Chapter Fifteen
“This Madeira,” Molly said, “was aged in a cellar beneath an old Portuguese monastery, where the stone keeps a perfect coolness even in summer, and every cask comes out tasting as though it has been taught patience.”
The customer, a stout gentleman in a green coat who had entered Teddy’s wine shop with the mild intention of purchasing a bottle of claret for his wife’s birthday, regarded the girl behind the counter like a man who had wandered into a theatre and was not entirely certain whether he was audience or performer.
“Is that true?” he asked.
“It is true that the cellar was once part of a monastery,” Molly said. “The patience is my interpretation. But the wine does not require assistance from me. Taste it.”
She poured a measure into a glass and held it out. The customer took it, and the tasting was conducted with the solemnity Molly brought to every transaction, as though the fate of nations might depend upon his verdict.
“That is very good,” he said, with the slightly surprised air of a man who had expected adequacy and received excellence.
“It is remarkable. The soil gives it that warmth at the finish, and the sea air leaves a brightness upon it which one does not find in common wines. There is something of the Atlantic in it, Mr Colton. Your wife will taste it too, and she will look at you across the dinner table and think, this man understands me, and you will not have to say a word, because the wine will have said it for you.”
Mr Colton bought three bottles, having intended only one, and left the shop with the bewildered cheer of a man who had been given a gift rather than relieved of his money.
Molly wrapped the bottles in paper and tied them with a length of blue ribbon she had brought from the milliner’s supply room: a small relic of her former life, now pressed into new service because presentation, as she had explained to Teddy on her first full morning, was the difference between selling wine and selling an occasion.
“You just told that man his Madeira had been improved by monastic architecture,” Teddy said from behind the ledger, where he was attempting to reconcile the morning’s sales with the morning’s stock and finding that the two bore only a distant acquaintance with one another.
Molly leaned one hip against the counter and bit the end of her thumbnail. “I told him the patience was my interpretation. He chose to purchase the interpretation. That is the art of selling.”
“The art of selling also includes writing down what has been sold, so that I may know what remains in the stockroom.”
“I did write it down.”
She produced a piece of paper from beneath the counter and slid it across to him. Teddy examined it and discovered a list of transactions in Molly’s handwriting, which bore much the same relation to legibility that her conversation bore to brevity.
“This says you sold four bottles of the Bordeaux, two of the port, and something that is either a sherry or a drawing of a cat.”
Molly peered over his shoulder. “It is a sherry. The S became enthusiastic.”
Teddy looked from the paper, to the girl behind the counter, to the morning’s receipts, which showed more sales in three hours than he ordinarily managed in a day.
The laugh that escaped him was easy and unguarded: the laugh of a man who had long ago accepted that the world arranged itself according to principles he did not entirely understand, and that resistance was less profitable than enjoyment.
She had been working the longer hours for five days, and the transformation was remarkable.
The wine shop, which had formerly been a quiet, respectable establishment frequented by knowledgeable gentlemen and the occasional curious passer-by, had become almost fashionable.
People came for the wine and stayed for Molly.
Word had spread, as word always seemed to spread around Molly Granger, through that invisible machinery of goodwill and gossip she set in motion wherever she went, that the wine shop on Quiet Street had a young woman behind the counter who could talk one into buying a bottle one had never heard of and make the purchase feel like admission to a secret.
She was, by any honest reckoning, ill-suited to those portions of the work which required tidy columns, exact totals, or sustained attention to numbers rather than people.
She transposed figures, invented abbreviations no one else could decipher, and poured samples with a generosity that caused Teddy to look, at intervals, faintly wounded.
But she could sell.
She could sell because, for Molly, selling was only another form of seeing.
She observed people, discovered what they wanted before they quite knew it themselves, and offered them not merely a bottle, but a story in which they might recognise themselves.
She sold wine as she made friends: by paying attention, by being interested, and by telling stories that were true in feeling even when they were not burdened by fact.
“This Bordeaux,” she told a nervous young husband buying wine for his first dinner party, “was carried across the Channel by a one-eyed sailor named Jacques, who had very little respect for weather and none at all for excisemen.”
The young husband listened with solemn attention, bought the bottle, and left looking considerably more equal to his dinner party than when he had entered.
Only when the bell above the door had settled did Teddy look up from the ledger.
“It was shipped by a perfectly ordinary merchant named Mr Higgins.”
“Jacques is more compelling, Teddy.”
“Jacques does not exist.”
“Jacques exists in that gentleman’s imagination, which is presently the important place.
He will serve the Bordeaux at dinner, tell his guests the sailor story, and every person at the table will enjoy the wine more because of it.
Then they will come here to buy bottles of their own, and you will have sold six instead of one. ”
“And Mr Higgins?”
“Mr Higgins has already been paid. Jacques must earn his keep.”
Teddy opened his mouth, closed it again, and returned to the ledger.
Molly grinned.
“Jacques sends his compliments.”
The warmth was back.
Not quite the same warmth she had brought with her when she first came to Bath: that quick, instinctive brightness which had survived even fear, exhaustion, and flight, as though some part of her refused to be extinguished.
This was something more deliberate. It had been tested, dimmed, nearly put out, and its return had the brave, obstinate quality of a candle relit in a draught.
She was still afraid. Fear remained beneath the laughter, a second pulse she could not silence.
Prescott was still in Bath; she knew it in the way one knows a change in weather, by a tightening of the air before the rain begins.
It made her glance twice down certain streets and check the lock at Mrs Bramble’s before she slept.
But fear was no longer the whole of her.
It had been pressed down, challenged, outtalked, outworked, and overruled by the life she was building in spite of it: by Teddy’s invoices, Mrs Bramble’s tea, Dorothea’s sharp kindness, Cillian’s steady presence, and her own furious refusal to be made smaller by a man in a grey coat who wrote unsigned letters and visited boarding houses while she was at work.
Cillian came to the shop every day.
At first, he told himself it was to see Teddy. By the end of the week, even Cillian, who could preserve a pretence longer than most men could sustain a principle, was forced to admit, in the strict privacy of his own mind, that Teddy was not the reason.
He came in the mornings, when the shop was quieter, and sat in the corner with a glass of whatever his brother pressed upon him. From there, he watched Molly work.
He watched her arrange bottles, charm customers, invent histories, dispute Teddy’s accounts, and turn even the tying of a parcel into a small performance, as though paper, string, and ribbon were all accomplices in the sale.
He watched because watching her had become the best part of his day.
The admission, even made silently and to himself alone, altered the shape of something in him. It was not comfortable. It was not easy. But it was true, and truth, once admitted, had a way of refusing to retreat.
On Thursday afternoon, Molly was describing a sherry to two elderly sisters in search of a gift for their nephew’s ordination.
She was making her case with great feeling, hands moving, voice rising and falling, her whole person engaged in convincing them that the sherry tasted of Spanish afternoons, old stone, and the golden light that falls through cathedral windows at four o’clock.
The sisters leaned forward in rapt delight. Teddy shook his head behind the ledger. The shop was warm, full, and alive.
A laugh escaped Cillian without warning.
Not the brief, reluctant sound he had managed at Teddy’s dinner. Not a dry breath of amusement, nor the rusty approximation of mirth.
A real laugh.
The sound startled everyone present, including Cillian himself.
Molly stopped in the middle of her sentence and turned to stare at him with such complete, unguarded astonishment that the two elderly sisters turned also. Teddy looked up from the ledger.
The entire shop, which a moment before had belonged to sherry, Spanish light, and ecclesiastical nephews, was suddenly fixed upon the Earl of Harrowden, seated in the corner with a glass in his hand and an expression on his face that suggested he had been caught committing some act of which he had not believed himself capable.
“You laughed,” Molly said.
“I did not.”
“You laughed. I heard you laugh.” She turned at once. “Teddy, did he laugh?”
“He most certainly laughed.”
“I may have been… amused.”
“You laughed, Lord Harrowden. I shall mark the day in my memory, since I have no almanack at hand. It is not every afternoon that one witnesses a marvel.”
“You are exaggerating.”
“I am giving the occasion its proper consequence. There is a distinction.”