The Silversmith's Wife _ Sophia Tobin Read Online Free PDF Page B

saw him.’
    ‘With your nature?’ said Mallory. As a child Mary had been plagued by nightmares; small traumas brushed off in moments by Mallory had lasted weeks for her. ‘It’s real enough as it is. No husband, no income.’ She finished the combing to her satisfaction, and sat back down.
    They looked at each other. ‘Can you be our plain old English Mary again, no more madame this, and madame that, now he is dead?’ said Mallory.
    ‘You’re glad of it, aren’t you?’ said Mary.
    Yes.
The word appeared in her mind as if Mallory had spoken it aloud.
    ‘Don’t snap my head off,’ said Mallory sharply. Mary wondered how, on such a morning, she could still be rebuked. ‘It’s a terrible thing and I’m not saying it’s not. I just thought you could be an Englishwoman again. It’s probably his French mouth that got him into trouble. Someone fancied him a Jacobin, all the stuff he was fond of spouting. He’d say anything if he could vex someone.’
    Mary regarded her sister carefully; the way she had gathered her teeth together under tight lips, she was just about suppressing a tut. She was right, she supposed, in her remembrance of Pierre talking in that way: after the Revolution, he’d really laid it on.
    ‘Who’s at the shop?’ Always businesslike, Mallory was. ‘I hope you haven’t gone and left all the doors and windows open, in the care of that fool Grisa.’
    ‘Ellen and Benjamin are there,’ said Mary. ‘People will come. Everyone will have heard.’
    ‘Of course they will. What do you expect? They’re probably rummaging around in the plate chest as we speak.’
    ‘No they’re not. Grisa is a faithful guard. I trust him as I would a brother.’ She felt unbearably tired. She had come to Mallory for comfort, but now she could almost hear the chime of silver on silver, the greasy fingerprints left on valuables looked over. ‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ she snapped, irritation breaking through. ‘no one will touch my plate.’ Mallory tutted out loud this time, as though to indicate that, on a normal morning, she would have said more. She trusted no one; not even a theoretical brother. Mary took her arm.
    ‘Will you not ask me how I feel?’ she said.
    Mallory was stilled at last. She stood, and it seemed to Mary that her words had dissolved her sister’s rage. ‘No,’ she said, eventually. ‘No, I will not.’
    ‘I feel nothing,’ said Mary.
    Mallory put her hands on Mary’s shoulders. ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘It is over.’
    When she walked back to Bond Street, the crowds, the noise, the cold sunlight all made Mary feel giddy. She tried to hold her shoulders back, to walk as Mallory would, but the effort only lasted for a moment, before the fear came, overtaking everything. I said my silver, she thought. I said it was mine. She glanced over her shoulder. And for a moment it was as if Pierre walked beside her.
    ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘Everything you have, you owe to me.’
    There was almost nothing Edward Digby liked more than a good coroner’s meeting, and Pierre Renard’s was no exception. He arrived early at the tavern near St George’s, Hanover Square, and dallied around outside greeting some of the tradesmen he knew. It was a cool evening, but it had been a day of pale sunshine and a vein-blue sky, and the light had cheered him. When he’d amused himself for half an hour he went inside the tavern, the customary place for coroner’s meetings in the parish, and watched the men as they arrived. The constable did not come; he had told Digby he had a particularly profitable case to pursue that evening, and besides, Digby himself was the key witness.
    He’d felt better today, and not just because it was a bright day. When he’d got home after discovering Renard he had slept in the arms of a woman – a tart, but still a woman. He could not remember how long it had been since he had been held like that, but her embrace had imparted to him a liquid warmth that had clung to