‘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 mum 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 towards 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 favourite 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 realised 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 e’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 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, sh simply gave the same shy smile Harriet had seen on the stage of the theatre.
‘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 towards 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.’
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 vebeautiful,’ 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 yesterday 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 somuch 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 colour 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.’
III.5