Copyright © 2018 Lindsay Pritchard
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To Sarah… and her violin
© Cover illustration “She is Violin” by Bojana Randall
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Alfred Pinfold’s father, George, lay in the final throes of a long and painful illness. The old man was unusually philosophical for someone who had spent his days in work and self-denial, footling about in low-level clerical work.
“Don’t be like me – a slave to work. I am not afraid of dying. It is the pain of not living that I fear.”
He gripped his son by the sleeve.
“Live now while the sun is in the sky. The past is like the night, full of darkness and regrets. The future will always be unknown, holding only uncertainties, except the one certainty of decline.”
He beckoned his son to lean in closely.
“While the sun shines on your back and you breathe today’s air you can forget the shadows of yesterday and the mist of what is to come, and live your life!”
*
Alfred had certainly heeded the advice and lifted his horizons well beyond East London. In his youth during the early 1700s, he had ventured to make his fortune in plantations in the West Indies. He was a man in a hurry: he had multiplied his assets cleverly by plying a profitable triangle between the slave trade in Africa, the demand for labour in the fields of the Leeward Islands and the new appetites for tobacco, indigo and ginger amongst the burgeoning mercantile class in England.
He had established that a slave could be secured in the open market at Mansu in West Africa for £3. Translated into a productive healthy worker on one of his plantations their value would be £80 if sold. Alternatively, with a cost of less than two shillings a week in keep, their output could be twenty or thirty times that in coffee or pimiento.
Now, in his early sixties, the sun was still shining but perhaps a little lower in the sky. He had progressively passed on responsibility for the enduring success of the business and flow of funds to his son Robert, who was continuing the established family tradition of turning small penny outlays into many thousands of pounds of profit.
With his patronage of the arts, together with a judicious eye for useful social contacts, he had secured himself a hereditary baronetcy. His wife, Patience, a singularly mistitled woman, had insisted that a man of the stature of Sir Alfred must live in a grand home and be surrounded by art, gardens, porcelain, fine furniture and all of the trappings of success. He had bought a plot of land on Hampstead Hill of around twentyacres. There was a fine view over the Heath and down through Parliament Fields to London. Patience particularly admired the view and the pure air.
“Well away from the noisome pestilence and the peasantry down in the city,” she would say.
The great house had been built over three years or so in the fashionable Palladian style with porticos, columns, symmetrical wings and windows, and was set in sweeping parkland of hornbeams, oaks and limes. Immediately in front of the house was a parterre of precisely structured formal gardens with a series of intricate paths between stone fountains, neoclassical figures and clipped hedges, all laid out with strict mathematical precision.
But beyond the ha-ha, the gardens changed to a gentler, more rural style with changing vistas, unexpected points of beauty, meandering paths and pergolas merging further into undulating glades, and deep ponds set in dense thickets of bushes and trees.
Sir Alfred had engaged the services of James Pilgrim, a young architect and landscape gardener with a flair for interpreting the demands of Lady Patience. James lived with his wife Anne and young daughter Millie in a grace-and-favour cottage on the estate.
Leeward House had become a renowned social centre, where similarly wealthy or minor aristocratic gentlemen would visit and enjoy duck shooting on Hampstead Heath, and be restored later by a haunch of venison and a fine port in the panelled dining room.
Behind the grand façade of house and gardens, a small battalion of staff, largely kept out of sight in the kitchens, backstairs corridors and servants’ quarters, ensured the comfortable and seamless functioning of this small village. The head housekeeper had unquestioned dominion over the staff. Within the house, there was a hierarchy of underlings each with their circumscribed role: A laundress kept the linen cupboards stocked and serviced and the beds made; scullery maids cleaned the pottery and silver; housemaids laid fires, polished brasses and answered calls day or night; a groomsman and his lads kept the horses and carriages clean and readied for use at the Master’s whim; the head butler marshalled the serving staff whether for a party of thirty or when the only diners were Sir Alfred and Lady Patience.
Sir Alfred had a particular fondness, when with guests, for summoning his tall black slave, Underman. In his footman’s uniform, bewigged and appropriately
deferential, he was a curiosity who demonstrated that his master was a well-travelled man of the world but with a social conscience.
Underman had been in his service for some thirty years. When Alfred had attended his first slave market, he had been examining a group of adolescent boys for their productive potential. They had been brought to market by the war-like Ashantis who were accustomed to conquering neighbouring tribes, then making a turn on the youngsters who could be sold for a premium.
Underman, although only later given that name by Alfred, was from the Coromantine tribe who were noted for their superior physique and steadfastness. They were mixed in with a group of Ibos bought as a job lot. In order to forestall desertion or theft, a small silver brand was burned into the chest of each child. The first Ibo boy had screamed in fear and pain, but Underman had stepped forward and offered his chest undaunted. He had not flinched when branded. He nodded to his fellow Coromantines to signify that they should react accordingly, and snapped his fingers in contempt at the Ibos.
Alfred had been impressed by the boy’s courage and solidity and, after a number of years of uncomplaining service for him clearing land, planting cane and harvesting, he had made him his ‘Under Man’ in charge of a group of several hundred slaves.
Alfred believed in a scientific approach to slavery. Whilst he knew that the black brain did not function on the same level as, say, the English gentleman, he noted that if he treated his slaves well, they would work well in return. He thus avoided shrinkage of his resources through violence, desertion or illness. He initiated decent living accommodation, with working hours that gave the slaves time for constructing small dwellings and tending gardens where they could grow yams, mangoes and coconuts. If the workforce contracted common diseases and medical problems such as scrofula, abscesses or fever, there was an itinerant doctor who treated them to get them back to work. If the weather was bad, they were told to stay at home and given a glass of rum.
Many of these benefits had been negotiated by Underman. He had learned English quickly. His natural authority, reliability, patience and sober character were recognised by the slaves and harnessed by Alfred. Underman was mild in his punishments and respectful to white people. As a result the plantations flourished, plentiful products were shipped to the mother country and wealth flowed into the Pinfold account.
Also amongst the slaves were girls and women, partly to dampen the baser tempers amongst the men but also to prepare food, clean the house, sew and launder. In Alfred’s clapperboard house were negresses, each with an allocated job. Head of them was Eve, a mulatto who was the offspring of a white settler and a black woman. Eve was quiet, gentle, efficient and obedient. She was also very pretty with unblemished skin, clear eyes and an easy tendency to laugh becomingly when amused. Underman began paying court to her, not discouraged by Alfred who was happy to indulge his head man in order to maintain his loyalty and efficiency.
Underman and Eve made a strikingly handsome couple – he with his impressive bearing and Eve with her comely looks. She had a way of teasing him and making him laugh. Of course, Alfred knew that the negro was not capable of love in the sense that Catullus or Dryden might recognise, but he looked benevolently on the union.
Underman and Eve soon produced a son whose genetics were a happy combination of blue eyes from his grandfather, handsome bone structure and an easy placid humour from his mother and – as he grew – the beginnings of the four-square physique of his father.
However, less than two years after his birth, Eve developed yellow fever. There was nothing that could be done to save her.
Underman mourned her, becoming hollow-eyed and solitary. He began surreptitiously taking more rum than was sensible.
Alfred, alarmed at the change in the man, was brusque with him.
“No point hiding away like a whipped dog. You would be better off getting back to the fields. The women will look after the child. And there are plenty of other women; you can have your pick.”
After a while, the pain eased in Underman’s heart. He did not take another woman, but delighted in the growing child, called Joshua. After a day amongst the canes he would patiently play with the boy and teach him the rudiments of language and literacy. Joshua was fair of face and of a happy disposition. He became the darling of the household, cheeking the maids and even being allowed to sit in Alfred’s rooms when the Master was contemplatively sipping a glass of wine in the evening.
*
The business prospered, the money flowed in but Alfred was getting older. The strain of long sea voyages, running the plantations and dealing with cut-throat merchants made him long for home. Progressively, he schooled his son Robert in the ways of the trade and the scientific benefits of benevolent despotism and productivity. Concomitantly, when home in England, he and Patience – who was demandingly insistent to have him home permanently and allow her to become the chatelaine of a grand London residence – began designing and building Leeward House. It was time to take his ease and enjoy his wealth.
One spring day in early 1735 he arranged for his final transition, shipping his effects back to London and formally installing Robert as the Principal of the business. Alfred would keep a watchful eye on the numbers back in England. He advised Underman that, as his property, he would also be shipped back to England to occupy a position on his estate as a trustworthy, obedient and economic commodity.
“But Master, the boy?” Underman had enquired anxiously.
After some debate, Alfred agreed that the boy, now a sturdy ten years old, could be found a useful job in the gardens and would therefore be allowed to accompany his father.
And so it was that Underman and Joshua were taken to Liverpool and put in a carriage for London. The world looked wet and grey as the horses trotted up a long, sweeping drive, fringed by parkland. They gazed, wonderingly, at the imposing mansion that was to be their new world.
CHAPTER TWO
Whilst Sir Alfred was enjoying his wealth on Hampstead Hill across London, the Cubitt family lived an undemonstrative life. The first – and as it turned out, only – Cubitt child was born on the Thursday before Easter, 1715 as London came out of a frozen winter. His parents, properly dutiful and righteous, took this as a sign. The child was named Maundy.
Thomas Cubitt, Maundy’s father, was a master shoemaker, a member of the Worshipful Company of Shoemakers in the Borough of Lambeth. He plied his trade from a small workshop in Leaden Street and made a decent, if unspectacular, living supplying the customised requirements of the increasingly well-off and fashionable middle classes. Though not what you would call rich, his earnings enabled him to employ a private tutor for young Maundy as soon as he reached the age of five. His main lessons were Latin, Greek and arithmetic. From his earliest years, the boy was polite, disciplined and eager to learn his letters. But his passion was music. As a small boy he stood next to his parents in the congregation of St Giles’ Church, holding a heavy hymn book, enthralled by the choir and the wheezing music produced by the old organ. Eventually his entreaties persuaded his father to approach the ageing choirmaster, Mr Trust, and it was not long before Maundy could both read music and understudy the organist as well as perform his chorister duties.
Maundy grew into an exceptionally tall young boy, a full head taller than his contemporaries. He was angular and spare with a shock of dark hair and sensitive hands. Blessed with a calm and patient disposition, his face was permanently drawn into a half-smile which made even strangers smile back involuntarily.
His father’s wish that he follow him in the shoemaking trade were politely deflected as young Maundy realised early that music was the subject for him.
His precocious talents soon outstripped the limited musical abilities of the choirmaster and organist. They recommended that he should be seen by Dr Henry Prince, Master of Music at St George’s Chapel in Windsor. Now aged twelve, his father accompanied him to an audition one cold December
morning, late in 1727. Thomas was anxious about the cost of such a renowned tutor.
Dr Prince, a forbidding presence, asked Maundy to play a piece of his choosing on the piano. Maundy had chosen a Handel suite, and Dr Prince sat merely a metre to the side, half turned away and imperturbable apart from an occasional confirmatory nod to a particular interpretation.
“The boy is very competent but I can go out into the streets and find you a hundred boys who can learn a piece and play it perfectly. Therefore, I must test him.”
Dr Prince rustled through a stack of musical manuscripts and found the E Minor Prelude and Fugue by Bach, which he considered would tax him.
Smilingly, Maundy sight-read the piece perfectly with a measured tempo, keeping the complex layers and multiple voices moving expertly across and between his hands.
Realising that here was a special talent in the making, Dr Prince unearthed one of his own compositions. The boy could not possibly have seen or heard the piece before. Again, Maundy unhesitatingly performed the piece, whilst also imparting some passion into the music. Dr Prince pulled an appreciative face but then, taking away the manuscript said, “Now boy, show me how well your musical memory works.”
Maundy was almost note-perfect. Dr Prince studied the boy with the half-smiling face and then turned to Thomas Cubitt.
“You do realise that my cost to tutor your boy will require a stipend of forty shillings per month?”
“I do, sir,” replied Cubitt apologetically, “and that to me is a major expense. We will have to consider the matter very carefully and look—”
Dr Prince held up his hand to stop him.
“In this instance, there will be no cost.”
Cubitt looked bemused, unable to process this information.
“Your boy has an exceptional ear and it would be a sad day if music were to lose that talent for the sake of pounds, shillings and pence. He will come to my school as a free scholarship boy, and I do believe that by the time he is of age, he will have mastered the piano, the organ, the violin and composition.”
The Violin Page 1