Кейт Седли - The Goldsmith’s Daughter

‘Pray continue,’ I begged.

Toby shrugged my foolishness aside. ‘That’s nearly all there is to tell. Mistress Bonifant, urged on by her husband, went to look for the original pendant in Mistress Nell’s room, when she was absent from the house one day, but couldn’t find it. But Master Bonifant’s description was good enough for the master. The gold replica was easily made.’

‘And was Mistress Babcary pleased with her gift?’

Toby thrust out his bottom lip. ‘Funny you should ask that,’ he said after a few seconds’ musing. ‘Now that I come to think of it, she wasn’t as pleased as I should have expected her to be. But at the time, I put it down to the fact that we were all upset by Master Bonifant’s outburst against Meg for getting the goblets mixed up. No one was in very good spirits after that.’

‘But did Mistress Babcary wear the pendant very often?’ I persisted.

Toby considered the question. ‘She’s worn it a lot lately,’ he said.

‘Since Master Bonifant’s death?’

‘Well … Yes, I suppose so. But she might have worn it just as much before. I don’t recollect.’

Miles Babcary, followed by his nephew, came into the shop. The former beamed for a moment until he realised that it was not a customer who was claiming the attention of his apprentice, but the same nosy chapman whose constant poking and prying and questioning was becoming so unwelcome. Afraid to vent his ill-humour on me – the emissary of the Duke of Gloucester and the King’s favourite leman – he shouted at Toby instead.

‘If you’ve let the fire go out, you stupid boy, I’ll have the skin off your back! Get back to that furnace and those bellows immediately.’ He turned to me. ‘And what do you want this time, Master Chapman?’

‘That’s exactly what I asked him,’ Toby proclaimed, not noticeably cowed by his master’s displeasure. But all the same, he scuttled off to the furnace and worked the bellows with renewed vigour.

‘I just want another word or two with Mistress Eleanor,’ I answered humbly, ‘if I may.’

I think that Miles Babcary, prodded in the back by Christopher, would have refused his permission had not Isolda, just at that moment, entered the shop from the back of the house. She was hot and flushed, wearing a big linen apron and holding a ladle in one hand. She was obviously in the middle of preparing dinner, the wholesome smell of cooking hanging about her, and lovelier by far to my nostrils than any exotic perfumes of the East.

‘What’s going on here?’ she demanded, and I repeated my request before either her father or her cousin could reply. ‘Oh, very well,’ she agreed. ‘You’ll find Nell upstairs in the parlour, busy at her embroidery.’ Her menfolk started to protest, but she cut them short. ‘The sooner Master Chapman finds out what he wants to know, the sooner he’ll leave us in peace,’ she said, and vanished again in the direction of the kitchen.

Her common sense prevailed and I was given grudging permission by Miles to proceed upstairs to speak to his niece.

Eleanor was seated in front of her embroidery frame, which had been set up close to the fire, two large working candles, in silver candlesticks, on the table beside her. She looked round as I opened the parlour door and remained, needle poised above the canvas, staring at me.

‘Master Chapman,’ she murmured warily, ‘why are you here?’

‘I’ve come to speak to you,’ I answered, drawing up a stool and sitting down beside her.

‘I’ve told you all I know about Gideon’s death.’ Her voice had acquired a shrill note and I noticed that her hands were trembling.

‘Not quite all,’ I demurred. ‘Sometime or another, you bought a pendant in Leadenhall market, and the man who sold it to you told you that it had magical properties. If you wore it to bed, you would see the face and form of the man you would one day marry. Isn’t that true?’ She nodded, looking at me with round, frightened eyes. ‘And you confided this secret to Gideon Bonifant?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘So let me guess,’ I went on. ‘It was after you began wearing the pendant to bed that you started seeing him in your room each time you woke up. Am I right?’

Eleanor gave a shudder. ‘I’d be asleep, and then something, a touch on my cheek or forehead, would rouse me just in time to see his likeness gliding out of my room. Of course, I realised that this was a hallucination of the Devil. How could Gideon possibly be my future husband when he was already married to Isolda? I didn’t know what to do.’

‘And you couldn’t confide in her, as you would have done about anything else that was troubling you, because she was the person most nearly concerned. Did you think of saying anything to Gideon himself?’

The colour flooded her cheeks. ‘No, I couldn’t. That would have been worse than telling Isolda. It might have looked as though … as though …’ Her voice tailed away into silence.

‘As though you might have been making it up as a way of offering yourself to him,’ I suggested.

Eleanor covered her face with her hands and nodded.

‘So you said nothing to anyone?’

She raised her head again. ‘No, but I didn’t wear the pendant in bed any more. And when that didn’t stop the visitations, I threw it away.’

I wondered how Gideon had found out about this, but I was convinced that somehow he had done so.

‘And then your uncle and cousins gave you a pendant made to the selfsame pattern for your birthday. But this was made of gold, studded with sapphires. You couldn’t possibly throw this one away.’

‘No.’ She was trembling so much that I put an arm about her shoulders for comfort. ‘And then, of course, I started seeing Gideon’s likeness in my room again each night.’

I asked as gently as I could, ‘And did it never occur to you that it could be Gideon himself whom you were seeing? That it was a flesh and blood man and not some hallucination, as you call it, of the Devil?’

Eleanor turned her head slowly to stare at me. ‘You mean …? You mean that Gideon was coming to my room every night in person ? That it was a trick to frighten me? But why on earth would he want to do that? No, no! He would never have been so unkind.’

‘I don’t think it was meant as unkindness,’ I answered. ‘Quite the opposite. I believe he was hoping to make you fall in love with him by planting the idea in your mind that you and he would one day be married.’

‘But how could we ever have been married?’ Eleanor asked. She pushed aside her embroidery frame with shaking hands. She repeated, ‘He was married to Isolda.’

I shrugged. ‘But who knew what the future held? Fatal illness, accidents, both these things are everyday occurrences, which, by his reckoning, could have happened to your cousin at any time. He wished to accustom you to the idea that, one day, you and he could possibly be man and wife. But Gideon was like all of us: while he could quite easily envisage the death of somebody else, he regarded himself as immortal.’

Eleanor considered this idea for a second or two, then emphatically shook her head. ‘No! You’re wrong! Isolda and Gideon were happily married.’

It was my turn to demur. ‘Maybe Mistress Bonifant was happy, but I wouldn’t be certain about her husband. My guess is that he’d fallen in love with you. You were only a child when they were first married but, over the years, you’d grown into a beautiful woman. I suspect that he suddenly – perhaps to his own surprise – found himself attracted to you. Maybe, to begin with, it was against his will. Let us give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he struggled to suppress his feelings for a while, but that, eventually, they proved too strong for him. That was when he started to spread rumours about Isolda and your brother.’