I picked up my needle and sucked the end of some grey wool to thread it. ‘Where is Mr Salter?’ I asked. ‘I’ve not seen him for ages.’
‘Oh, he’s gone,’ she said, her brow creased into a worried frown. My heart leapt . . . at last a piece of good news! ‘Mr Sheridan was kind enough to send him off to Bristol the day after his play failed. He said he had an errand for him there, but it’s been over a week now and we’ve not heard from him. I thought the change of scene would do him good, but now I’m very worried about him.’ Mrs Reid’s eyes, grown short-sighted after years of close sewing, now seemed to be staring at nothing. Her glasses slipped from her bony nose and dangled from their ribbon on her chest. As a widow, it was widely known backstage that she had set her cap at Mr Salter, the most eligible bachelor to appear in Drury Lane for many years. She had a fair bit set by for a rainy day, it was said: what with her money and his pretensions to gentility, it was an advantageous match on both sides. But I couldn’t imagine it myself. Anyone marrying that dry old stick of a playwright, even if he was the second cousin to a lord over Norwich way, must need their head examining.
‘Perhaps he’s not coming back?’ I asked hopefully. ‘Perhaps his cousin has decided to stop him ruining the family reputation with his plays and has offered him employment.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mrs Reid waspishly, coming to herself and stabbing her velvet pincushion with a pin. ‘The Earl of Ranworth does not think anything of the sort. In fact, from what Mr Salter says, it’s the Earl of Ranworth’s own son that cause, the sleepless nights, not his cousin.’
‘Oh?’ I said, intrigued. This sounded like good material for a story: dissension in high places, wayward sons and worried fathers. It would certainly serve to pass the tedious time of sewing.
Mrs Reid was flattered by my interest . . . I knew how to coax her to be indiscreet. She loved passing on gossip and, from the sly expression on her face, I could tell that this was a piece of news she had been sworn not to relate. That made it all the more tempting, of course. She probably excused herself by the thought that I hardly counted.
‘Apparently,’ she said, lowering her voice to a confidential whisper, ‘the Earl of Ranworth’s son has run away. He got himself into some kind of trouble and cleared off without so much as a change of clothes.’ She pinched her glasses back on to her nose and picked up her needle. ‘Fell out with his father over plans for his future, Mr Salter says. He’d be disinherited if it wasn’t for the entail.’
‘The entail?’
‘The Ranworth estates are legally tied to the next male heir. The poor Earl of Ranworth has no power over his son.’
Lucky son, I thought. He could afford to be rebellious.
‘I shouldn’t be telling you this,’ she went on though from her face, I could tell she was enjoying speaking so freely before me, ‘but Mr Sheridan has been helping to find the young man. He sent Mr Salter, who knows what he looks like, you see, thanks to the family connection, to search the docks at Bristol. There was a rumour that he was heading abroad from there.’
I hid a smile, imagining the prim Mr Salter poking his nose into the rough and ready dealings of Bristol docks. I could understand now why Mrs Reid was concerned: if Mr Salter wasn’t picked up by the press gang and thrown on board one of His Majesty ships, he could easily be done over by a party of drunken sailors. He would stand out as rich pickings for any troublemaker.
‘Oh, I’m sure Mr Salter will be all right,’ I lied to comfort her. ‘He’ll be back soon, probably bringing the young lord with him, having had a splendid adventure.’
‘And it might give him something worth writing about,’ I added under my breath.
She grumbled something in denial of my optimistic words and we returned to our sewing. I was making a hash of mine as usual, doubly so because of my unsettled mood. I tried to hide the evidence from the eagle eye of Mrs Reid by covering the worst with my apron. I had enough experience of her temper to know that if she was fretting about her lost beau she might take it out on me with her birch measuring rod. My hands still bore the scars of her last bad day.
It came to me as I sat there that since I had first heard about the diamond, everything had turned strange. It was as if the stone stood between me and all the usual things of my life, fracturing and distorting them from their true shape. I wasn’t the only one hiding things under my apron. No one was as they seemed. Mr Sheridan, who claimed not to have enough money to pay for candles, had a valuable diamond somewhere in the theatre, probably not so very far from where I was sitting.
Then there was Johnny. At first glance he seemed an innocent young man making his own way in the world, when in truth he was branded a traitor by the government and was hiding from the law. Not only that, he continued to disguise the fact that he was still drawing his treasonous cartoons by shutting himself away from us all.