Crowther folded together his long fingers over his knee and wondered if every person in the world had some such story, one that could release the teller in the telling. He had his own story, but he had never found it easy to speak of it, even when the confession was forced into the open as Miss Marin’s was now. When he told his story it did not come cloaked in this nostalgia; he told it with no charm. He stated the facts and was stared at like a grotesque.
Morgan picked up Isabella’s thread. “The next time we saw him was the last. He had been a little queer in his ways from time to time, sometimes shutting his door and not crawling out of it for a week, and here was another moment of it. We have the lesson as usual then he closes the lid on the harpsichord and says, ‘Isabella, I have taught you all I can. I have made you a fine singer, but I know another teacher who can make you great. There is a man in Paris called called Le Clerc—all the great singers of Europe go to him. So must you.’ Well, we just laughed at him straight out. Here we were earning pennies on the street corner, and he wants us to go to France. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I mean it,’ and he hands us a letter addressed to Le Clerc, lots of bits of paper with official stamps on them and a little bag holding more gold in it than I had ever seen in my life. Turned out he’d been planning and saving for us for a year.”
“I was thirteen,” Isabella said, “and never been out of the city. I was so scared I thought my head would fly off.”
The image made Harriet laugh, and Isabella looked up as if she was afraid of being mocked, but seeing nothing to alarm her in the other woman’s green eyes, she simply gave the same shy smile Harriet had seen on the stage of the theater.
“So off we went,” Morgan continued, crossing her ankles. “Issy learned at Le Clerc’s school for four years, we could earn enough to pay our way in the usual fashion, and she picked up the lingo till she could jabber away like a Frenchie born. Then when Le Clerc wanted her to start singing at little concerts and that, he told her to change her name. He said no opera singer would ever succeed keeping the name Baker—that was Tessa’s name. So we settled on Marin and there we go. She did good, then better, and everyone just thought she must be French, even the Parisians, and we never bothered correcting them.”
“I sang at the opera house in Paris in seventy-seven—it was only a small part, but then their prima donna fell ill, and I was asked to sing in her place. I think Mr. Harwood saw me there.”
“He told us he was transfixed by your performance,” Crowther said. Isabella made no reply, but simply nodded.
“We visited Milan one time and liked it there so stayed,” Morgan said. “Everyone knows the best women singers come from Paris, so wherever we went it suited us that they believed Issy was Frenchborn. I took charge of the money, and where she would be going and when, and we started trotting along very nicely. Sang to more kings and bishops than I thought the world had room for, in opera houses and palaces all over the continent. Not London though. Not till now.”
“I got my first letter from Fitzraven this spring when I was singing again in Milan,” Isabella said. “There was a picture of me in a newspaper in Paris, and it got sold in London too, as I’ve been talked about here a bit. Morgan almost cried when she saw it, said it was so like my mother she couldn’t credit it. He saw it too, worked out his dates, and wrote care of the opera house, knowing they’d find me.”
Crowther thought of the exclamation point under the portrait in Fitzraven’s notebook. He must have thought the gods were dropping honey on him when he saw it.
“Morgan advised me not to answer, not to admit I was his daughter. She told me to remember he’d got my mother into trouble then left her with nothing but a nod, but I couldn’t help myself. Especially when he said he worked for the opera house. I thought, Oh, so that’s why it felt like home, that’s where all the music has come from. He talked about me coming here, and I remembered that night I first saw an opera was at His Majesty’s.” She turned toward Harriet and Crowther. The glow on her face was no trick of the firelight in the gathering dusk. The woman was shining from within. “So you see what last night meant to me? How many people get to have a dream become real in such a way? It frightens me a little. And it was just as I hoped it might be, and with that duet. The rest of the opera is pleasant enough, but the ‘Yellow Rose Duet’. . .” She looked back into the flames. “When I first heard the tune it was as if someone had found the gold in me and made it really shine. Can you understand me? I felt it was written for me alone.”
Harriet struggled for a phrase. She felt she could discuss many subjects with authority, but not music. “Mademoiselle, your talent is remarkable and the tune very beautiful,” she said, and Isabella seemed satisfied.
“And to sing it with Manzerotti! Whatever I have been through, what he has had to suffer for the sake of music, what heights he has reached . . . I may spend the rest of my life trying to find such a moment again. Yet I have had it. A Golden Hour. I shall always have that.”
“So Fitzraven came to see you in Milan, to hire you for His Majesty’s. Did you like him?” Harriet said. “We have heard . . . differing reports.”
Isabella looked a little pained and it was Morgan who, once again, answered for her.
“We did not like him. Issy tried to. For all the fight in her, she still had her sentimental ideas of what a father is. Gave him money too.” She frowned. “Mr. Harwood has been a far straighter man to deal with. And Fitzraven knew he had a hold on us. If it came out in the papers now that the beautiful Parisian songbird Mademoiselle Isabella Marin was just plain old Issy Baker from Southwark, we’d be laughed at all round town. He never did anything about it. Just, you know, suggested we should all keep the secret together. I could tell his game. I’m glad he’s dead. Bet there are others that feel the same.” Morgan looked at them fiercely.
Harriet though was observing Isabella, who was pulling on the folds of her dress. The stuff of it was so soft it seemed to flow over her hands like liquid, like mercury.
“Do you feel the same, Miss Marin?” Harriet asked.
“It’s a bitter thing to say, Mrs. Westerman, but perhaps I do. I wanted to love him, I wanted to show him I was his daughter and he had wronged my mother. I had an idea he’d beg forgiveness, that we’d visit Dead Man’s Place together and think of her. But he didn’t care about my mother. I don’t think he even cared about music. When he started talking about the opera to me, I could see he didn’t feel about it as I did. To him, it was all about the fuss and gossip. I wanted to be unhappy when Morgan told me he was dead, but I wasn’t, in truth.”
“Morgan told you he had died?” Crowther said, looking up from his hands and with an eyebrow raised. “I thought it was Mr. Harwood who informed you after the performance.”
The old lady crossed her arms and sniffed. “I was about that morning. Watching a body brought in from the river is not the opera perhaps, but it’s always of interest.”
Crowther’s mouth twitched into a smile. “It was you that named him on the street.”
“Just sort of blurted it out like bad wind when his head lolled back as they carried him up the steps. Told Issy. My first thinking was, Good, he can’t go blabbing tales about my Issy now.”
Harriet looked between Morgan and Isabella. “But it was not just Fitzraven who knew the secret of your origins. What of your music teacher? You must have written from France, and visited him since you returned to London, this man who did so much for you.”
The two women were silent for a moment before Isabella replied, “We cannot find him. He began to answer our letters less and less. Nothing would come for months then twenty pages all written very close—strange rambling things they were, deeply earnest one page then light and airy and gossip-filled on another.” She swallowed. “Then they stopped all at once. I would love to sing to him again, show him what he made me. Remember, I was a thing of the gutter when he first found me. Morgan tried to see his old landlady as soon as we arrived. She said he had been taken off to a mad
house by his family over a year ago, but we have no further information. We have struggled . . . I have asked Mr. Bywater to look for him on my behalf.” Crowther thought he detected the beginnings of a faint blush as she mentioned the composer’s name. “I would not trust Fitzraven to do so, but Mr. Bywater has had no success as yet and we have all been greatly occupied.”
Harriet cleared her throat. Even before she began to speak she could feel the color spreading up her neck and across her cheeks. “Mademoiselle, my husband was recently injured. An accident on the ship he commanded. He is in health now, physically, but his understanding has been impaired. He is currently in a private asylum on the outskirts of London. I tell you this because, if your teacher had been prone to worsening fits of melancholia, perhaps he too could have ended up in such a place. I am sure Dr. Trevelyan knows most of them. May I make enquiries on your behalf?”
Isabella’s voice was soft in reply. “I am sorry your husband is unwell, Mrs. Westerman, and I would appreciate anything you could do on my behalf in this matter.”
Harriet managed a small smile. “Just give me his name, Mademoiselle. I will make what enquiries I can.”
“His name is Leacroft. Mr. Theophilius Leacroft.”
5
Before they left Great Swallow Street Harriet and Crowther had also taken the time to knock up the other lodgers present and found that even with the thin walls and close quarters of the building, no one had heard or seen anything out of the ordinary on Thursday. Various people had heard footsteps on the stairs, but no one had noticed any altercation, nor had seen someone leaving with a body wrapped in a hearth rug over their shoulder in the early hours. Crowther was not surprised, saying simply that if they had done, it was likely they would have mentioned it before now. The lodger they had most wished to speak to, however, had not answered their knock. This was the gentleman who had his lodgings at the rear of the first floor, directly under those of Fitzraven. He was away from home, though Mrs. Girdle was sure he had been present on Thursday afternoon. The young man was apparently living on an allowance from his parents, and attempting to find some position in London from his base in Great Swallow Street. His name was given to them as Tobias Tompkins, so Crowther and Harriet wrote a note asking him to call on them in Berkeley Square in the evening, and hoped that the impressive address might tempt him into making their acquaintance.
They did not return immediately to Graves’s home, however. Crowther, as they rejoined the carriage, instead asked the driver to take them to Somerset House. When he settled back in his seat he realized Harriet was looking at him with her eyebrows raised.
“I have an acquaintance, Mrs. Westerman, who I know will be making use of the Royal Society’s library today. He is an expert in matters dental.” He reached into the pocket of his coat and produced a small silk bag. He pulled the string loose and shook out Fitzraven’s false teeth into his palm.
“Good God, Crowther! Have you been carrying those things with you all day?”
He looked at her with mild innocence. “Does this concern you, Mrs. Westerman?”
Harriet folded her arms as the coach rattled through the muck of the street. “I am only glad I did not know you had them earlier. I do not think I could have listened to poor Miss Marin’s account of her struggles with an easy mind, had I known you were sitting there with her father’s teeth in your pocket!”
Crowther did not seem discomfited, but lifted the teeth to the level of his eyes and clacked them together. “Indeed, it was an affecting tale.”
Harriet raised her eyebrows. “You do not believe it?”
“It is not that, Mrs. Westerman,” he said with some hesitation. “Only I am surprised she was so eager to know Mr. Fitzraven. I heard her reasons, of course, but she had a powerful motive for revenge. The man mistreated her mother quite horribly, for one thing, and for another he knew that her official biography is a lie. He could have turned her from the fêted star of the season into a laughingstock.”
“I liked her.”
“That is charming, Mrs. Westerman, and so did I, but it is not evidence. Fitzraven’s accounts indicate that he was receiving money from someone recently arrived in London. She would seem a likely candidate. We may well find that he died because of some treachery more minor than Mr. Palmer thinks.”
“You may have your suspicions, but I cannot think Isabella likely to throttle a man, then hurl him in the river. Now, please do put those horrible teeth away.”
Crowther slipped the teeth back into the bag without protest. “Yes, I believe that women, when they turn murderess, more often use poison. And seldom tidy up.”
Harriet settled into her corner and turned her head to look out of the window as they turned off Oxford Street. There was some sort of commotion on the road beside them—an open cart with a man and older woman sat up in the back. The woman had her arm around the man’s shoulders, which were shaking with sobs. Harriet recognized them as two members of the little walking party they had seen passing earlier in the day.
She looked down into the back of the cart as they passed. There was the third, the pretty blond woman. Her husband was holding her in his lap and rocking her back and forth. Her arm hung loose by her side. As their coachman waited to negotiate a way through, a man in a dirty coat emerged from the barber-surgeon’s where the cart was stopped. He climbed up in the back in a rush and felt for the woman’s pulse.
Harriet craned around as the coach worked itself free and held the picture in sight long enough to see the man shake his head and pat the younger man awkwardly on the shoulder. The cart driver crossed himself. Then they turned the corner and the sight was lost.
Harriet leaned out of the window and shouted up to the driver “Slater! What was all that?”
The man sucked his teeth and half-twisted to shout back without taking his eyes from the traffic in front of them.
“Accident, ma’am. Young woman slipped and fell, up by the brick kilns. Stove her head in.”
Harriet retreated into the carriage again and met Crowther’s inquiring eye.
“What is it, Mrs. Westerman?”
“Nothing of significance, Crowther. Some other little tragedy.”
6
As Jocasta came to the main road toward Holles Street, her view of the way was blocked by a carriage with a phoenix on the door. It was working into a free space on the road, so the wheels came very close to her, almost snagging her skirts. It brought back her dream of The Chariot with a sort of sick lurch, and she stopped dead, so as it pulled away and she saw the cart and Kate’s limp body supported by her husband and mother-in-law, it was like being at a theater and watching the curtain swept back.
The sight of it almost knocked her down. She had to put her hand out palm flat to the wall of some fancy goods shop behind her to keep from falling. Kate’s face was dirty and there was red on Fred’s breeches.
She stumbled forward to the edge of the crowd where she could hear the voices talking.
“Slipped and her husband tried to catch her . . .”
“Such a pretty girl too . . .”
“Dead before he could pick her up again . . .”
“Constable’s writing it up now. His mother was there—saw the whole thing . . .”
“He’s taking it hard . . .”
The crowd shifted and Jocasta saw Mrs. Mitchell reach down, unclasp the little brooch from Kate’s shawl and slip it into her pocket.
Jocasta pushed her way through and started to shout.
“Oh no, not Milan, Mr. Crowther, not Milan!”
Harriet did not think she would ever become very fond of Mr. George Gillis. He had a face that reminded her of a self-satisfied raisin pudding, and his eyes looked like dubious oysters. That, if unappetizing, she could forgive, but his voice, drawling and nasal, seemed to find its way to some sensitive spot in the middle of her forehead and attack it with a brass pin.
He was sitting back in his chair in the reading room with his legs crossed and toying with a
lorgnette tied to his waistcoat with purple ribbon. His tone from their arrival had been one of conceited disdain. Having made lengthy remarks on how honored he was to be asked for advice by the great Mr. Crowther, he had been of no assistance whatsoever, answering only in negatives and evincing very little interest in Crowther’s curiosity, despite his avowed expertise in matters of the kind. The lorgnette continued to twirl and wink between his fingers. Crowther did not reply but simply watched the man with level attention. Harriet looked about her. The reading room of the Royal Society was a place of some beauty. This north wing of Somerset House had been only recently completed, and the high ceilings, comfortable armchairs scattered in groups, and conveniently lit reading desks all gave an air of elegant confidence. It was a place built by and for men who believed absolutely in their work, and in their capacity to unfold the various mysteries of the universe. Men like Crowther, but also it seemed men like Gillis. She could not believe that such a being would contribute much to the knowledge of his countrymen, yet Crowther had referred to him without irony as an expert, and stood waiting for him now.
Gillis gave a dramatic sigh. “There may be . . . I suspect there was a reference in a letter I had from a correspondent on the continent some weeks ago . . .”
He paused. Crowther raised his eyebrow and Harriet clenched her hands together in her muff.
Gillis unfolded himself and with a slowness Harriet thought could only be deliberate, reached into his pocket for a notebook and began turning the pages. It seemed necessary that he read each page complete before moving onto the next, and all the while he wore the same amused self-indulgent smile that certain people reserve for their own work.
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