Her teeth bit at her nails and she fisted her fingers when she realised what she was doing. Agitation had marked many areas of her body now, she thought—her hands, her stomach with a constant nervous ache and her face, the tension written deeply into lines of ugliness.
Beautiful. Hawkhurst had called her such, but he was a man who had wanted more when he said it and what male would not use falsity in such a situation?
She shook her head hard at this errant nonsense for where was such an idea leading? She had been mortified by both her reaction to his kiss at Taylor’s Gap and her heightened sense of Hawkhurst as he had sat with her in the carriage. Charles’s betrayals were stretched thin across the veneer she had so successfully erected and she knew that any break would destroy everything in the same way that it had once before.
The sweet smell of opium smoke curling from a pipe and Charles’s eyes upon her, glittering bright and furtive. She had allowed him the right to pull the gown away from her breasts so that flesh spilled out into the air, cold in the autumn evening. She had trusted her husband, relied on his honour and his principles, the band of gold around his finger denoting all that she had promised him.
Foolish false troths. It had taken her only one night to understand his depravity.
The noise of feet made her turn and, as the door opened, she saw that Henry Kerslake had finally arrived. He looked distracted and tired, the large bag he carried over his shoulder rubbing a dent into his over-cloak.
‘The jacquards took longer than I had imagined they would to sample. Although the punched cards make the patterns more intricate, they are slow to set up.’ Opening the buckles on the bag, he brought out a swathe of cloth, flowers and leaves that owed much to the influence of Japan spilling forth.
‘Godwin had his hand in the design, Mrs St Harlow, but I have strengthened the colours myself. What do you think?’
‘The stylised motifs are…unusual, though the Oriental taste is gaining in attraction.’ To her eye the shades were too lurid and the shapes too foreign, but her own Louis schemes garlanded in blossom were falling in demand and she knew that they had to widen their range.
‘No one else in Macclesfield is doing anything like it yet, so if we hit the market quickly we will be ahead of them all.’
His sentiment heartened her. With the mooted reopening of the trade routes to Japan, interest in the East had escalated and the furniture being turned out by eminent manufacturers reflected the change. She had begun to see bamboo used in the new mass-produced chairs and tables, something silk patterns such as these ones would complement exactly and she was enough of a businesswoman to understand the necessity of diversity.
Renaissance splendour, Gothic arches, gilded rococo boiseries, French roses and now a simpler lightness from a country far from Europe. Her own designs stood alongside those from the more famous houses, but with the limited time she had to produce them she was beginning to depend on Henry and his ‘fashionable finds’ more and more. The thought concerned her, for if she lost control, everything would be forfeited.
There was nothing to be done, however, and as a woman she was bound to use a man as a front-person no matter how liberal-minded those she was doing business with purported to be. Victorian sensibilities could not be changed in a moment, even though the rumblings of emancipation were beginning to be heard more plainly.
Not for her, though, the luxury of free hours to pursue a lofty cause all in the name of womanhood. Time was her enemy and had been for a long while, though she was becoming most adept at using it more effectively.
‘Put the Little Street Mill into the production of the Japanese-patterned silks and keep the Chester Street Mill producing the French-styled roses.’
Henry Kerslake did not look pleased. ‘You might regret not moving more quickly upon this matter, Mrs St Harlow.’
Irritation bloomed at his criticism, but the relationship between her and Henry Kerslake had been foundering just as certainly as their profits had been increasing. Another few months and she could sell the business at a good advantage. Aurelia was more and more desperate for that time to come.
‘I met a man on the way in who was asking questions about the sort of cargo we bring in here each month. I told him what I knew and he went on his way.’
‘Did he talk to others around here as well?’
‘I don’t know.’
Aurelia felt rattled by the news. A few of her designs had gone missing lately as had a book of invoices detailing payments pending, the new contracts secured detailed in pounds and pence. Could this person have had something to do with that? Perhaps another mill was on the prowl to see what it was they were to produce next. They had been lucky in their choices of design so far and mayhap this had been noticed by a less successful venture.
Some mills had failed even in the four years she had been in business, their warehouses empty and still, the slumps and booms that were so much a part of the English silk industry taking their toll. She wished there could have been someone to talk over these problems with, someone to give her guidance and advice, but her father’s mind had long since dwelt in a place where no one could reach him and her three sisters’ world encompassed none of this. Realising she was again biting her nails, Aurelia stopped. She would place sturdier locks on all of the doors and pray that such measures would be sufficient deterrent.
Henry Kerslake was not quite finished, however. ‘The stranger had that unmistakable air of wealth about him, if you ask me, Mrs St Harlow.’
Shock reverberated through her. ‘What did he look like?’
‘Tall with dark hair and he moved in the way of a man who knows exactly where he is going.’
Lord Hawkhurst? Could it possibly be him? Had he been making enquiries about her that had led him back here? Danger made her breath shallow, although underneath some other small feeling blossomed quietly. She might see him again. He could be here right now, outside somewhere watching. Her glance went to the window, but there was only stillness, the grounds around the warehouse empty.
Fingering the silk on the table before her, she tried to settle back into some sort of work, but the colours and patterns swam into nothingness and all she could see were the golden eyes of a man who had begun to invade her night-time thoughts.
She was therefore pleased when Henry looked at his timepiece and packed up his things, in preparation for a meeting in town with one of the suppliers of buttons.
‘I have left orders in the box for you to sort through, Mrs St Harlow. Dickens & Jones want extras of the fine, blue, handmade shawls for their shop in Regent Street. Perhaps we might need to employ more staff at Chester Street to cope?’
Aurelia winced. Another problem that she would have to deal with quickly. Was there no end to her worries today? She was pleased when Kerslake left and a rare silence enfolded her.
She did not feel like working, fidgety nervousness making her stand, a prickling feeling raising the fine hair on her forearms. She was still at the window a few moments later when a knock on the door took her attention. Thinking it to be Kerslake, she opened it, but it was not him, and the air that she had just breathed in congealed at the back of her throat.
Mrs Aurelia St Harlow stood before him, a swathe of scarlet silk in her hands and wearing the same black dress Stephen had seen her in every time he’d met her.
‘You?’ Her voice could not have been more shocked, her mismatched eyes widened and fearful. ‘What are you doing here?’