by Roz Southey
‘That arm hamper you much?’ she asked, nodding at his sling.
‘Not a bit of it.’
She leant closer as she passed. ‘You could prove that to me. Tonight?’
‘Hugh,’ I said wearily.
He grinned. ‘You’re becoming a staid married man, Charles!’
We went up the stairs off the kitchen passageway, and stood on the threshold of what had been Nightingale’s room, looking at the stripped bed, the clothes tossed on to the trunk.
‘There was a good turnout for the funeral,’ Hugh said. ‘He’d have liked that.’
I thought of the Nightingale who’d faced Mrs Annabella in that other world. I’d rather liked him; I wondered if under all the sham and pretence our Nightingale had been similar. ‘I think he’d have much preferred to be at someone else’s funeral.’
‘I wonder why his spirit hasn’t disembodied yet. It’s been three days since he died.’
I couldn’t guess – three days is the general length of time it takes for a spirit to appear but it can take longer. I was, in truth, glad Nightingale’s spirit was not yet here; to turn over his belongings in its presence would not have been a comfortable experience.
Hugh picked up a ruined waistcoat, stiff with blood. ‘What are we supposed to do with all this?’
I began to sort through the paraphernalia of everyday living on the bedside table: a razor, a ring, a few coins. I put Nightingale’s watch amongst them, picked up a thick bundle of letters. ‘The clothes he was wearing when he was stabbed will have to be thrown out. The rest are to be kept until his landlady in London replies to my letter. If there are relatives we’ll send them the trunk; if not, it’ll all go to the poor.’
Hugh was trying to fold clothes one-handedly. I held out the bundle of letters. ‘Here, you go through these. I’ll see to the clothes.’
Hugh sat down on the bed and used a nail to flick up the heavy blob of wax on the first letter. ‘These just look like business matters. Jenison’s letters are here.’ He whistled. ‘Have you any idea what Jenison was proposing to pay him?’
‘London prices. And even then he wasn’t satisfied.’ I tossed aside the blood-ruined clothes, looked down on a trunk that was already neatly packed. ‘Do I need to repack this, do you think?’
Hugh glanced across. ‘There might be more letters there – even a miniature or two – some clue as to his relatives.’
‘True.’ I started lifting clothes from the trunk, trying to disturb them as little as possible. Some of the clothes were very fine; Nightingale had plainly been intent on cutting a figure in the neighbourhood. The colours were all rather too strong for me – there was a particularly bright purple that tried my eyes.
‘There’s a letter here from Durham,’ Hugh said. ‘Unopened. Looks like it came after he was attacked.’ He lifted the wax with a fingernail. ‘Good lord, it’s from Peter Blenkinsop. You know, the fellow who sings through his nose.’ He did a quick, and accurate, imitation.
‘Was Nightingale inviting him to perform?’ What a concert that would have been, I thought.
‘No, it’s in his other capacity, as landlord of the Star and Rummer Inn. Charles,’ Hugh was sounding very puzzled now, ‘it’s a bill – for four nights’ accommodation and the devil of a quantity of beer, wine, spirits. You name it, he drank it. He must have been stupefied the whole time he was there!’
I stared at him. ‘Does it say the nights he stayed in Durham?’
‘Friday night till Monday night.’
‘That fits in with what Mrs Annabella said.’ I leant against the bed post. ‘She told me Nightingale had come up to town several days before he officially arrived on the coach. He was trying to persuade her to keep quiet about their dalliance in London.’
‘He must have led her on quite as much as she suggested, if he felt he had to come up and plead for secrecy.’
‘He must have been here on the Friday, ridden back south to Durham – that wouldn’t have taken him more than an hour – then stayed in Durham four nights until the coach came through. Devil take it, Hugh! I heard one of the women on the coach say to him he’d given her a wonderfully entertaining end to the journey. I should have realized then that he couldn’t have come all the way from London on the coach. He caught it in Durham!’
‘There’s another bill attached.’ Hugh struggled with pieces of paper that didn’t wish to be unfolded. ‘For stabling a horse for four days.’
‘He must have ridden up from London. Quickest way.’
‘Blenkinsop says that if Nightingale doesn’t pay his bill by the end of the week the horse will be sold.’
‘Let him sell it,’ I said. ‘It’s the simplest way of getting his money.’ A horse, I thought; Nightingale had come north on a horse to Newcastle, seen Mrs Annabella, ridden south again . . .
I lifted out the folds of clothes. A pocket knife fell into my fingers. A folded newspaper with an advertisement marked.
‘There’s a letter to someone else entirely,’ Hugh said. ‘A man by the name of Richard Crowe.’
‘Crow?’ I stared at him. I’d heard that name before. No, someone had said that Nightingale sang like a crow. Ridley – at that drunken fracas at Jenison’s house.
Hugh started to laugh. ‘You’ll never guess, Charles! His name wasn’t Nightingale at all.’ He waved the letter at me. ‘This is from an old inamorata. She says, You’d better change your name, Dick, whoever heard of a singer called Crowe? Charles, are you all right?’
‘Crow,’ I repeated. ‘Richard Crow.’
‘With an “e” on the end.’
‘Cuthbert Ridley,’ I said. ‘Richard Crowe.’
‘What?’
‘That’s the trouble with monograms, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘You never know which way round they are. CR or RC?’
‘What are you talking about?’
I started digging amongst the clothes left in the trunk. I was barely halfway down and the coats were thick. There was a pair of boots and some shoes, a copy of an almanac, a book of stories of a very unsavoury kind. And something that chinked amongst the folds of a waistcoat. I threw back the folds and coins chinked, louder.
‘He was bound to have cash somewhere,’ Hugh said.
I tucked back the skirts of the waistcoat and there it was. A leather purse with a drawstring fastened securely. And the monogram R and C intertwined.
The bag was heavy in my hands. Hugh stared. ‘It can’t have been him! Maybe Ridley hid the purse here to implicate him.’
‘Ridley doesn’t have this kind of money. And he wouldn’t part with it if he had.’ I was busy pulling the story I’d built in my mind apart and putting it back together again. ‘Nightingale came up on the Friday to see Mrs Annabella,’ I said. ‘He must have been furious at having to humour her but he had to – if Jenison had found out Nightingale had been leading his sister on, he’d have lost his engagement here. Nightingale would have been angry at even finding himself in that kind of a situation. What would you have done then, Hugh?’
‘Get drunk.’
‘Exactly. He was a stranger in the town and Jenison had recommended the George to him. I wager he went there, Hugh – the stable boy saw someone that night who matched his description. Or the description of his horse, at any rate. That’s why he refused Jenison’s offer of rooms there – they’d have recognized him, and he didn’t want it to be known he’d been in the town before he was supposed to be. The stable boy gave him directions to the bridge; he was riding south to Durham to wait for the coach there. But he went the wrong way, probably got lost. Which would have made him even more angry. And when he ended up on the Key, being Nightingale, he had one more urgent need to satisfy.’
‘The whores.’
‘But he was too drunk to perform properly – which worsened his temper yet further. He rode off without caring who or what was in his way – and knocked the woman into the river. He may never even have realized what he’d done. He was too preoccupied with thoughts of Mrs Annabella
.’
Hugh sighed. ‘He was playing a dangerous game.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘a fatal one.’ I dropped the purse back into the trunk. ‘But he should have known. He spent all his life dancing on ladders, after all. He must have fallen off more than once.’
A silence.
‘So Ridley’s innocent after all,’ Hugh said.
I grimaced. ‘He didn’t precipitate the child into the river, certainly. But innocent, no. Ridley’s not dancing on ladders, Hugh – he’s on the edge of a precipice.’ I tossed the clothes back into the trunk. ‘Let’s throw all this in together and leave it for Jenison to deal with. I’m sick of it all. I just want to get home.’
Hugh gathered up the bits and pieces from the table and tossed them on top of the clothes, together with the letters. I looked at the heavy bag in my hands, the intertwined initials.
I buried it deep in the pile of clothes and turned my back.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Every effort has been made to be geographically accurate in a depiction of Charles Patterson’s Newcastle. In the 1730s, Newcastle upon Tyne was a town of around 16,000 people, 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 and the smells 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 recognized 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.
A number of real people fleetingly appear in Charles Patterson’s world. Solomon Strolger, organist of All Hallows for fifty-three 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.
Strange though it may seem, ladder dancers also existed in real life; occasionally advertisements for such acts appear in London newspapers. None, however, ever seem to have found their way north to Newcastle. In addition, a ‘Signor Rossignol’ (an Italian ‘Mr Nightingale’ from Naples) enjoyed enormous popularity in the second half of the century, ‘singing’ concertos, symphonies and other pieces, as well as imitating birdsong, but nevertheless died penniless and forgotten in Yorkshire.
Charles Patterson is entirely fictional, but the difficulties he finds in making a living 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.
