Page 49 of Linenfold (The Alice Chronicles #4)
‘My Lord, I am glad to have been of service. And now, mistress,’ he says, packing up his measuring cord, scissors, notes, ‘I have your young man’s measurements and will start on the garments ordered for him.’
Having seen him on his way, Alice draws Philip back into the dining parlour and closes the door.
‘Listen,’ she says, ‘I have an idea.’ Speaking low she explains what she is thinking, asks his opinion.
They discuss it for a few minutes, considering its aspects, gauging the threat.
In the end, ‘We must tell him everything because he needs to understand the peril he courts,’ Philip says.
‘Once he does, it all comes down to whether he’s willing.
If he is, I undertake to pay the tailoring bill. ’
It feels quite strange, Alice reflects, thinking back over the past few days, to have the whole width of her screens passage back. She became accustomed to the crowding piles of boxes, and now that they are all gone in the luggage coach to London, the space echoes its emptiness.
But even stranger were the hours last night in the locked winter parlour when the five of them, Philip, Jack, Olivia, Juliana and herself, released the rest of the one hundred and forty-four gems, each in its folded cyprus-linen bag, from their crewelwork fruits.
If eyes could tear away the covering, the cyprus-linen would have been so much dust. Lest, cyprus stripped … The first was a pebble the size of a spaniel’s eye, a pearl black yet gleaming with all the colours of the firelight playing on its surface, almost perfect in its roundness, fit for a queen.
They looked their fill, marvelling, until at last Philip returned the gem to its bag and laid it alongside the ruby and the emerald in the linenfold box.
They made a list of each jewel in case of enquiry, and the work went on.
Each find was a treasure in its own right, each one unique, blue or red or green, round, rectangular, oval or square, faceted, cabochon, winking or glowing from their depths.
Ragged molten nuggets of raw gold and silver declared their inestimable value.
There was one unforgettable polished mound, dark as midnight, impossible to tell if it were blue or rose or turquoise as Philip held out his hand to show them.
He called it an opal, turning it this way and that, and its depths caught and winked first one colour then another in the rushlight.
The list grew. And then diamonds made their appearance, great glitterings of cut ice, colourless and yet blazing with all the rainbow’s splendour beaming from the facets, almost hurting the eyes.
An expression came to Alice’s mind, “of the first water”, and surely these were the first of the first, like sunshine through a shower, a rainbow caught in a drop.
On and on came the gems, at least fingernail-sized, most larger, though there were a few clusters of smaller stones, three or more in a fruit.
Layer rose on layer, dozens on dozens in Philip’s box, until the last was tucked away and they had one hundred and forty-four entries on the list. There was something final in the closing of the box, a sigh of regret that such beauty they would never again see.
There was also a sigh of relief that the treasury that had claimed three men’s lives and nearly four, would soon pass into someone else’s care.
Philip locked the box and slipped the key on its silken fillet back under his shirt, to lie with the other key that used to be his uncle’s. At the last moment he hesitated, drew it back over his head and held it out to Alice.
‘I should like you to keep this for the time being,’ he said, ‘in case.’
Like that other in case. His uncle tearing the riddle into pieces in case. She nodded, removed it from the silk and attached it to the ring amongst her own keys. Please don’t let anything happen to Philip .
Maureen sits on the mounting block outside the White Hart in Guildford’s High Street.
Her legs ache and she is footsore. Not that Maureen has walked that far, but she is more used to sitting down.
Exertion is not to her taste. And slogging around her few friends in town has not improved either the state of her feet or the balance of her humours.
Happy as they are to see her when she brings a few stoppered bottles of filched ale or wine from High Stoke, her friends have been less welcoming of her requests for help.
Lost her position? Such an easy one, how could she be so careless?
No there was nothing they knew of in Guildford.
She might just have to take what she can get. Beggars and choosers and all that.
It’s all Mistress Jerrard’s fault, Maureen has decided.
Creeping around the house like a thief, making Maureen drop her mug.
Taking on so for a mite of ale. As the cook, Maureen should be entitled to little bonuses.
Instead, penny-pinching Mistress Jerrard was just waiting her chance.
She’ll rue the day soon enough, beg Maureen to return, and then Maureen will dictate her terms. Make the Jerrard woman sorry.
Something is going on at High Stoke, something to do with the young Lord Hardcastle.
Something the duke was looking for. The young Lord still there after sending his people home.
Murmured conversations behind closed doors.
Oh yes, it all fits with what John Pearce thought, they’re hiding something.
But poor John is dead, and for all her listening at doors she was unable to find out anything useful for him.
Anything useful, that is, until now. It was late last night, hanging around in the shadows, that she gained her best scraps of information.
The light still showed under the winter parlour door when everybody should have been in bed.
Listening at the latch told her confusing things.
She heard the young Lord saying That’s a red topaz, very rare .
There would be long pauses of silence, murmurings of Is it real? , Glitters like ice, Such colours .
Was that what the duke was after?
And what was it the young Lord said to his secretary that day? Something about a linenfold box. The box his uncle carried around with him. It all begins to fit. And then Maureen has an idea. Someone she knows would dearly love to drive a spoke in the Jerrard woman’s wheel.