Anatomy of Murder

5

The investment in transporting Isabella and Manzerotti from Italy had, it seemed, been justified. For an evening so early in the season the crowd that night at His Majesty’s was remarkable. The Hay Market was almost completely blocked with carriages from five o’clock. The torches outside the Opera House doors flared and roared, casting folding shadows up the brickwork. The scrum that thundered for entrance into the pit and stalls extended far along the pavements toward Northumberland Palace, and up and down its lengths went a dozen boys and girls selling copies of the libretto for a shilling and nuts for a penny. Two other children with piles of books in their arms like schoolboys late for the bell scurried between the carriages, handing more copies of librettos through the windows. Shillings were pulled from silk purses by long, gloved fingers and dropped into the boys’ waiting palms. A couple of street singers, one turning the wheel on the hurdy-gurdy around her neck, sang the crowd songs from the previous season above the general noise and put out their hands for tribute. A man with a brazier had set up shop roasting chestnuts beside them and the air filled with the sweetness of the black papery skins.

Among the general noise and excitement the Londoners were getting on with the serious business of looking at each other, till, as the bells of Westminster rang out six o’clock, there was a groan from bolts in the locks and the high entrance doors were swung open by liveried footmen. At the same moment the door to the pit was loosed, and the stagehand who opened it was almost crushed by the weight of people rushing in waving papers and arguing for cheap tickets at the tops of their voices, long before they were in earshot of the harried clerk at his booth. Through the smarter entrance to the lobby and private boxes passed brocade and silk, feathers and high headdresses all bulked up with horsehair and smothered in powder. Fans flicked open and closed, little high-heeled shoes in ivory and red picked their way over the grot of the pavement. Tailcoats flicked up as the men showed their legs and bowed to the ladies. A murmur of spray diamonds and stones glinted their way into the lobby. Those of the crowd who were not fighting their way in kept up a commentary on the dresses and faces passing by. When one lady descended from her carriage in a skirt of particularly daring design, a shout went up from the jostling observers. Mr. Harwood heard it from the relative peace of his office and smiled.

The party of Mr. Owen Graves, consisting of himself, Mrs. Service, Miss Rachel Trench and Lady Susan Thornleigh, were not so extravagantly dressed, but the crowd knew them anyway. Susan heard her name whispered as she stepped through the throng with her guardian’s hand on her shoulder, and kept her eyes down till almost at her elbow she heard a voice ask her: “Off to listen to the music then, my lady?”

She turned and looked up into the full fat face of a woman with her arms crossed under her breasts. She did not know the woman but the face looked kindly enough so she smiled at it and replied, “Yes, thank you, ma’am. I like music.”

The fat lady roared with laughter. “Aww! Ma’am, she says! Bless the little chicken leg!” Then, as Susan felt her guardian’s hand steer her firmly forward, she heard the voice continue, “Oi! Ursula! You’ll never guess who just ‘ma’am-ed’ me! Lady Susan Thornleigh! Yeah, all them murders! Little bit that she is!”

Susan lifted her chin and kept her eyes straight ahead.

Crowther was in the library of the house in Berkeley Square, which, despite his having his own establishment, had become acknowledged as his domain. He had covered some pages with a record of his observations of Fitzraven’s body when Mrs. Westerman entered the room and took a seat in one of the well-stuffed leather armchairs in front of the fire.

“Do you regret refusing the invitation for the opera, madam?”

Harriet shook her head, and Crowther returned to his writing. Despite the pleasure she had taken in the rehearsal this afternoon, an opera was not how she wished to employ the time available to her. From the sights and stories, when they did not put too much of a strain on her good sense, she could take some amusement, but music itself seemed to her a language she understood only partially. When she attended concerts or indeed any gathering where music was more than a stimulus to dancing, she felt as if she were being told fairy tales in Portuguese. Some sense of the drama reached her, some element of the subtle excitement everyone around her seemed to be able to taste, but she could not understand fully what she heard and was unable to work out the proper sense of it.

She remembered listening, one evening the previous spring, to a small group of musicians who came to play in the little assembly hall by the coaching inn in Pulborough. Rachel, her sister, had been very keen to attend, so Harriet had escorted her there. She had been listening to some slower piece the gentlemen were playing, and thinking it quite pleasing when she caught sight of her sister’s profile. Rachel had been not merely attentive, but transfixed, and her eyes were, Harriet had been astonished to realize, full of tears. Harriet had looked about her and seen a similar look of divine reverie on the faces of several of her acquaintance in the crowd, recalled it on the face of her husband when he had persuaded her to go to some concert on his arm. She had felt stupid and slow by comparison and judged herself as oddly insensitive, even though she was sure she loved, feared and dreamed as passionately as anyone else in those audiences. Now, since James’s continued illness had brought them to London and the home of their friends in Berkeley Square, she was continually surrounded by music. Lady Susan Thornleigh was, at eleven, an accomplished player on the harpsichord. Graves studied and loved music, as well as having it occupy his business life. It was as essential as air to them both.

Harriet remembered questioning Graves earlier in her stay about the effects of music, somewhat petulantly, when she had been a mute witness to an impassioned discussion of the technicalities of one of Mr. William Boyce’s symphonies, and its relative merits compared with some new score by a Mr. Haydn just brought, with great fanfare, by a gentleman who had been traveling in Austria.

“But Graves, what does it all mean?” she had said.

Graves crossed and uncrossed his legs several times before replying, drew in his breath and lifted his hand as if about to begin, then let it fall again, till at last he said with an apologetic shrug of his shoulders: “Mrs. Westerman, music does not mean anything at all. You cannot ask it to speak to you in such concrete terms. It can evoke, affect, cajole and persuade, but its language is not that of speech. Indeed, if a composer can say in literal terms what his music means, he had much better write prose than notes.” He saw that his answer did not satisfy her, and after a moment tried again. “Let music, when you hear it, work on you in its own way, Mrs. Westerman. Let it flow around you and find its own way to touch you. It is not something you must translate moment by moment. Give it your attention. If it fails to speak to you in its own manner then, well, it is a failure in the music, not in yourself.” Harriet had promised to try his advice, but remained doubtful.

She sighed again and Crowther’s pen ceased to scratch.

“Mrs. Westerman?”

“I do not understand this city, Crowther,” she told him, “and that is a concern to me. The noise, the continual bustle of the place, the air. How are we to manage?”

He placed his pen down on the papers in front of him.

“If it is any comfort, I do not believe we understand or know the country either. We will manage as everyone does, Mrs. Westerman, as best we can.”

Mr. Harwood heard the last chords ring out from the auditorium and waited. The signs during the performance had been promising, but it was now in this moment of silence that the fate of the season would be decided.

Two, three seconds passed-then a roar of noise broke like a tidal wave across the theater. It lifted and expanded; a storm of applause. The paneling of his room seemed to swell with the force of the muffled “Bravos!” making the portraits shift on the walls. The little plaques below each were a product of his own imagination. His predecessors had been primarily businessmen like himself, and never bothered to commemorate themselves in oils. He had bought the portraits as a job lot from a man who had lost his fortune one night at the card table and now used that man’s anonymous forebears to suggest an artistic lineage he did not have. Everything within these walls was spectacle.

The audience were still hysterical with pleasure. Harwood smiled. He thought how, on such an occasion, he could have guaranteed that even in this moment Fitzraven would be falling over his threshold to tell him the details of the rapturous reception. He would have noted the encores of each aria, gathered compliments or overheard twenty little fragments of other people’s conversations he would be desperate to scatter across Harwood’s desk like an explorer throwing down gems before his prince.

Harwood went to the window; he still had a few moments before he needed to play host to his royal guests and shower warmth on his performers. The Withdrawing Rooms this evening would be heady with the scent of glory, a golden sweat, his artists glutted and drunk with their triumph. He doubted if they would register the news of Fitzraven’s murder at all.

Looking out across the damp gray and shadowed roads around him, he wondered if the strength of the applause might be audible in Great Suffolk Street, where Justice Pither had his house and Fitzraven rested, wondered if its echo flowed over the man’s cold corpse and whispered in his empty ear. Then, smoothing his coat, he turned away from the night, prepared to leave his office with a proper air of modest pleasure. He would appear gratified, and each word of praise he solicited would sound to him like gold knocking on gold.