Music Macabre

by Sarah Rayne

  He zoomed the image up again in order to read the title.

  Beneath it, Loretta had typed, ‘Family group with the great-great (one more “great”?) aunts, outside L/L, c.1890s’.

  Roland sat for a very long time staring at the sketch. So Loretta had had great – several-times great – aunts, who had been drawn standing outside Linklighters. They might have been there by chance; they might simply have been looking round London, perhaps shopping in Harlequin Court itself, and been captured by a street artist outside Linklighters. But there might be a stronger connection. And if there was, that could certainly explain Loretta’s eagerness to get the place and renovate it.

  But either way, surely there was no reason for her not to have mentioned it?

  Loretta arrived home about midnight, poured herself a glass of wine, handed one to Roland, then kicked off her shoes and flopped down on the sofa.

  ‘It’s unusual to find you still up when I get back,’ she said.

  Without realizing he had been going to say it, Roland asked, ‘Who were the great aunts sketched outside Linklighters?’

  It was not often he had seen Loretta thrown off balance, but she was certainly thrown by this. She did not flinch physically, but Roland felt her do so mentally. After a moment she said, in a voice that was just a little too bright, ‘How on earth did you know about that? Oh, of course – you must have seen that little sketch on my laptop.’

  ‘I did. I wasn’t prying,’ said Roland, anxious not to be suspected of this. ‘I was looking for … for an invoice for the next tax return.’ He was surprised at himself for having thought of this, but it sounded credible. ‘I saw you’d uploaded some shots of the restaurant,’ he said, ‘and I was interested.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ She got up to refill her glass.

  Roland watched her, then said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you had a … a family link to Linklighters? Or was the sketch just coincidence – did they just happen to be in Harlequin Court one day?’

  ‘It was a bit more than coincidence, and it was a bit more than them just being there one day.’ Loretta sipped her wine. ‘One of them worked at Linklighters,’ she said. ‘I don’t know which of them it was, though, and “worked for” doesn’t necessarily mean performing on the stage. It could have been anything from scrubbing the floors to painting scenery or acting as pot boy. I’m rather sorry you found the sketch,’ she said, ‘although I suppose I shouldn’t have put it on the laptop. But the original’s quite fragile, so I scanned it in to preserve it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about them? They all looked nice,’ said Roland. ‘I rather liked that one who’d tried to jazz up an old outfit with an extravagant hat. I found that quite endearing.’

  ‘One of them’s supposed to have had an eye for nice clothes,’ said Loretta. ‘I’ve always thought it was that one. None of them ever had a brass farthing, but apparently one of the girls used to scour second-hand clothes’ shops and market stalls for things she could adapt or remake.’

  ‘Who drew the sketch?’

  ‘No idea. It was most likely one of those street artists, though. I found it in my grandmother’s things after she died. On the back she’d written, “Family group – great-aunts, outside Linklighters, early 1890s”.’

  ‘What about the man?’ asked Roland. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘I don’t know. A brother or a cousin, maybe. Or the husband of one of them.’

  ‘Why didn’t you show me the sketch?’

  Loretta had been staring into her glass of wine, but now she turned her head to look at him. ‘There are some ancestors you can talk about quite openly,’ she said, slowly. ‘You can share their stories, and it’s all very nice, and it reminds you that you belong to a family, even though none of them is around. But you only do that for the nice ancestors – the lively characters, or the ones who made a success of their lives. Because there are others, and their stories are far darker …’ A frown twisted her face, then she said, ‘Roland, be honest, would you have married me if you’d known—’

  ‘Known what?’

  ‘That I had an ancestor who was shut away in an asylum?’

  This was the last thing Roland had been expecting, but after a moment he said, ‘Yes, of course I would. It must have been a very long time ago, and those things – madness and so on – aren’t hereditary anyway.’

  ‘I don’t think you would have married me,’ said Loretta. With a kind of bitter anger, she said, ‘And if your mother had known, she would certainly have used it to get rid of me.’

  This was true, of course; Mother would have seized on it with triumph. Roland said, ‘It was one of those people in the group? The … the one who was put in an asylum?’

  ‘They had very bad childhoods,’ said Loretta, almost as if she was repeating something learned by heart a long time ago. ‘The stories were handed down – those last years of the eighteenth century aren’t so very far back, you know. Only three, or maybe four, generations. I expect the details got skewed over the years – bits might have got added on, or other bits might have been forgotten. But at the heart of it is imprisonment in one of those old Victorian asylums. And they were terrible places, Roland. Cruel. Inhuman. I grew up hearing the stories. One version said there had never been any insanity at all – that it had been faked.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How should I know? But people did do that for unwanted relatives. There was another version, though, that said it was entirely justified – that there had been violence and cruelty. Even murder. I’ve no idea how true any of that is. But when I found the sketch, I went to see the place where it was drawn. It was easy enough – if you look closely at the original, you can see where the artist had drawn in the words, Harlequin Court, on the edge of a wall.’ She made a brief, impatient gesture with one hand. ‘And as soon as I found it – as soon as I saw Linklighters, I wanted it,’ she said. ‘I wanted it for that ancestor whose name I never knew, but who might not have been mad – who might have been shut away for ever, perfectly sane.’

  ‘One of those four people in the sketch?’

  ‘That’s how I thought of it. And the dates are about right, I think. I wanted to … to make up for what had happened. To put success where there’d been failure and loss and tragedy. Because tragedy faced that group,’ she said. ‘It was waiting for them in their future. Linklighters became a kind of symbol of that. I was determined to get it somehow. I’d tried two or three times to link up with men with money, but I’d never managed it. Until I met you. You were the best possibility I’d ever found.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’ Roland had to stop himself from asking her if it had only ever been about the money.

  ‘D’you know, all those months it was being renovated, I sometimes thought I saw that little group in the sketch,’ she said, softly. ‘I’d imagine they were standing in Harlequin Court, watching. Approving of everything I was doing. I’d sometimes talk to them, just quietly, when no one was around. Explain to them what was going on. I’d say, “See how it’s all going to come right.”’ She sent him a sideways look. ‘And now you’ll think there really was madness and that I’ve inherited it.’

  ‘No. Which one of the four d’you think was shut away in the asylum?’ said Roland, suddenly.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But even as she said this, something cold and sad seemed to breathe into the warm room, and the image of the figure on the right-hand side of the sketch came back to Roland. Small, a bit birdlike, but with an air of cheerfulness about the way she faced the camera and about the jaunty angle of the lavishly trimmed bonnet. He found himself wondering what her name had been.

  SEVENTEEN

  Phin had almost forgotten promising to accompany Toby to the Marble Arch pub that evening, and by the time he had disentangled his mind from Links and found a clean shirt, it was already seven o’clock. It was after eight when they reached the pub, and the evening was already in full swing, with a group of people singing ballads from the pub’s colle
ction.

  ‘I think it’s a bit of a tradition here, this singing,’ explained Toby, as the group embarked on a gleeful rendition of a macabre ballad entitled ‘The Maid Freed from the Gallows’.

  They collected drinks, ordered two platefuls of the pub’s pasta bake, and found a table. The food arrived promptly, and they ate to the accompaniment of another, equally lugubrious ballad involving a hapless lady living in Manchester Street and a lascivious but ill-fated coachman. This was cheered loudly, after which Toby went off in search of the promised scrapbooks. Phin had another drink, and somehow found himself drawn into the conversation of an earnest trio who were discussing criminal lunacy.

  ‘They had no rights, those poor sods who were thrown into the madhouses,’ explained one of them to Phin, clearly considering that Phin’s presence was sufficient credential to include him in their conversation. ‘And the treatment they were given … Well, for my money, most of them might have been better hanged, because, believe you me, it’d have been a living death in those places. Years and years they’d be there. Entire lifetime for most of them.’

  ‘And the crime didn’t have to be serious, either,’ put in the girl sitting next to him. She was wearing fashionably torn jeans, and was typing notes on a tablet in the intervals between drinking cider. ‘Pilfer a couple of blankets or an apple from a costermonger, and you could be chucked into a madhouse for years. Bethlem, Colney Hatch, Broadmoor.’

  ‘Still, some of them did come out. There are documented cases of that.’

  ‘It was the luck of the draw,’ said the girl. ‘And whether you’d got money or knew people on high.’

  ‘Yes, think of Charles Lamb’s sister,’ said the second man, pushing his glasses back on his nose. ‘That’s Charles Lamb the poet,’ he added to Phin.

  ‘Yes. Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth,’ said Phin, then hoped this did not sound as if he was puffing off his erudition.

  But the bespectacled one said, ‘Praise the gods for a man of knowledge. Have another drink on the grounds of that.’

  ‘Well, I’ve already had … Oh, thank you.’ It was easier to accept the drink which looked like a double. Phin had no idea if it was whisky or brandy. He tried it and still had no idea.

  ‘Anyway, Charlie Lamb’s sister stabbed their mother—’

  ‘And should have gone to the gallows for it,’ said the girl, at once. ‘Privilege of the rich, that’s all that got her off. Disgraceful.’

  ‘No, they judged her insane, and she was put in Islington Asylum,’ said the man who appeared to be the group’s leader.

  ‘But she was let out – that’s the point I’m making.’

  ‘Ah, but there’s that tale about how she felt the madness starting up again, and she and poor old Charles walked across the fields to put her back inside. Arms around one another, sobbing as they went. Bloody heartbreaking. Where’s my drink?’

  Phin said, ‘You’re all very knowledgeable.’

  ‘Wait till you read the book we’re writing.’

  ‘If we ever manage to finish it.’

  ‘If we ever manage to even start it.’

  ‘Have any of you ever heard of an asylum called The Thrawl?’ said Phin, suddenly. He had not realized he had been going to ask this. He thought the place in Links’s sketch was probably an asylum, but it was also likely that it had never existed outside of Links’s imagination. But the man who had bought the drinks, said, ‘Thrawl. Thrawl. There’s a Thrawl Street, isn’t there? I think it’s on one of those Jack the Ripper walking tours.’

  ‘Oh, Jack the Ripper got everywhere if you can believe the tours,’ said the girl. ‘Like all the beds Elizabeth I’s supposed to have slept in. She was never even near most of them. Still, Jack might have bought his tobacco or his newspaper in Thrawl Street, I suppose. If you can imagine him doing something so mundane as reading a newspaper.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Murderers aren’t murdering every hour of the day. They have to do ordinary things like – like grocery shopping or paying the rent. I grant you it’s difficult to imagine Jack the Ripper asking for a pound of apples or queueing up at the fish shop for a bit of cod for his supper … And don’t say he only ate kidneys, please don’t.’

  ‘He’d want to read the papers,’ said the man with glasses, seriously. ‘Specially the local ones – to find out what was being said about him.’

  ‘Hold on, though, wasn’t The Thrawl one of those old asylums they called tunnel houses?’ said the first man, ignoring this side-road.

  ‘What on earth is a tunnel house?’ asked Phin, and the man said, ‘Means once in you couldn’t get out. One-way street. Those were the really grim institutions in those days. Think Broadmoor set in darkest Transylvania, or Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell.’

  ‘There weren’t many tunnel houses though,’ said the other man, ‘because there was that fashion for people to visit asylums – to do – what did they call it? “View the lunatics”.’

  ‘Sunday afternoon outing,’ put in the girl, disparagingly. ‘Ranked about equal with public hangings.’

  ‘At least they stopped in … well, around the middle of the nineteenth century.

  ‘Nobody could ever go inside the tunnel houses,’ said the trio’s leader to Phin. ‘Visitors weren’t ever let in.’

  Visitors weren’t ever let in. The words jabbed into Phin’s mind. But alongside this was the fact that The Thrawl had existed and had indeed been a madhouse. But if visitors had not been allowed in, there was only one way that Links could have gone in there. But Links did not need to have been inside – he could simply have known about the place, and the sketch might still have come from his imagination.

  Phin said, ‘Was the place, this asylum – The Thrawl – actually in Thrawl Street?’

  ‘If it was, it isn’t there now,’ said the leader. ‘I only know about it because I remember seeing it referred to in some archive or other. Tower Hamlets library, I think it was. We’re making a detailed study of all the London madhouses, so we’ve been all over the city. Hell of a task it is, as well. Needs a few drinks to oil the wheels.’

  ‘My round,’ said Phin, taking the hint and getting up.

  He could not, afterwards, remember how it was that he ended up seated at a battered piano next to the main bar, extemporizing accompaniments to several of the songs that were still being sung. He was quite surprised to find he could still sight-read, although it was as well that most of the drinkers were singing loudly enough to cover up all the wrong notes.

  Toby, enthusiastically joining in with this, read out the verse about the sinister ghost river beds, which went down well, and resulted in Phin being urged to try to match up music to it so it could be sung with suitable gusto.

  He thought it was as well Arabella was not here to witness this uncharacteristic behaviour, but then he realized that Arabella would have loved it; she would have entered into the spirit of it all with great enthusiasm, and she would probably have found several more songs for everyone to sing. He remembered how she had once said she had never yet heard him play the piano, and that he had promised he would play something romantic to her. At the time, he had had in mind something on the lines of Jerome Kern’s ‘The Way You Look Tonight’, or perhaps, ‘Take My Hand, I’m a Stranger in Paradise’, to a background of a candlelit restaurant overlooking a rose-filled garden. Songs about a maid consigned to the gallows for mangling an errant lover, belted out at top range in a London pub, did not quite meet the case.

  ‘I didn’t know you could do that, old man,’ said Toby, as they got out of their taxi considerably later, and tiptoed a bit unsteadily into the house.

  ‘Do what? Don’t make such a row, you’ll wake everyone up.’

  ‘Vamp on the piano like that.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Phin. ‘Not very well, at any rate. You must have heard all the wrong notes. And you wouldn’t have heard middle C at all, because it wouldn’t play.’

  ‘It was still bloo
dy good. I couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Yes, but I couldn’t whip out an appendix.’

  ‘Nor could I at the moment.’ Toby made vague stabbing and slicing gestures at the air, almost overbalancing with the effort. ‘See what I mean?’ he said. ‘Ah well, I’ll get along to my bed. It’s a solitary one tonight, but at least it isn’t a Pig-in-the-Dyke ghost bed where you get mangled and tangled.’

  He began to sing,

  ‘O, never be lured to the ghost river beds,

  Only sleep in a bed where you’re safe.

  In a ghost river bed, you could end up quite dead,

  On some terrible night—’

  ‘For pity’s sake don’t make such a row,’ said Phin. ‘It’s nearly midnight.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Toby. ‘By God, so it is. Midnight, the witching hour, as I live and breathe.’ He began to sing again:

  ‘It was on the bridge at midnight,

  Throwing snowballs at the moon.

  She said, “Sir, I’ve never had it”,

  But she spoke too bloody soon.’

  ‘Toby, you’ll wake everyone up,’ said Phin, torn between helpless laughter and a sudden desire to join in with the next verse. ‘People will come storming out and complain. And you’ll probably give dear old Miss Pringle nightmares.’

  ‘Heaven forfend. You’re perfectly right, of course. G’night.’ He sketched a vague farewell gesture, followed it with a reasonable attempt at a courtly bow in the direction of the garden flat, then clumped along the corridor to his door.

  Phin, letting himself into his own flat, hoped he was not going to dream about Victorian madhouses where people were locked away from the world for ever, and where visitors were not allowed.

  With the idea of dispelling these potentially troubling shades, he checked his emails, hoping for something cheer-ful, and smiled when he saw Arabella’s name. If anybody was guaranteed to dispel darkness and chase away ghosts, it was Arabella. He opened the email and began to read.