Chords and Discords (4 page)

I knew this to be untrue of both Heron and Jenison. Bairstowe was merely trying to pay back a few enmities. If he wasn’t going to tell me the truth, I might as well go home now. I nearly
did. I nearly walked out of that musty workshop, out of the debris-strewn yard and the filthy alley.

But those twenty guineas...

I persevered. “Anyone else?”

“That London fellow.”

“You’ve mentioned Strolger before.” I couldn’t believe Strolger capable of something like this. Though he would have had the opportunity to leave the notes; no one would
have been surprised to see him near the church or the organ manufactory.

“If you didn’t keep the notes,” I said levelly, “what evidence is there to go on?”

“Told my wife.”

“You showed her the notes?”

“One on ’em, aye.”

“Can I speak to her?”

“You can,” he said. “But it’ll do you no good. Haven’t had a bit of sense out of her since I married her. Not a day’s work either.”

“Nevertheless – ”

“She ain’t here. She’s off gadding about. Come back tomorrow.”

I wanted to say no. I didn’t care for Bairstowe’s company in the least – God help me, I even had a certain amount of sympathy with the fellow trying to kill him. There was not
the slightest chance of finding out anything with so little information. But those guineas – those twenty guineas...

“I’ll come back tomorrow afternoon to talk to her,” I said.

He nodded. His hand came out of his pocket and something shiny twisted through the dust-laden air towards me. The guinea. “On account,” he said.

I longed to toss it back to him.

I did not.

It was still early evening but in the alley leading to the manufactory it was already dusk. I called softly: “Hello?” The singing I had heard while I was talking to
Bairstowe, that old song sung in the alley by a young voice, could only come from a spirit.

“I heard you,” I said. “I know you’re here. I want to talk.”

Another long moment. Then the spirit came, a faint shine on an old stone, like the sheen rain leaves behind. She darted off, up high on the blank wall, so that I lost her in the gloom. Then her
breathy voice came behind me.

“Hello – ”

God help us, she was, or had been, a coquette. There was no mistaking that teasing murmur, like one of Demsey’s more bashful pupils. How old had she been when she died? Eighteen
perhaps?

“I want to talk,” I repeated.

“Oh.” A breathless sigh. “It’s been such a long time since anyone took any notice of little me.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

She was off again, darting from her perch on an old nail, to a stone that jutted out from the wall. “I’ve so many stories to tell.”

My heart sank. “Really?”

“But first –” like a maiden bartering a kiss. “Tell me, what year is it?”

“1736.”

I heard the murmur of laborious arithmetic, then what might have been a sob. “Maybe I’m wrong,” she said. “I died in the siege. Tell me, how long ago was that?”

She was old, very old. In 1642, the King’s party and the parliament had clashed in this part of the country, and in the siege of this town of that year, she must have died. Her spirit had
been here nearly a hundred years, which was almost as long as any spirit could linger. And as in life, the older the spirit, the less reliable the memory.

“Do you know William Bairstowe?” I asked.

“Oh yes.” The faint shimmer darted along the rough wall. “Who?”

“The organ-builder.”

“No,” she said firmly. “He’s a carpenter.” She almost cooed. “And
so
handsome.”

I would not remotely have called William Bairstowe handsome. And her confusion over his profession did not bode well for the accuracy of any other information I might get out of her. “How
old is he?”

“Oh.” Now she was uncertain. “Twenty, thirty? Well, maybe a bit older than that. What do you think?”

I reminded myself of the twenty guineas. “Does he have any brothers and sisters?”

“Only Thomas,” she said dreamily. “No, Edward.” She giggled. “Sometimes I get confused.”

“Was Edward older or younger than William?” I persevered.

“Oh, older – but he died years ago.”

“Here?”

“On the bridge.” She started humming again. “Just dropped down dead.” She added, scrupulously. “I’m told.”

The news would have come back to the house from one spirit to another almost as soon as Edward was dead, passed on by an invisible network of dead voices. I stared at her dull sheen on the dark
wall, wanting to be out of this place; it is unwise to linger in unlit alleys after dark. And this spirit was making me feel oddly uneasy. It is easy to blame all confusion on the age of the
spirit, yet I sensed something more. But what?

“I didn’t like Edward,” the spirit said. “William is much nicer.”

“Really? Do you know anyone who doesn’t like William?”

“No. Of course not.”

“No one has come down here to put notes under the door?”

“No,” she corrected. “No people. Just voices. So many voices in the dark.” Her voice was fading, coming and going like the ebb and flow of the river tides. The spirit was
on the edge of dissolution; it would not be long now until the breeze took her, and then the alley would be silent, unspirited.

“So much arguing,” she said with a sigh. “I hate arguments, don’t you?”

“Who argued?”

“Oh, all of them,” she said dreamily. And then she was gone, sliding along the wall and rising, rising out of my sight until all I could hear was the faintest of songs.

The house belonging to Bedwalters, the constable, was like all the others on Westgate – tall and thin, shabby but trying to keep up appearances. The front door was open
to a room filled with low tables and chairs; books were scattered across shelves running the length of the far wall. On one table, a primer lay open at a picture of a sleek cat; the picture had
been hand-drawn and -coloured, and labelled in large letters: C-A-T.

“Mr Patterson, sir.” Bedwalters, the constable and writing-master, stood in a doorway to the inner part of the house, his arms full of slates, a middle-aged man, stocky and drably
dressed. A man of habitual calm. We had become acquainted the previous year and I liked him greatly.

“I hope I am not keeping you from your pupils,” I said. With Bedwalters, you always feel that you should apologise for inconveniencing him.

“No, Mr Patterson,” he said, levelly. “My pupils will not be here for another few minutes. How can I help you?”

“The lad who was found dead in Bairstowe’s yard this morning. I was wondering if you might explain what happened?”

He began to gather up apple cores scattered across the nearest table.

“May I ask why you are interested, Mr Patterson?”

“William Bairstowe suspects that he is under threat.”

Bedwalters pursed his lips. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to sit down and explain all to me.”

I perched on one of the small chairs and stated William Bairstowe’s case as best I could. Explaining it to Bedwalters’ calm and sceptical face made me acutely aware how unconvincing
it was, but he listened without comment until the end.

“Notes in a childish scrawl?” he repeated. “Which he burnt.”

“Indeed.”

“A dead cat nailed to his workshop door?”

“And broken windows.”

“And from this he deduces that he is under threat of death?”

“He believes the shoplad died in his place.”

Bedwalters straightened a chair or two. “Tom Eade died when the wind blew a piece of seasoned timber down on his head.”

“One of the pieces stacked against the wall?”

Bedwalters nodded. “You’ve seen the place? Mr Patterson, there were, and still are, many accidents waiting to happen in that yard. Sharp pieces of metal on which a child might cut
himself, rubble to fall over in the dark, timber to come crashing down – ”

I shifted on the uncomfortable chair. “Do you know what the lad – Eade – was doing there?”

“Courting the maid.” Bedwalters looked briefly disapproving. “He crept into the yard after dark to persuade the maid to let him into the house. She says she was watching out
but didn’t hear him.”

“A strong wind rattles windows and doors,” I said thoughtfully. “No doubt it swirls around that enclosed yard with a howl that could drown out all other noises.”

He nodded and bent to pick up a dead leaf from the floor. “It brought down the timber on his head. Or in the darkness, he brought it down himself. He didn’t have a candle or a
lantern so he’d be feeling his way about.”

“No light at all? In a strange place?”

A thin smile. “Not a strange place at all, Mr Patterson, if the maid is to be believed.”

“Ah,” I said. “A well-established liaison. When did this accident happen?”

“Late last night. She was expecting him at midnight.”

“And he was found – ”

“This morning, when the maid went out to get rid of the night soil. She was hysterical, I understand.”

“It is not possible that someone attacked him and then arranged it to look like an accident?”

“I believe not,” he said. “And Gale the barber surgeon concurs. We’ll talk to the spirit when it disembodies, but I have no doubt of what it’ll say.”

“And you know of no one who might wish to kill William Bairstowe?”

“That, sir, is not a matter for me to comment upon. It is out of my remit as constable.”

I heard the sound of children’s voices outside and hurried on. “But speaking in your private capacity?”

He held my gaze steadily as four or five boys and two girls came rushing in, giggling and trying to be prim.

“In my private capacity, Mr Patterson? I follow the tenets of the Christian church, sir – speak evil of no man.”

Without looking away, he told the children to be seated.

Speak no evil
implies that there is evil to be spoken.

At the door, Bedwalters gave me the place of Tom Eade’s employment – a leather merchant’s shop on the Side – and the direction of his mother. The mother
lived on the Castle Stair so I turned across town. The wind was gusting rain into my face, lifting the skirts of my greatcoat, and trying to snatch the tricorne from my head. It put itself behind
me and hurried me into the maze of poor tenements that clustered around the castle.

Hens scurried around my feet, children scratched themselves on doorsteps. An elderly man sucked at a clay pipe in a sheltered doorway, grunting to a garrulous spirit lodged on a grimy windowsill
like a stray patch of sunlight. I turned through the looming Black Gate into the castle, passed the grimy Keep and crossed wet cobbles to the postern gate leading through the ruins of the curtain
wall. Beyond were steps, worn with centuries of use; alleys came off to left and right, filled with tumbledown houses. Holes gaped in rotting roofs, sacking flapped over broken windows.

Halfway down the Stair, I found a shabby door and knocked. After a long moment, the door was opened by a woman. Perhaps forty years old, grey-haired and tired, she looked at me with dulled eyes,
dragging a ragged shawl about her against the rain. “Ain’t got no money.”

I stood bare-headed, wondering what on earth I could say. “I’ve come about your son. Tom.”

“Oh,” she said, with sudden fire. “Him. Sure, no one worried about him when he was live. Now he’s dead, everyone’s sorry. ‘He must have been a fine
lad,’ they say.” She thrust her face into mine; she smelt of sweat and gin. “Well, he never thought of me so I’ll not think of him. Be off!”

“Don’t you want to know how he died?”

“Ask his spirit.” She laughed, a dry mirthless sound. “Maybe he’ll tell you the truth for once. And ask him where he hid his money. Because he never spent a penny on me,
that’s for sure.”

“He had money saved?”

“Ask the girl,” she said bitterly.

“The maid?”

“What maid?”

“William Bairstowe’s maid, at the organ manufactory.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The girl he was going to marry.”

“Her?” She pulled her shawl tight. “She’s no maid. One of the stinking fisher girls on the Key. All red hair and green eyes, and wild ideas. Going to make her fortune,
she is, going to wear fine gowns.” She laughed again, bitterly. “She’ll learn.”

No mother ever seemed less grieving; I walked off into the rain with a great deal of sympathy for Tom Eade. Filial respect is to be praised, but a mother so sour tests duty to the limit. And it
must be hard to know your hard-earned money will turn into gin.

I went on down Castle Stairs towards the Key and the river. William Bairstowe was probably imagining threats where there were none, but those twenty guineas still called. While
there was a chance I could earn them, I must continue. There was still the leather merchant – Tom Eade’s employer – to investigate. If nothing came of a visit there, then I would
resign myself to losing the money. I did not know what made me more bitter, the prospect of losing the money, or earning it and having to take it from a man like Bairstowe.

From the Stair, I walked across the Sandhill into the Side, the narrow street that leads from the lower town up to the more genteel regions. I had seen the leather merchant’s shop here a
dozen times but had never had cause to enter. It was a timbered building, all angles and corners. I ducked through the low door.

The smell inside was abominable; I have never much liked the stench of new leather. Dozens of small goods were on display: purses, leather-bound notebooks, walking canes, a scabbard with a
wooden dummy sword thrust in. An open door to the back of the house showed skins slung over tables and a young man in shirt sleeves and aprons poring over them. I could hear whispering too, a
constant background murmur. Was that a living man or spirits?

A lanky lad materialised in front of me, bowing obsequiously. His face was pocked with scars, his coat dusted with flakes of skin. Under his fashionably small wig, his scalp must be scabrous. I
cut off his extolling of the shop’s goods.