Edge of Glass Read online

  Edge of Glass

  Catherine Gaskin

  Copyright © The Estate of Catherine Gaskin 2017

  This edition first published 2017 by Corazon Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1967

  www.catherinegaskin.com

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover image from Shutterstock © Ollyy

  Other titles from Corazon Books by Catherine Gaskin

  The Property of a Gentleman

  Sara Dane

  The Lynmara Legacy

  The Summer of the Spanish Woman

  A Falcon for a Queen

  Promises

  More titles coming in 2017

  Visit www.catherinegaskin.com

  to be the first to know when the next Catherine Gaskin ebook is released

  For Joxer and Jem-Jem

  for Kay and for Al

  ‒ and the memory of the

  year of the Enclave

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Preview: The Property of A Gentleman

  Preview: Sara Dane

  Preview: The Lynmara Legacy

  Preview: The Summer of the Spanish Woman

  Preview: A Falcon for a Queen

  Preview: The Wine Widow by Tessa Barclay

  Preview: Lily’s Daughter by Diana Raymond

  Preview: Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom

  One

  Sometimes when I see a scrap of paper blown before the wind I am reminded of the way he seemed to come into the shop that morning ‒ almost soundlessly, with only the stirring of the draught from the door causing me to look around. His stance there had that tenuous quality, as if in a second the wind might blow again and he would be gone, elusive, whimsical. I had looked at him, and with the unreasoning instinct women are forever denying and always using, I knew I didn’t want him to go.

  So I hurried towards him down the long narrow shop, past the games tables and writing-tables, the rococo ornamented commodes, the Staffordshire dogs and the silver trays, indifferently polished now that Blanche was not there to see that they were done properly, or to do them herself. As I walked, it seemed as if I walked into one of those gilt-framed convex mirrors we sold, though I had never noticed this effect before. Perhaps it was because the man at the other end of the shop seemed to loom suddenly so largely ‒ everything else, at the edges, diminishing. The figure was tall, and the face instantly striking ‒ too beautiful, perhaps, for a man, though there was nothing feminine in those features, the planes sharp, the mouth a straight deep line. Perhaps my reaction to him showed in my own face, making him uneasy. He appeared about to open the door again and go; it seemed the gesture of a shy man, someone who is unsure of his acceptance.

  ‘Can I help you?’ I said.

  The half-glance became a full stare, and I knew I was mistaken about the shyness. The eyes were deeply set, of that hard, brilliant blue sometimes encountered in a man, sensual in the way that the hard, straight lips also were sensual.

  Then he offered me a smile that softened all the lines of that arresting face, and that seemed for me to melt the gloom of that rainy Friday morning.

  ‘Oh ‒ I’ll not be troubling you. If I could just look about for a wee while …?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. I would have liked to have shown him about myself, just for the pleasure of it, but I stepped back and allowed him to get past me. His smile still lingered, as if I had done him a personal favour.

  ‘That’s very kind,’ he answered. His voice was deep and yet soft, an Irish voice, the accent a little thicker than I would have expected from the way he was dressed ‒ the good tweed suit carelessly worn, the buff raincoat just fashionably soiled. Perhaps he did not quite carry off those clothes because when I had first looked at him I had thought of an actor, but an actor would long ago have polished that accent out of existence. He continued on down the shop, pausing here and there, moving with a grace and lightness that pleased me, and I also rejected the idea that he might be a prosperous farmer, a farmer on holiday in London. And then I realised I had been tricked into the game I had vowed I would never play ‒ becoming interested in the personalities of customers, guessing about them, acting as if I would be in this business, this shop, for the rest of my life, as Blanche had been. So I turned my back on him, stared out the window, and tried to remember that this was only a morning’s work.

  The name, Blanche D’Arcy, was still lettered in gold on a long black board above the shop, although Blanche had been dead for four months, and I could see, backwards, the distorted reflection of those letters in the window of the shop across the King’s Road. The traffic flowed by, the cabs and the red buses, and when the pace slowed I could see in their sides the reflection of the lighted chandeliers that hung down the length of the shop, and that reflection in turn was thrown back on the rain-slick surfaces of the pavement. Blanche’s name was still high above the King’s Road, as it had been for almost twenty years, and the chandeliers were lighted, as she had always lighted them to attract the customers. Blanche’s customers still came, out of loyalty and affection, but we knew it was all over. The lease of the shop still had six years to run, but I knew I wouldn’t stay here six years. If Mary Hughes, the woman who had worked with Blanche, didn’t want it, I would sell it. It would become another coffee-shop, I supposed; something that made quick money. It was a rainy morning of a cold spring day in London, and my spirits were dampened; I remember I stood there watching the traffic and thinking of other places in which there was always sun, the kind of places I hoped to find next week when I took my holiday in France, the kind of place described in Lloyd Justin’s letter from California that had arrived that morning. I wondered why, in England, we always talked as if sun was the answer to all our unhappiness.

  The sound came in one of the rare moments when there was no traffic, so that it seemed louder than it need have been ‒ the sharp tinkle of glass breaking. I swung around, but he was looking, not at the splatter of crystal fragments on the floor, but directly at me, waiting for me to turn, knowing that the glass would break and I would turn and come towards him.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said. ‘It was very clumsy of me.’ Clumsy was almost the last word I would have used of him. He met my eyes and we both knew that he had lied; he knew that I knew he had lied, and he didn’t care. For some reason the little crystal vase had to be broken.

  ‘Of course I’ll pay for the damage,’ he said. ‘Was it valuable?’

  I bent and picked up a triangular piece of the base; he bent at the same time to forestall me, and again our eyes met. I wondered why I should be the one to look away, discomfited. Blanche’s handwriting stared back at me from the little sticker on the fragment.

  ‘Sheridan,’ I said. ‘Three guineas.’

  He nodded, as if the question of the money was not the most pressing on his mind. ‘Irish,’ he said. ‘It�
�s Irish glass.’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. He waited, and at the same time his hand went out and he took the fragment from me, not to check the price, because he didn’t even glance at it, but as if he sought to make the contact. He waited, still saying nothing, and I felt compelled to add the information, as if he had the right to it. ‘My mother always bought Irish glass when she could. She came from Ireland.’

  ‘Your mother …? Then your mother would be Blanche D’Arcy?’

  The hurt was still there, as if the jagged glass had suddenly pierced my flesh. ‘She was Blanche D’Arcy. She’s dead.’

  ‘Ah …’ The sound was regretful. ‘I’m sorry. Was it long ago it happened, then?’

  ‘Four months. Look … I don’t …’ I wanted to tell him to stop asking his questions, but he knew what I meant.

  ‘Ah, well, it comes to it, finally, doesn’t it?’ He turned the fragment over and over in his fingers, still not looking at it. ‘Would you ever, then, have any more Irish glass? Antique pieces … Something to send back to Ireland. Any more Sheridan, perhaps?’

  When I hesitated, he pressed again. ‘You know ‒ it would be a joke, wouldn’t it, to send back something Irish from London. Ireland’s been a poor country so long, people forget we ever made anything good.’

  Perhaps it was the way he said it, as if he cared more than the casual tone would have had me believe. Which made his smashing of the Sheridan vase all the more strange. In my experience of the trade, young men looking for antique glass were rare enough, but a young man like this one, who might seem to be more at home in some masculine Irish world of pubs and race courses, was an oddity. And I was of the generation to which oddities are attractive. I had seen his hands as we had exchanged the broken fragment of glass; they were heavy and too blunt for the rest of his build, reddish, as if they had been mercilessly scrubbed. The shock was in the seams and callouses, the multiple scars of what looked like cuts or burns. They were strangely at variance with the face.

  ‘Perhaps there’s something,’ I answered finally, compelled by his stare. ‘Down here at the back.’

  He followed me closely, and I wondered if I had gone mad. He had deliberately broken a Sheridan piece ‒ both of us knew it had been deliberate ‒ and here I was calmly offering to show him more of it. But that was the trouble; I wasn’t calm at all. And I had thought, until this moment, that I was at last past the stage of being swayed and moved by a mere face, a presence; a couple of years of hard-won sophistication seemed to vanish with this man. This irritated me, and I was curt as I motioned him to where Blanche had her desk, where she had done her accounts, surrounded by the clutter of little objets. This was in the little alcove formed by the space left over from the hall, with its separate street entrance, and the stairs that led to the flat above.

  There were about a dozen pieces which I remembered Blanche had said were Sheridan, in a glass-fronted cabinet that hung on the wall beside the desk. There wasn’t room to display them properly, and I couldn’t recall that Blanche had ever made any particular fuss about them, but I couldn’t recall, either, that she had ever shown them to customers, even those whose interest was antique glass. As I searched for the right key from those on the ring, I was uncomfortably aware that I was poaching in a preserve that had been Blanche’s own; I hadn’t any special knowledge of the things we sold in the shop; until Blanche had become seriously ill I had lent only occasional help on Saturdays. But without being able to pin-point the arrival of any particular piece, I remembered that any time Blanche had acquired a good example of a Sheridan goblet or glass or plate, it had never been allowed to mingle with the general items in the shop, but had sat with its fellows on the dusty shelves of the cabinet. Obviously she had not considered the little vase which had been broken good enough to join this select group. It wasn’t odd that Blanche had this small collection; most dealers in antiques played favourites. What was odd, now that I thought about it, was that if Sheridan glass had been Blanche’s favourite, she had somehow failed to say so.

  As I fitted the key in the lock I glanced back at the man behind me. He was looking, not at the glass, as a prospective buyer would have been, but directly at me. His stare, instead of warming me, made me feel the chill of the morning once more. I looked away, and my fingers fumbled.

  No one had washed the Sheridan pieces for a long time; their brilliance had given up to the greasy dust that is London’s air. But even to my comparatively inexperienced, and until now indifferent, eye, nothing could ever detract from their fine lines, the sureness of the execution, the ingenuity of the craftsmen who had spun them. I selected the plainest piece I could see, a dessert plate with a design of flowers engraved on its centre, the omnipresent grime lodged in every cut of the engraving. I turned to give it to him.

  But I heard the quick, sharp intake of his breath, and his hand was already reaching past me. It went unerringly to the finest, the most intricate piece, a two-handled goblet on an air-twist stem, the handles a marvellous interweaving of blown glass, culminating, where the drinker’s fingers would grip, in sprays of flowers and leaves. It was heavily engraved with a portrait head and lettering ‒ some kind of commemorative glass. The man looked at it closely, turned it upside down to see the engraver’s mark. His hands were enormously sure as he touched it; now, as it rested between those scarred fingers, I had not the slightest fear that this also would lie in fragments on the floor.

  He murmured, without looking at me, ‘Sheridan …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s it worth?’

  I didn’t know. I didn’t know the value of half the things Blanche had in the shop. She had tried to label all the small oddments of glass and china so that I wouldn’t have to ask her constantly on Saturday afternoons when the shop was filled with King’s Road strollers. But the important pieces had been Blanche’s business, hers and Mary Hughes’s.

  ‘It isn’t for sale.’

  He looked up. ‘But you showed it to me.’

  I had done that, and I couldn’t explain why. I shrugged. ‘I thought you might like to see some good Irish glass. You said …’

  Now it was his turn to shrug. ‘Looking is for museums. But still, if you won’t sell …’

  I didn’t want him to make the whole matter so personal. ‘It isn’t that I won’t sell. It just happens not to be for sale.’

  ‘But if it were for sale ‒ just supposing it were for sale ‒ about what would it cost?’

  I was backed into a corner; I was ignorant, and he probably guessed it. So I put the price as high as I dared, perhaps ridiculously high ‒ I couldn’t tell. ‘Fif-seventy guineas.’

  ‘You’re daft!’ He uttered the words without passion, simply as a statement of fact.

  ‘It’s a very fine piece of glass,’ I said defensively.

  Now he smiled again, a slow smile that mocked and pitied my ignorance.

  ‘Let me tell you ‒ just let me tell you about this.’ He flicked one of his nails against the goblet, and I heard the sweet ring of crystal. ‘This is not just a very fine piece of glass ‒ though it is that, indeed. This is a unique piece. If you were ever interested enough to look, you’d find the original of this pictured in every history of English glassmaking.’

  ‘English?’ I was glad he had made the slip; it gave me back some self-esteem.

  ‘English,’ he repeated. ‘The original of this is known to glass-fanciers as the Culloden Cup. It and its two copies were the main reason why the Sheridan family of glassmakers were forced to leave England and resettle in Ireland ‒ and lucky to be allowed to do that without a charge of treason.’

  ‘Treason?’ I wondered how I had even imagined that this man might be a farmer. His expression, as he scrutinised the glass, was intent, absorbed; he was talking of something he knew and loved intimately, and I could not have stopped him talking even if I had wanted to.

  ‘You see this?’ He pointed to the engraved portrait. ‘Charles Edward Stewart ‒ Bonnie Prince Charlie �
� the Young Pretender. Then these flowers on the handles ‒ the thistle and the rose ‒ the crowns of England and Scotland. And here, twined about the portrait of the Prince, the stricken oak, the Jacobite symbol. Of course there are a lot of these glasses about, but this must be among the finest and the most famous. The Sheridan family were for the Pretender, and Thomas Sheridan himself ‒ the great Sheridan ‒ made two copies of his original and sent them to the Prince as he and his army entered Liverpool on the way south ‒ 1745, was it? ‒ you’d know English history better than I do. Then the luck ran out ‒ those Stewarts were a very unlucky family, I’m thinking ‒ and the Prince was chased north again. I suppose you could say the battle of Culloden Moor was the end of the Jacobite dream. After Culloden one goblet was found among the Prince’s abandoned baggage. The maker was easily identified, of course. The goblet was destroyed, the story goes, by the Duke of Cumberland himself, the victor of Culloden. Sheridan and his family ran to Ireland. But somewhere between Liverpool and Culloden, the second goblet vanished, either broken or given to some loyal supporter of the cause.’

  ‘And the other?’

  ‘With the Sheridan family still ‒ in Ireland.’

  I looked with awe, nervously, at the piece in his hands. ‘Then this one has to be …’

  ‘The one lost since Culloden.’

  He turned it reverently, his finger tracing the lines of the engraving, following the interweaving of handles, stroking the smoothness of stem and foot. The sensuous quality that I had read in his eyes was revealed again in these movements, the hands of a lover on the body of the beloved. His tone was almost dreamy as he murmured softly, ‘Lost for two hundred-odd years … where has it been? Put away in some cupboard, too dangerous to display until everyone had forgotten the Pretender’s cause, then itself forgotten, sold at auction with the contents of a house. Where did she find it, I wonder? God, what incredible chance! What luck … and for her of all people…’

  Without asking my leave, once again he stretched past me and carefully replaced the goblet on the shelf, closing the cabinet door. ‘So you see,’ he continued, his tone normal now, ‘it doesn’t have a price. It belongs in a millionaire’s collection ‒ or with the Sheridan family. Or perhaps,’ he added, with a touch of malice, as if he wanted to deny the former dreaminess, ‘you should be patriotic and give it to the Victoria and Albert, on the grounds that it really is English.’