Harriet struggled for a phrase. She felt she could discuss many subjects with authority, but not music. “Mademoiselle, your talent is remarkable and the tune very beautiful,” she said, and Isabella seemed satisfied.
“And to sing it with Manzerotti! Whatever I have been through, what he has had to suffer for the sake of music, what heights he has reached. . I may spend the rest of my life trying to find such a moment again. Yet I have had it. A Golden Hour. I shall always have that.”
“So Fitzraven came to see you in Milan, to hire you for His Majesty’s. Did you like him?” Harriet said. “We have heard. . differing reports.”
Isabella looked a little pained and it was Morgan who, once again, answered for her.
“We did not like him. Issy tried to. For all the fight in her, she still had her sentimental ideas of what a father is. Gave him money too.” She frowned. “Mr. Harwood has been a far straighter man to deal with. And Fitzraven knew he had a hold on us. If it came out in the papers now that the beautiful Parisian songbird Mademoiselle Isabella Marin was just plain old Issy Baker from Southwark, we’d be laughed at all round town. He never did anything about it. Just, you know, suggested we should all keep the secret together. I could tell his game. I’m glad he’s dead. Bet there are others that feel the same.” Morgan looked at them fiercely.
Harriet though was observing Isabella, who was pulling on the folds of her dress. The stuff of it was so soft it seemed to flow over her hands like liquid, like mercury.
“Do you feel the same, Miss Marin?” Harriet asked.
“It’s a bitter thing to say, Mrs. Westerman, but perhaps I do. I wanted to love him, I wanted to show him I was his daughter and he had wronged my mother. I had an idea he’d beg forgiveness, that we’d visit Dead Man’s Place together and think of her. But he didn’t care about my mother. I don’t think he even cared about music. When he started talking about the opera to me, I could see he didn’t feel about it as I did. To him, it was all about the fuss and gossip. I wanted to be unhappy when Morgan told me he was dead, but I wasn’t, in truth.”
“Morgan told you he had died?” Crowther said, looking up from his hands and with an eyebrow raised. “I thought it was Mr. Harwood who informed you after the performance.”
The old lady crossed her arms and sniffed. “I was about that morning. Watching a body brought in from the river is not the opera perhaps, but it’s always of interest.”
Crowther’s mouth twitched into a smile. “It was you that named him on the street.”
“Just sort of blurted it out like bad wind when his head lolled back as they carried him up the steps. Told Issy. My first thinking was, Good, he can’t go blabbing tales about my Issy now.”
Harriet looked between Morgan and Isabella. “But it was not just Fitzraven who knew the secret of your origins. What of your music teacher? You must have written from France, and visited him since you returned to London, this man who did so much for you.”
The two women were silent for a moment before Isabella replied, “We cannot find him. He began to answer our letters less and less. Nothing would come for months then twenty pages all written very close-strange rambling things they were, deeply earnest one page then light and airy and gossip-filled on another.” She swallowed. “Then they stopped all at once. I would love to sing to him again, show him what he made me. Remember, I was a thing of the gutter when he first found me. Morgan tried to see his old landlady as soon as we arrived. She said he had been taken off to a madhouse by his family over a year ago, but we have no further information. We have struggled. . I have asked Mr. Bywater to look for him on my behalf.” Crowther thought he detected the beginnings of a faint blush as she mentioned the composer’s name. “I would not trust Fitzraven to do so, but Mr. Bywater has had no success as yet and we have all been greatly occupied.”
Harriet cleared her throat. Even before she began to speak she could feel the color spreading up her neck and across her cheeks. “Mademoiselle, my husband was recently injured. An accident on the ship he commanded. He is in health now, physically, but his understanding has been impaired. He is currently in a private asylum on the outskirts of London. I tell you this because, if your teacher had been prone to worsening fits of melancholia, perhaps he too could have ended up in such a place. I am sure Dr. Trevelyan knows most of them. May I make enquiries on your behalf?”
Isabella’s voice was soft in reply. “I am sorry your husband is unwell, Mrs. Westerman, and I would appreciate anything you could do on my behalf in this matter.”
Harriet managed a small smile. “Just give me his name, Mademoiselle. I will make what enquiries I can.”
“His name is Leacroft. Mr. Theophilius Leacroft.”
5
Before they left Great Swallow Street Harriet and Crowther had also taken the time to knock up the other lodgers present and found that even with the thin walls and close quarters of the building, no one had heard or seen anything out of the ordinary on Thursday. Various people had heard footsteps on the stairs, but no one had noticed any altercation, nor had seen someone leaving with a body wrapped in a hearth rug over their shoulder in the early hours. Crowther was not surprised, saying simply that if they had done, it was likely they would have mentioned it before now. The lodger they had most wished to speak to, however, had not answered their knock. This was the gentleman who had his lodgings at the rear of the first floor, directly under those of Fitzraven. He was away from home, though Mrs. Girdle was sure he had been present on Thursday afternoon. The young man was apparently living on an allowance from his parents, and attempting to find some position in London from his base in Great Swallow Street. His name was given to them as Tobias Tompkins, so Crowther and Harriet wrote a note asking him to call on them in Berkeley Square in the evening, and hoped that the impressive address might tempt him into making their acquaintance.
They did not return immediately to Graves’s home, however. Crowther, as they rejoined the carriage, instead asked the driver to take them to Somerset House. When he settled back in his seat he realized Harriet was looking at him with her eyebrows raised.
“I have an acquaintance, Mrs. Westerman, who I know will be making use of the Royal Society’s library today. He is an expert in matters dental.” He reached into the pocket of his coat and produced a small silk bag. He pulled the string loose and shook out Fitzraven’s false teeth into his palm.
“Good God, Crowther! Have you been carrying those things with you all day?”
He looked at her with mild innocence. “Does this concern you, Mrs. Westerman?”
Harriet folded her arms as the coach rattled through the muck of the street. “I am only glad I did not know you had them earlier. I do not think I could have listened to poor Miss Marin’s account of her struggles with an easy mind, had I known you were sitting there with her father’s teeth in your pocket!”
Crowther did not seem discomfited, but lifted the teeth to the level of his eyes and clacked them together. “Indeed, it was an affecting tale.”
Harriet raised her eyebrows. “You do not believe it?”
“It is not that, Mrs. Westerman,” he said with some hesitation. “Only I am surprised she was so eager to know Mr. Fitzraven. I heard her reasons, of course, but she had a powerful motive for revenge. The man mistreated her mother quite horribly, for one thing, and for another he knew that her official biography is a lie. He could have turned her from the feted star of the season into a laughingstock.”
“I liked her.”
“That is charming, Mrs. Westerman, and so did I, but it is not evidence. Fitzraven’s accounts indicate that he was receiving money from someone recently arrived in London. She would seem a likely candidate. We may well find that he died because of some treachery more minor than Mr. Palmer thinks.”
“You may have your suspicions, but I cannot think Isabella likely to throttle a man, then hurl him in the river. Now, please do put those horrible teeth away.”
Crowther slipped the teeth
back into the bag without protest. “Yes, I believe that women, when they turn murderess, more often use poison. And seldom tidy up.”
Harriet settled into her corner and turned her head to look out of the window as they turned off Oxford Street. There was some sort of commotion on the road beside them-an open cart with a man and older woman sat up in the back. The woman had her arm around the man’s shoulders, which were shaking with sobs. Harriet recognized them as two members of the little walking party they had seen passing earlier in the day.
She looked down into the back of the cart as they passed. There was the third, the pretty blond woman. Her husband was holding her in his lap and rocking her back and forth. Her arm hung loose by her side. As their coachman waited to negotiate a way through, a man in a dirty coat emerged from the barber-surgeon’s where the cart was stopped. He climbed up in the back in a rush and felt for the woman’s pulse.
Harriet craned around as the coach worked itself free and held the picture in sight long enough to see the man shake his head and pat the younger man awkwardly on the shoulder. The cart driver crossed himself. Then they turned the corner and the sight was lost.
Harriet leaned out of the window and shouted up to the driver “Slater! What was all that?”
The man sucked his teeth and half-twisted to shout back without taking his eyes from the traffic in front of them.
“Accident, ma’am. Young woman slipped and fell, up by the brick kilns. Stove her head in.”
Harriet retreated into the carriage again and met Crowther’s inquiring eye.
“What is it, Mrs. Westerman?”
“Nothing of significance, Crowther. Some other little tragedy.”
6
As Jocasta came to the main road toward Holles Street, her view of the way was blocked by a carriage with a phoenix on the door. It was working into a free space on the road, so the wheels came very close to her, almost snagging her skirts. It brought back her dream of The Chariot with a sort of sick lurch, and she stopped dead, so as it pulled away and she saw the cart and Kate’s limp body supported by her husband and mother-in-law, it was like being at a theater and watching the curtain swept back.
The sight of it almost knocked her down. She had to put her hand out palm flat to the wall of some fancy goods shop behind her to keep from falling. Kate’s face was dirty and there was red on Fred’s breeches.
She stumbled forward to the edge of the crowd where she could hear the voices talking.
“Slipped and her husband tried to catch her. .”
“Such a pretty girl too. .”
“Dead before he could pick her up again. .”
“Constable’s writing it up now. His mother was there-saw the whole thing. .”
“He’s taking it hard. .”
The crowd shifted and Jocasta saw Mrs. Mitchell reach down, unclasp the little brooch from Kate’s shawl and slip it into her pocket.
Jocasta pushed her way through and started to shout.
“Oh no, not Milan, Mr. Crowther, not Milan!”
Harriet did not think she would ever become very fond of Mr. George Gillis. He had a face that reminded her of a self-satisfied raisin pudding, and his eyes looked like dubious oysters. That, if unappetizing, she could forgive, but his voice, drawling and nasal, seemed to find its way to some sensitive spot in the middle of her forehead and attack it with a brass pin.
He was sitting back in his chair in the reading room with his legs crossed and toying with a lorgnette tied to his waistcoat with purple ribbon. His tone from their arrival had been one of conceited disdain. Having made lengthy remarks on how honored he was to be asked for advice by the great Mr. Crowther, he had been of no assistance whatsoever, answering only in negatives and evincing very little interest in Crowther’s curiosity, despite his avowed expertise in matters of the kind. The lorgnette continued to twirl and wink between his fingers. Crowther did not reply but simply watched the man with level attention. Harriet looked about her. The reading room of the Royal Society was a place of some beauty. This north wing of Somerset House had been only recently completed, and the high ceilings, comfortable armchairs scattered in groups, and conveniently lit reading desks all gave an air of elegant confidence. It was a place built by and for men who believed absolutely in their work, and in their capacity to unfold the various mysteries of the universe. Men like Crowther, but also it seemed men like Gillis. She could not believe that such a being would contribute much to the knowledge of his countrymen, yet Crowther had referred to him without irony as an expert, and stood waiting for him now.
Gillis gave a dramatic sigh. “There may be. . I suspect there was a reference in a letter I had from a correspondent on the continent some weeks ago. .”
He paused. Crowther raised his eyebrow and Harriet clenched her hands together in her muff.
Gillis unfolded himself and with a slowness Harriet thought could only be deliberate, reached into his pocket for a notebook and began turning the pages. It seemed necessary that he read each page complete before moving onto the next, and all the while he wore the same amused self-indulgent smile that certain people reserve for their own work.
After a pause of some minutes he gave a little nod and tapped the page with his forefinger.
“Ah, yes. Here it is. My friend has been traveling on the continent and made the acquaintance of an apothecary called Alexis Duchateau. He has been experimenting with porcelain for false teeth rather than ivory or wood. His experiments have not become particularly commercial as yet, though my friend says he had supplied some people with sets by way of experiment. Apparently he tries to give them to the great and good, or their friends, to try and build their popularity.” Gillis looked up at them and blinked.
“And where is Mr. Alexis Duchateau’s shop? Is he resident in Italy?” Crowther asked, a little impatient.
Gillis smothered a yawn. “Dear Lord, no. Why would you think that? The French are the experts in this area. These teeth came from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. Nowhere else.”
7
Mr. Palmer found that his thoughts turned over better in his head when he could move rather than stare at the walls of his office at the Admiralty. He knew the ways well enough to walk without paying much attention to his immediate surroundings, instead thinking over his various stratagems and those he suspected might be in play against himself and his masters. He was just returning to the building and deciding how best to arrange a private meeting with Mrs. Westerman and Mr. Crowther when he realized he was about to trip over a small and very pale-faced lad who was looking fearfully up at the building’s imposing frontage.
“Can I help you, boy?”
The boy started. “I’m looking for the Admiralty Board. The head clerk.” He reached into the waistband of his breeches and pulled out a piece of paper, only slightly crumpled. “I’ve got a note.” He then noticed the paper was bent and began to try and smooth it against his thin chest. Mr. Palmer thought this treatment might do it more harm than good and put out his hand.
“That’s Mr. Jacobs, I shall give it to him.” Once he had hold of the paper he flicked it open. The wife of one of the clerks had died suddenly and the man was requesting a half-day to bury her on the morrow. “Very well. Tell Mr. Mitchell he has the permission.” He reached into his purse and pulled out a shilling and put it into the boy’s hand. His fingers shut over it smartly and he turned to hurry out into the road again. Mr. Palmer frowned.
“Boy!” The lad turned again and came back with great reluctance. When he had got close enough he opened his palm and offered the coin up again.
“I knew you didn’t mean to give me a whole shilling.” His face was so sorry Mr. Palmer couldn’t fully conceal a smile.
“No, boy. You may keep the coin. I just wanted to ask how his wife died. Was she with child?”
“Broke her skull,” the boy said rather miserably. “So he says, anyway.”
Mr. Palmer, his head full of Fitzraven, simply nodded. “Indeed. Convey our reg
rets and sympathies,” and when the boy looked entirely blank: “I mean tell him the gentlemen here say they are sorry for his loss.”
The clouds on the boy’s face cleared and he trotted out into the road.
8
Mrs. Westerman had been oddly subdued on their journey back to Berkeley Square, and had retired to her room as soon as the household had dined, complaining of a headache. Crowther shut himself in the library in an ill humor and wondered briefly if she had been thinking of her husband again.
Mrs. Westerman was very rarely ill, but since her husband had returned she had suffered headaches with greater frequency. It irritated Crowther that she was now unavailable at times when he wished for her company, and he hoped that as her husband’s health improved, her own would do the same. Her indisposition was not the only reason for his souring mood, however. The discovery that Fitzraven had been strangled rather than drowned had been a professional disappointment. It would have been of interest to add to the literature on the state of a body after drowning, to see if the pink foam in the throat he had observed in some animal experiments was present, for example, but a throttling was ordinary. Equally, an active investigation into a death ran counter to his habits of solitary study. It put him out among people far more than he liked, or was used to. However, he had agreed to help Mr. Palmer and serve his king, so with a slight growl in his own throat he went to work composing and sending a large number of notes, then awaiting their replies in the comfort of the library. Thus he avoided at least the perils of conversation for some hours. If he realized the inconvenience he caused in Graves’s household by sending off its staff to several corners of the city bearing his requests, he gave no sign of it. He had enough left of those habits of command that he had developed in his youth to ignore completely what it did not suit him to see, and his rather brittle mood made him even less likely to consider the convenience of others than usual.
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