Too Many Notes, Mr Mozart

by Bernard Bastable

  I knew better than to play anything grand or beautiful. I played instead a succession of encore pieces – dances, marches, ending in compliment to the King with an arrangement of a well-known hornpipe. The programme left me ample scope for reflection. My first thoughts centred on the Queen. She was on the surface a dowdy little thing, though perfectly nice and peace-loving, so far as I could judge. Her final remark about Rossini, which could have been humorous and sly, was apparently said in total seriousness. On the other hand she understood her new position, could enforce silence, ensure proper consideration for herself.

  Except perhaps from the FitzClarences. Their attitude to her seemed ambiguous. On the one hand they stressed their relationship with ‘Mama Queen’, no doubt as a way of underlining their new status as the King’s children. It was well known that the Duke of Clarence, when he took a wife, had insisted that it must be someone who was willing to be a mother to his brood of natural children. Adelaide had clearly taken the responsibility seriously, and all credit was due to her.

  The children, on the other hand, seemed to mingle affection and contempt in their attitude to her. George had seemed to want to stress that she was of a different generation from her husband, and that he had had a life before he married her. That, perhaps, was natural: the FitzClarences were the product of that life, and they would all have vivid memories of their mother before her abandonment and death. Many of them, indeed, would have been grown up before Adelaide came into their lives.

  I played for fifteen minutes. I couldn’t risk more. Already ominous barking sounds were coming from the direction of the King’s chair. As I took my bows and let the party resume its chattering and laughing, the King came over.

  ‘Very nice, very nice. You’ve certainly got a way with a tune, Mr Mozart. Thought I recognised that last one.’

  ‘It’s a well-known hornpipe, Your Majesty.’

  ‘Ah, that’d be it. Didn’t know you’d wrote it. Needs a lot of midshipmen, clapping in time. Couldn’t get this stuffy lot to do it.’

  He looked around disparagingly.

  ‘The court seems remarkably unstuffy and relaxed, sir,’ I ventured. ‘In comparison to—’

  ‘To m’brother’s court?’ said His Majesty, with a complacent little smile. He had obviously been disparaged and kept in obscurity for so long that he relished praise. ‘Well, we do our best. Can’t expect things to change overnight, what? I suppose you think I’m unfeeling, do you?’

  I was taken aback by the abruptness of the accusation.

  ‘Your Majesty?’

  ‘Unfeeling. Not to put on a great show of grief for poor old George. Lot of nonsense, mourning. I don’t like shows. Pantomimes. George was never much of a brother to me. All he ever taught me was the price of a whore – down to the price of a quick go against a wall. Useful. But not what you’d call a liberal education.’ All this had been said in quarterdeck tones, with the Queen no more than a few feet away. Now he lowered his voice, a thing he obviously found difficult. ‘Mr Mozart – I wonder if I might have a few words with you?’

  Ah! My doubts about the Queen’s love of music were going to be justified.

  ‘Of course, Your Majesty.’

  Already he was leading the way across the Drawing Room, and once away from the press of courtiers he jogged through a little chapel, down the grandiose length of St George’s Hall, past a staircase, then through other grand rooms, talking all the time about nothing very much. Finally we landed up at the other end of the State Apartments, in a small room, decorated in dark, claretty red, with something of the air of a study. Candles were already set there, and the footman who had followed us from the Drawing Room stood by the door and waited. The King nodded to him to fill my glass, then nodded to him to leave us alone. He had rather an eloquent nod.

  ‘Take a seat, Mr Mozart. No ceremony here. Lot of stuff and nonsense, all that. We never had any, Adelaide and me, when we were at home at Bushey. M’brother George liked it, and could carry it off. He had an air. Not a lot of use, an air, if you ask me. Where were we?’

  ‘Your Majesty wanted a word with me.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course … Hear you’re giving piano lessons to m’neice.’

  Ah, ha!

  ‘I do have that honour, sir.’

  ‘How does she strike you?’

  I cleared my throat.

  ‘I couldn’t presume to—’

  The King showed signs of impatience.

  ‘Come along, man. None of this flim-flam. What sort of a gel is she?’

  ‘Well, sir … Rather bright. Sharp. Sees things, wants to get at the truth of things.’

  He nodded, pleased.

  ‘Quite right. She’ll need to. Knowing little thing?’

  ‘Something of the sort, sir. Honourable, straightforward. Very conscious of her position.’

  He nodded his pineapple head.

  ‘So she should be; Adelaide’s never going to produce now. Poor woman – she feels it very much. We had a baby, you know, and it died. Still weeps for it. But Victoria’s the heir, no doubt about that.’

  ‘She is conscious of her position in line to the throne, sir, though those around her think she is not.’

  The King roared with laughter.

  ‘Cunning little thing! She’s had to be, probably. We want to get to know her better.’

  ‘I think you will find that she wants that very much herself.’

  The King smiled in satisfaction.

  ‘Always behaved very prettily when we’ve seen her. Which isn’t often. Adelaide’s always tried to be a good aunt to the gel. Mother’s the problem.’

  I tried to enter into the subject tactfully.

  ‘Her mother seems to think that court would be a corrupting influence.’

  The King went red.

  ‘Stuff and nonsense! Courts are dull as ditchwater. She should know that … Funny woman. Good wife to Edward, while he lasted. Wasn’t long. Maybe she was lucky. Funny chap too, Edward. All the girls in the family loved him, but he had a taste for flogging soldiers to death. Odd taste, that … You think the mother will stand in our way with the gel?’

  ‘I think it’s possible, Your Majesty.’

  His extraordinary head bobbed up and down, as if it were on the water.

  ‘Ye-e-es, that’s what we think. We need something to put pressure on her. Tell you the truth, that’s why I wanted a word with you, Mr Mozart.’

  ‘With me, sir? I assure you I have no influence—’

  He leaned forward in his chair.

  ‘You’re a sharp fellow. That’s known in our circle. Fixed things for m’brother Ernest. Anyone who can get him out of a scrape must be a genius.’

  He felt in the pocket of his coat, and his hand emerged with a large chamois leather bag. Without ceremony he handed it over. My practised hand knew at once that it contained a considerable number of guineas.

  ‘Your Majesty! I am overwhelmed! I don’t know anything that I can do that would earn—’

  ‘Here’s what you can do. Find out the truth about her mother and Sir John Conroy!’

  4. Lackey

  ‘Well?’ said the Princess Victoria.

  She said it the moment the first gentle snore wafted over to us from the chair by the door, after five minutes of her third lesson with me.

  ‘Play on, Your Royal Highness,’ I said. ‘It’s too early to tell whether there has been any improvement yet.’

  ‘Oh, bother improvement!’ said the Princess, but she played on nevertheless. ‘Actually, I have practised and practised for you, Mr Mozart. And do you know what the interesting thing is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I haven’t improved one little bit. Isn’t that strange?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, being very used to that situation. ‘There is practice where you try to eradicate your faults, and there is practice where you just repeat them over and over again. Yours must have been of the second kind.’

  ‘I suppose it must … Eradicate. I sup
pose that means “get rid of”. I must remember that. There are some people I should very much like-to eradicate … Anyway, you know perfectly well, Mr Mozart, that I wasn’t asking about my playing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  I tried to sound magisterial, full of wisdom born of long experience.

  ‘Your Royal Highness must understand the nature of an investigation of this kind. It is not something that can be rushed. For a start, the information that is sought is of a peculiarly delicate kind. That means the sources of that information have to be subtly softened, cultivated, until they are willing to reveal what they know.’

  The Princess looked impressed.

  ‘How extremely fascinating! I should so like to be an investigator.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Of course, by rights I should be one of the sources you are talking about.’

  ‘That would hardly be right—’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ She had a very obstinate streak when she was contradicted, and raised her chin, which truth to tell was almost non-existent. ‘I think it would be perfectly natural. You see, I sleep in the same room as Mama. It is not by choice, and it is not at all what I would wish. In fact, it seems to me altogether wrong.’

  I took the liberty of contradicting her again.

  ‘It is quite common. Many poor children have to sleep in the same bedroom as their parents.’

  ‘I am not a poor child.’ She was playing a passage for right hand alone, and with her left hand she reached down and pulled at the stuffing that was protruding from her piano stool. ‘Though you might think I was for the way we live … But the fact is that the moment I go to bed I sleep incred … incredabally soundly, though I try not to, and always have every intention of staying awake to see if anything happens.’

  ‘I am glad Your Royal Highness sleeps well. It is the basis of all good health.’

  ‘But not at all the right quality for a good investigator,’ she said, giggling.

  ‘I do not see myself staying up all night on observation duty,’ I assured her. ‘I was very tired last week when I went to Windsor to play, for the King and Queen.’

  She played a wrong note in her interest at this news, but it was not noticeable among so many.

  ‘You played for the King? That must have been … interesting. I shouldn’t think his comments were much to the purpose.’

  This was said unmaliciously, as a statement of fact.

  ‘I improvised on a hornpipe in His Majesty’s honour,’ I said. ‘He seemed to think I had composed the tune myself.’

  ‘Whereas in fact it is even older than you, Mr Mozart?’

  ‘Even older. It is what is known as “traditional”,’ I said gravely.

  ‘Young Mr Mendelssohn came to Kensington. Palace to play for us last year,’ said the Princess Victoria. ‘Such a lovely young man – so handsome, and kind, and sympathetic. And people say he’s been a musical genius for years and years and years. Were you ever a child progeny, Mr Mozart?’

  ‘I was the most gifted child prodigy the world of music has ever known,’ I said magisterially. She giggled again.

  ‘I know you were.’ She amended this, unconscious of the insult, to: ‘I know that’s what you think … You do know I tease you a little, Mr Mozart?’

  ‘I know that very well, Your Royal Highness.’

  ‘It’s very nice to have an old man I can tease a little.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, it’s rather nice to have a young lady who teases me, my dear.’

  She played on again, concentrating because she wanted something out of me, making fewer mistakes and managing to get much more of feeling into her playing.

  ‘Tell me what the King says about Me,’ she said at last.

  I pondered. We had discussed the Princess and her mother at some length after his extraordinary request.

  ‘His Majesty wishes to get to know you better.’

  ‘And I him! He seems to be a much nicer king than dead Uncle George … Though perhaps not king like.’

  ‘There are different sorts of king, my dear. Many people thought the old King your grandfather was not kinglike. That’s why they called him Farmer George.’

  She was interested at this. She seemed to want to hear about a King who was a different kind of king to the ones she had known.

  ‘Did they? I found an old book of his in the library the other day, one he had when he was Prince of Wales. It was Shakespeare. I … I read bits of Hamlet. I expect you can guess the bits I was looking for. He had written in the margin: “Such stuff!”‘

  ‘He was a very good man,’ I said, ‘but nobody thought he had impeccable literary taste.’

  ‘I don’t think he did. Because I found it terribly exciting. Just to read it made my heart thump like anything. It was very passionate, and very wise… How will the new King get to know me better?’

  ‘We talked about that,’ I said, feeling I had really been mingling with the great. ‘He is hoping to ask you and your mother to spend a few days at Windsor – have something of a party.’

  She almost stopped playing in her excitement, but just controlled herself, and threw a glance over her shoulder at the sleeping Späth, terrified of having wakened her.

  ‘Oh, that would be wonderful!’ she said, in an excited whisper. ‘I should so enjoy that! Mama must let me go. I shall make her let me go!’

  I coughed warningly.

  ‘May I suggest, my dear, that you do not show too much excitement, do not press your Mama too hard.’

  She gave me an interested-to-learn look.

  ‘How should I go about it, Mr Mozart?’

  ‘Be very quiet. Say you think you ought to go, because the new King is very popular, and people will be critical if his friendly overtures to his heir are rejected.’

  She smiled happily.

  ‘How wise you are, Mr Mozart!’

  ‘There is no warranty that it will work. People and their reactions can never be predicted. But it will be more likely to than if you were to show too much enthusiasm.’

  ‘I feel in my bones you are right. You understand Mama even though you have barely met her. Mama is very obstinate. Perhaps I get it from her, just a little. We are alike, but we pull in different directions … I am terribly tired, Mr Mozart. Can’t you play a little, to show how it should go?’

  ‘If Your Royal Highness listens. Really listens. We have talked quite enough.’

  And there the conversation effectively ended. Soon after I began to play the Baroness Spath nodded awake as suddenly as she had nodded off, and said. ‘How beautiful! Schön! What wonderful improvement! … Oh, Mr Mozart. But of course if you are playing I would have expected—’

  ‘I always play the piece my pupil is practising at the end of a lesson,’ I said smoothly. ‘To show them what they should be aiming at. But you are quite right, Baroness: the Princess’s playing is much improved.’

  As the lesson ended, and before I bowed myself out, the Princess whispered, ‘What are you going to do next?’

  ‘Never fear, my dear, the matter is well in hand,’ I muttered, bending to replace the music in my bag. ‘Enquiries will begin immediately.’

  As a matter of fact that was true. As I had been shown in by the oafish footman I had questioned him very casually about where his preferred drinking place was, and when he would be off duty. When noises were heard from the dining room he had given me a knowing look, and before he had withdrawn to fetch the Princess and her duenna had said, ‘See you there!’

  Thus I was to be found later that evening at the Royal Orange, a public tavern ten minutes from the palace, having dined at a detestable chop house where I was not known and where I was forced to pay with ready money. The Royal Orange was clearly the resort of stable-hands and footmen, and was noisy and dirty, but they were nevertheless not unused to a better sort of customer as well, and they served an excellent, tangy ale.

  He came at ten past seven, suggesting that he had downed tools at the palace pr
ecisely at the time he had told me, seven o’clock. Indeed, since he was wearing an open shirt with a neckcloth, and rather natty grey pantaloons, he must have changed in his employer’s time. The British workman! He appeared behind my chair, and said cheerily, ‘A pint of the Peculiar, if you’re doing the calling, Mr Mozart.’ (How I hate that pronunciation, Mozart, so unlike the Princess’s pretty enunciation of Moat-Zart), and when I returned with his tankard he was sitting confidently on the bench of my snug, looking up at me cockily.

  ‘Your’elf, Mr M.,’ he said, taking a first, long swig.

  He was, in his own clothes, not ill-looking. There was the slightest suspicion of a squint in his eyes, but otherwise it was a well-formed face, and his own hair was an attractive brown, much preferable to an askew wig. I could imagine him capturing many hearts below stairs. I could also imagine him in twenty years’time, double-chinned and pot-bellied, as the proprietor of just such an establishment as we were now drinking in – if, that is, he found himself in the meantime a post more likely to yield rich pickings than the Duchess of Kent’s service in Kensington Palace.

  ‘Yours,’ I responded equably, ‘Mr – er—’

  ‘Dorkle. Ned Dorkle. And likewise Yours again.’ And he took another long draught of ale. It was going to be an expensive conversation. He licked his lips. ‘Lovely drop of ale, this. I always asks for Landlord’s Peculiar.’

  ‘Always?’ I was surprised into asking.

  ‘When there’s gentlemen after information. Like gentlemen from the morning papers. Wery interested in anything they can pick up, the gentlemen from the papers are. Likewise there’s even been gentlemen from the Parisian hillustrated magazines – if you can call a Frenchman a gentleman, which I beg leave to doubt.’

  ‘After information about the Princess?’

  ‘Natcherly. What else? That’s why it’s better to work for the Duchess than for the Princess Sophia, say, for all that she’s daughter of a king. Nobody’s interested in an elderly princess, whereas everyone’s interested in a young one who’s going to be the next Queen, God willing. So what you don’t get in wages – and you don’t, believe you me – you make up for in liquid form’ere.’