A little later, dressed in an old green fustian gown that had survived the journey from the Isle of Wight with remarkable fortitude, Ellie went down to the kitchens for breakfast. She was still unsettled by what had happened with the tea leaves, but satisfied that Mrs. Lewis had told her the truth about not having seen anything. It would have been too embarrassing for words if the housekeeper had been a silent witness.
Ellie expected to find her uncle taking breakfast, but there was no sign of him. Mrs. Lewis ushered her to the scrubbed table where supper had been served the night before. White geraniums bloomed in pots on the window sills, the red-raddled floor was bright and clean, and four cats sprawled by the hearth, luxuriating in the heat.
Fruit bread had just been taken from the wall oven and was cooling on a rack on the table. Blue-and-white crockery—not the work of John Bailey—adorned a great dresser against one wall, and the clock on the mantel had stopped at four, which was when Gwilym had left to commence his daily duties at the Castle Griffin stables.
“Where is my uncle?” Ellie asked as Mrs. Lewis set about cooking her breakfast.
“Oh, he’s been hard at work these past two hours,” the housekeeper replied, looking around from the pan on the hearth and pointing to a door at the other end of the kitchen.
Ellie had been told the night before that beyond the door there were stone steps leading down to the cellars, from where access could be had to the canal and wharf. Her uncle’s few employees worked in the adjacent outbuildings, but he remained mostly in his workroom, which no one else dared to enter because it was where he decorated and gilded the successful porcelain, and mixed together the secret ingredients of his soft-paste formula.
Mrs. Lewis brought Ellie’s breakfast of scrambled eggs and fried bacon. “There, that will set you up for the day,” she declared.
“It certainly will,” Ellie replied, thinking that such a mound would probably set her up for tomorrow as well.
“Mr. Bailey said that as soon as you finish, he would like you to go down to see him in his workshop.”
“In his workshop?” Ellie was startled.
The housekeeper raised her eyebrows and nodded. “That’s what he said, miss.”
“I’m being honored, aren’t I?”
“Well, you are family.”
After eating rather more of the breakfast than she’d expected, Ellie left the table, but as she approached the door to the cellar, Mrs. Lewis hurried after her with a candle she’d lit hastily from the fire.
“Take this, Miss Ellie. It’s terribly dark down there when the doors to the wharf are closed, and the stone steps are a very steep spiral. They’re well-worn too, so please be careful.”
Ellie accepted the candle. “Thank you, Mrs. Lewis.”
The housekeeper opened the door for her, and a waft of freezing air swept up into the warm kitchen. Or was it that the warm air swept down and left a chill behind? Shielding the flame with her hand, Ellie began to descend.
At the bottom there was a large windowless room, deserted except for careful stacks of unglazed, unpainted porcelain that she would soon learn was termed biscuit ware. At the far end were double doors around which she could see daylight. Beyond them lay the busy canal. Clogs clattered on rounded cobbles, people talked in Welsh, and now and then a horse whinnied, presumably a tow horse belonging to one of the barges.
Ellie crossed the dark cellar room with care, for it too was cobbled and therefore very uncomfortable to walk on without clogs. She didn’t open the doors, but peeped out through a knothole. She saw the tow horse beside the sixty-foot-long barge that had been waiting overnight, and leaning against the trunk of one of the nearby evergreen trees, the man and boy that crewed the barge. They watched as a cargo of finished chinaware was carefully loaded.
Another barge had arrived an hour earlier, to discharge its cargo of what Ellie was to learn included bone ash, Lynn sand, potash, borax, whiting, niter, lead oxide, alum, gypsum, salt, and glass. The wharf was piled with barrels, and men with wheelbarrows took things in and out of a nearby storage shed. The kilns had been fired, and smoke drifted on the air as her uncle’s workers—the oddly named turners, lathemen, throwers, squeezers, and saggermen—went about their business.
There was a great air of industry, as if Nantgarth porcelain was selling like the proverbial hotcakes, but Ellie knew that there was only such activity when barges came and went; in between it was too quiet to tell of profit.
The tow horse whinnied again, and she heard hooves in the alley that led down beside the canal bridge. By straining a little she was able to see that it was Gwilym on one of the white Castle Griffin horses. People shouted greetings to him, and he grinned back as he slipped lightly from his mount. Hardly had his boots touched the cobbles than there was a cry of dismay from a worker who was just lifting some finished porcelain into the barge.
The man’s clogs slipped on the cobbles, and he began to lose his balance. Gwilym turned in a moment, and looked intently at the unfortunate man, who seemed to hover in midair, then, impossibly, regained his equilibrium. There were shouts of approval from the workers, who were all clearly accustomed to Gwilym’s powers.
Ellie was shaken, for by all the laws of physics and gravity, the man and his load of porcelain should have fallen from the wharf into the barge, but somehow he had avoided calamity. Mrs. Lewis’s strange son had used sheer willpower to prevent the accident. Fey was indeed the word to describe him.
She drew back from the knothole, and turned to the darkened cellar behind her. For the first time she noticed there were several doors into adjacent rooms, but nothing to indicate her uncle’s whereabouts. “Uncle John?”
“Here, Ellie!”
His muffled voice emanated from the door to her right, so she opened it and went inside. To her relief, the small room inside was warmed by a fireplace, and was quite cozy after the chill and drafts of the stairs and outer cellar, but as she entered, her uncle almost leapt from his tall stool to seize her candle and extinguish it.
“Never light candles during daylight, Ellie! Never! For it is very bad luck and an omen of death.” There was a frightened note in his voice, an edge that told of total belief in what he was saying.
Shaken to hear words she herself had uttered during the reading of her tea leaves, Ellie stared at him. “Uncle?”
“Nikolai did that too, you see, and within a week—” John broke off, biting back the rest of what he’d almost said.
“Who is Nikolai, Uncle? And what happened within a week?” Ellie was a little frightened by the intensity of his emotion.
He took a deep breath to steady himself, then forced an apologetic smile. “No one, my dear, no one at all. Forgive me, I fear you caught me in a superstitious moment.”
“I’ve never heard of it being unlucky to light candles during the day.”
“No? Oh, it’s the same as never walking under a ladder. You know the sort of thing.”
Yes, she knew the sort of thing; she also knew that he had meant every word of his instinctive warning.
Placing the candlestick on one of the cluttered trestle tables that lined two walls, he wiped his hands thoroughly on a clean cloth, then kissed her on the cheek. “I trust you’ve slept and eaten well?”
“Yes to both.”
He beamed, then waved an arm to encompass the little room. “Welcome to my lair.”
Ellie looked around. Samples of soft-paste porcelain were everywhere, stacked on the floor, lining shelves, and even higgledy-piggledy in a wooden crate in a corner. One of the trestles was taken up with his painting and gilding equipment, the other with brushes, oils, cloths, dishes, knives, turntables, and sundry other things necessary for his specialized work. This included metal oxides for all hues, copper to give green, cobalt for blue, manganese for purple, and antimony for yellow.
Her gaze rested on the item her uncle had been working on before she interrupted him. It was a glazed but as yet undecorated soup tureen, twelve inches high, wide, and deep, of the same size and shape she had seen on the unknown mantel when Mrs. Lewis turned the tea leaves.
To one side of it, also awaiting painting, lay an elaborate stand, and a high-domed cover with a pinecone knob. She noticed two more tureens set on another trestle, both in the same untouched state, the delicate waxy hue of soft-paste porcelain so fine and fragile that it was only a few steps away from glass. But she had not long since seen one of these beautiful things in its finished state.
Somehow she managed to hide her shock. “Good heavens, Uncle, how many gallons of soup do such tureens hold?”
“Enough to fill Cardiff Bay,” he replied dryly, then answered more seriously. “Actually, it’s two gallons. Look kindly upon these elegant receptacles, my dear, for my hopes for the future rest upon one of them. I know not yet which,” he said quietly.
“Really?”
He went to the table, sorted through a pile of papers, then drew one out. “This arrived just before Christmas. Read it.” He thrust it into her hand. “It’s from a Prince Valentin Andreyev in St. Petersburg.”
“Who is he?”
“I have no idea, except that he appears to be aide-de-camp to Czar Alexander, but I do know his communication pleases me immensely. It’s in French, but I’m sure you will have no trouble with that. Read on, read on.” John waved a hand at her.
She began to read, then looked quickly at her uncle. “A commemorative tureen for the czar?”
“Yes, my dear, an order for royalty, to be given to the czar early in July, on the Russian day for celebrating the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. We celebrate it on June twenty-ninth. Be that as it may, I have to have a fully completed tureen ready to leave here sometime in May, to allow for the voyage to Russia.
“Have you any idea how important such orders as this are to china manufacturers? Just think how Wedgwood benefited from Catherine the Great’s commission for a huge dinner service. They have not looked back since. Whichever of these tureens is eventually selected for decoration, it could be as beneficial as that to Nantgarth. And furthermore, somewhere in Prince Valentin’s letter he states that I am to bring the tureen to St. Petersburg myself, so that the czar can meet me.” He paused then, as if in this he perceived a hidden drawback.
“Uncle?”
“Well, I vowed never to go there again.”
“Again? So you’ve been there before?”
“Yes, my dear, I’ve been there, and it is a place that holds only sad memories, I fear.”
Ellie wanted to ask more, but something in his demeanor prevented her.
“Anyway,” he went on briskly, “this order from the czar is what I meant yesterday about you seeing the Russian capital, for if I go there, then you, my dear, will most certainly have to come with me.”
“Really?” Ellie’s eyes shone and her lips parted in a delighted smile. “But how on earth has the czar heard about this little china works?”
For a second she again thought she saw something odd in her uncle’s eyes; then his smile returned. “I believe I have Lord Griffin to thank.”
She was happy for him. “Oh, I’m so pleased to hear this, Uncle.”
“I am, too, believe me. And I’m relieved that I have actually managed to produce three perfect tureens. I made twenty-five before I succeeded.”
“Twenty-five?” Her eyes widened.
He drew a heavy breath. “They all failed, turning almost to glass, crumbling, distorting, shivering. Oh, anything that could go wrong did go wrong. But here are three bites at the cherry, eh?”
“How are they to be decorated?”
He shrugged. “Well, believe it or not, that is being left up to me. The only stipulation is that it must be lavish with gold.”
“As befits the emperor of Russia,” she said with a smile. “Do you have a particular design in mind?”
“Flowers, I think, for that is what I do best. Prince Valentin intends to visit here when he comes to Britain in a few weeks’ time, and he will choose which tureen will go to St. Petersburg.”
“Nantgarth is to be graced by a Russian prince? How very grand we will be.”
“Indeed.” He drew a rather trembling breath. “So much hangs upon this, Ellie. When I have finished the decoration and gilding, there will be no other pieces to compare with their rare beauty. The czar’s soup will be served from a veritable Holy Grail!”
She smiled. “If anyone can do it, Uncle, you can. No one has a more delicate brush, or more artistic ability.”
“And no one else has my secret formula.” He winked and tapped the side of his nose, but then became serious again. “Would that this new connection with St. Petersburg could put the past entirely to rights, but that can never be.”
“I don’t understand, Uncle.”
“Nor is there any reason why you should, my dear. Take no notice of my ramblings.”
She wasn’t entirely reassured. “Is there something it’s better I should know about, Uncle?”
“Nothing at all, my dear, nothing at all. Oh, don’t look so worried, and just be thankful, as I am, for the stroke of unutterable good fortune that crossed my snowy path with Lord Griffin’s on the Pennines. If it were not for his generosity in setting me up here, his tolerance concerning the ground rents, and his undoubted hand at work on my behalf in Russia, I would not be in this hopeful position now. I owe him a great deal.”
Ellie was reluctant to accept the change of subject, but had no real option, for it was clear her uncle had no intention of elaborating on anything else about his past in St. Petersburg. “What is Lord Griffin like?”
“You ask that in a way that suggests some preconceived opinions.”
She colored a little. “Well, I do rather have a picture of him in mind.”
“And what picture might that be?”
She told him, and he roared with laughter. “My dearest Ellie, you could not be more wrong. A widower he may indeed be, and rightly keen on the Griffin stud, but certainly not to the point of stinking of horses and wearing his boots in bed! He is young, fashionable, exceedingly good-looking, charming, and amusing, and I have the honor to be able to address him by his first name, Athan.”