“I think that is when the company engaged for this season arrived in London.”
“Now that is an interesting coincidence.” Harriet passed the little book back to him, and Crowther slipped it into his coat, then her eye was caught by the violin case that lay open on the bed beside her.
“Poor orphan,” Harriet said, and let her fingers rest on the honey-colored wood. It was her thought that if Fitzraven had no relatives to claim the estate of newspaper cuttings, some printed music and clothes, it would in all likelihood be sold by Mrs. Girdle to cover the rent he had agreed to pay. She wondered about buying the violin herself as a present for her son. Graves could tell her who was best to teach the boy. James would have loved his son to develop an affection for music like his own. Would have. She had squeezed her eyes shut, trying to close the thought away and on opening them again lifted the instrument from its case. She was turning it in her hands to catch the light creeping apologetically in from the street outside, when Crowther picked up the case and turned it upside down, shaking it vigorously.
“Good Lord, Crowther, what on earth are you. .?” Then Harriet found herself interrupted by the sound of the case’s inner lining giving way and a little tumble of letters fell onto the bed between them. She picked one up and had just unfolded it, hoping for state secrets but catching only a flowing feminine hand, when she heard footsteps in the outer room. Turning toward the door in expectation of seeing Mrs. Girdle, she was surprised to find herself looking into the shocked face of Isabella Marin. From behind her, as if appearing out of the folds of the soprano’s skirts, a short, bullet-headed woman stepped forward, saw what Harriet held, and whistling put her hands on her hips.
“Well, that’s torn it, Issy. I told you we should have started out earlier, but no you have to go and show off at church, and then show off to Lady Georgiana, yabbering away about millinery as if it’s something you either knew or cared a damn about.”
Miss Marin remained still and silent throughout this little speech. She blinked and parted her lips, but no sounds issued forth.
Her maid, or so she appeared by her dress, if not her manner, nodded to Harriet and Crowther. “I’m guessing you are Mrs. Westerman and Mr. Crowther that Harwood mentioned to us last night. I’m Morgan, and this chatty little piece is Isabella Marin. Though I suppose you know that.”
On hearing that the famous French soprano Miss Isabella Marin was in her house, Mrs. Girdle was only too ready to put her parlor at their disposal and provide tea for her guests. She seemed reluctant to leave them to themselves, but she soon quailed under the eye of Miss Marin’s formidable maid. Harriet was amused. She would never have thought it possible at a time when French maids were regarded as essential to any woman of fashion in London, that a Frenchwoman would hire a Londoner to see to her needs; particularly one with such unusual manners. Morgan spoke like the urchins and street sellers that rolled along in the London muck. It seemed she had managed to get her position without troubling herself to learn the more refined accents used by most upper servants.
Harriet watched Morgan bustling Mrs. Girdle out of her own living room with some admiration. She reminded her of the wife of a master shipwright in Gibraltar. A woman born in the back streets of Plymouth, she had dealt with the social niceties of the naval community by cheerfully ignoring them. She would treat an admiral in the same way she would a midshipman or her own servant, and had ended up with friends in every rank of the service.
Miss Marin herself had hardly said a word since they met her and now she turned toward the fire and fell into a study of the flames. She seemed only a ghost of the woman Harriet had heard singing the previous day, and she wondered what toll the rigors of performance took on women like this slight French girl.
Having secured the room, her maid took a seat a little way behind her. The fire cracked and Harriet was beginning to cast about in her head for some words that could wake the young lady into conversation again, when the maid, without shifting her head from the study of Mrs. Girdle’s mantelpiece, said, “Well, Issy love, if you are to tell, then do so. They have seen the letters, and I don’t think they’ll hand them over till they know what’s in them from us, or read them on their own-not now that bastard is dead. You must confess, so do so and have done.”
Harriet was startled. Whatever the relationship was between the two women, it was very different from the one she had with her own maid.
“I reckon you can trust ’em, dearie.”
Isabella gave herself a little shake. “Yes, I suppose I shall have to, Morgan. Lord, but how to begin! You were right-I should never have replied to his bloody letters.”
At this, Crowther and Harriet had to struggle to keep their jaws closed. Isabella spoke with the same accent of the London slums as Morgan. She looked up at them and smiled ruefully at their expressions.
“Yes. I am more a native of this place than you, or Mr. Crowther I think, Mrs. Westerman. I was born and raised in London and I’m sorry to say it, but there it is: Nathaniel Fitzraven was my father.”
Crowther and Harriet continued to look at her in astonishment. Morgan peered round at them both carefully.
“Well, they weren’t expecting that, Issy.”
Sam bobbed along behind Jocasta looking scared and getting tangled up with Boyo at her heels.
“Is it because of the note, Mrs. Bligh? It meant something bad, didn’t it? I knew it soon as Ripley said, that’s why I ran back so fast.”
Jocasta powered on. “Yes, lad, you did well. Out along Oxford Street?”
“Yes-” Sam said, and almost got a crack around the ear for knocking into a man with a pie halfway down his throat. “Maid said that puckered-faced woman had been asking for a quiet place to walk.” He had no idea that Mrs. Bligh could have anymore speed left in her, but her pace picked up again and Sam danced among the mess and mass of people to keep up with her.
Isabella shrugged, then looked back toward the fire and began to speak. “I was born and raised in London. Not this part of town, though-never made it out of Southwark till I was seven years old. My mother died about then, and she asked Morgan here to take care of me. She was always a good friend to Mother-helped her out when she could and showed me how to make enough money to feed myself by the time I could walk. Tell them, Morgan.”
Crowther looked at Morgan as if for the first time. She was perhaps in her sixties, small and rounded in her figure. Her eyes were uncannily blue. Crowther did not think himself a snob, despite his ignored title and his still considerable wealth, but he was aware that the woman in front of him was changing in his eyes from an addendum to Miss Marin to an individual herself.
“I used to sing ballads in the bars and streets for pennies. That was my trade and that’s when I met Issy’s mom, Tessa. She used to hang about to hear me sing for hours, when she was just big with this little bird.” She frowned at the floor between them, and scratched her chin. “Issy’s mom was a good girl, but she was never going to get to old age in this town. Too feeble to do the hard work, and too much an easy mark for bad men. Oh I’d tell her, time and time again, I’d tell her. I learned to spot a wrong ’un young, but she’d never listen. She’d defend them, not speak to me for a month then come round to my room dragging Issy behind her with fresh bruises and nothing to cover herself with but her stays and a skirt too raggedy for even them to steal off her. Some people learn. Some people just roll about in the mess they’ve made and complain about the stink.”
Isabella twisted in her chair as if about to argue, but Morgan held up a hand. “Oh, don’t fret, Issy! Your mother was a good kind girl and I miss her still, but she wasn’t fit or fighting enough to be poor. You know it. Bless me! By the time you were five, if someone cheeked you on the street you’d let fly and they’d be crawling off with the crowd laughing at them before the minute was out.” Morgan put a hand to Isabella’s face, pulling back a strand of her black hair. Isabella squirmed in her seat, but allowed it, and Harriet and Crowther saw a jagged little
scar on that otherwise velvet skin. Morgan let her fingers brush it, and the hair fall back. “One of the last did that when Issy took against him for knocking poor Tess about. At seven she tried to fight a grown man, daft little bird.”
“So you taught her to sing, Mrs. Morgan?” Crowther asked.
The woman nodded. “Just Morgan, sir. No need to pretty it up. Yes, I taught her. She used to come along to keep her clear of Tessa’s beaus, and learned by listening. By the time she was waist high she was earning more than her mother and feeding them both-and whatever man was about. Though even then I started holding on to her money for her, so they couldn’t get their fat paws on the lot.” She paused and sniffed. “Too late for poor Tessa, though. She was already worn down and the first chill she got in the winter of sixty-seven killed her in a week, no matter how many oranges and red meat that little girl brought her.”
Harriet looked at Mademoiselle Marin, who was staring into the flames as if she could see all her history there, burning and tumbling. Harriet thought of the little girl trying to ward off all the evils of the world with the most expensive fruit she could find. It was never a fair fight.
“Still,” Isabella said now with a sigh, “no reason you should have any interest in that. You want to know about Fitzraven, don’t you, and who killed him. My mother’s dying had nothing to do with those things. Fitzraven charmed her in a house where she worked and he taught fiddle to the eldest son. He promised her roses and marriage then ran for it and would have nothing to do with her when she was cast off. Then came some bad times and they are best forgotten.”
“Miss Marin,” Crowther said, “did you never see your father when you were a child? Did your mother make no attempt to speak to his conscience?”
Isabella nodded slowly. “Once, only once. It was on London Bridge. I was with Mother and she spotted him on the other side of the road. It was before they knocked the houses down, and the way was so crammed I thought we’d be crushed under the wheels of the carts. I was about five, I think. There was this gentleman, or at least he looked a gentleman to me, picking his way along the pavement, and my mother ran up to him and shouted at him, pushed me under his nose. It was the only time I ever saw her stand up for herself like that.” She shifted in her chair. “He pretended not to know her at first, then he said he didn’t think I was his flesh at all. She wouldn’t let him get away, not till he had to push her over. I think a couple in the crowd would have had him for that, but he was too quick for them. I remember him disappearing among the people, and my mom on her back in the mud crying like a lost thing. She told me his name, but I never thought to look for him after that, though.”
She fell quiet and put out her hand toward Morgan without turning her face from the fire. The woman took it and held it between her palms.
Harriet began to feel that if she ever met Fitzraven’s murderer, she would be forced to congratulate him. “So then, how came you by your name, your training?” she asked gently.
Morgan patted the hand in her lap and replied for her. “Well, Mrs. Westerman, after Tess passed in sixty-seven, me and the little bit carried on as we were for a year or two, then a musical gentleman took up residence just round from one of our favorite corners for a song up on the far side of London Bridge.”
Harriet thought of the street singers they would pass from time to time in the busier thoroughfares, pinched and dirty faces glimpsed only for a moment as the carriage rolled by, the horses high-stepping as though they were too fine to set their hooves in the muck. She had seen children enough at the same work, their hands outstretched and their voices pale and forced through the cold and soot-soaked air. She realized she had never thought much about their lives before, nor paid attention to their songs.
Morgan’s voice was low. “He heard Isabella and told us he was a teacher of singing and would give her lessons every week without payment. I thought at first he might be one of those gentlemen who like ladies very young, if you take my meaning, but I have to give it to him, there was never a sniff of that sort of nonsense about him. We’d go there every week and I’d sit in the corner and he began to teach her. Me too, I suppose. He’d tell us stories from the opera, and the business of the thing, and show us all the new music and teach it to her, just for the pleasure of it.”
Isabella looked up. Her eyelashes were very long, and her features seemed too delicate for a creature reared in the stink of the city. “I loved those stories,” she said. “All those gods and heroes. He had a way with his telling.”
Morgan nodded. “And I saw on his card at his door one week that he normally charged two shillings an hour for that sort of work, but he’d never take a penny from us. ‘Morgan,’ he used to say, ‘I spend all my days hammering tunes into the heads of the silliest girls in this town. It’s a pleasure for me to teach what I know to a true musician.’” The old woman wagged her finger at them. “‘A true musician’-that’s what he called her. Well, once a week turned into twice, and then three till it got to the point we were there every day during the season, and her voice bloomed with the care of it.”
Isabella said: “He paid for me and Morgan to get into the gallery at His Majesty’s and I fell in love with it. The idea that I might be on the stage myself one day was more than I could dream of. All those beautiful women, those costumes. It was as if my heart would burst just at the thought of it.” She was lost for a second in her memories, then said with a quick grin, “I have never told this story. It feels like a pleasure to tell it-isn’t that strange? I always thought it’d be a secret I kept to the grave. Yet here it comes, tripping off my tongue like an old tune.”
Crowther folded together his long fingers over his knee and wondered if every person in the world had some such story, one that could release the teller in the telling. He had his own story, but he had never found it easy to speak of it, even when the confession was forced into the open as Miss Marin’s was now. When he told his story it did not come cloaked in this nostalgia; he told it with no charm. He stated the facts and was stared at like a grotesque.
Morgan picked up Isabella’s thread. “The next time we saw him was the last. He had been a little queer in his ways from time to time, sometimes shutting his door and not crawling out of it for a week, and here was another moment of it. We have the lesson as usual then he closes the lid on the harpsichord and says, ‘Isabella, I have taught you all I can. I have made you a fine singer, but I know another teacher who can make you great. There is a man in Paris called called Le Clerc-all the great singers of Europe go to him. So must you.’ Well, we just laughed at him straight out. Here we were earning pennies on the street corner, and he wants us to go to France. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I mean it,’ and he hands us a letter addressed to Le Clerc, lots of bits of paper with official stamps on them and a little bag holding more gold in it than I had ever seen in my life. Turned out he’d been planning and saving for us for a year.”
“I was thirteen,” Isabella said, “and never been out of the city. I was so scared I thought my head would fly off.”
The image made Harriet laugh, and Isabella looked up as if she was afraid of being mocked, but seeing nothing to alarm her in the other woman’s green eyes, she simply gave the same shy smile Harriet had seen on the stage of the theater.
“So off we went,” Morgan continued, crossing her ankles. “Issy learned at Le Clerc’s school for four years, we could earn enough to pay our way in the usual fashion, and she picked up the lingo till she could jabber away like a Frenchie born. Then when Le Clerc wanted her to start singing at little concerts and that, he told her to change her name. He said no opera singer would ever succeed keeping the name Baker-that was Tessa’s name. So we settled on Marin and there we go. She did good, then better, and everyone just thought she must be French, even the Parisians, and we never bothered correcting them.”
“I sang at the opera house in Paris in seventy-seven-it was only a small part, but then their prima donna fell ill, and I was asked to sing in her place. I
think Mr. Harwood saw me there.”
“He told us he was transfixed by your performance,” Crowther said. Isabella made no reply, but simply nodded.
“We visited Milan one time and liked it there so stayed,” Morgan said. “Everyone knows the best women singers come from Paris, so wherever we went it suited us that they believed Issy was Frenchborn. I took charge of the money, and where she would be going and when, and we started trotting along very nicely. Sang to more kings and bishops than I thought the world had room for, in opera houses and palaces all over the continent. Not London though. Not till now.”
“I got my first letter from Fitzraven this spring when I was singing again in Milan,” Isabella said. “There was a picture of me in a newspaper in Paris, and it got sold in London too, as I’ve been talked about here a bit. Morgan almost cried when she saw it, said it was so like my mother she couldn’t credit it. He saw it too, worked out his dates, and wrote care of the opera house, knowing they’d find me.”
Crowther thought of the exclamation point under the portrait in Fitzraven’s notebook. He must have thought the gods were dropping honey on him when he saw it.
“Morgan advised me not to answer, not to admit I was his daughter. She told me to remember he’d got my mother into trouble then left her with nothing but a nod, but I couldn’t help myself. Especially when he said he worked for the opera house. I thought, Oh, so that’s why it felt like home, that’s where all the music has come from. He talked about me coming here, and I remembered that night I first saw an opera was at His Majesty’s.” She turned toward Harriet and Crowther. The glow on her face was no trick of the firelight in the gathering dusk. The woman was shining from within. “So you see what last night meant to me? How many people get to have a dream become real in such a way? It frightens me a little. And it was just as I hoped it might be, and with that duet. The rest of the opera is pleasant enough, but the ‘Yellow Rose Duet’. .” She looked back into the flames. “When I first heard the tune it was as if someone had found the gold in me and made it really shine. Can you understand me? I felt it was written for me alone.”
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