by Roz Southey
He said nothing, continued to smile. But there was an extra tension in him. It would not be long before he made his move.
“You yourself showed me the family Bible,” I reminded him. “You were trying to be clever, were you not? Daring me to work it out. You pointed out that your parents married in January 1713. You told me your month of birth too, didn’t you? August, you said, inviting me to guess the scandal. And, as you’d intended, I assumed you meant the August after the marriage. But you were misdirecting me.” I waved the song at him. “If you were eighteen in August 1730, then you were born in August 1712. Before your parents’ marriage.”
His smile broadened.
“You’re illegitimate,” I said. “Which means you cannot inherit your uncle’s estates.”
He started to laugh. “You’re too clever by half, Patterson. I keep hearing your praises sung – I’m told you can untangle every mystery known to man! But compliment me a little at least! Did my antics not tax you even for a moment? And I worked so hard to confuse you! With the help of my wife, of course. And Hopkins. You remember Hopkins? The coachman? Who even now, by the way, is keeping watch downstairs.”
It was his first slip and I was fiercely exultant at it. They hadn’t discovered the coachman’s body. Alyson had come alone. Of course he had – he would have done so in any case. He’d challenged me – it was an argument between the two of us. One he was so confident of winning.
“Hopkins is dead,” I said. “In that derelict cottage.”
His head lifted; he clearly didn’t know whether to believe me or not. “And don’t look to your wife to help you either,” I added. “Mrs Jerdoun and the new constable have gone to find her.”
He was shaken. “You won’t find her,” he snapped. “You’ll never find her.”
The spirit startled us both by shooting up the wall to the little shelf. “Golden Fleece,” it said. “Parlour on the first floor. Drinking wine and waiting for you. Just like she was waiting for a morning call. Well, she was. She’s off to the prison now with the lady and the constable.”
“You should have brought her with you,” I said, taunting him.
“This is between you and me,” he snarled, drawing the sword. Fischer’s sword.
“No,” a voice said behind him. “This is between you and me.”
Alyson swung round. Bedwalters stood calmly in the doorway. He was thinner than he had been but he still carried with him that new air of ease. “You have apparently forgotten,” he said courteously, “that Nell is a spirit now, too. She received a message telling her what was going on here. Did you think, Mr Alyson, sir, that I would sit back and let you wreak yet more havoc?”
The sudden vehemence in his voice took Alyson by surprise. He flinched. And in that moment the spirit shifted, shooting across the intervening space of ceiling, and latching on to a cobweb. The cobweb swung into Alyson’s face – I heard the spirit slap on skin.
Alyson broke. He dived for the doorway. Bedwalters put out a hand, caught him by the right arm. Alyson tried to swing the sword but Bedwalters tightened his grip. Alyson gasped; the sword dropped from his nerveless fingers and went clattering down the stairs.
As I started across the room, Alyson swung his left fist – but the constable was used to dealing with refractory drunks and swayed backwards out of reach. I seized Alyson from behind. He kicked out a foot. Bedwalters shifted but the foot caught his ankle, swept his feet from under him. He gasped, let go of Alyson, wavered at the top of the stairs, fell.
He landed on the top step; the old wood snapped like a gunshot. I had an arm round Alyson’s chest, struggled to pull him down. He jerked his head back, hit my nose with a thump. I felt blood flow at once. I clung on, spluttering with pain. Bedwalters scrambled up and lunged at Alyson.
Everything seemed to happen at once. Alyson disconcerted me. I was braced to stop him jerking forward but he fell back against me instead. I fumbled my grip, lost my balance, grabbed at the door jamb to stop falling. Blood was running down my chin, dripping on to my waistcoat.
Alyson flung himself at the stairs, Bedwalters grabbed at him.
With a rumble and a screech, the stairs gave way.
A snowstorm of plaster and mortar descended on me. Fragments of brick stung my cheeks. Alyson screamed – I saw him tumble, bounce down the top steps then crash into a great gap where the treads broke apart.
Bedwalters went with him.
He’d had a grip on Alyson’s arm but let go almost at once. It was not enough to save him. His forward momentum took him down.
I grabbed for Bedwalters, caught only a handful of his coat skirts. It slowed his fall but I heard cloth rip. The door jamb was breaking away from the wall. I wrapped my arm around it.
“Grab my hand!” I yelled.
The snowstorm of plaster was still falling. More solid objects now too – whole bricks. I could hardly see for the dust. Blood from my nose dripped into the fallen plaster like roses among snow. But I felt Bedwalters’s fingers curl round my wrist.
His full weight jerked at my arm. I slid down the wall, felt myself being dragged over. I managed to get on the floor, lying at full length, let go the door jamb, struggled to get my other hand around his wrist. His weight was well-nigh pulling my arm out of its socket.
The spirit shot over my head. “Hold on, hold on! They’re coming! I’ve sent for help. Hold on!”
They came, five burly keelmen in yellow waistcoats, who clambered over the rubble below, taking no notice at all of the bricks and plaster falling from the disintegrating walls. They took Bedwalters’s weight, handed him down to safety then found a ladder and encouraged me down it. We’d hardly got out of danger before the entire outside wall of the stair went down in a huge flurry of dust and a roar that must have been heard all over town. It pulled part of the eaves away and we ran from the lethal rain of slates.
And all of it came down and buried Edward Edmund Alyson, and the spirit slid down the wall and rushed across the surface of the rubble, crying out in triumph.
42
When all is said and done, nothing must disturb the natural order of things.
[Letter from Retif de Vincennes, to his wife, Régine, August 1736]
Bloodied and dust-covered, I sat watching the sailors and labourers sifting through the rubble of the staircase. Bedwalters stood a little way off, speaking to the new constable, Phillips; the two men looked to be on the best of terms. I’d already overheard Bedwalters spinning a tale about Alyson and myself coming back to look for clues to the murderer’s identity. The sword was under all that rubble too, and I’d dropped the song in my hurry to apprehend Alyson. I wondered if Fischer would still be so eager to have his inheritance, given its recent history.
A scent of summer flowers drifted to me and I heard the swish of skirts. I looked up. Esther was walking towards me, dressed once more in a gown of palest green, halting in sudden shock as she took in the blood and the grime and the bruises which were rapidly forming.
“Do you have her?” I asked.
She took a deep breath, nodded. “She’s hysterical. I left her to the attentions of the law – I couldn’t tolerate her any longer.” She cast a critical look over the stairs and the men rigging up a pulley to remove the heavier blocks of masonry. “He is dead, of course.”
“I can’t see how he could survive.”
“Sweet Damon...” she murmured. “They had an odd idea of love.”
“Love conquers all,” I said flippantly.
“I wish it did.” She turned to regard me in a measured way. “Do you know what Claudius Heron said, that night in the drawing room at Long End?”
“I assumed he was planning the wedding.”
“Oh, he has done that,” she agreed. “He has already taken steps to procure the marriage licence. But he was more concerned to make sure I knew what kind of a marriage I was making. He told me I would never stop you getting yourself into trouble.” She gave me a wry smile. “He was right.”
; I gestured helplessly. “Until last year, I led a blameless life. Dull, but blameless.”
“Until, in fact, you met me.”
“A coincidence, no doubt.”
She stood looking at me for a moment. I enjoyed looking back – at her slender figure, flattered by the pale gown, at the golden hair that drifted about her neck in the faint morning breeze. And I loved her calm air, her matter of fact acceptance of life, her exasperation with my obstinacy, her ability to find a solution to any problem.
There was no help for it, I knew. I’d probably be a married man before the month was out.
There was nothing, I thought, that I wanted more.
“Charles,” she said.
“Yes?”
She sighed. “We will, I know, set the town gossiping when they hear of our marriage. I am resigned to that. But,” she smiled, a trifle maliciously, “I do draw the line when it comes to walking through the town with you in that state! Dinner, Charles. Don’t be late.”
I watched her go, with a grin. Then I heard one of the labourers shout. They had found Alyson’s body. Plainly dead, someone called.
I glanced over at Bedwalters. His face was flushed. He nodded to Phillips and, calmly, unhurried, walked off.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Every effort has been made to be geographically accurate in a depiction of Charles Patterson’s Newcastle. In the 1730s, Newcastle was a town of around 16,000 in population, hemmed in by old walls, and centred on the Quay where ships moored to carry away the coal and glass on which the town depended. The single bridge across the Tyne, linking Newcastle with its southern neighbour Gateshead, was lined with houses and shops, a chapel and even a small prison; from the Quay, the streets climbed the hills to the more genteel (and cleaner) areas around Westgate and Northumberland Street. Daniel Defoe liked the place when he visited in 1720, but remarked unfavourably on the fogs that came drifting up the river. Places such as Westgate, High Bridge, the Sandhill and the Side did (and still do) all exist, although I have added a few alleys here and there to enable Patterson and his friends to take short cuts where necessary, and invented a stylish location for Esther’s house, Caroline Square.
Musically, Charles Patterson lives in an atmosphere that the residents of Newcastle in the 1730s would have recognised instantly. The town had one of the most active musical scenes in England, after London, Bath and Oxford. From 1735, inhabitants could hear music in a weekly series of winter concerts (and occasionally during the summer too), listen to music in church (plain simple music if you went to St Nicholas, much more elaborate and ‘popular’ music at All Hallows), attend the dancing assemblies in winter, and listen to the fiddlers, pipers and ballad singers in the street. Nationally and internationally famous soloists often visited, but sadly there is no evidence to support the story that the most celebrated musician of the period, Mr George Frideric Handel, ever visited Newcastle.
The summer musical party around which Sword and Song takes place is based on the house parties held by George Bowes of Gibside in County Durham. Bowes was rather more ambitious than Edward Ayrton, and a great deal wealthier, and entertained his guests each year with an Italian violinist, who brought not only music with him but also macaroni and mineral water. The German sword makers of Shotley Bridge also really existed, although their family connections with Philadelphia are fictional.
A number of real people fleetingly appear in Charles Patterson’s world. Solomon Strolger, organist of All Hallows for 53 years, is one, as is another organist, James Hesletine of Durham Cathedral. Thomas Mountier, the bass singer in Broken Harmony, was a singing man at the Cathedral for a short while until drink intervened. The Jenisons and Ords were real families with a particular interest in music but the specific individuals who appear in these books are fictional.
Charles Patterson is entirely fictional, but the impoverished situation in which he finds himself would have been entirely familiar to musicians of the time. If he has an alter ego, it would be Charles Avison, a Newcastle-born musician and composer who was well-known in his time and who dragged himself up by his own efforts from obscurity to wealth and respect, even being invited by local gentry to dine at their tables. If Patterson’s career follows the same path, he will be extremely happy.
CHARLES PATTERSON’S NEWCASTLE
Key
1 Town walls
9 Chares
2 St Nicholas’s Church
10 Bigg Market
3 St Andrew’s Church
11 Fleshmarket
4 St John’s Church
12 Sandhill
5 All Hallows’ Church
13 Sandgate
6 Castle
14 The Key
7 Guildhall
15 Tyne Bridge
8 Caroline Square
16 The Side
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