Secret Lament Read online

  Secret Lament

  Roz Southey

  First published in 2009

  by Crème de la Crime

  P O Box 523, Chesterfield, S40 9AT

  Copyright © 2009 Roz Southey

  The moral right of Roz Southey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Typesetting by Yvette Warren

  Cover design by Yvette Warren

  Front cover image by Peter Roman

  ISBN 978-0-9557078-6-5

  eBook ISBN 978-1-906790-86-8

  A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library

  Printed and bound in Germany by Bercker.

  www.creativecontentdigital.com

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  Praise for Roz Southey’s inventive historical mysteries:

  … points for originality… different, absorbing, and with an unhackneyed setting…

  – Alan Fisk, Historical Novels Review

  what really makes the novel come alive is its setting… she seamlessly incorporates the historical information into the novel… The dialogue, too, rings true: just ornamented enough to feel right for its time… A charming novel…

  – Booklist, USA

  A fascinating read, and certainly different.

  – Jean Currie, Round the Campfire

  … plot as intricate as a fugue… wickedly pointed characterizations and the convincing evocation of the sounds and stink of a preindustrial city. Southey deserves an encore…

  – Publishers Weekly, USA

  … a masterpiece of period fiction that delights while it provides an intriguing puzzle that keeps the reader riveted until the end.

  – Early Music America

  … it is good to see a publisher investing in fresh work that… falls four-square within the genre’s traditions.

  – Martin Edwards, author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries

  Creme de la Crime… so far have not put a foot wrong.

  – Reviewing the Evidence

  With thanks

  … to Lynne Patrick at Crème de la Crime for her unfailing support and belief, and to Lesley Horton for her clear-sighted assistance as editor. To Larisa Werstler for all her hard work in America. And to Jeff, for his entertaining company at various books signings, book fairs and conventions, including that fantastic trip to Philadelphia and Baltimore…

  … to my sisters, Wendy and Jennifer, and to my brother-in-law John, for their generous help over the years, and to all the family (including Billy, who is much too young to know anything about the matter at all). Thanks too to Jackie, Laura and Anuradha for their continuing support.

  … and especially to my husband, Chris, who as usual has obliged with endless cups of tea and a shoulder to cry on when things get rough. And thanks too for his enthusiastic organisation of trips all over England and even to America. I said there’d be a few good holidays…

  Roz Southey is a musicologist and historian, and lives in the North East of England.

  www.rozsouthey.co.uk

  For Wendy, Jennifer and John

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  1

  Indeed, sir! There is nothing to be compared with the conviviality of a troupe of comedians!

  [Reminiscences of a theatre manager, Thomas Keregan (London: published for the Author, 1736)]

  If ever a man was born to be murdered, it was John Mazzanti.

  I was not in the mood to be tolerant. My head ached with the June sun beating in through the windows of the makeshift theatre, catching clouds of dust and sawdust in its rays. Outside, in the timber yard, sawyers could be heard shouting and clattering; inside, the resinous scents of the pine and cherry and rosewood that were normally kept here made me giddy. The store had been swept clean and the stage raised at one end for us to stand on, yet the scents still lingered.

  But it was Mazzanti who tried me most. Here he came again, pounding up the wood floor of the warehouse, a tall thin man with a sour twist to his mouth. The very worst kind of theatrical director. He called imperiously, “Violino! Quiet! Damn it – can’t you play more softly than that!”

  Amongst the assembled company gathered on the stage, someone tittered. Mazzanti swung round on them. His gaze settled on Ned Reynolds, our leading man, playing the role of the dashing hero. “You laugh, sir!”

  Ned stared at him, with an insolent little smile. Mazzanti reddened but snarled. “You have nothing to be proud of, sir! You began the song too slowly. And you!” He rounded on elderly Mrs Keregan, resting her bulk against a table on the stage. “Yes, you, madam! Do not breathe so loudly in your dialogue!”

  “Want me to stop altogether, eh?” Mrs Keregan wheezed. Her husband, the company manager – kind, gentle, inoffensive Mr Keregan – fluttered and stuttered unhappily.

  The real problem – the reason we all disliked Mazzanti so much – was that he wasn’t even Italian. All could have been forgiven if he had been – or at least swallowed with some resentment. Everyone knows that Italians are the crème de la crème as far as music and the musical theatre are concerned. Or at least it’s fashionable to say so. But Mazzanti might have had an Italian name, and an Italian father, even a performance or two before the nobility of Europe, but he was as English as I am.

  Besides, I had a personal grudge against him: he had been hired to lead the band for the concerts in Race Week and throughout the winter. That had been my job.

  “Very well,” Mazzanti snapped. “Let us start again – from the beginning of Julia’s song.”

  Someone groaned. That damn girl. Julia, John Mazzanti’s daughter, his pride and joy, his rising star of an actress and singer, even now hesitating with modest innocence at the front of the stage. Seventeen years old, golden-haired and blue-eyed, demurely
dressed in white and pink. A limpid melting gaze. She turned to smile coyly at Ned Reynolds. He was playing her lover in this nonsensical little musical entertainment and did his best to look adoringly down at her, but I saw his jaw clench as he fixed his smile hard.

  “No, no!” Mazzanti said. “Hold her hand, you fool.”

  A muscle worked in Ned’s cheek; he took the girl’s hand. Yes, surely someone must have planted a punch in Mazzanti’s face before now, maybe several times. I was tempted myself.

  We began again. The sun beat in and bathed us in sweat. The players in the company walking the stage around me were surrounded by a bright glare that made my head ache. I screwed up my face in a desperate attempt to play quietly enough so that Julia’s song could be heard. She had the worst singing voice I have ever known, a breathy little girl’s voice that you could hardly hear a foot away.

  My sweaty fingers slipped on the violin neck; the squeak was loud enough to be heard over the shuffling of the actors.

  “Damn it, violino!” Mazzanti roared. “Are you completely incompetent?”

  “Play it fortissimo, Mr Patterson,” advised a Scotch voice above me. Glancing up, I saw a huge cobweb – a single line drifting in the sunlight – and on the end of it a bright gleam. A spirit. Timber yards are dangerous places at the best of times and many a man has met his death here; three days later, his spirit disembodies and – as spirits cannot move from the place of the living man’s death – joins the throng already here, happily spending their eighty or hundred years before final dissolution in the company of their friends and fellow workers.

  I knew the spirit on the cobweb of old; the living man had been killed when a stack of oak fell on him and the spirit, once disembodied, insisted it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. To be confined to a snug warm wood-scented building was apparently his idea of heaven, particularly during the winter months and in June’s Race Week when the building was cleared of all its wood and transformed into a theatre, and he was given plays and farces and pantomimes for free.

  “As loud as you can, sir,” the spirit whispered, swinging dangerously on the end of the cobweb. “Drown the girl out! She’s not worth hearing.”

  Mrs Keregan took a hand, saying loudly, punctuated by heavy breaths: “Ignore His Foreign Highness, Charlie boy. I’ve been in this business fifty years and never yet cowtowed to no Italian.” The Keregans’ daughter, Athalia, spirited and red-haired, said: “You tell him, Mama.” But then Athalia was jealous of Julia Mazzanti who, she insisted, had stolen the leading role from her.

  Mazzanti flushed bright red, clearly remembered just in time that it was unwise to shout too often at the wife and daughter of the theatre manager, and took out his ire on the spirit instead. “Get those damn cobwebs out of the way! They’re catching the light and blinding me!”

  He stood immoveable until young Richard the errand boy brought a broom and swiped at the cobwebs. The spirit scuttled away to a corner beam, and Richard hurried after to apologise. Never offend a spirit if you can avoid it. Eighty or a hundred years is plenty of time for them to wreak revenge on someone they don’t like.

  Mazzanti banished me to the back of the stage where I could ‘scratch away’ without overwhelming the singers. On his way back to his place, he glowered at Ned Reynolds. “Take your hands off my daughter!”

  I stifled a grin at the thought of Ned putting hands on any woman, then stared in astonishment as I saw him flash a smile at the girl. Anyone would have thought he genuinely admired her.

  Of course Mazzanti paid the price for offending the spirit. No sooner had delicate, demure Julia started once more on her song, than the spirit struck up from a high beam with a Scotch song so bawdy it would have embarrassed a married man. The actresses in the company sniggered, Mrs Keregan looked grimly triumphant, and only young Richard, who is barely sixteen, blushed.

  In the aftermath, while Mazzanti was shouting and Mr Keregan trying to calm him, and the spirit crooning happily in the rafters, the rest of us retired to the costume boxes and fanned ourselves against the overwhelming heat.

  “Someone ought to see to that man, they should,” Mrs Keregan said darkly. “Beer, Charlie boy?”

  I took it eagerly.

  “I hope the spirit isn’t offended,” young Richard said anxiously, staring at the cobwebs in the corner.

  Athalia preened her red hair to an even greater pitch of curled perfection. “I’ll sort him out,” she said in warlike tones and pranced off across the stage.

  The afternoon sun was slanting across me; I shifted the box backwards into the shade. Outside, in the bright yard, bare-chested workmen hauled huge timbers about and shouted instructions to the apprentices darting here and there. And one dark face appeared at the window, peering in with a leer. An unshaven face, scarred on one cheek and surrounded by dirty tousled hair.

  He met my gaze. Instinctively, I pulled back. He grinned and was off.

  He was following me, had been for nearly three months now, along with two or three other fellows. Back in March, I tangled with some ruffians in one of the chares down by the Keyside, and they had been after me ever since. They trailed me down the wide daylight streets, grinned at me if I thought of venturing into an alley, embarrassed me by coming up and addressing me by name when I was talking to respectable gentlemen and ladies. I had even seen them lounging outside my lodgings.

  They were trying to frighten me, of course, revenging themselves for the defeat I had inflicted on them and their leader. They were succeeding. And I suspected that they would not stop at frightening but would sooner or later press on to give me a beating. I would have felt safer if my great friend Hugh Demsey had been in town to lend me a little practical help, but he was in Houghton-le-Spring, teaching the country ladies and gentlemen to dance, and I didn’t expect him back for another week or two, until Race Week itself.

  At the front of the stage, Athalia was cooing over John Mazzanti’s shoulder.

  “She’s after him,” her mother said with a sigh.

  I was startled. “But he’s married.” Signora Mazzanti, who is also English, lingers in her lodgings, annoying the neighbours by practising her scales. She is a much better singer than her daughter – very good indeed, I’m told.

  Mrs Keregan rolled her eyes. “Marriage? Why should Athalia want that? It’s money she’s after.”

  I kept quiet. I had one hundred guineas hidden beneath my mattress, the proceeds from selling a chamber organ which I had won in a raffle despite the fact that I had not bought a ticket; there were two people who might have bought me a ticket without telling me, and I didn’t much like the idea of being beholden to either of them. Athalia would think one hundred guineas amply worth her attention, although, if the rumours were right, Mazzanti had a great deal more. He certainly dressed like a wealthy man.

  He allowed himself to be cosseted out of his bad temper and called for us to begin again. I sent young Richard to whisper a polite request to the spirit not to annoy Mazzanti further; the boy looked dubious but went off willingly enough.

  As I got up to play, I saw Julia Mazzanti turn. Her golden hair glittered in the bright sunlight, the twin yellow ribbons danced and gleamed. She gave me the sweetest of looks, winning and winsome.

  I stared stonily back and glimpsed something else. A trace of anger? Or even desperation? Abruptly she looked very young, almost lost.

  She turned her shoulder and began her song once more.

  An hour or so later, as the company was rehearsing some dialogue and Mazzanti was busy offending everyone even further, a man slipped in beside me. I was dozing at the back of the stage and started in alarm, thinking the newcomer was one of the ruffians. But it was Matthew Proctor, the wandering psalm teacher, a slight, reserved man with a soft voice and a hesitant manner. In his mid-thirties, perhaps eight or so years older than myself. He slid down on to the wicker costume basket with a nervous nod of greeting, clutching his bassoon case to his chest.

  “Proctor,” I s
aid in surprise. “I thought you were spending Race Week in Carlisle.”

  “Yes. No,” he said. “Very well, thank you.”

  He was staring at Julia Mazzanti in patent adoration. Heaven help us, did she have all the men trailing in her wake? Even young Richard was offering shy homage, darting here and there to bring her lemonade, or her shawl, or a sweetmeat. They were much the same age of course, and I had seen them chattering together in odd moments – Julia artlessly innocent, Richard innocently adoring. He longed to act upon the stage himself and I had overheard Julia offering sage advice, which Richard would do well to ignore.

  But it was Ned Reynolds’s behaviour that startled me most. What the devil did he mean by solicitously handing Julia into her chair like that, or leaning over to murmur something that made her laugh? Proctor certainly didn’t like it much. He leant close to me, without taking his reverential gaze from Julia.

  “Who’s that fellow?”

  “Ned Reynolds. One of the company.”

  “He’s too encroaching.”

  I could have told Proctor he didn’t need to worry about Ned Reynolds as a competitor for Julia’s affections. Whatever pose he might strike in public, Ned wouldn’t even glance at the girl – any girl – in private. But such things are obviously never to be talked of, given the penalty the law demands.

  Proctor’s thoughts had already moved on. “She is going to London, you know.”

  “Julia? Is she?”

  “To play Lucy Locket.”

  Yes, I thought, Julia would look very well as the virginal heroine of The Beggar’s Opera. A pity she couldn’t sing.

  “I may go there myself,” Proctor whispered. “To see her acclaimed at Covent Garden would be magnificent.”

  I said nothing. Proctor was clearly enamoured of the girl – he was unworldly enough to think of her as an angel come down to earth. That was no doubt a part she could play very well too. Providing she didn’t have to sing. Or act.