“How. .” Harriet paused to pluck the right word out of the air “. . oddly pathetic.”
Harwood tilted back his chair, running his eyes over the gilt and splendor of the King’s Box. It was twice the size of the other private boxes, though the Prince’s Box at the other side of the stage was also generous, and had a little divan at its rear. All the boxes were ornate, but here everything was just a little more. The velvet draperies had a few more folds, the chairs a little more room for gilded wreaths, the upholstery a little more plush. Harriet found herself thinking that where she sat this afternoon, a king would sit in the evening. It gave her a little cold thrill of connection.
“Indeed,” Harwood went on, “I know Fitzraven was not here for the music. He obviously made some useful connections in Italy. He told me he had received a letter of introduction from someone-he did not say from whom-to Lord Carmichael’s house, for instance, and had been invited back to attend that gentleman more than once. He did not go there for love of art. Lord Carmichael has little to recommend him, I believe, other than his wealth.”
“Lord Carmichael?” Crowther said. Harriet was impressed with how much disdain Crowther could invest only two words. She wondered briefly if there might be some sort of mathematical formula for it. Perhaps she should suggest it to her new acquaintances at the Royal Society.
Harwood smiled at the ceiling. “I see you know Lord Carmichael, Mr. Crowther.”
“I knew the gentleman in my youth. A man I would go some way to avoid. It seems Mr. Fitzraven was not very particular in his choice of friends.” Harriet looked at Crowther with surprise. He seldom spoke with such passion about anything he had not recently dissected.
“I would agree,” Harwood replied evenly. “However, he is a peer, very rich, and since making his acquaintance Fitzraven reveled in the connection.” He let the queen’s chair tip back onto four legs and turned with a slight smile to Harriet. “I say this so you do not mistake Fitzraven’s devotion to this place,” a casual wave of his hand took in performers, music, audience, waves of gilt, “for a devotion to art or music. He was one of those strange hollow men. I do not think he existed in his own self at all. He was all light reflected. Sometimes from us here, sometimes from a creeping acquaintance with the great and good.”
Harriet rested her chin on the palm of her hand. “Can you tell us, sir, what were Fitzraven’s last duties for this place?”
Harwood considered. “I should imagine preparing the parts for the duet you have just heard. He readied them on Wednesday for its first rehearsal on Thursday morning.”
Crowther turned toward the manager and said very evenly, “Mr. Harwood, are you sure you have been quite frank with us about the nature of Mr. Fitzraven’s duties here?”
Winter Harwood met his look, and said with a polite inclination of the head, “Of course, Mr. Crowther.”
Jocasta was almost back at her own door again, and walking so quick that Boyo had a job of it to keep up with her, when she came to a sudden halt. He stubbed his nose on her ankle and yelped.
“I don’t want to speak of it now, Boyo,” Jocasta said. “I’m too ruffled and fretted.” She stayed where she was, though, the people passing on the pavement occasionally turning to give her a quick, sidelong stare, then moving on. She sighed and thrust her hand into another pocket under her skirts, pulling out a handful of dirty coins.
“All right then, Boyo. I will if it’ll keep you quiet. Though we must work in the morning if you want meat this week.”
Boyo smacked his lips and Jocasta turned again and made her way back toward the chophouse, jingling her money.
5
The investment in transporting Isabella and Manzerotti from Italy had, it seemed, been justified. For an evening so early in the season the crowd that night at His Majesty’s was remarkable. The Hay Market was almost completely blocked with carriages from five o’clock. The torches outside the Opera House doors flared and roared, casting folding shadows up the brickwork. The scrum that thundered for entrance into the pit and stalls extended far along the pavements toward Northumberland Palace, and up and down its lengths went a dozen boys and girls selling copies of the libretto for a shilling and nuts for a penny. Two other children with piles of books in their arms like schoolboys late for the bell scurried between the carriages, handing more copies of librettos through the windows. Shillings were pulled from silk purses by long, gloved fingers and dropped into the boys’ waiting palms. A couple of street singers, one turning the wheel on the hurdy-gurdy around her neck, sang the crowd songs from the previous season above the general noise and put out their hands for tribute. A man with a brazier had set up shop roasting chestnuts beside them and the air filled with the sweetness of the black papery skins.
Among the general noise and excitement the Londoners were getting on with the serious business of looking at each other, till, as the bells of Westminster rang out six o’clock, there was a groan from bolts in the locks and the high entrance doors were swung open by liveried footmen. At the same moment the door to the pit was loosed, and the stagehand who opened it was almost crushed by the weight of people rushing in waving papers and arguing for cheap tickets at the tops of their voices, long before they were in earshot of the harried clerk at his booth. Through the smarter entrance to the lobby and private boxes passed brocade and silk, feathers and high headdresses all bulked up with horsehair and smothered in powder. Fans flicked open and closed, little high-heeled shoes in ivory and red picked their way over the grot of the pavement. Tailcoats flicked up as the men showed their legs and bowed to the ladies. A murmur of spray diamonds and stones glinted their way into the lobby. Those of the crowd who were not fighting their way in kept up a commentary on the dresses and faces passing by. When one lady descended from her carriage in a skirt of particularly daring design, a shout went up from the jostling observers. Mr. Harwood heard it from the relative peace of his office and smiled.
The party of Mr. Owen Graves, consisting of himself, Mrs. Service, Miss Rachel Trench and Lady Susan Thornleigh, were not so extravagantly dressed, but the crowd knew them anyway. Susan heard her name whispered as she stepped through the throng with her guardian’s hand on her shoulder, and kept her eyes down till almost at her elbow she heard a voice ask her: “Off to listen to the music then, my lady?”
She turned and looked up into the full fat face of a woman with her arms crossed under her breasts. She did not know the woman but the face looked kindly enough so she smiled at it and replied, “Yes, thank you, ma’am. I like music.”
The fat lady roared with laughter. “Aww! Ma’am, she says! Bless the little chicken leg!” Then, as Susan felt her guardian’s hand steer her firmly forward, she heard the voice continue, “Oi! Ursula! You’ll never guess who just ‘ma’am-ed’ me! Lady Susan Thornleigh! Yeah, all them murders! Little bit that she is!”
Susan lifted her chin and kept her eyes straight ahead.
Crowther was in the library of the house in Berkeley Square, which, despite his having his own establishment, had become acknowledged as his domain. He had covered some pages with a record of his observations of Fitzraven’s body when Mrs. Westerman entered the room and took a seat in one of the well-stuffed leather armchairs in front of the fire.
“Do you regret refusing the invitation for the opera, madam?”
Harriet shook her head, and Crowther returned to his writing. Despite the pleasure she had taken in the rehearsal this afternoon, an opera was not how she wished to employ the time available to her. From the sights and stories, when they did not put too much of a strain on her good sense, she could take some amusement, but music itself seemed to her a language she understood only partially. When she attended concerts or indeed any gathering where music was more than a stimulus to dancing, she felt as if she were being told fairy tales in Portuguese. Some sense of the drama reached her, some element of the subtle excitement everyone around her seemed to be able to taste, but she could not understand fully what she heard and w
as unable to work out the proper sense of it.
She remembered listening, one evening the previous spring, to a small group of musicians who came to play in the little assembly hall by the coaching inn in Pulborough. Rachel, her sister, had been very keen to attend, so Harriet had escorted her there. She had been listening to some slower piece the gentlemen were playing, and thinking it quite pleasing when she caught sight of her sister’s profile. Rachel had been not merely attentive, but transfixed, and her eyes were, Harriet had been astonished to realize, full of tears. Harriet had looked about her and seen a similar look of divine reverie on the faces of several of her acquaintance in the crowd, recalled it on the face of her husband when he had persuaded her to go to some concert on his arm. She had felt stupid and slow by comparison and judged herself as oddly insensitive, even though she was sure she loved, feared and dreamed as passionately as anyone else in those audiences. Now, since James’s continued illness had brought them to London and the home of their friends in Berkeley Square, she was continually surrounded by music. Lady Susan Thornleigh was, at eleven, an accomplished player on the harpsichord. Graves studied and loved music, as well as having it occupy his business life. It was as essential as air to them both.
Harriet remembered questioning Graves earlier in her stay about the effects of music, somewhat petulantly, when she had been a mute witness to an impassioned discussion of the technicalities of one of Mr. William Boyce’s symphonies, and its relative merits compared with some new score by a Mr. Haydn just brought, with great fanfare, by a gentleman who had been traveling in Austria.
“But Graves, what does it all mean?” she had said.
Graves crossed and uncrossed his legs several times before replying, drew in his breath and lifted his hand as if about to begin, then let it fall again, till at last he said with an apologetic shrug of his shoulders: “Mrs. Westerman, music does not mean anything at all. You cannot ask it to speak to you in such concrete terms. It can evoke, affect, cajole and persuade, but its language is not that of speech. Indeed, if a composer can say in literal terms what his music means, he had much better write prose than notes.” He saw that his answer did not satisfy her, and after a moment tried again. “Let music, when you hear it, work on you in its own way, Mrs. Westerman. Let it flow around you and find its own way to touch you. It is not something you must translate moment by moment. Give it your attention. If it fails to speak to you in its own manner then, well, it is a failure in the music, not in yourself.” Harriet had promised to try his advice, but remained doubtful.
She sighed again and Crowther’s pen ceased to scratch.
“Mrs. Westerman?”
“I do not understand this city, Crowther,” she told him, “and that is a concern to me. The noise, the continual bustle of the place, the air. How are we to manage?”
He placed his pen down on the papers in front of him.
“If it is any comfort, I do not believe we understand or know the country either. We will manage as everyone does, Mrs. Westerman, as best we can.”
Mr. Harwood heard the last chords ring out from the auditorium and waited. The signs during the performance had been promising, but it was now in this moment of silence that the fate of the season would be decided.
Two, three seconds passed-then a roar of noise broke like a tidal wave across the theater. It lifted and expanded; a storm of applause. The paneling of his room seemed to swell with the force of the muffled “Bravos!” making the portraits shift on the walls. The little plaques below each were a product of his own imagination. His predecessors had been primarily businessmen like himself, and never bothered to commemorate themselves in oils. He had bought the portraits as a job lot from a man who had lost his fortune one night at the card table and now used that man’s anonymous forebears to suggest an artistic lineage he did not have. Everything within these walls was spectacle.
The audience were still hysterical with pleasure. Harwood smiled. He thought how, on such an occasion, he could have guaranteed that even in this moment Fitzraven would be falling over his threshold to tell him the details of the rapturous reception. He would have noted the encores of each aria, gathered compliments or overheard twenty little fragments of other people’s conversations he would be desperate to scatter across Harwood’s desk like an explorer throwing down gems before his prince.
Harwood went to the window; he still had a few moments before he needed to play host to his royal guests and shower warmth on his performers. The Withdrawing Rooms this evening would be heady with the scent of glory, a golden sweat, his artists glutted and drunk with their triumph. He doubted if they would register the news of Fitzraven’s murder at all.
Looking out across the damp gray and shadowed roads around him, he wondered if the strength of the applause might be audible in Great Suffolk Street, where Justice Pither had his house and Fitzraven rested, wondered if its echo flowed over the man’s cold corpse and whispered in his empty ear. Then, smoothing his coat, he turned away from the night, prepared to leave his office with a proper air of modest pleasure. He would appear gratified, and each word of praise he solicited would sound to him like gold knocking on gold.
PART III
1
SUNDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 1781
London rolled over in its bed and yawned at the approaching morning, then cursed it. In the churches, old men turned large keys in the doors and shoved them cautiously open, letting the darkness out before the first worshippers found their way in. Those who had got enough pennies together to drink the night before flinched at the dawn and their empty pockets. In the better houses, young girls, their hands already worn red with work and cold water, cleaned the grates and set the fires, dreaming of the narrow beds they had just left. In the rookeries the day began with angry growls and hands grasping for what comfort they could find in the dark. Another day to live through.
The night had gone and dawn was wearying away at the skin of the November gloom as best it could when there was a low tap at Jocasta’s door. She was in her usual place among the patchwork blankets on her little settee, but everything existed in only shades of gray. Her fire had gone out and she had lit no candle. Until she jerked her head up at the knock, the scene could have been one of stone; even Boyo was still and waiting.
“Come in then,” she said, not bothering to raise her voice. The door opened a crack, and a little boy peered round its edge. He looked very young, and mangy. His fingers were black with filth, and his hair so greasy it looked like he’d been dipped into a tar pit by his heels.
“Mrs. Bligh? Ripley said I should come to you once I’d seen the morning in. Tell you what I been looking at on Salisbury Street.”
“Good lad. Ripley said he’d send Sam. That you?” He nodded. “You been there all night?”
The lad began to sidle around the door and rubbed his nose on his hand. “I have, Mrs. Bligh.” He paused.
Jocasta waited a moment then looked up at him frowning. “Out with it, boy.”
“Mrs. Bligh, I don’t mean no disrespect, but are you a witch, Mrs. Bligh?” The words tumbled out of him like a sailor’s pay.
Jocasta sucked on her few good teeth. “Wish that I were. But if I were, you’d see more frogs and toads round here and fewer men. I have my talents. See forward sometimes. Right-I’ve satisfied your asking, now satisfy mine.”
The boy looked a bit confused and Jocasta thought for a second he wouldn’t have the sense to stop with his own questions, but he seemed to take a hold of himself and said, “Ripley told me at your asking to stay outside the Mitchell place. By the time I got myself there, there was a candle lit, and a lady walking about inside. Young, like.”
“Kate.”
Sam shrugged. “Can’t answer to her name. So she closed the shutter, then evening-timeish came a man, not that old, all yellow-haired and milky-looking. .”
“That’d be Fred.”
“I guess so. Anyhow, he was in a while then he came out and spotted me, lurking, and he gave me a p
enny to carry a note to Hay Market. Said it was urgent. Told me to give it to Mrs. Mitchell in the coffee rooms there.” He puffed out his chest a bit as he said the last, then his shoulders dropped again. “I wasn’t sure what to do, so I got my mate Clayton to stand watch while I went. Was that right?”
“It was.”
The boy looked relieved.
“So I took it where I was told and she was there flogging oranges and coffee fast as she could take the money. She read the note and looked bitter as dry lemons, and made a face like she’s smelled something real bad, and said, ‘You go back to the man that gave you this, and tell him to come fetch me at midnight and say nothing but sweets till then,’ and sent me out of the place. She made me repeat it a couple of times first.”
Jocasta nodded slowly. “Can you read, boy? Did you look at what was writ?”
The boy scratched the back of his neck with sudden energy and force for a moment then replied, “No, Mrs. Bligh. But I brought it with me.” He reached into his waistband and pulled out a crumpled bit of paper. “She just dropped it after I gave it her, so I picked it up again, pretending to be after touching her manky oranges. Cost me a slap.”
“No use handing it to me, lad.”
“Oh,” he said, and put it a little disappointedly on the table between them.
Jocasta pulled her shawl around her shoulders. “All right then, boy-then what?”
“I went back to that milky bloke, gave him the message and he gave me the penny.” The boy looked sadly at his feet. “I gave it to Clay, though I might’ve kept it because he said no one had been or come since I was gone.” The corner of Jocasta’s mouth twitched. “Then late, real late, Milky Boy heads out again, and about an hour later I see them turn in at the top of the street and stand there a while.”
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