‘All right. So this wasn’t a stranger you saw,’ I agreed, endeavouring to make sense of what Jack was trying to tell me. ‘It was someone you recognized, but without actually registering who it was you were looking at. Well, I suppose that has happened to all of us at one time or another. We catch a glimpse of someone so familiar that we don’t really see him. Probably most of the people you met on your way home to dinner were like that, unless you stopped and spoke to them. So what makes you think that one of those faces prompted your memories of Isabella Linkinhorne?’
Jack was tired and growing weary of the conversation. He lay down again, sticking his elbow so firmly into the dog’s ribs that Hercules gave an angry snarl and took himself off to sleep at the bottom of the bed, curling up by my feet.
‘I dunno,’ he grunted sleepily. ‘It jus’ felt like summat I’d seen made me think of her that day in the porch of All Saints’ Church.’
‘And you thought that, after all, maybe you had caught sight of the man she was with, and had just seen him again. Is that what you mean?’
But a loud snore was my only answer.
With the coming of morning, my companion was even less inclined to discuss the matter further. He was by now thoroughly bored with the subject and obviously regretted having mentioned it in the first place. He was anxious to be off to deliver his cartload of soap and to set out for Stowe as soon as possible.
‘Then promise me this, Jack,’ I said, as we swallowed a breakfast of bacon collops and oatcakes and emptied tankards of small beer, ‘that if you ever remember whose face it was you saw — this face that prompted all these memories of Isabella — you’ll let me know.’
He grunted and I had to be content with that. But we parted on the best of terms and with expressions of mutual goodwill, he going off to the stables to collect his horse and to the barn to retrieve his merchandise, while I went in search of the landlord to enquire if he knew of any goldsmiths in the city.
‘Goldsmiths, is it?’ that worthy echoed, grinning. ‘Thinking of buying something for the goodwife at home, are you?’ He enjoyed the joke, shaking with silent laughter. ‘Well, I daresay you’ll find a trinket or two in Goldsmiths’ Row, lad.’
I thanked him in as dignified a way as I could manage, ignoring his unseemly mirth, and set off, following his directions. Hercules trotted behind me, the belt buckled around his neck thwarting him in his attempts to fight every stray cur who crossed his path and to chase each new and enticing smell that tickled his nose.
‘We haven’t the time,’ I told him severely.
Goldsmiths’ Row, however, turned out to be a disappointment. There was no master in any of the workshops who was anywhere close to the correct age for ‘Melchior’, who must now, I reckoned, be around forty. Most of them were elderly, grey-haired, wrinkled men, all, with one exception, nearing sixty by my calculations. Nor did they own to any sons of the right age, but, like the good people of Westbury before them, grew steadily more suspicious of my intentions. And indeed who was to say they were wrong to be on their guard? A shabby stranger with a scruffy dog, I could hardly have inspired any confidence in workshops where I was surrounded by gems and precious metal. Nor did any one of the greybeards own to having any knowledge of Isabella.
The one exception was a Master Cock-up-spotty who had, as far as I could gather, inherited a thriving business from his recently dead father and was now hell-bent on exploiting his new-found importance by making the lives of his apprentices and workmen as miserable as possible, giving and countermanding orders in quick succession in a way that demonstrated all too clearly his ignorance of a business which must have been a part of his existence from childhood. His dress proclaimed the man, reminding me of a young popinjay I had known in Bristol who had come to an unfortunate end. Parti-coloured hose and tunic, long pikes to his shoes and a codpiece decorated with silver tassels. A self-satisfied youth of perhaps some twenty summers, he listened to my enquiry with a condescension that made me grind my teeth and long to hit him on his superior nose. And I noticed that his workmen — one hammering away to turn a thin sheet of the precious metal into gold leaf, another engraving a piece of amber — looked as if they would be pleased to see me try. A third, lovingly polishing a silver chalice with a rabbit’s foot, grimaced at me behind his master’s back.
When I had asked my question, Master Cock-up-spotty shook his head dismissively.
‘There are no other goldsmiths that I know of in Gloucester except my neighbours here in the Row.’
‘Do your workmen know of any?’
I could see that I was beginning to irritate, as well as worry him, but he cast a quick look at the bench behind him, raising his thin eyebrows as he did so. The men immediately stopped what they were doing and concentrated on the problem as though their lives depended on an answer. They knew that would annoy him.
‘All right! Get on with your work!’ he shouted when it became obvious that no reply was forthcoming. He turned back to me. ‘I’m sorry, my good fellow, but nobody here can help you.’
At this point, the elderly man who had been attending to the furnace dropped his bellows and came forward, wiping his sooty hands down the front of his leather apron.
‘’Scuse me, Master, but there were Goldsmith Moresby. He had the workshop right at the end of the Row until ten years or so ago when he got sick and gave up the business. Master Flint, who lived next door, bought it from him, knocked down the inner walls and made the one big workshop. I don’t suppose you’d remember. You weren’t much more’n a boy at the time. But I recollect old master — yer father — and the others getting very disgruntled about it.’
‘So I should think!’ boomed Master Cock-up-spotty. ‘Flint’s always been a conniving old so-and-so, stealing a march on his neighbours. I wonder my father and the others …’
‘What happened to Goldsmith Moresby?’ I hurriedly asked the bellows man. ‘Do you know?’
He nodded. ‘Went to live with his niece, over by the abbey. She looks after him now.’
‘And how old would Goldsmith Moresby be?’
My informant pondered the question, ignoring his master’s growing impatience, manifested by a tapping foot and a face like a thundercloud.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘older’n you, but younger’n I. He were young when ’e started out. His father died, like the Master’s here, when he weren’t so very advanced in years, and he were quick to learn.’ I thought I heard a faint note of accusation, or maybe contempt, in his tone as he cast a fleeting glance at his own unsatisfactory employer.
‘Would you reckon him to be forty now? Or a little older?’ I queried.
The bellows man bit a grimy fingernail before replying.
‘Ar, I reckon so,’ he finally agreed.
‘You say he lives with his niece. Has he no children of his own?’
‘Not that anyone knows of. Not that he knows of. He never married.’
‘Do you know why not?’
But at this, Master Cock-up-spotty exploded with wrath.
‘How much longer are these questions going on? If it comes to that, how much longer do you intend wasting my workmen’s time? You’re costing me money, whoever you are! What’s this Goldsmith Moresby to you?’
I drew myself up to my full height and flexed my not unimposing chest and shoulder muscles, hoping that this display would be sufficient to counteract the glories of piked shoes, parti-coloured hose and nattily adorned codpiece. It seemed to work. Master Pomposity appeared somewhat deflated.
‘I am making enquiries on behalf of Mayor John Foster of Bristol,’ I announced, and left it at that. I didn’t feel that I owed him an explanation.
Meanwhile, the bellows man answered my question as if there had been no interruption.
‘There were some talk — mainly tattle, as these things generally are — about an unhappy love affair. Some maid as he’d wished to wed who’d none of him come the time of askin’.’