The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ the arrangement with Peabody worried her.

      ‘We are too much in his hands already,’ was Lavelle’s view. ‘I wouldn’t put it past Peabody to go directly to Frontignac himself. What’s stopping him – except you?’ he added, teasingly.

      She swiped at him with her apron. ‘You might be right, Lavelle,’ she teased back, ‘but underneath everything, Jacob is all business,’ adding more seriously, ‘he is at no risk financially. That is what’s stopping him. He doesn’t pay until he sells. Nobody else affords him that arrangement.’ She paused. ‘But if we are to give the same terms to enter business with others, then what little reserves we have will be strained. We will need to approach the banks – or R.G. Dun, the credit agents!’

      ‘Well we didn’t give it to Higgins …’ Lavelle started, referring to the customer he had secured while she was in Ireland; a steady, but not startling account. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t …’ he corrected himself, so as not to appear critical of her arrangement with Peabody. ‘The city is bursting at the seams. It cannot develop quickly enough. There is such wealth here that we can scarce go wrong by expansion, and without having to extend excessive credit,’ was Lavelle’s final word.

      She told Peabody of their plan, reassuring him that they would not supply anybody within a certain radius of his own stores.

      ‘I wondered how long it would take you. Of course, you must expand – God forbid anything should happen to me!’ was all he said. ‘Come, sit now a while and we will discuss life, instead of business – all only business with you Irish,’ he mocked.

      She was relieved at his generous response. There were times when Jacob seemed more interested in philosophy than profit, and she did love these discussions with him. He seemed to know so much, quoted freely from poem and psalm alike and had such seeming wisdom. How like her father he was in that respect. Yet, unlike the Máistir, Jacob never revealed much about himself; his defence to veer off into being flirtatious with her, if she probed too deeply. Not that he needed much excuse for that either.

      Jacob, how did you come to know so much … of everything?’ She had decided to try some probing of her own. ‘Was it from your father or through schooling?’

      ‘Neither,’ he quipped, ‘but from gazing into the eyes of beauty. Much wisdom is to be found there.’ Then he turned it around, asking questions of her. ‘That song at your wedding – I was reminded of it again recently,’ he began. ‘The “Úna” in your song intrigues me. Love beyond death? Death in love? Which is it?’

      She laughed; he always did this. ‘It is both … it depends,’ she answered vaguely.

      ‘On what?’

      ‘On the love, the lovers – you know that, Jacob!’

      ‘And is this love a common thing, do you think, or only in songs?’ he pressed.

      ‘It is uncommon. If it were common, it would not be written about.’ She tried to bring the discussion back within the framework of the song but Peabody was having none of it.

      ‘So, there is love and there is love. One, the common kind for the many and the other – great, tragic love – for the few. Is that it?’

      She knew where this would lead. He could be wicked, Peabody, the way he forced her to uncompromise her thinking.

      ‘Yes … I suppose so, Jacob,’ she parried.

      ‘What begets the difference, Ellen Rua?’

      It was the first time he had called her that since she had spoken of it to him on her return to Boston – about how she had shortened her name, dropped the ‘Rua’.

      ‘I don’t know, Jacob, and don’t call me by that name.’ She stamped out the words at him.

      ‘Do you know the Four Elements of the Ancient World, Ellen … Rua?’ he repeated provocatively.

      ‘Of course I do!’ she said, angry that he still persisted with her old name. ‘Earth, wind, water, fire,’ she reeled them off.

      He held up his hand. ‘Fire – that is it, the Element of Fire. That is what begets the difference, Ellen Rua.’

      Sometimes he was hard to follow, the way his mind twisted and darted.

      ‘The Element of Fire? What on earth are you talking about, Jacob?’ she asked. ‘And I told you – it’s Ellen!’

      He ignored her reprimand. ‘That is the difference between love for the many and love for the few – the Element of Fire,’ he answered, as if it were all self-evident. Then, seeing the look on her face, he continued, ‘Fire smoulders, it burns, it rages, it purges and purifies, it engenders great passion … and it destroys.’ He paused, took her hand as if passing some irredeemable sentence on her.

      ‘You were named for fire, Ellen … Rua.’

      The talk with Peabody had unsettled her. What was he at with such a statement? That she was named for fire, the element that destroys! Jacob was trying to bait her, to stir something in her. Maybe some tilt at Lavelle and herself? But why? While Peabody was dismissive about Lavelle, he was hardly suggesting that she didn’t love him, that it was merely a marriage of convenience? You never knew with Jacob. Sometimes she felt that if she were to encourage him, he would be quite willing to draw down the shutters, pull her into the storeroom, and fling her on to the nearest flour sack, or chest of tea from the Assam Valley.

      He was capable too. More than once when he embraced her, he had pushed in close to her, so that even through her underskirt she could feel his ‘scythe-stone’. Whatever about Jacob’s ‘scythe-stone’, his mind was sharp and dangerous, always trying to cut through her thoughts, to lay them bare.

      She didn’t speak to Lavelle about her discussion with Peabody except to say, ‘My fears were unfounded, Jacob was most generous at the news.’

      ‘I don’t trust him, Ellen; and neither should you,’ was Lavelle’s response.

      ‘He has always been upright in his dealings, give him some credit,’ she defended Jacob with.

      ‘It’s not in their nature, the Jews.’ Lavelle would give no ground to her argument. ‘While there’s money to be made, they’re trustworthy. When more is to be made elsewhere, then see how far their trustworthiness stretches,’ he challenged.

      ‘Lavelle, you can’t say that. They’re not all the same, no more than all the Irish are fighters and drunkards,’ she retorted.

      But Lavelle was not for turning. ‘History teaches us – didn’t they betray the Saviour for thirty pieces of silver?’

      ‘That was just one, Judas,’ she responded.

      ‘Yes … His friend,’ Lavelle retorted. ‘Kissed Him and betrayed Him, and the rest – all Jews – stood by while it happened. How well the like of Peabody got started here. The wandering Jew will get in anywhere.’

      ‘Jacob was our saviour when –’ she started to protest, but he cut her short.

      ‘I know you and Peabody have talks, and I know, too, that at the start, he was our saviour, but he is too familiar in his talk with you, and,’ he added, ‘how he looks at СКАЧАТЬ