Andrew Taylor - The Fire Court

Time passed. The light faded. The bells of surrounding churches chimed seven o’clock, though not quite at the same time.

Mr Hakesby dismissed Brennan for the day. The draughts- man was due an extra fee for a piece of work he had done at home. Hakesby found the money in his purse himself and told Cat to make a note of the payment. She added it to the current sheet of sundry expenses. Glancing back, she saw an alarming number of entries already. She drew up a rough total in her head, and the amount staggered her. There were two months to go until the quarterly rent on the drawing office was due at midsummer.

The draughtsman came over to where she was sitting so she could pay him the money and initial the entry as a receipt. At that moment, Mr Hakesby retired to his closet to answer a call of nature.

Brennan took his time. He stood very close to Cat’s stool. He was fair complexioned, with pink cheeks and a sprinkling of freckles on his nose. He wore his own hair, which was sandy in colour. Cat saw two grey lice squatting among the roots where it fell into a parting on the left-hand side of his scalp.

He laid down the pen and blew on his initials to dry them. Cat felt his breath touch her cheek. Involuntarily, she turned her head. He took up the paper. He stared at her with pale eyes, neither blue nor grey, that made her think of pebbles on a shingle beach.

She held out her hand for the paper, anxious for him to be gone. His hand touched hers. She snatched it away.

‘Less haste,’ he said, smiling, ‘more speed. What’s the hurry?’

He leaned on the table, resting on his right hand. His left hand touched her neck in a caress which was as light as a feather. She seized her dividers and jabbed them between his index and middle fingers, missing them by a fraction of an inch on either side. He snatched his hand away. The points of the dividers had passed through the expenses sheet and dug into the wood of the table.

He raised his hand. ‘God damn you, you could have stabbed me. My right hand, too.’

‘Next time I will stab you.’ Cat tugged the dividers free from the table and turned the points towards him. ‘And it won’t be your hand.’

‘Ah.’ He lowered his arm and grinned at her, exposing long, yellow canines. ‘A vixen. I like a woman with spirit.’

The closet door opened. Brennan sauntered over to the peg where his cloak was hanging.

‘Why are you still here, Brennan?’ Hakesby said. ‘I thought you’d be gone by now.’

The draughtsman had recovered his composure. ‘Talking to Jane, sir.’ He bowed low. ‘I wish you goodnight.’

‘He promises well,’ Mr Hakesby said as his footsteps sounded on the stairs. ‘Particularly on the fine detail. Dr Wren was right.’

Cat busied herself with throwing another shovel of coals on the fire, keeping her face averted to conceal her rising colour. The fire was a luxury at this time of year. More expense. Hakesby craved warmth, a symptom of his illness. His blood ran cold nowadays, he said. Colder and colder. She stood up and looked at him.

‘Come here,’ he said.

She put down the shovel and stood beside his chair.

‘This damnable question of money,’ he said. ‘I wish I had not taken yours.’

‘Sir, you had no choice in the matter. Neither of us did. If you hadn’t taken it, both of us would have starved.’

Cat had lent him sixty pounds in gold on Lady Day, all the money she had in the world, taken from her dead father’s body. Hakesby had been behindhand last quarter’s rent and the wages for his employees. He had owed his own landlady for two months’ board, and there had been a host of other debts. The commissions were flowing in but few clients paid promptly for the work. With luck, most of the money would come in its own good time, and they would be more comfortable, but in the meantime they all had to live.

‘Money confers an obligation,’ he said. ‘I’m worried I may not be able to discharge it.’

‘Of course you will. But at present we need ready money. Which is why Marwood was a gift from heaven, sir. If you go to a moneylender, they would rob you.’

‘I can’t get reasonable terms.’ Hakesby held up his right hand. The bony fingers fluttered. ‘This grows worse.’

‘It’s been a hard winter, sir. Everyone says so. But now summer is here, the warmth will soon—’

‘I have seen the doctors. This ague of mine will not get better. In time, it may touch the mind, as well as the body. With your help, and Brennan’s, and perhaps another draughtsman’s, we shall manage for a few months, perhaps a few years. But then …’

‘We shall contrive somehow,’ Cat said. ‘If you rest more and worry less, the ague will progress more slowly.’

‘And how will I pay you back if I cannot work? Or Marwood?’

‘You give me shelter, sir, and you give me work. That is repayment. We’ll manage with Marwood. He looks prosperous enough to be kept waiting a little.’

After a pause, he said: ‘What will become of you if I’m not here?’

A silence spread between them. Cat did not want to think about the possibility of Hakesby’s death. It was not just the trembling that was growing worse, it was the depression of his spirits.

Hakesby straightened in his chair, squaring his shoulders as if for a fight. ‘Fetch me the ledger, Jane. We shall reckon up the accounts. Let us find out how bad matters really are.’

‘My husband,’ Jemima said, sitting at her dressing table in Pall Mall and staring sideways at her reflection in the mirror, ‘is a fortunate man.’

And Mary, whose own reflection shimmered and shifted behind her mistress’s, murmured like a mangled echo, ‘Yes, my lady, the master is very fortunate. I’m sure he knows it too.’

Yes, Jemima thought, and when my father dies and Syre Place and everything else is mine, he will be even more fortunate. Because of me. When her father died, her husband would have the management of Syre Place and everything that went with it. Including herself – unless she could learn the art of managing him.

When she was ready, she descended the stairs, one hand on the rail of the bannisters, the other clutching Mary’s arm. She wore her grey taffeta, sombre yet elegant, and a pendant with a diamond the size of a pigeon’s egg. Mary had dressed her hair and applied the patches and powders to her face.

Rather than go directly to the dining room, where there was already a murmur of voices, she went halfway down the stairs to the kitchen. The smells of their dinner came up to meet her, and made her feel queasy. For a moment her hand touched her belly. Was it possible she could be pregnant?

In the kitchen, the birds were turning on the spit over the fire, the fat sizzling as it dropped on to the hungry flames. The cook and the scullery maid curtsied, Hal the coachman doffed his hat and made his obedience, and the boy, Hal’s son, tried to hide behind the scullery door until Hal dragged him into the open and cuffed him so hard he fell against the wall. The Limburys did not maintain a large establishment in London – all of their servants were in the kitchen, apart from Richard and Hester, who were serving at table upstairs, and the gardener.

Without speaking, Jemima stared at them. She had sent Mary down with her orders. But it was good to show oneself in the kitchen too, even if one didn’t want to. Marriage was a contract, her father had told her, and she would fulfil her part of it, to the letter, even if her husband faltered in his.

Faltered. What a puny, insignificant, inadequate word.

‘Well?’ she said.

The cook curtsied again. ‘Yes, my lady. Everything as it should be.’

She held the cook’s eye for a moment, as her mother had taught her to do all those years ago at Syre Place, and then let her eyes drift over the other upturned faces, from one to the next.