by Joan Aiken
‘Don’t be silly, Pa – that won’t do at all. Look at the guests! Half of ’em are wearing crowns – they’re all dukes and duchesses and noblenesses.’
It was true that the guests were all magnificently dressed – the ladies in flashing tiaras, or feather headdresses, in crinolines with spangles and precious stones at every seam; while the men were almost as dazzling, in satin knee-breeches, with jewelled military orders pinned on their jackets, gold epaulettes on their shoulders, rings on their fingers and diamonds on their shoe-buckles.
‘His Nabs certainly do know all of the top nobs,’ said Dido, impressed
‘They come because of my music,’ said Mr Twite with certainty.
He flipped a white-and-gold programme out of the gilt basket of a passing page-boy and showed Dido its contents:
His Excellency the Margrave of Nordmarck,
Landgraf of Bad Wald,
Plenipotentiary in Ordinary from the
Court of Hanover
to His Majesty King Richard IV of England
presents
an evening of Healing and Harmony
with the Eisengrim Household Players
conducted by
Herr Boris von Bredalbane
Programme:
A Suite of Tea Music
B. Bredalbane
Eisengrim Concerto No. 1
B. Bredalbane
Eisengrim Concerto No. 2
B. Bredalbane
‘Coo! Pa, what a lot of your music. Is that really what they’ve come for?’
‘Of course. And to observe a demonstration of its healing power. But that is neither here nor there – Now I must wait no longer – be a good child – behave yourself –’
Dido saw that she would get no help or advice from her father as to how she should conduct herself. In fact he left her without more ado and made his way to the platform, where he conferred with the members of his group.
Glancing warily around her, Dido was pleased to see the red-headed page whose birthday was July the fourth. He, too, carried a basket of programmes, which he was offering to new arrivals.
‘Hey – cully – gimme that basket – be a pal,’ muttered Dido in his ear. ‘Remember me – March the first? I feel like a busted back-stay without summat to do –’
He grinned, passed her his basket, and went off to collect a tray of brimming wine-glasses from the buffet that ran along the side of the room.
Strolling among the crowd, proffering her programmes, Dido felt much more comfortable, and was able to pick up a number of comments from the elegant guests.
‘They say this musical feller – what’shisname – Bredalbane – is really something quite out of the common . . .’
‘I prefer a good military march myself . . .’
‘But does his music really have the power of healing?’
‘Ha, ha! So Eisengrim asserts, but for my part I take that with a pinch of salt!’
‘Poor Eisengrim! I see that, despite all his lures, the king has not come to his party.’
‘No, and I hear the Margrave’s monstrous put about at such a snub – face as long as a fiddle.’
‘As long as a viol da gamba.’
‘Oh, ha ha ha! Begad, your grace has such a wit!’
‘Poor Eisengrim! They say that, since Prince George of Hanover died, he has been trying in every way to win King Richard’s favour – with very small success.’
‘He certainly sets a lavish table –’
Dido noticed that the other pages, having supplied every guest with a programme, were now carrying round trays of refreshments – bowls piled with gleaming caviare, lobster patties, crystallized grapes, ices – besides all kinds of delicacies she had never seen before; besides oceans of champagne in sparkling myriads of glasses. Maybe the people come for the nosh, not Pa’s music, Dido thought; but no, they probably get just as good at home.
Following the example of the pages, Dido went to the buffet for a tray of glasses, wondering a little anxiously if she would be spotted as an intruder; but it seemed that extra staff must have been taken on for the occasion; nobody gave her a second look. Behind the buffet, busy opening bottles of wine, she noticed a couple of the black-leather-coated boys whom she had last seen bullying half-crowns and half sovereigns out of the poor traders in Wapping High Street. Now they were dressed up stiff and grand in white wigs and gold-laced white uniforms.
It sure is handy to be small and nohow-looking, thought Dido, receiving a tray from one of these, whose glance passed over her indifferently. Wouldn’t it be a joke if I saw somebody I know amongst the guests – Simon or Sophie maybe? Gliding about like a small black ghost in her page’s uniform, she listened and watched, offered food and drink, ice creams and sorbets, tea and coffee, for upwards of an hour. Then the service of refreshments came to a stop, the guests began to settle themselves on the gilded chairs, and the musicians to tune their instruments more loudly, as a hint that they would shortly begin playing.
All this time, Dido had not once laid eyes on the Margrave; but now she noticed him walk in at the end of the room farthest from the platform; his face looked puffed and red, oddly so – from bad temper, because the king had not come to his party, or for some other reason? – He walked, too, with a slight limp, and sometimes pressed a hand against the small of his back as if he had a pain there. Snatching a glass of champagne from the tray of Dido, who happened to be nearest to him, he gulped it down without looking at her. He was as gorgeously dressed as any of his guests in white velvet with gold trimmings, which had the effect of making his face appear even redder and puffier.
‘Dear excellency!’ said a lady in a diamond coronet and amber satin gown. ‘We are so much looking forward to your musical treat.’
‘I am happy to think, Lady Maria, that you will not be disappointed.’
The Margrave was obviously making a strong effort to collect himself and behave as if nothing were amiss.
‘Do, do tell me, Margrave, who is to be healed? I am so curious –’
‘Why, you see that row of seats to the right of the platform – some ailing Chelsea Pensioners, some afflicted children from the Foundling Hospital are to be brought – indeed, there they are now –’
Half a dozen elderly men in pensioners’ uniforms, limping on crutches, were followed by children who were wheeled in basket chairs.
‘What a dismal sight!’ whispered one lady. But others said, ‘How touching! What quaint mites! How wonderful it will be if this evening’s programme can really help them.’
Somebody clapped hands for silence and the Margrave walked to the front of the orchestra and said, ‘My friends, I am happy to welcome you here. I need say no more. My personal physician and medical adviser, Doctor Willibald Finster, will explain to you about the use of Herr Bredalbane’s music.’
Dr Finster, looking neat and brisk in black with a grey cravat, gave a short talk on the healing power of music; and that of Bredalbane in particular, with allusions to natural harmonies, waves of magnetism, currents of power, and other things that Dido did not understand. Croopus, she thought, does Pa’s music really do all that? Or is it a load of boffle?
‘Some people do say that the Margrave himself is only kept alive by the power of this fellow’s music . . .’
‘He is not much of a recommendation for it, then; he looks far from well.’
‘Ah, but think how much worse he might be!’
‘He is a strange fellow! What is he really after?’
Dido edged closer, hoping to learn something useful.
‘Oh, power, undoubtedly,’ said Lady Maria’s companion. He inserted a quizzing-glass into his elderly eye, in order to study the Margrave more closely – but at this moment the group of musicians began to play, and, as always when she heard her father’s music, Dido was swept away into another world, and a far more beautiful one, where everything was orderly and perfect, where no explanations were needed at all, because nothing could vary or be in any way bette
r than it was.
The Tea Suite, played first, turned out to have many of her old favourite tunes in it – ‘Tapioca Pudding’, ‘Galloping Mokes’, ‘The Lost Slipper’, ‘The Day Before the Day Before May Day’, and ‘Penny-lope’s Peevy’, the tune that always, for some reason, made Dido think of her sister in a bad temper. Wonder where old Penny has got to now, with that buttonhook fellow of hers, Dido mused, and then the music carried her on, through flowery fields, past rushing rivers, into a place of total content.
Too bad I ain’t got a broken leg; this music’d fix it for me, she thought, and forgot to watch the audience.
She had positioned herself among the other pages, who were lined up against the long wall opposite the row of huge arched windows that looked out on to the river. The guests, glittering and plumed, randomly grouped on their gilt chairs, occupied the middle of the room, with the Margrave among them; the sick people and children, with their nurses or attendants, were assembled in a small crescent near the orchestra platform; and beyond the great row of arched windows the snow fell steadily, and the river lapped higher and higher, flowing westwards; then, as the tide came to its peak, the river began to eddy, the water waited, swung to and fro, and turned at last to flow in the reverse direction.
Dido wholly lost track of time while her father’s music was playing. It might have lasted an hour, two hours or three; she could not have said.
‘My: that was really, really prime,’ she sighed to her neighbour, the red-headed page, when the final piece was finished, the last encore played, and her father, pale, sweating, dishevelled, his wig slightly askew, had taken his final bow.
‘Wonderful! Truly wonderful!’ fluted Lady Maria to the Margrave. ‘Your Chapelmaster is a true genius, dear Eisengrim. May we not meet him – converse with him –?’ – as Mr Twite, with a last hasty bow, vanished through a door backstage, in pursuit of his musicians.
‘Ah, no, dear lady – in most ways he is a rough diamond. It must be said that, apart from his music – which is everything – he has a rude, untrained mind, no culture, no breeding, no parts; in conversation with your ladyship he would be quite at a loss, unable to put two sentences together.’
Hearing this, Dido flushed with indignation; but a moment’s thought obliged her to admit that what the Margrave said was mainly true; furthermore, Mr Twite, carried away by his excitement and success, might easily have been capable of forgetting his false identity as Bredalbane and letting some terrible cat out of the bag.
The Margrave, Dido noticed, seemed to have derived considerable benefit from the music. His face was now a much more natural colour, less bloated and flushed; he moved more freely, smiled and spoke more easily. But what about the sick children and the pensioners? Dido craned on tiptoe; from where she stood she could not see them, since, now the music had come to an end, most of the noble guests had stood up and were moving about, strolling and conversing in groups that formed and re-formed.
‘What’s happened to the sick folk?’ Dido asked her red-headed neighbour, who was taller.
‘Dr Finster’s looking at ’em and testing ’em,’ he said. ‘The little yaller-haired gal got up and walked.’
‘Coo!’ said Dido.
Murmurs of genteel wonder, polite oohs and ahs of amazement came from the elegant crowd.
‘Can the music really have such sovereign virtue?’ Lady Maria asked her elderly companion.
But suddenly – shocking and breaking the quiet, almost reverent atmosphere – a sharp little voice was heard, distinctly demanding, ‘When does I get my orange?’ and then, louder, ‘That Dr Finster promised me an orange if I sat through the music and then walked six steps and said my legs was better. I want my blooming orange!’
There followed a moment’s thunderstruck silence – then a ripple of amusement, polite but mocking laughter, which ran through the crowd, from front to back.
‘I fear his excellency has done for himself!’ said the man with the quizzing-glass to Lady Maria. ‘Salting the mines, what?’
‘My dear duke, what can you mean? What mines?’
Now the disillusioned audience began to drift away. Guests took their leave. With civil salutations, with courteous expressions of pleasure they said their farewells to the Margrave, admired his charming house, extended polished thanks for his delightful music, and walked away down the hall. And then – as soon as they were half a dozen paces from their furious host – the ridicule broke out: ‘My dear, did you see? Did you hear –? That absurd little creature gave the whole game away. Demanding payment! Depend upon it, they were all bribed to pretend that the music had cured them of desperate illnesses!’
‘His poor excellency is wholly discredited.’
‘Oh come, now, Maria, how the deuce could he bribe a Chelsea Pensioner?’
‘I daresay they are all actors, you know, merely dressed up as pensioners.’
In five minutes the salon was empty – except for the pages, briskly collecting used plates and glasses, the small group of children and old men by the stage – who looked, most of them, utterly confused and bewildered – and the Margrave, who, pale with passion, was delivering a low-toned but savage reprimand to Dr Finster, furiously waving an empty champagne glass while he hissed his maledictions.
‘Dolt! Idiot! Jackass! Dummkopf! Booby! Blockhead! What in creation’s name made you stoop to such a stupidity? How could you betray me so? How could you betray yourself so?’
‘Oh – your highness – your excellency – forgive me! Forgive me! It was simply that – results are sometimes so unpredictable – I did so wish everybody to be certain –’
‘And now you have ruined it all. No one will ever believe. What a fool you have made of me. I’ve a mind to dismiss you on the spot – send you packing back to Bad –’
‘Oh, my lord – no! Think of your own health – I beg you – I beseech you –’
‘Well, I won’t do it at once; not yet. But you are in utter, utter disgrace – I do not wish to see your face – or only at consultation time – Well? What is it?’ he snapped at Dido.
‘Your glass, sir.’
‘Bring me another – a full one,’ he said, dropping the empty glass on her tray.
‘Yessir.’
I wonder if Pa will be in disgrace too, Dido ruminated, filling a glass from one of the remaining bottles on the buffet.
‘And have all those imposters locked up!’ the Margrave was ordering, when she took him back his drink. ‘In the cellars under the river! Immediately! I will not have it said that I let such an imposture go unpunished –’
‘But, sir – but, my lord – most of them –’
‘Be quiet! Don’t argue with me, or –’ The Margrave added something in the German tongue which turned his physician ashen-white with horror; then he spun on his heel and walked out of the salon.
Poor devils, thought Dido, watching with anger and pity as the group of patients, or counterfeit patients, were swiftly hustled away by a dozen burly uniformed footmen. One of the children she recognized as a little creature who had been crying ‘Sweet Lavender’ the other day in Wapping High Street. Dido heard one of the old men, a Chelsea Pensioner, muttering, in total perplexity, ‘But what did I do that was wrong? I were cured – sartin sure; no hocus-pocus – there’s me crutch to prove it –’ He looked back wistfully at his abandoned crutch leaning against the platform. ‘So what the pize is ’e going on about?’
I’d best find Pa post-haste and get outa here, thought Dido, with the Margrave in this fratchety frame; there ain’t a thing I can do for those poor souls on my own; I’d best tell somebody about them. But who?
‘Where’s Mr Twi – Mr Bredalbane?’ she asked a page.
‘Him? Oh, he went off ten minutes ago.’
‘Plague take Pa,’ muttered Dido, and made for the front entrance – passing, though she did not know it, by the door of the room where Sophie sat helplessly gagged, with her arms strapped together and her legs tethered to the legs of her chair.
>
‘Hey, you,’ said the porter, grabbing Dido, as she was about to run down the red-carpeted steps, ‘where d’you think you’re off too, my cocksparrer? Pages ain’t allowed out after ten –’
‘I’m no page. I came with my pa – Mr Bredalbane,’ said Dido. Would he remember? Otherwise she would be in a fine fix.
But luckily he did remember.
‘Very well, run along and let me close up. Brrrr! It’s cold enough to freeze the sails off a brass windmill.’
It was. The snow had stopped falling, but a bitter wind blew, straight from the North Pole. The snow on the ground had frozen into a surface hard and slippery as marble. Dido shivered in her thin velvet, though she ran as fast as she could, hoping to overtake her father.
He had not hurried. In fact when she caught up with him he was drifting slowly along, veering from one side of the road to the other, hands in his pockets, head in the air, humming over the various themes from his suite and concertos.
‘Pa, Pa! Wait for me!’
‘Eh –? Is that you, child? Why did you not meet me at the door?’
‘How the blazes did I know when you was planning to leave?’ Dido said crossly. ‘I thought as you’d stay for the healing.’
‘Pshaw! Mumbo jumbo! My music is the important thing – not all that pesky mystical nonsense of Finster’s,’ said Mr Twite. ‘Oh, mystical nonsense of Finster’s, he sang, ‘it may affect dotards and spinsters . . . But was not my music magnificent, child? Was it not majestic, sublime, transcendent?’
‘Oh yes, Pa, it was all those things,’ Dido assured him sincerely. ‘It was – it was naffy!’
‘Now do you see why no position is good enough for me save Master of the King’s Music!’
‘Ye-es – but Pa, I still don’t see – specially now His Nabs is in such a peck of trouble because of that clunch, Finster, going and rigging the cures –’
‘What?’ demanded Mr Twite, who had wandered out of Cinnamon Court, in dreamy, elevated spirits, quite unaware of the embarrassing scene that followed his concert.
When he heard about it he was almost as angry as the Margrave.