1940
BASEMENT VAULTS, THE MIRRORMAKERS’ CLUB
Livy excused herself from coffee after lunch, leaving Peggy, Bill and Jonathan at the table. She wanted to find the Kinsburgs; to be alone with her task. Seated at the desk in the Document Room, she turned to the first box, labelled: ‘Club: building of’. It was an archive box of stiff buff-coloured card, its structure secured with heavy metal staples. It was discoloured, as though it had spent its life absorbing London’s smoke, and its years of neglect gave it a faintly reproachful air.
She opened the box. On the top was a paper folder, labelled ‘Invoices, 1839’. Sure enough, it contained a pile an inch thick of workmen’s bills: for plasterwork, carving, and all the allied trades required to create the building. Livy closed the folder, and lifted it out carefully. Beneath it, and on top of another folder, there was a small notebook, the smooth ivory-coloured leather of its cover showing signs of age and some decay. Livy picked it up and opened it.
Henry Dale-Collingwood. Architect and surveyor. The Mirrormakers’ Club. 1839.
She thought of Christian. She turned a page. There was a sketch of an acanthus leaf, made in pencil, alongside an ink drawing of a cornucopia. She turned another page, and frowned at similar drawings: almost the same, but not quite. Repetition with the smallest details changed. Just small designs, she thought. Material which would delight Christian, but which would mean nothing to Whitewood. She turned to the end of the notebook, and slipped a folded piece of paper out of the back. Unfolding it, she wondered who had last read its contents.
Gentlemen, I beg leave to submit to you some designs for the Red Parlour, to be executed in the richest style of finish . . . although a slight departure from what was originally discussed.
Livy turned back to the first page and began to read.
She assumed the scrawled note next to a column’s capital was by the architect. The scagliola to match the colour of blue supplied in my paper sample. To match it exactly. She frowned and turned the page. Dale-Collingwood had begun the draft of a letter there.
The colour of the scagliola does not match the sample. It does not answer. It must be remade and I will not countenance delay or argument. I did not wish it to be in imitation of verde antico: that was part of the old scheme, and this is new.
She frowned. Christian had been right: demanding was the word.
It was the same with the plasterers, it was the same with the flowers. The flowers must match exactly, must match my drawing, in every detail.
She wondered whether the letter had ever been sent: saw then lines, the writing less tidy, the ink fading at the end of each sentence.
It is the same in everything. Nothing can match it. Always I ask for it, always I put down what it must be.
Nothing can match it.
Livy sat back in her chair. She turned another page: saw drawings of a bunch of flowers, annotated for colour, gilding and type. Turned another page: a drawing of a chaise longue. No mention of the Kinsburgs, no shadows of other people: only the architect’s relentless attention to detail.
Then, she saw what at first sight was a doodle; swirls of ink. But as her eyes focused on it she saw that it was a cypher, two letters intertwined in a design.
She felt her heart give a little jump in her chest. It was the same feeling she had felt in that moment in the Stair Hall, kissing Jonathan, when a sudden brightness had lifted the room into colour. CK for Charlotte Kinsburg, she thought. But she could see no mention of the full name. She turned one page, then another, but there was no name. Initials were too small a clue to go on.
Instead there was a heading. Committee meeting, 22 September 1839. Beneath it, a list of items to be addressed.
Impatiently, she turned a chunk of pages, and another bill fell out. This one for a safe. The architect’s scrawl across it: more precautions! not just one lock. Livy closed the book.
She got up, turned the lights out, and went out of the basement room and up the stairs. Crossed the Stair Hall, up the staircase, taking the left branch. Straight ahead, past the entrance to the Dining Hall on her right, and down a short passage into the Hide. The doorknob, polished brass, turned with a slight squeak.
The room that had been Miss Hardaker’s Hide was in darkness. The windows were covered with blackout material. Livy pulled a small corner back, and light fell across the desk. The room was not big; the walls were covered with empty mahogany shelves, which had once held the archives, and these looked mournful to Livy. She avoided the sight, sat down at the desk, and started to go through the drawers. Astonishingly, the top drawer was full of unlabelled keys, all, it seemed, of different vintages; Livy stared at them, then shut the drawer.
It was the bottom drawer, the last she checked in, which finally yielded something. Piles of files, not orderly at all. Livy opened the top one, saw the typewritten list, entitled ‘Index’. She took it out and closed the drawer, replaced the blackout, and went out of the door, through the same passage, and onto the landing, emerging with the large doors to the Dining Hall on her left. The vast double doors had been closed when she had passed them before, but now one was open. Frowning, she went to close it.
She was drawn into the room by the sense that there was someone there. Someone, or something; that she moved through a room shot through with presence. But the room was as she had left it: the same dull light, bathing its details in shadow, the gold leaf darkened to ochre. She walked across the small margin of sprung boards, and when she stepped onto the carpet the light changed in the room; changed so that she blinked, and looked again. Some trick of the light – a few clear shafts penetrated the stained glass, and were not lost, so that the glass pendants of the corner chandeliers, beneath their sheeting, seemed to glow briefly between the gaps. A pale orange light, as one sees in the last moments from the setting sun, or – she thought, and could not check it – from a city on fire. In that moment, she looked straight ahead, and realized that she was facing the mirror at the far end; she was central to the reflection, and she could see the mirror behind her, and in that brief breath of light, she saw the reflections repeating, on and on, into an infinity, as Christian had said, so that it drew an exclamation from her.
The light dissolved, a cloud across the sun, and in a moment, it was as it had been – only she saw a figure, the edge of a figure, just leaving, behind her; she saw a figure in the reflection of the mirror. And she thought she knew who it was.
‘Mr Taylor?’ she called as she turned, thinking he must have stayed to look around more, and that he was wrong to linger so. Christian, she sensed, would have come back at her call, but nobody came.
She started to walk towards that door, thinking it could be one of the firewatchers, the ‘Index’ folder flapping in her hand. She came out onto the landing, but nobody was there. Then she saw Whitewood, striding up the stairs to her left; and she gasped.
‘Were you just in the Dining Hall, behind me?’ she said.
‘What? No.’
‘Has anyone passed you?’
‘No.’
Livy walked swiftly on into the north anteroom, then the Committee Room. ‘Mr Taylor?’ she called, though she knew he would not be hiding anywhere. She didn’t see the way Jonathan’s face changed as she said the name.
Livy stood, looking between the Committee Room and the ruined Red Parlour. ‘There was someone here,’ she said. ‘I know there was.’ And she did not say the other name which came into her mind; the hurried, agitated handwriting.
Henry.
She jumped when Jonathan put his hands on her shoulders. He turned her around and looked into her shining eyes, as he brushed one hand against her pale face. One sheaf of her dark hair had fallen free from its pins.
‘He’s gone for now,’ he said. ‘This – Christian.’
‘It’s not that.’ She looked around her. The feeling of presence, that sense of another person, thickened the air.
‘I am worried about you. Over coffee, Peggy mentioned – your home. The shock may not be over yet. These things can overtake you. I know something about that. From the first war.’
She frowned. Sensed the pressure building behind her eyes: the swell of her blood, loud as the sea. Her sight seemed to pulsate with it, the rhythm of uncontainable agitation. And she walked past him and towards the staircase.
‘I should have told you,’ he called after her. ‘Miss Baker. Our mystery. I am looking for a diamond.’
She turned sharply and stared at him, on the top stair.
He came to her and pulled her back from the top. ‘You’re too close to the edge,’ he said. ‘You might fall.’
She shook his hands from her shoulders. ‘I don’t care. What does the Mirrormakers’ Club have to do with a diamond?’
He looked flushed and a little ashamed; only now did his steady gaze falter. They had talked of family, of a beauty in a portrait, but not of money. She remembered the turn of the cigarette lighter in his hand; that barely contained agitation. ‘Charlotte is wearing it in her portrait,’ he said.
‘I remember,’ she said. ‘It’s that specific diamond?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s an heirloom. I was left it – or thought I was. But I’ve been told the stone I have is a fake, and is worth nothing at all. The real diamond is somewhere else. The real diamond is, I think, somewhere in this building.’
She stared at him for a long moment. ‘And you want me to find it for you?’ she said.
She remembered how he had reached out for her, in the Stair Hall. His apparent coolness; his attempts to smile and be jovial. He had needed her for something. He had needed her to be on his side.
‘Miss Baker?’
For a moment, she turned, and teetered on the edge of the top stair. Stared down the length of those steps to the half landing. They were steep, and marble, and it was not as if she hadn’t thought about it before: their seductive height.
She moved forwards.
‘Livy!’
But she did not look back at him. And she did not jump. There were things she wanted to know; a mystery she wanted to solve. She ran down the marble staircase as fast as she could.
Jonathan paused for a moment, cursing under his breath, and then he followed her.
At the top of the stairs, the doors to the Dining Hall remained open, a perfect rectangle. And had Livy and Jonathan been there, they would have seen it: a bright glow, as though all at once three hundred and thirty-six candles, set in their glass sconces and surrounded by glass lustres, flared into life in the chandeliers, briefly, before the half-darkness fell again.