not? Jared’s a good friend.’ Adam turned to Gellar and said a fraction sharply, ‘Aren’t you, Jared, old fellow?’

‘Of course! At least, I’ve always hoped so,’ Gellar boomed. He, too, had been knocking back the wine and his nose had gone quite red.

As Sarah bent to serve his goose, she felt for several terrifying seconds what she thought was an enormous spider crawling up her bare leg. She squeaked and jerked away from the table, but when Gellar smirked up at her she realised it had been his hand on the back of her knee. Gritting her teeth behind her smile, she set the food on his plate, managing rather satisfyingly to drip blobs of dark gravy on the shoulder of his coat.

‘Adam, I’d rather we didn’t discuss the matter this evening,’ Esther said extremely frostily.

But Adam had apparently gone selectively deaf. ‘You see, Jared,’ he explained, leaning back in his chair so Sarah could get at his plate, ‘Esther believes our home is at risk of intrusion from a ghostly presence.’

Sarah stole a quick glance at his face. What had Esther been saying to him? Whatever it was, from his casual tone it didn’t sound as though he’d taken it too seriously.

‘Really?’ Gellar looked from Adam to Esther and back again. ‘That
is
alarming! How terrifying!’

‘It is, especially for Esther,’ Adam agreed. He waved his hand around vaguely. ‘Hence the rosemary and the amulets and the mezuzah all over the place. They ward off evil, you know. Esther has a very strong belief in the spirit world.’

‘As I do myself,’ Gellar said unexpectedly. ‘In England I was once forced to sell a house I owned due to the fact it was haunted.’

‘Is that right?’ Adam reached for more wine.

‘Yes, and it took months because everyone local knew. I ended up having to sell to someone from Cornwall.’

Esther suddenly burst out in a shrill voice, ‘It’s your fault!’

Sarah, in the act of removing the lid from the vegetable dish, felt her heart almost stop. ‘Mine?’ she said, as water from the lid dripped onto the tablecloth.

‘Yes! That girl you knew, the one who died — I overheard you and that Harrie Clarke talking about her and now odd things are happening and I can sense something evil, here in this house. She’s come back, the dead girl, I know she has!’

‘Esther —’ Adam attempted to stand but couldn’t quite manage it.

Esther extended a shaking finger towards Sarah. ‘She’s following you and it’s
your
fault and I want you
out of this house
!’

Adam had another go. He rose, moved around the table and laid a placating hand on Esther’s arm. ‘Esther, please, you’re getting hysterical.’

She stood herself and slapped him. ‘And you’re drunk, so shut up!’ Throwing her napkin on the table, she rushed out of the dining room.

They all heard her mount the stairs, a crash as she slammed her bedroom door, and her footsteps on the floor above. Then nothing.

Adam rubbed his stinging cheek. Gellar tut-tutted and helped himself to more wine.

‘Would anyone care for broccoli or julienned carrots?’ Sarah enquired.

Adam sat hunched over his workbench, rubbing his temples with his fingertips, a tumbler and an empty jug nearby. Sarah felt sorry for him; he seldom drank much and as a consequence of last night’s overindulgence was suffering the horrors. Also, Esther had shouted at him over breakfast, and it was a warm day, the temperature in the workshop already unpleasantly high.

‘Would you like some more lemonade?’

He sighed biliously and eased back his shoulders, shifting on his stool. ‘Yes, I would, thank you, Sarah. Is Esther about?’

‘Gone out,’ Sarah replied.

She thought he was relieved.
She
certainly was, though Esther’s filthy mood hadn’t been helped by Sarah rising particularly early this morning to remove the porridge saucepan from the kitchen and leave it balanced incongruously on a tree-stump in the backyard. Not after last night’s talk of ghosts and odd happenings.

She went out to the cool safe in the kitchen and poured some more lemonade. The house was so nice and peaceful without Esther. She was constantly stirring up agitation, although last night, when Sarah had fully expected a row between her and Adam, there’d been nothing. Adam had stayed up drinking with Gellar until all hours while she’d been stuck in the kitchen washing plates and pots until her hands had turned into prunes, but there hadn’t been a peep out of Esther. When Gellar had finally staggered off into the night Sarah had braced herself for war, but Esther stayed shut in her room while Adam had crashed off to bed in his own chamber, bouncing off the walls and mumbling to himself like the village idiot. It was no wonder he felt poorly this morning.

She returned to the workshop and set the lemonade jug down on the workbench. With an eye on the shop in case a customer came in she perched on her own stool and watched what Adam was doing,
which was filing into a bezel the grooves where claws would sit to secure a ring’s central stone — in this case a large and rare pink topaz. He really was a very skilled jeweller, even if this morning his hands were shaking rather badly.

As he’d explained to Sarah when she’d first arrived, he’d had the workbench custom made, but she’d seen the like often enough in England and had worked at one herself for several years. This one had fittings and recesses for two craftsmen and when she’d finally been allowed to sit down at one she’d truly felt as though she’d come home.

The bench itself measured six feet long, two and a half deep and three high. On the side at which she and Adam worked were two curved recesses cut out to a depth of eleven inches and a width of twenty. Draped beneath each void was a pigskin to catch dropped gems and to prevent burns from hot metal. At the farthest extent of each recess was a drawer for small implements and a pigskin pouch to hold larger tools such as saws and files, to the left a rack for pliers, and above the drawer a tapered boxwood peg against which to work.

On the right of each recess — as Sarah and Adam were both right-handed — sat an oriental-style bronze oil lamp with a wick affixed to the spout. When the lamp was lit, a mouth-operated blowpipe was used to feed extra oxygen into the flame, increasing the heat, and the flame applied to whatever required soldering, the solder and flux to form the joint having been applied beforehand. It was a very fiddly and sweaty business, but a skill mastered by any jeweller worthy of the title. At one end of the bench was fixed an engraver’s ball, with an accompanying padded case of the burins used to engrave jewellery, and to shape and carve gold and silver, and to assist with the setting of stones.

The bench was situated so that Adam and Sarah faced an unusually large window as they worked, overlooking part of the backyard. The window had been made and fitted by glaziers specially, its mullions solid iron to deter burglars, which Sarah
thought poignantly amusing as the thief was already on the wrong side of it. At night or on badly overcast days they worked under the light of half a dozen Sinumbra oil lamps, which cast no shadow, burning in them only the best sperm oil so smoke didn’t pollute the air and irritate eyes.

Against the walls of the workshop were a bench on which sat the rolling-mill for rolling out sheets of precious metal, a draw-bench for drawing down gold and silver wire from those sheets, and a table on which were arrayed various, less frequently used, tools. Also in the room were the safe — whose lock Sarah had picked during her third week with the Greens — where the metals and gems were kept and the most expensive pieces were stored at night, and a small charcoal furnace to heat alloys of gold and silver and form them into ingots for rolling or drawing.

On days when the furnace was operating the room was unbearably hot, especially in summer when the house’s ground floor was stifling anyway, but when opened the windows admitted hordes of mosquitoes and other insects, not to mention the stink from the Tank Stream just beyond Adam’s back fence. To date he hadn’t found a fabric fine yet robust enough to stretch over the window frame that would exclude pests but still admit light and any breeze, so they sat at their workbench and suffered, sweat pouring down their faces, wiping their damp hands every few minutes. But Sarah was once again doing what she loved, so the discomfort was something she was more than willing to tolerate.

Adam had chosen her to work for him because of her skills as a jeweller, but initially she’d been limited to housework until she’d demonstrated her trustworthiness. Esther had protested against Sarah serving in the shop, believing she would steal the stock, which of course she did, but Adam reasoned that if he already trusted her in the workshop, he might as well trust her to serve behind the counter as well. Now she and Adam shared the duty, Esther only rarely consenting to help when business was very brisk.

For Sarah, stealing from Adam Green had at first been like stealing from anyone else — easy and completely unencumbered by the complication of guilt. But as the months passed and Adam had shown her increasing respect, allowed her more privileges, and stoutly defended her against his wife’s endless harassment, she’d grown steadily more uncomfortable. She couldn’t stop her pilfering, however, as she had no other means of contributing to Charlotte’s welfare. Rachel had gone, but now there was Charlotte, seven months old. She relied on them completely for that money to pay for her care and it cost a fortune because of the corruption in the Female Factory, even with wily, tough Janie Braine as her foster mother.

There were other considerations, too. If Sarah stopped stealing from Adam and didn’t put anything into the fund, Friday would be the sole contributor. Sarah loved Friday and would do anything for her, but she couldn’t bear that prospect. It would alter the balance of power among the three of them in a way that could harm their friendship. Friday, being the generous soul she was, wouldn’t mind, but Sarah certainly would. She, Sarah, frequently told Harrie it was of no concern that Harrie wasn’t in a position to put money into the fund, and it wasn’t, because Harrie gave so much in other ways, but it was a different matter when it came to herself. Also, of the three of them, Sarah knew she had the skills and intellectual ability most suited to generating money, and it would drive her to distraction if she couldn’t use either to contribute to the fund. Finally, the idea of not being able to honour her commitment to their vow to take care of Charlotte was something she could not — and
would
not — live with. It smacked of the mercenary, disloyal and dishonourable behaviour so typical of Tom Ratcliffe, the boss of the crew in which she had worked in London, and whom she had loathed. The last she’d heard he was rotting on a prison hulk in the Thames, and a bloody good job, too. Her belief that men could not be trusted had only been reinforced by Ratcliffe’s double-crossing ways, and her
resolution to maintain her own version of honourable behaviour was further entrenched as a result.

So she continued to steal from Adam, though growing increasingly ill at ease with her conscience as time passed. Occasionally she picked pockets on the street but this rarely netted more than a few pounds; it took time to set up a potentially lucrative mark and she hardly ever had that luxury, even after Adam ordered Esther to allow her more freedom.