‘Thank you.’
Harriet patted his hand and released herself with a slight wince. ‘We shall regret it, I imagine. I hope you shall not, sir. We are at your service.’ She glanced at the clock on Mr Pither’s mantel. ‘Or at least we shall be so in the morning. The dinner-hour approaches and Mr Graves’s house keeps careful hours.’
Graves took advantage of the carriage trip returning them to Berkeley Square to tell them what he could of Nathaniel Fitzraven, musician. It became clear at once that he had not liked the man, and as Graves seemed to like and value most people to a degree Harriet found frustrating, she had pushed him for his reasons and impressions. He had spoken haltingly at first, watching the damp, darkening streets pass by through the carriage window. He shivered.
‘He liked to pretend intimate knowledge of his betters. He played in the band of His Majesty’s Theatre for some years and the association with the singers and patrons there was a tonic to him. To hear him speak, you would have thought him the confidant of every music-lover of note in the city. Then his talents began to desert him; his fingers stiffened to the point he could no longer perform what was required.’
‘The swelling of the joints was not extreme,’ Crowther said, his eyebrows raised.
Graves looked down at his own young hands for a moment, then hid them in his pockets. ‘It does not need to be extreme to lose a musician his livelihood. He managed to wheedle himself back into the employ of the Opera House, however. Perhaps the manager there, Mr Harwood, pitied him. This year and last he was running errands for them, and acting as if he was Harwood’s right-hand man. He bought last season’s selections to be made up into songbooks.’ Graves, among his other responsibilities, also managed a small music shop in Tichfield Street, a much less fashionable part of Town. He continued: ‘I did not like the way he treated the children. As soon as their true lineage and worth was acknowledged, he became ingratiating. My heart sank if they were keeping me company in the shop and he entered on some pretext or other. I am sure he told everyone he stood like an uncle to them.’
Harriet smiled gently at him as she pulled her cloak more tightly round her throat. ‘Lord Thornleigh and Lady Susan know who their friends are, Graves.’
The young man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Susan does, I think. But Jonathan is still very young. However, whatever my doubts about Fitzraven, Harwood placed great trust in him this summer. He sent Fitzraven to the continent to recruit singers for the current season. Fitzraven came back bristling with pride, and looking rather sleek. He had engaged Isabella Marin in Milan and, indeed, this new castrato of whom such praises are spoken – Manzerotti. They say he is the greatest singer to come to London since Gasparo Pacchierotti’s debut of seventy-seven. One of my customers heard him at a party in Devonshire House some days ago and was all but overcome.’
Harriet and Crowther must have looked a little blank at the names. The noise of London was crashing in on them through the windows of the carriage as it bullied its way along Cockspur through horses, carts and bobbing sedan chairs in the gathering dark. The carriage wheels spat mud up the doors as they jostled between ruts, the light had bled out of the day and already the shadows were deepening and the colours folding in on themselves. A pieman, his tray almost empty, chucked the last of his wares to a group of dirty-looking boys who had been following him down the road. After a brief struggle the strongest of them emerged in victory and held his prize high above the heads of the others. He tore pieces of the misshapen pastry off and stuffed them into his mouth, while keeping the rest out of the reach of his mewling, begging band and their long skinny fingers. Hawkers and song-sellers walked by them shouting out their produce and prices, occasionally running a casual, assessing eye over the carriage, which here at least moved scarcely faster than they did, and over its occupants. A girl, no more than fourteen, but already pox-marked and old in her expression, peered in and whistled at Graves, then noticing Harriet winked at her, and with a swing of her hips was gone. Graves was too busy marvelling at his companions’ expressions to notice her.
‘Really, Crowther, Mrs Westerman,’ he said, ‘you are educated people but your ignorance of music is astonishing.’
Harriet looked very serious. ‘Forgive us, Graves! We are nw to the capital, and I was in the East Indies in seventy-seven and Crowther was in—?’
Crowther looked up from his fingernails. ‘Oh, I was in London. And I went to a concert or two, but my occupations were in general less polite.’ And when Graves looked enquiringly at him, Crowther met his gaze and said very evenly, ‘I was cutting up dead people.’
Graves cleared his throat and crossed his legs.
‘Then, Graves, my dear boy, you must educate us.’ Harriet smiled and folded her arms. ‘Who is this Manzerotti? And who is Isabella Marin?’
Graves leaned forward with a sudden enthusiasm that reminded Harriet that, for all his cares and responsibilities, he was still not yet twenty-five.
‘Manzerotti is said to be the greatest soprano castrato living. He is much spoken of. It is a marvellous thing to have him in London! They say that with both him and Marin in the company, the serious opera or “opera seria” could equal the success of
Creso
in seventy-seven, and there were
sixteen
performances that season.’ He sat back again with the air of having delivered a startling revelation.
Crowther exchanged a glance with Harriet, and lifted his eyebrows, murmuring, ‘Is that good?’
Graves gave an exasperated sigh ‘It is remarkable! An opera is judged a great success if it manages a dozen performances. And Isabella Marin! Her name is pure gold on the continent, and it is her first appearance on the English stage. It is a sensation.’
Harriet pulled absent-mindedly on one of her red curls of hair, saying, ‘Are there no English singers who can hold a tune? Why did Harwood need to send Fitzraven to the continent to recruit? Are we not at war with most of our neighbours over there?’
‘Art knows no boundaries and borders,’ Graves said a little stiffly, then, throwing his body back into the corner of the coach and smiling, ‘but it is partly fashion. We English love to see something new at the opera. I think bringing in singers from hundreds of miles away to serenade us makes us feel more important. What is nearby is necessarily unexceptional.’
He looked up and to his right into the dark of the carriage. Harriet could tell he was imagining the sound of this Manzerotti’s voice in the private auditorium of his mind. Then, coming to himself and noticing the streets outside, he said, ‘We are nearly arrived. I hope you dine with us this evening, Mr Crowther.’
Mr Crowther bowed and the carriage came to a halt.
Mr Crowther was not a regular guest at dinner in Berkeley Square, however he thought it might be politic not to return to his own rented house as yet. He had been late at work the previous night; indeed, dawn had already begun to cough at the windows when he ceased his examination of small lesions on the brain of a young man who had died of a seizure. It had been a fascinating study, but he was not entirely confident that he had tidied away all his samples before retiring at last to bed. If he had been remiss it was likely the maid would have been thrown into hysterics by the discovery of part of a brain in a jar and left her post. He had lost two maids in this way since coming to London, and his housekeeper, Hannah, though loyal, had limits to her patience. He hoped to avoid the punishment of a bad dinner by taking a seat at Graves’s table. However although the food was excellent, the table was so crowded with good-humour he feared his digestion might still suffer.
Mr Gabriel Crowther was not known for his sociability. Indeed, when the Royal Society invited him to address them it had been more out of respect, than in expectation that he would accept. But he
had
accepted. It was Mr Crowther who had, in September of this year and after careful correspondence, found and recommended Dr Trevelyan’s establishment as a suitable place for James Westerman to be confined. It was Mr Crowther who had written to Graves to advise him of the matter, and his letter that had prompted the family’s warm invitation to Harriet and her family to treat their establishment as their home while James was resident in Highgate. Mr Crowther had rarely done so much for any other human being. The reward for his unusual activity was to discover in a distressingly short time that he missed the society of the ladies of Caveley, so when the invitation from the Royal Society at Somerset House arrived he drew up a list of reasons why it would be advantageous to spend time in London, and ordered his housekeeper to make the necessary preparations.
His welcome in Berkeley Square had been warm, and he was forced to admit he had been glad to see them all. However, he had not lost his habits of silence and isolation completely. A noisy table of young people could still feel something of a trial. Lady Susan was giving her guardian an account of her day which included a cruelly accurate impersonation of her Italian master. Miss Rachel Trench, Harriet’s younger sister, was trying hard to interest her sibling with an account of some wallpapers she had seen, and which she thought might be suitable for the salon in their country house of Caveley. Graves was torn between listening to Susan and preventing his jugged hare from escaping over the edge of his plate. The candles blazed and the footmen went to and fro setting down dishes or taking them away, and Stephen and Lord Thornleigh were competing to entertain the table with their story of a dead rat in the cellar and their plans for the corpse in various schemes to terrify the maids.
At the head of the table, the personification of calm good grace, sat Mrs Beatrice Service. Her dress was modest and neat, and her grey curls were pinned up neatly under a white cap. Her eyes suggested she found the world an amusing and pleasant place in general. When Owen Graves had taken on the task of constructing a proper household in which these two ennobled orphans, Lord Thornleigh and Lady Susan, might grow, he naturally turned to those who had already shown themselves to be their friends in their time of poverty and obscurity. Mrs Service was such a one. She had lived in the street where the children were born, and had known both their parents. A poor widow, albeit a gentleman’s daughter, she had passed her days quietly starving and trying not to cause any difficulty for anyone in the process. Now she lived with Jonathan, Susan and their guardian as friend and companion in Berkeley Square. She had a box at the opera, good food when she wanted it, and thought herself a very lucky woman.
There was an element of the governess about Mrs Service’s role, th Susan had masters who visited the house to instruct her in music and, despite her early reluctance, French and Italian, but there was never any question among the household as to her status. Mrs Service was counsellor to Graves; she held the keys to the store cupboards; the housekeeper came to her for directions, and she acted as a sort of honorary grandmother to the children. She was by nature retiring, but her principles were sound and held with conviction, so if she ever had cause to speak to Susan about the propriety of her behaviour, her words carried great force, and were attended to. Just now, she gave the Earl of Sussex a mild look and the speeches about the rat came to an abrupt halt. In the little silvered moment of silence that followed she asked Mr Crowther how he had occupied his day.
‘Mrs Westerman and myself have been recruited to investigate a murder, Mrs Service,’ he replied.
The silver silence became something harder, and the room seemed to still. Graves put his fork down and said, ‘Susan, Jonathan. I am afraid Mr Fitzraven, the gentleman from the His Majesty’s Theatre, has been killed.’
The children were silent a moment, till Jonathan, looking up at Crowther under his pale lashes, asked in a small voice, ‘Was he stabbed, sir?’
Crowther watched him carefully as he replied, ‘No, Lord Thornleigh. He was strangled and thrown into the river.’
Lord Thornleigh nodded. He had, Crowther surmised, been thinking of his own father’s death; it seemed his sister’s thoughts followed a similar trajectory.
Susan looked up at her guardian. ‘Graves, did he have any children? He never mentioned any.’
Graves reached out his hand to touch her hair. ‘No, my love. He was alone in the world. That is why Mr Crowther and Mrs Westerman must try to give him some justice.’
The argument, Crowther thought, sounded a little weak. He and Harriet had already agreed that Mr Palmer’s role in the case should not be known to anyone else in the household. It would seem to involve unnecessary risk to all concerned. However, noticing as he did now the tightening of the muscles round Miss Rachel Trench’s jaw, he wished his conscience would let him be more frank. He then became aware that Lady Thornleigh was looking at him with wide and thoughtful eyes.
‘You are going to find out who killed Mr Fitzraven, then? I am glad.’ Her glance returning to the plate in front of her; the little girl chased some morsel of meat through its gravy with her fork like a god idly steering ships onto rocks or towards treasure. ‘Though he was never very nice to me till I became rich. Then he smiled much too much. Before then he used to just ignore us and try and impress Father with talk of the opera. Isn’t it foolish to like someone just because someone else has died and left them money and things?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, my dear. Very foolish.’
Rachel stood up rather suddenly. ‘I had thought you in better spirits this evening, Harriet. I hope this new adventure is not the reason for that. Forgive me, Mrs Service, I have a sudden headache. I fear you must excuse me.’