Authors: Elizabeth Essex
“And taste.” The old goldsmith put the coin in his mouth, and kept it there as he reached across the workbench to take up a heavier pair of metal snips. He spat the coin from his mouth into this hand, before he plied the tool to snip a small wedge out of the coin.
“Mala fide,” the old man muttered into his beard, and passed the split coin to Tanner, who was fairly bristling with barely contained energy at the sight.
“What does that mean?” Claire looked from Mr. Solomon to Tanner.
“Mala fide.” Tanner explained, “Made in bad faith. A forgery. Fake.”
The goldsmith turned his mouth down in distaste. “A thin layer of gold fused over a core of lead, and then struck. Worthless.”
“Not entirely,” Tanner countered. “Only if discovered.”
“Ah. True.” Mr. Solomon chuckled into his beard. “They’re good.” He looked at the tiny cut he’d made into the body of the coin again through his hand lens. “Damned good. Proportions correct. Attention to the detail. The formation of the equine pose, the depth of the lettering. Whoever they are, they’re skilled.”
“Whoever?”
The old goldsmith shrugged, and took a long pull at his beard.
Tanner helped him along. “Who could make such a thing, in London, Elias? It’s not like making flimsies—forged banknotes,” he added for Claire’s benefit. “It takes a different kind of skill. And space. Lead, you said, and gold fused together. Working hot? Lead smelting isn’t something that can be hidden in a garret room like paper notes. Whoever did this has materiel, space, and skills.”
“A skilled hand to forge the molds, but then—” Mr. Solomon made a disparaging sound. “Half of Rotherhithe is heavy with the sulfurous stink of lead.”
“But I’ll venture not half of Rotherhithe has the skill for this kind of gold work. Who could have had the skills to cast the molds to strike something that could so easily pass for the real antique? And what have you heard of goldsmiths who were down on their luck, or not keeping their custom, who suddenly seemed to have bounced back?” The relentless questions poured out of him, as if from an open tap. “What lead manufacturers were badly operated or on their last legs and have had a sudden resurgence? Who could be bribed into taking on this kind of work? Who was vulnerable or in debt? Walker and Maltby on Red Bull Wharf? Or Reynolds and Wilkins in the Barbican? Who?”
“Got your ear to the ground, haven’t you?” The old man chuckled, but he was serious enough. “There are goldsmiths enough with skill, including myself, and making a cast for a replica is not a crime—maybe even Parker and Fields can make a replica for a client who wants to wear such a coin as a fob, and wants to preserve his original.”
The old man took another long moment, as if he were considering how much to say, before he made a little moue of decision. “But no reputable goldsmith makes a replica out of lead. And the lead—passing the lead coin off as gold—is where the crime occurs. Now that I put together a little of this, and a little of that, I’d say Walker’s
son
”—Mr. Solomon said the name as if the word itself might be poisoned with the fumes of lead—“fell out with the old man. Went into business on his own just recently. Set up down St. Catherine’s Dock.”
Tanner was watching the old man’s face, reading his expression. All but quivering in his excitement—like one of her father’s gundogs who knew exactly where to find the fallen grouse. “Yes. What else do you hear?”
“I hear he was back telling his old man he didn’t need him, or his ways—that he had plenty of business. But I hear the old man doesn’t believe it, and says the yard he took at Parson’s Stairs is decrepit, the shot tower falling down. And for myself?” Here Mr. Solomon made an ironic little shrug. “Since the peace, lead yards are not doing the custom they did during the war. Not such a demand for bullets. The peace is bad for business. So, what is he doing in his decrepit yard in St. Catherine’s Dock? Perhaps Walker’s boy is pouring something other than bullets. Perhaps.”
“Ah.” Tanner drew the word out, thinking and looking up at the low ceiling meditatively, his expression a sort of agonized ecstasy of a Renaissance saint. “St. Catherine’s Dock. Where the traffic of the Goodwyn, Skinner and Thornton brewery might mask an havey-cavey business they’ve got going on. Ingenious. Yes, I’ll find out.”
“But what about the real coins?” Claire asked.
Both men turned to her, as if they had forgotten she was there. But only one of them smiled—Tanner. “Go on,” he said.
Thus encouraged, she said, “Does it stand to reason that someone has to have the real coin in order to make a copy? Could it have come from someplace like the Royal Academy, or Sir John Soane’s house, where the artifacts from Pompeii have been displayed, and someone could see it, and then make his own copy?”
“I see why you like her.” Mr. Solomon offered Tanner his own sharp, conspiratorial smile. “But I
have
seen the original coin from which
this”
—he tossed the fake upon the table—“was copied.”
“You’re sure?” Tanner was still bluntly inquisitive.
“Oh, yes. Gold the color of Damascus honey, soft and buttery, and as ancient as time. Only a few legitimate dealers in London would have such a coin. So I ask a question or two, but Goadly and Berry, up on Cornhill—who are the ones who would know—say they’ve never dealt that coin. So it wasn’t bought in London.”
“But it was genuine?” Claire was still trying to follow. “Something from which someone might strike—is that the right word?—strike these replicas?”
“Fakes,” Tanner insisted. “Made of lead to deceive.”
“It was genuine. As genuine as this one is not.” Mr. Solomon was emphatic. “This I know.”
“But the question is who brought you the coin?” Claire was thinking out loud, trying hard to understand. “And if that is the same person who is striking these fakes?”
“Oh, oh.” Mr. Solomon clapped his gnarled hands together. “I can see why you like this one, Tanner. Very clever. She’s like you. She’s special.”
* * *
She was special. She was clever.
She was his.
“Yes,” he answered but met Elias’s eyes, willing his attention back to the pressing question that he had not yet answered. “Who brought you the real aureus, Elias?”
“Customers.” His answer was vague and evasive. “Discerning gentlemen who know better than to take their custom to tinkers on the High Holborn.”
It wasn’t like Elias Solomon to be so cagey. “Elias?”
The old man looked at Tanner and then let his eyes travel very carefully to Claire before they came back. “If I might have a private word, about my fee?”
The telling glance would have been enough without the additional mention of the fee—Elias knew damn well Tanner would compensate him for his trouble. He always had. So something else was afoot.
Tanner gestured toward the doorway. “If you’ll give me a moment, Claire?”
“Of course.” She smiled, nodded, and curtsied politely to Elias Solomon and then moved just outside the doorway of the workroom, so Tanner might turn his back and speak to the goldsmith privately.
“And?”
“The names.” Elias lowered his voice to something just heavier than a whisper.
Tanner’s impatience was about to crawl out of his body. “Yes?”
“Be careful, Tanner. These are powerful men.”
The warning was out of character for Elias, whom Tanner had known for so many years, he had lost count. “I always am.”
His brusque assurance wasn’t enough. “Be more careful. Especially with her.” Elias’s eyes cut to the figure in the doorway. “I don’t like to think I have to worry about you.”
“With her? You don’t.” Was this meant to be some sort of fatherly advice to act the gentleman? “What is it you’re trying to tell me?”
Elias Solomon gave him another long look over the top of his spectacles, his eyes old and sad and tired. “Tanner. Several men have come to see me about this gold coin of yours. Each more powerful than the next. First was Mr. Edward Layham, a monied squire from Suffolk.”
That it was Layham satisfied Tanner’s brain. The pieces of the puzzle were finally beginning to take shape.
“Not a regular customer,” Elias Solomon went on. “It’s real, I tell him. Then next comes Sir James Kersey, a baronet who has never darkened my door before. Asks the same question. Gets the same answer.”
This was news of a different sort. Sir James Kersey was known to him. Amiable, social, a man who liked his cards for recreation but was not a gambler. The kind of man who did not lead but followed. But Elias was not done. “And?”
“And the last, my dear boy, was the Earl Sanderson.”
The words fell on him like a cold dousing from a bucket. His skin went cold and clammy, his palms damp.
And while his brain’s reaction was more controlled than his body’s, the result was the same—every fiber of his being was alert.
“The Earl Sanderson.” He repeated Elias Solomon’s words, trying them on for size, giving his brain time to sort out this particularly unwelcome piece of evidence, and make the connection backward, from the coin to the fob, and from the fob to Maisy Carter’s dead body.
He could find none.
But he understood one thing very clearly. Things had just gotten complicated. Very complicated.
“I will proceed with all due caution,” he assured Elias Solomon. Caution in some areas and greater speed in others. “I need a ring.”
“A ring?” Elias Solomon echoed his words as if he did not understand.
“A ring. Gold. Beautiful. Delicate. Fitting.”
“Fitting?” Elias took another meaningful glance toward the doorway. “I see. May I be the first to wish you happy.”
Tanner didn’t bother to read the man’s tone—warning or disapproval, it made no difference. His course had been set since the moment he followed Lady Claire Jellicoe out the doors of his grandmother’s house. “You may.”
“I do wish you happy.” Elias took out an iron ring full of keys and began to select one out. “But will I be reading about you in the tittle-tattle of the scandal sheets, or will there be a formal announcement from her father, the earl, in
The Times
?” Tanner’s old friend’s tone was still quiet and careful. As if Elias Solomon were the one who were unsure of
him
.
“I honestly don’t know.” Indeed, he no longer knew exactly how he was going to achieve his object, only that he must do it rather sooner than he had planned. And perhaps differently. “How did you know who she was?”
“Come now, Tanner. I may be an old man who rarely leaves my quarter of the city, but I read the newspapers. I see the drawings in the print shop windows. She is one of the beauties of the age—one of the Swans of Society, they call her. And her father, the earl, is a discerning regular private customer. I would have to be blind and deaf not to recognize her. Even in her present state.” With another glance at the doorway, Elias Solomon tapped a careful finger across his hollow cheek. “Are you going to tell me how
that
happened, or am I going to have to be vulgar, and insist?”
As the Earl Sanderson was a respected client of Elias Solomon, it behooved Tanner to make one thing perfectly clear. “A man named Lord Peter Rosing thought to try to rape her. I stopped him.”
Even as he said it, Tanner could hear the pride, the savage satisfaction, in his voice. He made an effort to tamp it down. He needed to think—if Elias Solomon had recognized her, who else did? Was he exposing her scandal even as he planned to protect her from it?
“God blight him. Although I’m sure you already have.” Elias Solomon leaned down and unlocked a drawer. “In that case…”
Elias Solomon retrieved a sueded pouch from his drawer, and from it handed Tanner an exquisitely wrought band of jewelry, composed of gold and scrolls and petals. It was a creation of air and stunning, delicate beauty. “It’s perfect.”
Elias Solomon smiled. “Of course. I
know
you—I have since you were eight years old. At eight and twenty you haven’t changed all that much. You have good taste. You always have. You still like the things beyond your reach.”
It
was
fatherly advice, after all. Fatherly advice no one else would give him.
Tanner’s mouth felt dry and tight, but he made himself ask. “Are you saying she is beyond my reach, truly?”
“No.” Elias leaned forward again and looked into Tanner’s eyes. “I am telling you to reach very, very carefully, and for the love of God, boy, don’t get caught.”
“Ah.” Tanner let air back into his lungs, and felt some of his confidence swagger back. “I won’t. I never have.”
“Then take it with my blessing, and go. Leave an old man to break his fast in peace.”
“Thank you.” Tanner hid the ring in the pouch he wore from a string around his neck under his clothing, safe next to his skin. Old habits died hardest. “Keep your ears open. Send word if you hear anything I should know.”
“Chances are you’ll hear it before I will, but you have my word. Now go. Take that girl home where she belongs.”
Tanner couldn’t. Not now.
And as he couldn’t agree to something he knew he would not do, Tanner only nodded and took his leave. He found his breath and his wits again once they were outside, in the open air of the close confines of Angel Alley.
Claire turned toward him with a smile. In the warming light of morning, her porcelain perfection was disrupted by the frown pleating her forehead. And by the damn bruises scrawled across her cheek in obscene color.
He should have killed Rosing—Rosing was the one person Tanner was absolutely sure was an unrepentant villain. He should have held his hand across the man’s face, and smothered the useless life out of him when he had the chance.
“Tanner? Was everything all right with Mr. Solomon?”
Tanner willed the rage to leach away. “Yes,” he assured her, the falsehoods falling easily from his tongue. “That is just his way. I didn’t like to pay him in front of you. He might have refused the money. Pride always asserts itself more strongly in the presence of a beautiful lady.”
She shook her head and pulled her scarf up over her head as they passed their reflections in the dusty window of an antique bookseller. “I’m not beautiful today. I feel like I never will be again.”