Broken Harmony Read online

  If I had known what would happen, I wouldn’t have looked at the boy twice.

  5

  SONG FOR THREE VOICES

  Sly Mr Ord was the first to remark on the matter, pouncing on me the moment I set foot in his house the next day (to instruct his grandson upon the harpsichord). I was feeling somewhat better; I had decided that the strange events in Caroline Square the previous night had been a drunken delusion and determined not to think of the matter again. (What else could it have been?)

  Mr Ord’s fingers pinched my arm. “Naughty boy,” he scolded with the cosiest of chuckles, and wagged a finger. “Causing such uproar!”

  “I, sir?”

  He drew me to one side of the hall to prevent his footman hearing our conversation. “I’ve just come from his house. For my lesson, you know. Of course it would be more proper if he came here but one must make allowances for Genius.”

  “Of course,” I agreed, perfectly aware that Genius would unhesitatingly run to the house of the titled. Sly Mr Ord, unfortunately for his dignity, had made his money in trade. “I take it, sir, that you refer to Monsieur le Sac?”

  “Who else, who else? He has taken it very ill, you know.”

  I thought of the boy I had left at home, assiduously copying music. My heart sank.

  “He says you have stolen the boy.”

  I looked into those sly eyes and understood – gratefully – that Mr Ord had made his money not by chance, but from shrewdness.

  “Of course,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “That is mere wild talk. But we must make allowances for the continental temperament. The French, you know.”

  “Swiss,” I said before I could stop myself.

  “Besides, the lad’s father says that Le Sac wrote him a letter repudiating the boy. And between you and me –” he prodded my arm with a plump finger – “the father called the letter disrespectful. Of course one must also make allowances for the language problem, though why foreigners can never speak English when it’s so easy, I cannot fathom.” He sighed. “Well, even Genius has its weaknesses. And Le Sac can hardly say you stole the boy when he had cast him off.”

  “So I judged.”

  “But I thought you would want to know the state of affairs,” said sly Mr Ord. In truth, he did not seem sly any longer. “You can be sure I have told my friends there is no truth in the accusations. But…” He sighed again. “You had better not have done it, sir.”

  I was concerned by the hints in his words that accusations had spread widely, but I murmured, “You are very kind, sir.”

  Mr Ord shook his head so vehemently the flaps of his wig flew up and down. “I like you, Patterson. I would hire you myself, you know, to learn me my violin, for Le Sac gets a little impatient from time to time. But, as I say, we have to make allowances for Genius.”

  And, thanking heaven for the small mercy that I had not to struggle day upon day with Mr Ord’s propensity towards shakes and other ornaments, and feeling a twinge (but no more) of sympathy for Le Sac who did, I proceeded to shrewd Mr Ord’s library and his eager, but heavy-handed, grandson.

  Demsey caught me near mid-day at the door of Nellie’s coffee-house in the Sandhill, as I was about to step inside for a pie. He slapped me on the back and shouted for the entire town to hear. “Well done, man. Well done!”

  “Demsey –”

  “I’ve not known a better trick!”

  “I would not call it –”

  “Think me up a similar game to play with Light-Heels!”

  A pair of Scotch sailors went past, cackling in their unintelligible patois. I bundled Demsey into the coffee-house. “In heaven’s name, keep your congratulations close, man. It was not as you think.”

  “Of course not.” He grinned and tossed back a stray lock of black hair. Demsey keeps that irritating lock for show; his mere flick of it makes all the young ladies swoon. It is the oddest thing; Demsey in his street clothes looks but a lout, noisy and argumentative; but put him on a polished floor, in evening dress and a pair of dancing slippers, with a kit-fiddle in his hands, and he is the lightest, most elegant man you ever saw. Which is why all the young ladies long for his classes, and all the young ladies’ mamas seriously consider sending them to Light-Heels Nichols.

  The noise from the crowd in the coffee-house was fearsome. We raised our voices to shout at each other as we stumbled over legs and tripped over sleeping dogs. The acrid stink of the brew pervaded every corner, combined with the delicious savoury aroma of Nellie’s famous meat pies; a rustle of papers accompanied the clink of dishes and the scrape of knives upon plates.

  A cat scampered across my path; I stumbled and trod on a shoe. Or rather a pale blue slipper encasing a slender foot. A newspaper was drawn down and green eyes looked coolly over its folds.

  “Lady Anne,” I said, bowing. “Forgive my clumsiness.”

  She regarded me for a moment, her delicate lips pursed in thought. “Perhaps,” she said and drew up the paper again.

  Demsey pulled me to a table deep in the back corner of the room. “Damn women. Shouldn’t allow them in here.”

  Lady Anne, in her blue and pink satin splendour, was the only female apart from the serving girls. “Lady Anne goes where she chooses.” It crossed my mind to talk to her of what had happened in Caroline Square – but admit my drunken state to a woman? No, it would be halfway round the town within hours and in the ears of concerned mamas who would talk to fond papas. The result would be lessons cancelled and pupils taken elsewhere. A teacher, particularly one allowed into family homes, must be of a saintly disposition, or at the very least discreet.

  We ordered game pie and broke our fast hungrily. Demsey pulled a bedraggled letter from his pocket and made me read it. It was a fulsome encomium from M Bagieu of Paris, extolling the dancing prowess of M Hugo Demsey and detailing his proficiency in this dance and that dance and all the other dances that were the present rage in the French court.

  “Hugo,” I remarked, handing the paper back. “Are you turning Italian, my dear Hugh?”

  He waved pastry at me on the end of his knife. “If I did, it would be sound commercial sense. The Italians are all the rage now.”

  “I like Italian music,” I said. “Corelli, Geminiani –”

  “Vivaldi?” he suggested, as slyly as Mr Ord.

  “Fit only for children,” I said severely. “As you well know. Come to think if it, not even fit for them if you want them to grow up with decent musical taste. Defective in harmony and no idea of how to write a decent melody. In fact –”

  But I was interrupted by a swirl of blue satin and the heavy thump of a chair. Lady Anne sat down.

  “Mr Patterson.”

  “Lady Anne.”

  “My lady,” Demsey said. The lady took no notice of him.

  “I hear you have clashed with Monsieur le Sac.”

  “Then you have heard incorrectly, madam.”

  “The matter of a boy.” She raised thin eyebrows. “A boy who was his apprentice and is now yours.”

  “He got the better bargain,” I said. “He got – and kept – the premium.”

  She threw back her head and laughed as freely as any man. The gesture exposed even more – if such a thing was possible – of her chest. I say chest for Lady Anne was not the most well-endowed of women; her figure was scrawny although her skin was soft and fair. Her arms were her best feature and she knew it, taking care to display and use them obtrusively. Her hair, uncovered, was a brownish shade. One does not pry into such matters as age but I fancied she was thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old – perhaps a decade older than myself.

  “If you do not make a profit from the boy,” she pointed out, “what other reason can you have for taking him on other than to spite Monsieur le Sac?”

  “But I will make a profit, Lady Anne. Three shillings and sixpence for every concert he plays.”

  “That seems a paltry return.”

  “You were born the possessor of a fortune, madam.�
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  “True,” she said curtly. I fancy she was offended. “But there are more creditable ways of making a living than exhibiting yourself on a public stage. Even to be a tradesman is more respectable.”

  “What about being a dancing master?” Demsey said sourly. He had been reddening with anger throughout our conversation, chiefly I believe at being so contemptuously ignored.

  I nudged my foot warningly against his under the table. “I assume you have said the same to Monsieur le Sac, my lady?” Did my anger show in my voice? I think not.

  The lady shrugged. “He is a foreigner. They have lower standards. I am told that in France they even tolerate musicians socially.”

  “How unfortunate,” Demsey said savagely.

  I indicated the crowded coffee-house. “Is this not a social occasion?”

  “One cannot govern whom one meets in public,” she said disdainfully. “One can, on the other hand, pick and choose who sits at one’s own dinner-table. No musician will join me there, I assure you.” She leant forward. “I have an investment in Monsieur le Sac, sir, and I do not desire to see that investment threatened by a young man of little talent who chooses to indulge in petty enmities out of envy and jealousy.”

  “That is a comprehensive assessment of my character, madam,” I said as coolly as I could. “And I would let no man utter it unchallenged. You take advantage of your sex.”

  “So I do,” she agreed, rising. “And you can be sure I do it deliberately. Be warned, Mr Patterson.”

  And she swept from the room in a flurry of satin and lace.

  6

  BATTLE PIECE

  Movement I

  I left Demsey to finish another slice of pie and strolled out upon the Key. A fitful sun shone, although there was little warmth in it; nonetheless the sailors on the Key were sweating as they heaved cargo across the cobbles and hung it on pulleys to haul it on deck. There was a smell everywhere of fish and of coal. Downriver, a great plume of smoke billowed into the air from the saltworks at Shields, close upon the sea. Today the smoke was almost pleasurable to look at, a thing of odd beauty; but I have known days – and many of them – when it comes rolling up over the town and lies heavy and stinking in the hollows, setting everyone who ventures out of doors coughing. Demsey jokes that the smoke is the reason that we have no singers of note in the town but must send south to the cathedral at Durham for them. We should banish the smoke by the erection of windmills surrounding the town, he says, and the man who builds the mills will earn a great reward from the Corporation, for the clear air will encourage native singers and so spare us the airs and graces of their lordships from the sacred precincts.

  My mind was not at ease. It seemed that everyone was intent upon thrusting me into conflict with Le Sac. First Mrs Foxton with her urgings to accept the boy, then Mr Ord with his glee – and Demsey likewise – and Lady Anne who took offence at my interfering with her investment. Demsey’s pleasure in the affair was nothing, merely a delight at seeing a crony of his enemy discomfited. But the others… I was uncomfortably suspicious that Lady Anne at least, and Mr Ord too perhaps, had games afoot in which I was a mere pawn.

  I walked down the Key towards the Printing Office, wending my way between coils of rope and heaps of stone with the lady’s voice, murmuring of investment, accompanying me. I found the term an odd one to apply to a man rather than a cargo of wood or coal. It is not uncommon for a wealthy benefactor to patronise a musician but it is generally from a love of the Divine Art itself, or from a desire to be in the fashion.

  I glanced at two gentlemen, plainly merchants, in conversation at the side of a keel – and stopped. One of the gentlemen, the younger – was he not the fellow who had whispered to the pretty young girl at the dinner table, in that strange vision when I had seemed to have been transported from Caroline Square?

  He saw me staring at him, gave me a chill look. I walked on. Clearly it had been nothing unusual after all. Lady Anne had been entertaining, I had glimpsed the party in a drunken stupor and imagined the rest, the impossible alteration of the surroundings.

  And yet – who had been the middle-aged man I had seen at the head of the table? And why had not Lady Anne’s cousin been present?

  The Printing Office was at the far end of the Key; I dodged barrels and piles of shit and roaming dogs. This matter of Lady Anne and Le Sac was more to the point. The gentry were notoriously fickle; if Lady Anne had taken against me it might rebound greatly to my disadvantage. Might the lady and Le Sac be conducting a discreet affair of love? A man of Le Sac’s stamp might enter such an affair cynically, for mercenary reasons. And they say the French – damn it! Ord’s mistake was infectious. The French may be amorously inclined but the Swiss, for all I know, may be as frigid as the tops of their mountains. And I would swear the lady had not an ounce of the softer passions in her.

  The Printing Office was a scurrying melee of men, running backwards and forwards with fragments of paper or staggering off with heaps of parcels. Clearly it was printing day. I made my way to the house behind the office, standing back from the Key down a narrow alley. An ugly old house, but as solid and well-built as I have seen in a long time, with thick walls that kept sounds from straying from one room to the next.

  The old uncle’s spirit swung the door open for me. “Master Patterson!” he said jubilantly. “Come ye in, come ye in.”

  The spirit clung to the door jamb as I entered the dark chill hall. He always calls me master, for he knew me when I was in frocks, and he knew my dead father and all my dead baby brothers and sisters too. He himself died three years since, in this very hallway, in the breath between one step and another. I was there and caught him as he fell lifeless and laid him down gently, and he has never forgotten that service.

  “My niece has been practising,” he said. “I’ve seen to that.”

  Elizabeth practises without being told, like many of my female pupils. She knows it will increase her chances in the marriage mart. She has always been a sensible, practical child.

  “That piece you left her last time,” the uncle said. “You wrote something like it for me, I recall, years back, before you went off to London. You never did tell me how you did there.”

  “I held a concert,” I said.

  “Just one?”

  “Just one. At Hickford’s Rooms.”

  He oohed in appreciation. “I’ve heard of them. Where the lords and ladies go.”

  “Not many came when I played,” I said ruefully.

  “Too many fish in the sea, eh?”

  “Too many musicians in the capital, certainly. And I am not Italian enough.”

  He cackled. “Change your name. Call yourself Carlo something or other and you will make your fortune.”

  Teaching can be tedious and it can be exhilarating. With pupils like Elizabeth Saint, it is merely a tolerable way to earn a living. She is assiduous, listens carefully to what I say and executes everything exactly as I require. The sun through the garden window was warm on my back, and roses bloomed on bushes that autumn had almost stripped bare of leaves. From time to time I put my hand on the wood of the new harpsichord to assure myself it was not too warm in the sunshine. We were chaperoned, of course. Her older, widowed sister yawned in a corner; the governess sat at the table and copied out sums for her pupil’s later solving. And I murmured and encouraged and corrected while my mind puzzled over the merchant I had recognised on the Key and the events of the previous evening. I came to no conclusions.

  It was dark when I came to the front door again and looked out on the evening. The chill in the air nipped at my nose and hands, and I pulled my coat close and shivered. Suddenly the air tingled and the maid that had opened the door for me yelped and jerked back.

  “Go, go, shoo, shoo,” said the uncle, and the girl fled indignantly. “Master Patterson, don’t go yet. Stay awhile.”

  “I have another lesson to give at the other end of town.”

  “Then go out through the garden.”
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br />   “And clamber the hill past Butcher Bank? I would come to my pupils stinking of offal!”

  “I warn you, Master Patterson,” he said. “Do not go yet.”

  Perhaps I was influenced by his tone of voice – the same tone he had used when I was five years old and intent upon escaping my father’s instruction. (Papa was not a good teacher.) I was tired, weary with teaching and with constant speculation on that other matter. “I must go,” I said and stepped out into the alley.

  I regretted my impulsiveness almost as soon as I reached the Key. In darkness, the Key has a different character, a reeling and rolling and dancing character, a singing and shouting and whistling nature, all accompanied by the loud good humour that can change to violence in an instant. I remembered that so-effective message system the spirits use and wondered if the old uncle had heard something that had alarmed him. Just like him not to tell me, to expect me to do as I was told as if I were still a child. But then, I had not given him much time to explain.

  I hurried along, seeing my way by lanterns that guttered at the doors of brothels and taverns, dodging the sailors that leant towards me with breath stinking of sour ale. The wind had changed and was bringing the smoke of the coal-pits and the salt works in billowing clouds stinking with sulphur that clung in my throat and made me cough. The smoke collected here along the river; higher up in the town, in the gardens of Westgate and of Northumberland Street where the richer sort live, there would be hardly a trace of it. And Caroline Square would surely hold no whiff of corruption at all.

  I turned to climb the Side, that narrow winding street that leads up to Amen Corner and the church of St Nicholas. The organist there is half-dead and half-drunk and so deeply in debt he will never be able to recover. I have long hoped for his dismissal and the ensuing election for the post. I flatter myself that no one in this town can match me on the keyboard and the forty pounds per annum paid by the Town Corporation would allow me to rent a larger room. Except that the organist, Mr Nichols – for he is elder brother to a certain dancing master – lingers and lingers beyond reason. I was feeling angry, resentful, ungenerous.