The Silversmith's Wife _ Sophia Tobin by Sophia Tobin Read Free Book Online

raise my glass to.
    Twenty-six hours on the mail coach, thought Alban Steele, was enough to kill a man. He felt as flattened and reduced to essentials as one of the letters he had travelled alongside. Longing to rest, to stretch, he looked out at the bustling crowds of Charing Cross, and wondered how he would fight his way through them to reach his cousin’s house.
    He had crossed the unimaginable gulf from his quiet world to this place, which had lived only in his memory for years. As the coach had slowed on the congested roads he’d looked out at the black night and seen the lights of the city glittering. It was true. He was in London. And if the view from the coach was anything to go by, she was just as he had left her.
    He climbed down carefully, clinging to his pack, ready for the onslaught. Seven in the evening at Charing Cross. In the winter’s darkness he felt the energy of London: the charged night. He was warier than he had ever been, for the newspapers talked of insurrection and riot, of fires lit all over, and coaches riding away from a burning city. Had he come here in time for revolution?
    Through the noise he picked out a voice calling his name. He looked around. The sound came again, a thread tying him to this place, preventing him from pushing through the chaos: consistent, a pause for breath, then again. Finally, he found the source, a boy whose mouth opened repetitively like a cuckoo’s. The child had pale flaxen hair, green eyes, and milk-white skin. Alban immediately saw the similarity to his cousin: the boy had to be Jesse’s. He waved, then fought his way through the crowd.
    ‘I’m your second cousin,’ he said, as he reached him.
    ‘I’m Grafton,’ said the boy, and held his hand out. ‘Pa says I’m to call you uncle.’
    Alban smiled, and shook his hand. The boy had been a baby when he visited last. Grafton: Duke of, he thought. He wished his cousin would stop naming his children after patrons. It wasn’t as if they would know or care. Had the Duke of Grafton been asked to recommend his silversmith, he would have said: Pierre Renard, at the sign of the Golden Acorn on Bond Street, for Renard liked to keep his sign as well as his number. His Grace the Duke had no knowledge of the man who had actually fashioned his favourite silver bread baskets. Alban had reasoned thus with his cousin years ago. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jesse said. ‘The plate on their tabletop was made by me, not that bloody Frenchman.’ He refused to admit that the silver had Renard’s maker’s mark stamped all over it, obliterating Jesse’s own.
    Alban followed Grafton as he weaved his way through the crowds. He knew it was some way to Jesse’s house, but he was glad of the walk, and glad too that Grafton was taciturn.
    The action of walking helped him shake off the melancholy that had settled on him during the journey Everyone had agreed it would be best for him to come here, to help Jesse. After all, that was what kin was for. The family silversmith’s firm in Chester was doing well enough: his cousins there hardly needed him. But Jesse did. He was sickening, and there was talk of a large commission from Renard, which he wanted a part in. So Alban had come, with hardly any need of encouragement, back to the city he’d once cherished hopes of establishing himself in, but which he never had, kept to his place by habit and, he supposed, weakness of will. He had begun the journey electrified with hope and the knowledge that he was doing good.
    He had travelled under the light of the full moon. They had just left the city and reached the open road when the driver had to pull up for an obstruction to be cleared from the horses’ path. As the coach swayed to a halt the three other passengers, all ladies travelling together, started murmuring to each other. Their eyes were wide with alarm and one even gave a little shriek. Alban hardly blamed her; the roads from Chester were notorious for footpads. ‘Be calm,’