The Ladder Dancer

by Roz Southey

  She sauntered insolently up to me, hands holding tight to the rags that passed for a shawl. I reached into my pocket, held out a penny on my palm. She stared at it then lifted her eyes to mine. Blue eyes in a face that wore an expression too old for it. She shook her head.

  ‘Nah,’ she said. ‘I want more than that.’

  There was something more than mere insolence there, something that made me uneasy. ‘How much then?’

  She considered, then smiled wolfishly. She was about to speak when someone behind me started shouting.

  I glanced round. A middle-aged man, heavy and red-faced, lumbered towards me. A merchant by the look of him. He shouted at the girl. ‘Get away with you! Go back to your hovel now, do you hear me?’ The girl gathered her shawl around her, smirked, then turned and walked off, head high.

  ‘Slut, sir,’ the merchant said. ‘They all are. The mother got so drunk she drowned her own child! Don’t have anything to do with them, sir.’ And he stalked away to where a boy held a horse for him.

  When I looked back, the girl had disappeared.

  Five

  In the warmth of a well-regulated family circle, true contentment may be found.

  [A Gentleman’s Companion, January 1731]

  I was itching to carry on hunting for the man who’d killed the child but tickets for the winter concerts still needed to be sold. I had a living to earn; I was determined to carry out my resolve to match Esther’s wealth with my own. And music is more than a profession to me. It’s a passion that’s survived even the tedium of teaching apathetic children and adults of little or no taste. To run my fingers over a harpsichord keyboard or the neck of a violin is a refuge from the troubles of life. Losing the chance to pass on that passion to other people would be like cutting out part of my soul.

  So I walked up from the Key on to the long stretch of Westgate, towards the house of Robert Jenison and his family in the genteel part of town, not far from where I myself now live in Caroline Square. To sell concert subscription tickets to the gentleman who is himself the chief organizer of the concerts and the most assiduous attender. But the Jenisons regard themselves as leaders of Newcastle society and consider it only right they should be formally petitioned, even begged, for their support.

  I’ve never been comfortable in the Jenisons’ house. They have a passion for the new. Every time I venture into Mrs Jenison’s drawing room there is a new sideboard or a new table, new curtains or new pictures. The pictures are generally productions of the lady herself or one of her three married daughters; a little while back, they all had a passion for feather pictures, arranged to simulate landscapes.

  The result of all this newness is, somehow, to produce a room that is supremely uncomfortable and incredibly cluttered. Footstools hide between chairs to trip you up, miniatures and ornaments cluster on side tables ready to fall over at the least jog of your elbow. Even the door to the next room – probably a private withdrawing room – is decorated with a fan made of preposterously large feathers. And today I could not help but contrast the comfort and clutter with the unfurnished hovel I’d just left.

  I took my place with caution on a new blue-upholstered chair and smiled at the two ladies who confronted me.

  ‘Bring the tea, Simkins,’ Mrs Jenison said.

  The servant withdrew; Mrs Jenison, a plump middle-aged woman, fidgeted, straightened an ornament on a table, avoided my gaze. Her face was flushed.

  ‘I trust you’re well,’ I said.

  ‘Oh— oh, yes indeed.’

  She plainly had not the slightest idea how to address me. Her old imperious tone – ‘Tickets, Mr Patterson? You really must take the matter up with my husband’ – was no longer suitable and she didn’t know what to substitute. I was neither fish nor fowl, no longer merely a tradesman but not quite a gentleman either.

  ‘And how is dear Mrs Patterson?’ her companion asked, with the most simpering of smiles.

  If it was difficult to face Mrs Jenison, it was much worse to deal with her sister-in-law. Mrs Jenison had simple desires: to be ahead of her neighbours and relatives in every way possible, and to have a little peace. But her husband’s maiden sister, Mrs Annabella Jenison – the Mrs is, of course, a matter of courtesy – was a different matter. Sharpened by want, and placed in the most invidious of positions, she was altogether more unpredictable. Dependent relatives are always the very devil to deal with; they say and do whatever they think will keep them in good odour with the people they depend upon.

  ‘It’s such a while since I saw her,’ she said, without waiting for a reply. ‘Not since your marriage, indeed.’ A simper. ‘So romantic.’

  I smiled, fixedly.

  ‘And I never guessed!’ This fact was plainly a source of pleasure to her. ‘I never imagined! And Mrs Patterson is not in her first youth . . .’

  It occurred to me, as her eyes went misty, that there was a not-so-hidden message behind this remark. Mrs Annabella must be almost sixty, and with no money of her own must long ago have given up hope of a husband. All that was left was love, and Esther’s late marriage had apparently given Mrs Annabella one or two ideas.

  She hid her mouth behind her hand and murmured again, ‘So romantic.’

  Mrs Jenison, secure in her position, her married status and her wealth, seemed unconscious of the undercurrent. She poured tea for me, and plunged into one of her favourite subjects. ‘I hope your wife’s taking care of her health, Mr Patterson. It’s so easy to catch cold at this time of year.’

  I allowed her to talk of her eldest daughter’s chill (while she was expecting her second, you know) then seized an opportunity to praise the new china, which was genuinely beautiful. She glowed and plainly began to feel more at ease. She informed me, in detail, of all the multiplicitous ways not to make tea, and warned me to tell Esther to put the milk in the dish first to avoid cracking the china. Then she realized she needed more hot water and paused to speak to the servant.

  Mrs Annabella bent towards me. She said, with a significant look, ‘Some gentlemen prefer mature women.’

  Startled, I stuttered a little; I do not regard Esther as mature – at least, not in Mrs Annabella’s sense. But was she trying to hint she had a specific gentleman in mind? I wondered if the gentleman in question had her in mind.

  ‘Do you continue to teach, Mr Patterson?’ Mrs Jenison asked. She sounded anxious, as if a new worry had occurred to her.

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Mrs Annabella said, shocked, ‘that must be such hard work!’

  Mrs Jenison frowned then smiled graciously. ‘Teaching music cannot surely be described as anything so menial as work. Music is a vocation.’

  ‘An Art,’ I agreed.

  ‘And a delightful one,’ she said, pouring me more tea. ‘It cannot be considered—’ a little shudder— ‘work to pass on the pleasures of one of the Creator’s greatest gifts.’

  And so, I reflected, any disturbing circumstance can be got over with a little effort. Mr Patterson is a gentleman (now, at least) and gentlemen don’t work. Therefore his teaching cannot be work. I had thought it would go the other way: gentlemen don’t work, Mr Patterson does work, therefore he’s not a gentleman.

  Mrs Annabella, clearly put out at being chastised, snatched at a workbox on the table between the two ladies, pulled out a piece of embroidery and regarded it with furious concentration. She took up a pair of delicate engraved scissors, snipped off a length of thread and reached for a needle. Her nose in the air all the time as if she was above such dull things as everyday conversation.

  The drawing-room door opened. Mr Robert Jenison stood on the threshold. I rose. He nodded, said, ‘Ah! Patterson!’ as if he hadn’t known I’d be there, although the servants must have told him.

  ‘Tea, dear?’ Mrs Jenison asked.

  He visibly recoiled. He was a man of medium height and more and more rotund as the years passed, but he compensated for these imperfections with dull businesslike wigs and sombre clothing that made
it clear he was a man of good solid worth. But today he was hesitant, not quite meeting my gaze. ‘And how is Mrs Patterson?’

  I sighed inwardly. ‘Very well indeed.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘Good, good.’ He covered his obvious unease by fumbling in a pocket as if for a lost coin. ‘And to what do we owe this pleasure, Patterson?’

  At last! I put down my dish of tea. ‘I was wondering whether you and Mrs Jenison, and Mrs Annabella of course, would honour me by subscribing to this winter’s concerts.’

  His face cleared. This, his manner said at once, was something he knew how to deal with. He took the subscription ticket from me and regarded it approvingly. ‘Printer’s done a damn fine job, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘This fellow we’ve got coming to sing this year is the real thing!’ he said enthusiastically. He put the tickets down on the table, I noticed, which meant he’d accepted them; now all I had to do was to get him to pay for them. ‘We saw Mr Nightingale in London last winter, did we not, my dear?’

  ‘Oh indeed,’ Mrs Jenison said, without a great deal of warmth. ‘He was excellent.’

  ‘So charming,’ Mrs Annabella said, simpering. ‘So handsome. A fine gentleman.’ Her gaze grew misty again; she let the needlework drop to her lap. I wondered if Mr Richard Nightingale was a handsome figure of a young man, with a pleasing way with the ladies.

  ‘Wasted in London,’ Jenison said. ‘Not properly appreciated.’

  ‘He was so light on his feet,’ Mrs Annabella said, with a reminiscent smile. She put a hand on her heart as if to stop it palpitating. ‘And when he stood on top of the ladder, I was quite afraid he would fall off!’

  There had to be some way to head off the worst excesses of this rapture. ‘But is the Assembly Room ceiling quite high enough for ladder dancing?’ I wondered.

  Jenison frowned. ‘Possibly not.’ He dismissed the problem with a wave of his hand. ‘In any case, the dancing is a mere novelty. I’ve hired him for his singing.’

  ‘Handel,’ Mrs Jenison said. ‘And Vivaldi.’

  ‘Indeed?’ I said hollowly. I’ve never dared tell Jenison how much I dislike Vivaldi; Jenison adores his music.

  ‘You should have heard him, Patterson!’ he said warmly. ‘Quite astonishing! I’ve never heard anyone imitate the trumpet so well.’

  ‘I’ve often said we should have trumpets in the band,’ Mrs Jenison said.

  This suggestion was easy to deal with; it had been raised before, and I had my answer ready. ‘Unfortunately,’ I pointed out, ‘we’d have to bring in musicians from a military band.’

  ‘Soldiers?’ Mrs Annabella said, sitting up and clearly thinking of smart uniforms.

  Her brother frowned. ‘I think we all know how the military behave, Patterson; we don’t want their sort in respectable company. But Mr Nightingale is an admirable solution. We can have our trumpets without the attendant unpleasantnesses!’

  ‘Admirable,’ I said. ‘Excellent.’ Vivaldi wrote a trumpet concerto, I recalled, and wondered if I could avert a very trying situation by claiming we were mere provincials and the shops didn’t stock the music.

  The door opened; the servant said with sonorous politeness, ‘Mr Claudius Heron.’

  Mrs Annabella sat up. Her hand went to her hair to pat it into place; she straightened her petticoats, pinned a gentle smile to her face. Good God, I thought, it’s Heron she’s after. A widower with extensive estates, coal mines aplenty, ships on the river and an elegant town house. The young son was a disadvantage, of course, but not an insuperable one.

  Heron – my patron – lingered in the doorway, his gaze slipping from one to another of us. A slight fair-haired man in his forties; to use Mrs Annabella’s phrase, he was not in the first flush of youth. But lean and handsome, and a man who had every confidence in himself and his position in the world. Just the sort to appeal to a maiden lady.

  I wondered if Mrs Annabella had ever been on the wrong side of his cynical tongue.

  Jenison was making the necessary polite noises of greeting; the footman was waiting his chance to continue his interrupted announcement. For there was someone else behind Heron, a nervous-looking young man who was wringing his hands together and reminding me uncannily of the Rev. Mr Orrick.

  The footman took a deep breath. ‘Mr Cuthbert Ridley.’

  I caught my breath. Cuthbert Ridley. And I saw again a bag flung over a horse’s back, and gold intertwined letters embossed into the leather.

  CR.

  Six

  A gentleman should always be at ease, neither too forward nor too reticent.

  [A Gentleman’s Companion, October 1735]

  I knew of Ridley, of course, as one knows of the younger sons of gentlemen one meets now and again. His father’s a Director of the concerts – although he’s travelling somewhere in the Baltic at this time – and two of his elder brothers occasionally turn up to yawn their way through concertos and symphonies, and ogle the young ladies in the interval. Cuthbert, I fancied, had been at Oxford, then somewhere in London, studying for the church, or the law, or something of the sort.

  I scrutinized him as he bowed to the ladies. Tall, ungainly, possibly a few years younger than myself, twenty-three or twenty-four years old. His fresh raw skin and rash of freckles made him look younger. Under a fashionable tiny wig, which sat on his head like a feather on an egg, there was a stubble which suggested his own hair was probably red. He had a habit of fidgeting with his hands and when he sat down, he kept his gaze fixed on his knees, and mumbled and blushed.

  Mrs Annabella was concentrating her attention on Claudius Heron. ‘Your son is well, I hope?’

  Heron hesitated, as if it took him a moment to remember he had a son. ‘Very well, madam.’

  ‘Such a charming boy.’

  Heron paused. ‘He promises well.’ I silently applauded his phrasing; as the boy’s harpsichord teacher, I knew he did indeed promise well but rarely kept his promises.

  Jenison intervened. He wanted to pontificate on the price of coal; both he and Heron had mines on their property. Mrs Annabella smiled and nodded, and tried to give the impression of intelligently understanding what they said. Mrs Jenison was asking the servant to bring yet more hot water; I manoeuvred myself into a position next to Cuthbert Ridley.

  He’d wrapped his hands round his tea-dish, and was staring fixedly into its depths. It was ridiculous to suspect a man of murder simply because of his initials, but Ridley was the only gentleman I knew with those initials, and I was certain the horse rider could only be a gentleman, from the cut of his clothes and the quality of his horse. Besides, what harm could it do to ask a few questions?

  ‘You’ve been in London, I think?’

  He started, stared at me like a hunted hare, mumbled.

  ‘At the Inns of Court?’ I suggested.

  He nodded. So he’d been studying the law; I couldn’t imagine how he’d ever bring himself to talk to any client.

  ‘Have you come home to practise?’

  He gulped tea, mumbled into the dish. In heaven’s name, he was a full-grown man, not a shy child! I repressed my irritation. ‘To see your family then. Have you been home long?’

  Mrs Jenison smiled kindly at him. ‘I saw your mother only yesterday. She said you were home. Thursday, was it not?’

  The day before the child died. Ridley jerked his head.

  ‘You rode, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘It’s much the best way,’ Mrs Jenison agreed comfortably. ‘The roads are so poor, the carriage jolts from side to side or gets caught in a quagmire. I find it intolerable! I trust you had no accident, sir.’

  He shook his head. I was briefly distracted by realizing that Heron’s gaze was on me. Did he want to say something? But he went back to his conversation with Jenison.

  ‘I daresay you left your horse at the Fleece,’ Mrs Annabella said comfortably, abandoning the gentlemen temporarily. ‘Such an excellent hostelry. We dined there in the spring whe
n we came back from London, while we were waiting for our chairs home. By far the best inn in town.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Jenison said, catching this. ‘They took an age to serve us. The George is the best. I’ve recommended it to our concert soloist and booked rooms for him there.’

  ‘The Fleece is a warren of a place,’ Mrs Annabella conceded, pliantly changing course. ‘I got lost there. Twice! Ended up in the kitchens!’

  ‘And the servants were not polite,’ Jenison pursued, and went off into an anecdote about the insolence of a serving girl. I paid little attention, formulating my next question for Ridley, and, as I turned back to him, I caught him glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.

  He looked hurriedly back into his tea.

  ‘Have you been solving any more mysteries lately, Mr Patterson?’ Mrs Annabella asked. She didn’t allow me time for a reply but rushed on, smiling at Ridley who’d lifted his gaze from his tea an inch or two. ‘Our Mr Patterson is very clever, you know. He catches murderers.’

  That made me curse inwardly. If Ridley was indeed to blame for the child’s death, Mrs Annabella’s revelations would only make him wary of me.

  ‘I wonder,’ Jenison mused, having apparently changed tack while I was not listening, ‘whether we should invite Mr Nightingale to dinner.’

  Mrs Jenison looked astonished, but covered it up well. I couldn’t imagine she was used to having entertainers at her dinner table. ‘Whatever you wish, my dear.’

  ‘To welcome him to the town,’ Jenison said. ‘He really is a most superior man.’

  ‘Really?’ Heron said dryly.

  ‘You must meet him. Come to dinner too. And you, Patterson,’ he said, warming to his subject. ‘I’m sure he’ll be of interest to you. As an example of a highly talented man. An example to emulate.’

  I managed to avoid wincing.

  ‘And Mrs Patterson must come too,’ Mrs Jenison said, clearly hoping to give her dinner table some respectability. ‘You will come, Mr Heron?’