Maundy introduced her gradually to the discipline of formal performance. They developed a repertoire of Corelli, Vivaldi, Marais and Pachelbel and she began to accompany him as he gave recitals at weddings, birthdays and salon afternoon concerts at grand houses in London. Short concerts would be performed for two shillings and sixpence whilst a grand concert would merit a guinea, discreetly passed and pocketed. The tall, middle-aged patrician virtuoso and the slight, striking young half-caste girl with blue eyes became much in demand. Cubitt allowed her to play his old violin whilst his Italianate instrument with its sonorous and reverberant resonance was the subject of much admiration and disquisition.
In order to widen Faith’s education he enrolled her in the academy of a violinist and composer called Giardini in Ebury Street in the village of Chelsea. There, pupils of her age, talent and assiduity would meet under the maestro’s auspices to talk, perform and compose. She formed a special friendship with Thomas Drinkwater, son of a parson. He was a tall, pleasant and sensitive boy in his late teens who would accompany Faith on the harpsichord and piano.
On her recommendation, he would join her and Maundy in their concerts from time to time. Thomas would smilingly count her in to the music and read her tempo perfectly. When playing a piano duet, Faith would feel a frisson as their hands touched. Maundy noticed the increasing bond between them but did not discourage it.
Faith grew into a lissom and comely young woman in her mid teens with an easy virtuosity for music matched by the kindness of her heart and her love for her adopted father. In turn, Maundy took pleasure in her flowering. In his prayers he lovingly described her beauty, skill and good heart to Verity.
“Would that you were here to see her my dear. Truly she is your parting gift to me and I pray that one day we shall all be together.”
*
One summer in 1765, Maundy, Faith and Thomas were commissioned to play at the wedding reception of the daughter of the Earl of Thanet in the spacious ballroom of his house on Grosvenor Square.
“Four guineas for a pleasurable afternoon of making music amongst fine people will do me very well,” smiled Cubitt.
“Of course, a guinea for young Thomas, too, for keeping us all in order at the piano.”
The trio were to play a selection of the family’s favourite pieces as a fine tea, port and brandy were served to the ladies and gentlemen.
As Thomas played the introductory notes of a piece by Monteverdi he nodded to signify the entry of the two violins. Faith, with a nod and a strong sweep of her bow, began to play. However, they and the assemblage were shocked when Maundy, on striking his first note, dropped his violin with a clatter onto the wooden ballroom floor. Thomas and Faith carried on whilst Maundy gathered himself with an apologetic smile. Later, when the concert was complete and Thomas had been sent on his way with a guinea, Faith spoke concernedly to Maundy in the carriage home.
“Father, that was most unlike you. I have never known you to falter in that way before. Is all well with you?”
Maundy, his customary smile somewhat strained, confessed, “For some weeks now my hand will not do what I tell it to do. Even writing my own signature, a feat I have capably managed a thousand times, seems to escape my will. It is the same with playing. Oh you will not hear it yet because I mask it. But my fingers will not dance about the strings as in my youth. Sometimes my arms and my two hands have a will of their own and I sense a weakness. Perhaps—”
He shrugged and, not wishing to alarm Faith, continued,
“Perhaps it is just an old man slowing.”
“But you are not yet sixty years,” said a perturbed Faith, “and slowing of the senses should be gradual and not sudden over weeks alone. Please promise me that you will talk to Dr Chevalier?”
Maundy promised as bid and told Faith not to worry as he was sure his strength and skill would soon return.
*
But they did not return. Dr Chevalier, privately to Cubitt after taking a detailed case history, said that the symptoms seemed to mirror those of a case he had heard about in his studies.
“If it is so – and we will check on any further decline in your faculties before we finally diagnose – I feel that I have known you long enough, Cubitt, not to dissemble. The outlook may not be good.”
He went on to describe the typical progression of the illness.
“There may be weakness and wasting. Your limbs may not respond to your instruction and may spasm of their own accord. I am afraid to say that as your control of your body declines, speaking and swallowing may become difficult. Food and drink will prove increasingly problematic.”
He tailed off and looked at Maundy.
“And what then? Is there hope? You must be entirely honest with me, Chevalier,” asked Maundy.
Chevalier pursed his lips and shook his head.
“If my diagnosis is correct – and from all I have observed I believe it is – then the body succumbs to a creeping paralysis. You would become increasingly drowsy and your heart and lungs would decline until they do not function. Of course,” he attempted to lighten the conversation a little, “we do not yet know that this will be the case. Perhaps it is only a short-lived reaction. An ague. A fever.”
But Chevalier’s diagnosis proved to be deadly accurate. Within months, Maundy experienced difficulties with his hands. For one who had lived through his music, this was the unkindest symptom. Within weeks, he began to trip as he walked. Involuntary spasms and tics were an everyday feature of his life. Within the year, he had to be washed, moved and fed by Constance and Faith. He continually apologised for his condition and his inability to contribute to the family income.
Faith and Thomas carried out some commitments, but without the income from students and the grand concerts for which Cubitt was a necessary presence, the family finances tumbled. This concerned Maundy, who was concerned that Faith, now a marriageable girl of eighteen, should have security.
One day, as he lay in bed in the encircling grip of the illness, he summoned her.
“My dear, I fear that Dr Chevalier was right. In which case I am not long for this world although I have asked for fortitude from God to bear it with courage until I am united with my Verity.”
Faith demurred.
“Father, do not speak like this. There must be hope, perhaps some other physic, different medicine…?”
Maundy smiled a loving smile.
“No I feel it. Every day a little worse. Like mistletoe around a tree, every day it tightens its grip. Soon I shall not be able to converse with you. My speech comes and goes. Today I can converse with you. But tomorrow the paralysis may move further.
“So I need to talk to you and ensure that you are secure after I have gone. I have made you my legal ward so that my money, goods and chattels will all pass to you. This house is most of my wealth so I have taken steps to see that you have an income. With the house as collateral, I have taken out a loan that will be invested in such a way as to provide you with a substantial income.
“My man at the bank learnt of a scheme to mine silver in Bolivia. So he has relinquished his position at the bank and has taken it upon himself. He will establish the Company, attract shareholders, of which I… you… will be one and he will oversee the operation and the finances of the scheme.”
Faith, sitting by his bed and stroking his brow, said, “You are a very generous and kind father but I would rather have you for ten more years than all the silver in the ground.”
Maundy closed his eyes.
“We each have our span and I fear that mine is coming to an end. So your security and happiness are my priority in whatever time I have left. You must also,” he said, opening his eyes, “have my violin. I have heard you play and you have a rare talent.
Remember that our days are numbered by God. We must all leave this temporal world when our time comes. But the music plays on and we
all may contribute a passage. We compose it and play it and the best of it is passed on down the years. There are people not yet born who will share in that delight in the years to come. And the violin remembers the music and those who play it, as if it were a living thing. So I pass it on to you, its player for now, and I hope for many years.
“But now I am tired. Please summon Constance so that I can take a little water and then I must sleep a while.”
*
Over the next few months, Faith anxiously watched his decline. The illness was taking over his body. The progression of the illness began to affect his ability to eat, drink and sometimes speak. He sensed that his time was coming so he asked to see Faith. With a great effort he spoke, slowly and with a slurred inflection.
“My dear, your financial security is assured. But it would be wrong of me to leave you alone and adrift in the world. So I have arranged for your betrothal. It will be my dying wish that you marry and I can go to my grave secure in that knowledge.”
Faith was surprised and anxious at these words but, given the circumstances and her father’s genuine concern for her said, “If that is your wish Father, then I will obey and respect that wish. Shall you tell me who I am to marry?”
Maundy continued with his laboured words.
“Yes. I have arranged that it shall be Thomas.”
Faith was quietly delighted and happily gripped both of her father’s hands.
“Thank you, thank you! I shall do as you wish. We will be very content and will continue to play music with his piano and your violin ringing through this house.”
Maundy looked bemused but then said, shaking his head slowly,
“No, no my dear. Not Thomas the musician. Thomas the banker who has arranged the investments. He knows of you from some years ago, and his father. He was sometime your tutor. He has often expressed to me his fondness for you – Thomas Chilvers.”
CHAPTER NINE
As the creeping paralysis tightened its stranglehold over Maundy’s body and his life began to ebb away, one hundred miles to the west, the fortunes of Edward Wortley could not have looked livelier.
His origins were modest as a barber-surgeon in Bristol. The sharp blades and instruments employed to shave clients and trim their hair were also useful to extract teeth, lance abscesses, extract blood and even cut out gallstones. In 1745, Parliament, demonstrating an unaccustomed wisdom, decided that hairdressing and medical interventions were incompatible and set up a separate college for surgeons. Edward Wortley saw an opportunity in the proliferating fashion for disporting wigs, a cultural crossover from the French.
With a very satisfied smile he would, with his equally satisfied bank manager, tot up his multiplying markets.
“Bishops, lawyers, army officers, bankers, judges, gentlemen. Now we will see the spread to bakers, cooks and shopkeepers. Of course we will reserve the full-bottomed wig for the better classes but there is no reason why every common man should not have his peruke! And wig-cleaning, wig-mending, not to mention pomade! I truly believe that there will come a time when every boy, youth or man, in every village, town or city will have his own set of periwigs!”
“Yes,” he would say, a smile playing over his ample features, his hands clasped over his prosperous belly. “Watch the wigs roll out and the money roll in!”
And the money did indeed roll in, which Wortley diverted to commission a slice of the façade in King’s Circus in Bath that the architect John Wood was fashioning into an elegant set of residences.
“Do you know my near neighbour the Earl of Chatham?” Wortley was wont to remark.
“Yes! He is in number eleven and I am in number fifteen, next to the Duke of Bedford! Ha!”
Wortley knew the occupants of all thirty-three houses populated by the great and good of Bath and also provided second houses for the haut monde of London in the summer.
“Yes! And Mr Gainsborough, the portraitist is nearby at number seventeen and has done me the singular honour of employing his famous palette for a Wortley family tableau.”
The picture was of Wortley, seated resplendently against a bucolic backdrop surrounded by his three small boys, all suitably bewigged, and the hand of his compliant wife on his shoulder. Naturally the tools of his trade – scissors, hair and part-finished wig – featured in the foreground.
*
Business flourished. Wortley grew rich, fat, self-satisfied and contented. But now, as a man of some means, he had naturally sent his three boys, William, Henry and Hugh to Dauntsey’s School a short carriage ride away.
William was a tall, square, sporting boy with a keen interest in all things military. Henry was gifted intellectually with an acute mind. It was no surprise that Wortley persuaded them that their destinies were to be in the army and the law respectively. The elder boys had been born in the mid-1740s. Hugh, the youngest, was an unexpected later addition to the family in 1756 and, perhaps influenced by spending more time at home with his mother, Sybil, turned into a more sensitive child with a passion for nature, philosophy, poetry and music.
A very handsome boy, with almost feminine high cheekbones and long dark eyelashes, he became aware, as he reached his teens, of the reaction to his appeal, as though in a looking glass. A glance from a girl or a woman extended into a stare and Hugh learned unconsciously how to entrance people – a half-smile askance, an absent-minded brush of his lustrous hair or a studiedly modest acknowledgement of surprise at being the subject of attention. Quick-witted, amusing and engaging, his mother said he would ‘Charm the birds from the trees’.
By the age of fifteen, he was the fancy of many a young maiden or spinster and even, furtively, of the occasional safely married lady.
Edward Wortley, his social-climbing father, inveigled himself into elevated Bath society via strategic snobbery, the careful dropping of names, and judicious patronage. Young Hugh, in his early years, made particular common cause with Thomas Linley, precocious son of the father of the same name established nearby in the King’s Crescent.
The two boys were of an exact age and shared a passion for all things musical. Hugh was always welcome in the Linley household , particularly by the five girls of the twelve children. Thomas Linley Senior was Master Of Music at Bath Cathedral but spent sabbaticals in London in Drury Lane, integral to the music establishment and being a composer of some repute. In early 1765, when the boys were still young, Linley Senior had called the boys into the elegant drawing room, overlooking the Royal Park.
“There is a young genius currently in London. This boy – exactly your age – is astonishing maestros with his musical renditions and compositions by his own hand. He has played across Europe for dukes and emperors, kings and queens. He has the scientific community astounded and a report by Dr Charles Burney attests to his God-given skill.
“And, my boys, let this be an inspiration to you, he has written a violin sonata in five movements which is remarkable by all the accounts I have heard. He has played for the King. The boy’s father enjoins those present to present him with any piece of written music, which the boy will play on sight. The King tested him with music from Wagenseil and Handel and he played all perfectly at first instance! He performs with his sister, herself a young genius of but eleven years old. Together they show a remarkable ability to compose, improvise and perform.
“I would like you both to accompany me to one of their performances in London. I believe it will give you inspiration and agitate your own learning on the violin!”
And so it was, in June 1765, that the Linleys, senior and junior, accompanied by Hugh Wortley, repaired to London to witness this musical genius. Two and sixpence a head saw them seated in The Swan and Harp public house in central London. They saw a very small boy with a profusion of fine fair hair and a pitted complexion, obviously from a bout of childhood smallpox, seated at the pianoforte with his elder sister beside him playing the violin. They pe
rformed a repertoire of complex compositions. A white-haired man, obviously their father, asked for suggestions from the audience, of which there were about a hundred, for music to test the duo. They would sight-read the music and the boy would arrange an instant superb accompaniment on the piano without a false step. The brother and sister then changed places and instruments and continued to astound the audience with their precision and interpretation of the music. The concert lasted around four hours with the father, Leopold, bowing at the sustained applause and gesturing to his two young charges, who also bowed in unison and left the patrons in the room mesmerised by the fascinating spectacle.
“Well,” said Linley Senior on the long journey home. “I feel that I have seen the hand of God on the shoulders of those two young children. Nannerl is eleven years old so has had some time to develop an expertise. But that young Wolfgang! Mark my words boys, you will surely hear of him again!”
The statement was to prove prophetic, particularly for Thomas Linley the Younger.
*
The concert did give them inspiration. The following year, at the age of nine, Thomas played a violin concerto in Bristol to great approbation. He then appeared in a musical fantasy called The Fairy Favour at the Covent Garden Opera House with his sister where he danced the hornpipe, sang, and played the violin to wild applause.
Young Hugh was similarly inspired but lacked the musical talent and competence exhibited by his young friend. Nevertheless, he would perform at concerts for family and friends. His rather pedestrian musical ability was outshone as he grew into a young man by his startlingly handsome appearance. He would also, along with Thomas, be commissioned to play afternoon recitals in the grand salons of Bath.
One of their regular patronnes was Catherine de Neufville, wife of the owner of a country bank in Bath. With the expansion of trade and the need for men of substance and integrity to back financial transactions, Charles de Neufville, scion of goldsmiths, had carved a profitable niche for himself in the West Country.
The Violin Page 6