by Roz Southey
I said nothing.
“I suppose the father is married,” he said after a moment.
“No doubt.”
Another silence.
“She was desperate to get out of that house,” he said, his mouth twisting. “She hated her father and despised her mother.”
Such an odd word to choose for a mother, I thought. “Despised Signora Mazzanti? Why?”
He shrugged.
“I want to get back to the point,” I said as patiently as I could. “I need to know what happened the night Julia died. You had arranged to meet her so you could elope but you had to spend all evening in various taverns, drinking, to try and summon up your courage to go ahead with the affair. How near to her did you get?”
Ord swung round on me. He had recovered himself. His expression was sneering; his demeanour confident and swaggering.
“Two streets away. Then I met that damn singing fellow.”
“Proctor? He was keeping a vigil, to protect her.”
Ord snorted in derision.
“And then you decided not to meet Julia?”
“I came to my senses, thank God!”
“So you didn’t see her?”
“No.”
“Was anyone else around?”
“Two or three drunks in the street.”
Something was nagging at me. “What time was this?”
“Midnight.”
“Are you sure?”
“I heard St Nicholas’s church clock chime.”
Midnight. That was significant in some way. But why?
“So you went back to the nearest tavern and drank some more.”
“I went home,” he said.
“No, you did not.”
His head shot up at that. I was, after all, accusing him of lying. “You saw us carrying Julia’s body home, remember. You came with us to the lodging house. But you already knew she was dead.” I thought I could guess what had happened. “After your first attempt to meet her, you went back to a tavern to drink, but you still couldn’t make up your mind whether to go or stay. Eventually, you decided you would elope with her and started back. But on the way, you saw her body in Amen Corner.”
He turned away from me, pushed his hands into his pockets and stared out of the window at his new, bare gardens.
“You bent over her, then when you heard me shouting, you took fright and ran off. And that’s why you were so distraught at the Mazzantis’ lodgings that night. Not only was the girl you loved and coveted dead, but you were afraid you’d been recognised in Amen Corner. You were afraid I’d seen you. That’s why you told Bedwalters you’d seen me wooing Julia – if I then accused you of being the man bending over the body, it would look like a lie to try and discredit you.”
Without turning, he held out his hand. “The letters, Mr Patterson.”
I hesitated but there was plainly nothing more to be got out of him. His silence told me I was right. I took the letters from my pocket and held them out. His fingers snapped closed on them.
“They are all here?” he demanded. “You have not abstracted one?”
“There were nine letters,” I said. “And there still are nine letters.”
And then I knew exactly what was teasing me. Nine, damn it, nine letters!
Ord stared at me. “What the devil’s the matter?”
“Nine letters,” I said and started laughing. “Nothing. Nothing the matter at all!”
I knew who the murderer was.
36
Mr Walpole is convinced we should stay out of this war in Europe; he says it will only swallow up men and money, and bring us no profit. Mr Walpole is an excellent man; but he is wrong.
[Whit Sunday Sermon preached by Revd Edwin Plumb, afternoon lecturer at St Nicholas’s Church, Newcastle, 13 June 1736]
Tiredness was beginning to catch up with me at last; I was yawning as I called in at Charnley’s bookshop for a parcel of books I had ordered from London. There was irony in picking up a book of Corelli’s concertos, but I had also sent for a copy of the songs from Camilla. An old opera, but with some singable tunes in it; when I had sent for it, I had thought I would have the direction of the winter concerts and the songs would come in useful then.
Well, they came in useful anyway. I told Charnley not to wrap up the books and strode up to Esther’s door in Caroline Square with the music boldly displayed: Mr Patterson, the music teacher, come to give Mrs Jerdoun her lesson, sadly neglected recently.
Tom showed me into what he grandly called the estates room. It was a small room at the back of the house, with space for little more than a table and chair, and an array of bookshelves filled with heavy tomes dating back twenty years. Leases, title deeds, correspondence – all the paraphernalia of Esther’s wealth, which the purchase of that ticket for the organ only served to emphasise.
Esther was sat at the table, figuring some accounts; she threw down her pen as soon as I was shown in.
“I have been cursing you all day,” she said. “I cannot concentrate on these accounts for worrying about you.” Then she saw my expression. “You know who the murderer is!”
I tossed down the music books down on the table. “I do. And I know how we can catch him.”
“A trap?” Esther said with a gleam in her eye.
“Tonight. If you care to help?”
“More than willingly,” she said, “What do you want me to do?”
I left the music with Esther despite her protestations that she loathed Camilla. “Such a silly plot!”
“All opera is silly,” I pointed out. “The characters always burst into song at the least provocation and at the worst moments. And in the Italian opera, they sing about opening doors and buying oranges and all the rest of it.” I was adamant about leaving the books however. “It will lend credence to my visit.”
In truth, I did not want to have to carry the books in the disreputable part of town into which I was about to venture. I wanted to go home to sleep before springing the trap for the murderer this evening but I had two things left to do. One was easily dealt with; I scribbled a note for Hugh, went back into Charnley’s and gave his boy a penny to deliver it. He is a reliable lad and eager for money to support his eight siblings. He went off with a will, and I turned towards the Keyside.
I was looking for the sailors’ tavern where Corelli and I had ended our entertainment on the night of Julia’s death, just before we parted and I reeled off to encounter the ruffians and find Julia’s body. How long ago that seemed now! The tavern was spit and sawdust, not very respectable, and I recalled that Corelli had rather liked it. The place was crowded and stuffy, and I had to hunt through the sailors before I saw him, easing himself into a chair in a corner. He looked much the same as before but more sombre, more subdued. Two tankards of beer stood on the table in front of him.
“I saw you coming,” he said, looking wearily up at me. “I reckoned you’d figured it out at last.”
He indicated the beer and the stool opposite him; I sat down, pulling the stool aside to accommodate a cluster of raucous sailors. I didn’t much like the ‘at last’ but I let it go.
“Thank you for speaking to Hugh,” I said.
He shrugged. “Those ruffians would have got the best of you sooner or later.”
“They’ve been called off. By a better friend than I deserve.”
He nodded, not much interested. “And I wanted to make sure you didn’t tackle Julia’s death on your own. There’s more to it than you know.”
“You didn’t think to enlighten me?” I asked tartly.
He gave a wry smile, glanced up as a serving girl called across our heads. “I know I had to get out while I still could. My original idea was to catch a boat from Sunderland and take in your dancing master on the way. But when I got to Sunderland, there were no ships sailing for three days.” He shifted the tankards on the damp table. “Ample time for a great deal of thinking.”
I reached for the beer. “Did you manage to pass the
information on?”
His gaze jerked to my face; he began to speak, fell silent.
“I mean,” I said to clarify my point, “the information you had on you when we discovered Julia’s body. The reason you had to make a speedy retreat – just in case Bedwalters took it into his head to search us.” I smiled on his obvious annoyance. “You told Bedwalters you were a government agent keeping an eye on Mazzanti because he was suspected of being a spy.” I shook my head, sipped the beer. “You’re the spy. And somewhere during that drunken spree of ours, someone slipped you some information, a paper of some sort. I didn’t see it, I admit, but then I was a great deal more drunk than you were. What was the information about?”
He looked at me a moment longer, then grimaced, made a careless gesture. The noise in the tavern was briefly overwhelming; two or three men scattered as one Scotchman took a wild swing at another. No one was paying the least attention to us. “Details of the regiments at Tynemouth, their officers, their strength, their armaments. And yes, I passed it on.”
“Who are you working for?” I said.
He laughed bitterly. “Whoever will pay me. At the moment, the Austrians.”
Hardly surprising, I thought, since half of Italy is ruled by the Hapsburgs. But I had thought they were supposed to be our allies.
He gave me a considering gaze. “Are you going to turn me in?”
I let him stew on that. “Why did you come back?”
He sighed. A horde of keelmen suddenly pushed through the doors, bright in their yellow waistcoats, and sauntered across to tables on the far side of the tavern. “I’m the one who shot at Mazzanti,” he said.
“Good God,” I said, not expecting this in the least.
He leant forward, resting his weight heavily on his arms laid on the table; his tired face was sallow. “They say you should always start at the heart of the matter, don’t they?” He sneered. “Only, there is no heart in the man at all, Patterson.” He smiled at me, and I saw all the bitterness of years in that smile.
“He is my father.”
37
My dear sir, if you want history, go to Italy and see the Monuments – do not bother me with it!
[Lord Eaglescliffe, in a coffee-house on the Strand, quoted in the Daily Courant, 8 March 1735]
He told the story quietly, as if it had all happened to someone else, in another age, long ago. John Mazzanti’s father had been Pietro Mazzanti, a Venetian violinist of great ability who had had the misfortune to injure an arm in a carriage accident. With stoicism and great practicality, he had turned to trade instead and set up a music publishing firm with branches in Ferrara and in London; on a visit to his associates in London, he met and married the daughter of a clergyman by whom he had four children, all sons, all given good sensible English names. John was the youngest.
Time passed. The clergyman’s daughter died of consumption, and, heartbroken, Pietro took his children back to Italy. Relations seem to have welcomed the children into their bosom, and all followed in their father’s footsteps covering Europe with the publications of the family firm and spreading the music of Italy far and wide.
All but John, who could not settle. The heat didn’t agree with him, the food didn’t agree with him, the elderly relatives didn’t agree with him. He pined for the attractions of London, the theatres where he had played in the rank and file as a precocious youngster; at the age of seventeen, he felt he had been cast out from all that made the world worthwhile. Except of course for the attractions of the servant girls. The inevitable happened; one of them fell pregnant and appealed to John to make her respectable and marry her.
John fled.
“Of course,” Corelli said. “My grandfather Pietro would never have countenanced a marriage, not to the fourteen-year-old daughter of a peasant. But family is family and you don’t ever disgrace it, or abandon your kin. He gave my mother a pension and a nice little cottage, sent her presents of food and drink on saints’ days, and made sure that I was healthy and well-cared for, and that the priest taught me to read and write and to figure. Once a year, on my birthday, I was paraded in the family drawing room, and given presents.” He flushed. “They made sure I knew my place, of course, but for all that they took good care of my mother and me.”
He spread his large hands on the table, ignoring his tankard. The keelmen were deep in a discussion of politics, the sailors in debate about the serving girls. “I inherited not a jot of the family talent for music, so when it came to taking an alias, I amused myself by adopting the names of the great composers. My real name – ”
“I don’t want to know,” I said. “At least I will be able to protest my ignorance with a clear conscience.”
He laughed. “But fencing – that’s a different matter. That’s where my talents lie. And in a keen eye for a good opportunity to make money. Now, that is a family trait.” He flung himself back in his chair. “Damn it, Patterson, you don’t want to know my entire life history! I was apprenticed to a sword master and have earnt my living that way for years until I took it into my head to see how my father was doing in London. He seemed to be making a great deal of money and I felt I deserved a share of it, even if it was only a bequest in his will.”
“You wanted acknowledgement,” I said.
He nodded. “But my father’s wealthy days were long over by the time I found him. Ciara is a great singer but she is getting older and fatter and no one cares any longer whether the voice is as good as it was. And as for Julia!” He made a gesture of disgust.
“So your father refused you money and you tried to frighten him by shooting at him.”
“Devil a bit of it!” He leant across the table. “He hired me to shoot at him!”
“To kill him?” I said, bewildered.
“No – to shoot and miss.”
I was no wiser. “In heaven’s name, why?”
Corelli grinned wolfishly. “The publicity, of course! He was scared out of his wits at the way things were going. Ciara is losing popularity with every sweetmeat she eats, Julia is – was – nothing yet – just a pretty little girl playing in provincial theatres.”
I thought back to those press cuttings I had found – all from provincial theatres, none from London. I should have realised the significance of that. “She’d never have been anything else,” I said. “What about the engagement to play Lucy in The Beggar’s Opera?”
“Oh, she had that,” he said sarcastically, “but not in London. In a small company touring the Kentish towns.”
I laughed wryly. “I thought Mazzanti was fooling himself over Julia’s prospects, but he wasn’t – he was trying to fool everyone else.”
“Exactly.” Corelli sat back, toyed with the splintered edge of the table. “He thought that if there were very public attempts on his life – and remember Ciara and Julia were both there at the time – the newspapers would pick it up and speculate, and the fashionable audiences would be intrigued enough to buy tickets, if only to see if someone would shoot him dead in the middle of a Handel aria.”
“Did it work?”
The heat in the crowded tavern was beginning to be unbearable; I drained the beer. Corelli must be the devil of a shot, I thought, if he could fire in the middle of a theatre crowd confidently expecting not only to miss Mazzanti but everyone else as well.
“Of course. The papers gave it some very good speculation – written by our correspondent at the theatre on the night.”
“Mazzanti wrote it himself?”
Corelli pointed to his own chest. “Trouble is, novelty wears off very quickly. A week later someone else is eloping with a footman, or arguing over a tricorne, or some similar trifle. And the audiences get bored, because, of course, no one does shoot Mazzanti dead in the middle of his wife’s aria.”
“So he told you to make a second attempt.”
Corelli nodded. “He got me to try the same trick in York to attract people to a private performance they gave there at the house of the mayor’s wife. But th
e Newcastle papers didn’t pick it up.”
He laughed shortly. “I wish you could have seen the scene. In a grimy tavern like this one, outside Micklegate Bar. Father had the latest edition of the Newcastle Courant and was in a rage that the attack hadn’t been mentioned. And what had the printer preferred?”
“Accounts of the debates in Parliament?” I suggested, remembering Thomas Saint’s recent editions. “What else could he expect? The possibility of war is of the greatest moment to merchants and tradesmen whose livelihood depends on the safe movement of shipping and goods.”
“He expected at least a paragraph or two,” Corelli said. “Well, I sent it in – what more could I do?”
“Try again,” I said. “In Newcastle.”
He grinned sardonically. “You were never in any danger, you know. I was never going to hit you.”
I was not going to let that pass. Good shot or not, he wouldn’t allow for the unexpected. “Unless I’d moved, of course,” I pointed out. “So that poster Mazzanti put up offering a reward for information – that was a further attempt to publicise the event? Did it have much effect?”
“Just what you’d expect – half a dozen rogues with some made-up stories. One or two ladies sympathised with Ciara and bought tickets for her concert. But they were probably going to do that anyway.”
“So,” I said, “when we found Julia dead, you worried about whether anyone knew you were the one who had shot at Mazzanti. If someone did know, they might think you had killed Julia to revenge yourself on your father. That and the document in your pocket gave you plenty of reasons to run.”
Corelli glanced about the tavern. The sailors were now attacking what looked to be half a haunch of beef; the more respectable keelmen were paying their bills and drifting out in twos and threes.
“There’s more,” Corelli said.
“What?”
“Julia.”
“Your half-sister.”
He nodded. “I hated those birthdays, the patronising little jokes, the plain little presents when they could have afforded better, the severe exhortations to obey God, the priest and my mother. But, believe me, Patterson, I have never allowed my injured pride to make me forget that if it wasn’t for those rich, condescending, pompous idiots, I would have died in the gutter and so would my mother. One thing is more important than anything else, Patterson, and that’s family. You do not desert your family. Julia was a little fool but she was my sister and I’ll kill the man who killed her.”
