Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Dante Manelli had drunk all the mineral water he could hold. One more cup, and he would start leaking like a faucet.
An ignoble end. He’d once feared he’d be buried in Cheltenham beneath stucco and Cotswold stone. Instead, he was going to be dissolved. Death by chalybeate spring.
“At first, I was only selling them in the pump room upstairs.” Henry Thompson, Dante’s guide, shouted over the noise of the steam-powered boilers that were busy evaporating the mineral water streaming in, a gallon every few minutes, from the dozens of wells across Thompson’s property.
Thompson knocked soundly on one of the lead pipes, smiling.
“But now, with my manufactory, I’m sending stock to Bath and London.
Found an apothecary in Throgmorton Street who’ll be my licensed and only authorized vendor.
” He held up the brown bottle with the white contents gleaming dully behind the label reading Real Cheltenham Salts.
“Exclusive and unique. Bound to be in demand, don’t you think? ”
As to the matter of being unique, Dante couldn’t say.
The Skillicornes had been selling Cheltenham salts and waters in London for decades, almost since the first spring was discovered.
A man could more or less sink a well anywhere in Cheltenham’s clay soil and find water.
But Thompson, a businessman from the cradle, was finding ways to be proprietary.
And making a profit from it, and wanting to build with those profits. And Dante was an architect in need of commissions. So he forced a smile.
“You know the London market better than I do.”
The heat in the manufactory was stifling, the steam dampening his hair.
His cravat had wilted upon arrival, and he was sweating beneath his coat.
He didn’t envy the stoker, whose job it was to feed the boilers with coal.
The man had long ago discarded his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and the plain back of his waistcoat was damp through with sweat.
Dante nodded at the stoker as they walked by.
Thompson didn’t acknowledge his employee, but Dante had learned never to dismiss—or underestimate—the men doing the real labor.
An idealist could design and dream all he liked, sketch till the pencil was a stub, but if he didn’t employ the right brains and hands, a project was guaranteed to fail.
“Thought you were born and raised there,” Thompson commented, overlooking his enterprise with the air of a man who was satisfied with what he had achieved, but only as a building block for the next dream. “London, I mean.”
“I lived there occasionally,” Dante replied. “When my father had commissions. I wouldn’t call it home.”
Dante hadn’t had a real home until recently, and it wasn’t the doing of his father, who had dragged the family here and there across Britain following his dreams and the fancies of the men who paid him.
Or sometimes, leaving his family for months in rented lodgings or at the whim of a dour relative.
It was Dante who had built himself a house, at long last, putting into it all the features he had been designing for others for so long.
It was Dante who had given his mother a suite of rooms all her own.
His sisters, too, would have a roof over their heads that was deeded in the Manelli name, and no one else’s.
Something none of them had known through Dante’s two-and-thirty years.
It felt strange to have roots at last. Sometimes he feared they might pull him downward, bury him in the folds of the Cotswold hills. He had built in Cheltenham because projects abounded, because it was a town being remade from timber to stone, the way the Emperor Augustus had remade Rome.
But if the work dried up—if the projects petered out, or went to other architects who were cropping up like mushrooms, a new head every time he looked behind him—what was he to do with this enormous mausoleum of a house?
Leave his family behind while he followed the work, and prove himself in the end no better than his father had been.
“What do they do?” Dante followed Thompson out of the manufactory toward the walkway that led to the wooden pavilion housing his pump room and baths, which he had taken to calling Montpelier, evoking the sophistication of France.
“What does what do?” Thompson paused to rest on the stairs.
Dante tried to guess the man’s age and gauged he must be in his fifth or sixth decade.
Thompson had built a fortune as an underwriter and merchant banker in London, had moved to Cheltenham at least a decade before and bought acres of property, and was slowly building an empire that would not just rival but overshadow the other spas in the area: Lord Sherborne’s and Cambray and Alstone, Orchard Well and Essex Well, and of course the venerable Old Well, the original.
Everyone in Cheltenham wanted to capitalize on the precious resource running beneath the soggy land.
And Dante wanted to capitalize on their ambitions.
But he found himself becoming more restless lately, wanting to know what it was all for.
What was the vision? What was the purpose of the town as a whole?
To amuse the fashionable, who were looking for a new stop on the circuit of places where they might show themselves in the pursuit of new amusements?
Was the purpose to revive ailing health, heal worn bodies and tired souls? What was the meaning of any of it?
He didn’t have an answer to this question. Perhaps he was feeling his age. A man’s third decade was for establishing his career and his reputation in the world.
His fourth—what was that for?
“The salts you manufacture. The mineral waters you bottle and sell. What do they do?”
Thompson chuckled and emerged from the manufactory into the open air, which promised a hint of warmth to banish the cool, wet underside of spring.
He stood with his hands on his hips, like a captain on the deck of a ship, and surveyed the vast square of undeveloped land, still grass and shrubs and currently blooming with cornflowers, teasel, and ox-eye daisies.
Dante wondered what Thompson saw as he contemplated the expanse.
Dante saw, in his mind’s eye, a rotunda in the middle of the square, sheltering a pavilion with seating for an orchestra and a floor for dancing.
He saw walkways weaving in gentle patterns towards and away the central structure, with spots to pause to contemplate flowers, listen to the trill of water tumbling over rocks, and sit in conversation.
He saw a cluster of elm trees shading a poet’s corner, statues in each corner to inspire an onlooker with thoughts of beauty, and perhaps a small pool, fed by a small public fountain for drinking, where children and birds could dip their feet.
Now, if he could only enlist Thompson in that vision. But Thompson wanted houses first.
“The water? Does nothing more than ease a man’s thirst, if you ask me.
” Thompson watched the small group of people promenading to and from the pavilion housing the baths.
“But if you tell someone it’s curative, because of a certain smell—list all manner of qualities associated with the chemical and mineral properties—why, a man, or a woman, feels better on the spot.
Then you encourage them one glass isn’t enough, and they ought to pay for a second or third. ” He chuckled.
“And the salts?”
“All the curative properties of Cheltenham, without having to hire a coach and lodging, find servants for the trip, and uproot the household for two weeks,” Thompson said. “All the benefits of the famous waters, delivered to your own door.”
“But you want people coming to Cheltenham,” Dante pointed out. “The villas I’m building. You want people to let or buy them. You want them to come, and then stay.”
“Don’t see why I can’t have both,” Thompson said. “There’s room for all. My villas for those coming to take the waters, to live among healthy air.” He pointed toward the strip of land he had already named the Parade. “And the bottles for those who can’t afford the trip.”
Thompson strode with confidence toward the group that congregated on the broad sweep leading up to the pavilion, new arrivals greeting one another and hailing those already present.
Dante hung back, prickling with the instant, familiar unease that a group of fashionable people always engendered in him.
His father, like Thompson, had been one to head straight for a well-heeled group, unself-conscious about the difference in station, seeing the expensive fabrics, fine horses, and elegant fripperies as a promise of coin that could line his pockets.
Andrea Manelli could mingle with the rich of any station and come away with their affection and promise of patronage.
Dante may have inherited his father’s looks, but not Andrea’s charm, nor his fine touch.
He’d been told he came across as brutish.
Sullen. Superior. He had no interest in inserting himself into a crop of fine folk and handing out cards with his nameplate so prospective patrons would remember him when they wanted to commission fine sculpture for their homes.
Architecture was a science, a profession, a unique skill.
Anyone could chip away at a stone or cast plaster and call it art.
Creating an entire building that could last for decades or centuries—that was a higher calling.
He wasn’t required to expend himself in pleasantries; he was called upon to provide excellent, exacting work of the highest quality.