Sedition (2 page)

After a while, Frogmorton raised his hand. “You speak of a grand pianoforte, Drigg. It will be large, I assume. Our girls must be seen. Will they be visible behind it?”

“Everina certainly will,” said Brass with a snort.

Drigg snorted back. “Georgiana may vanish entirely. Mrs. Drigg wonders if she’s quite well.”

“Mrs. Drigg can save her wondering. Georgiana’s well enough to bang a few keys.” Brass was not worried about his daughter. Skinny and fey she might be, but she was musical. He was certain of that. She must be or what was the use of her?

“Do you think it a good idea, Sawney?” Frogmorton asked. The others stopped talking. Sawney utterances were rare enough to be overvalued.

“Your plan seems good enough.” Sawney picked at fraying cuffs.

“
Our
plan, Sawney. It’s all of ours,” rapped Brass. He thought, why does Sawney wear rags? He could buy a whole tailoring business. Or get that disturbing daughter to do some mending.

“We have a plan,” repeated Sawney. “Why not?” Alathea already had a pianoforte but he kept that, as he kept many things, to himself.

“Well then,” said Frogmorton. “Are we agreed on the principle?”

Nobody demurred so he turned to Drigg. “We must purchase an instrument,” he said. “Drigg, you can see to it.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Drigg said, suddenly alarmed. “It’s a big purchase. We should all go.”

“Nonsense,” said Frogmorton. “If we go as a group of City men, we’ll be fleeced. You must go alone. Don’t you agree, Brass?”

Brass, keen to increase Drigg’s alarm, agreed. “Then we can blame you if it all goes wrong.”

“Sawneyford?”

Sawneyford didn’t care who bought the thing, or if nobody bought it.

“That’s settled, then,” said Frogmorton.

More details were hammered out. Since the Frogmortons’ Manchester Square house was the grandest, the pianoforte was to be delivered there, and through the pianoforte dealer, Drigg was to employ a tuner-teacher. Frogmorton would pay this music master every week and the full bill would be divided among them at the venture’s conclusion. The girls would be chaperoned by Mrs. Frogmorton as they took lessons and when the music master was satisfied the girls were ready, invitations would be sent out and the girls would perform.

As the clock struck three, the men’s minds turned to their offices. Clerks would be waiting. They pushed out their chairs, found their coats, and went to the counter, where Mrs. W. noted down each man’s dues. She accepted few notes of credit but she trusted these four to pay at the end of each quarter. So far, prompting had not been necessary and Alderman Frogmorton could be relied on for a good tip.

TWO

The girls were not consulted. Had they gone to the workshop of the pianoforte maker at Tyburn, things might have been different. As it was, Tobias Drigg made his way to Vittorio Cantabile’s workshop without the girls knowing anything of their fathers’ plan. Drigg did not choose Cantabile: Cantabile was the only pianoforte maker of whom he had heard, and he could find his way easily enough. Ten years after hosting the last wretch’s execution, the Tyburn gallows remained, even the destitute superstitious about chopping the famous arms for firewood. Today Drigg wished he could not find his way. He wished he had not been so assertive. He wished he had never mentioned the pianoforte. He wished he was back in the V & B discussing plundered ships and the muleishness of Yorkshire jaggermen.

One of the gallows’ arms pointed to the right, and after a brief meander during which he seriously contemplated abandoning his commission, Drigg found himself in front of two square stories of black brick, the sullen hub of five narrow warrens. Lean-tos would have softened the workshop’s appearance, but nothing touched it apart from the cartwheels that habitually clipped the corner stones of the three sides where the road passed very tight. On the fourth side, the road was wider, and a wooden pavement had been attempted. The building marked a boundary for local robbers: on the east side, official thief-takers and Bow Street Runners; on the west side, devilry. The window and the door were on the east side, as was the attempted pavement. It was a good place for the alehouse it eventually became.

Drigg rat-tatted on the door. No answer, except for jeers from a crowd of beggars. Drigg pushed the door open and took a moment to shut out the street. For a second, he could have been in the V & B—that tallow tang—then his eyes readjusted and he found himself contemplating a scene of destruction. Of the fifteen or so instruments in the workshop, few were whole. Two single-manual harpsichords had vomited their innards and from a spinet, a spew of shriveled veins. Another, skeleton cracked, had lost two legs and was frozen in a crippled buck. Others were covered with shrouds. Over the lid of a lion-footed clavichord, keyboard missing, implements to pluck, hit, squeeze, stretch, and force were spread in the manner of an orderly torturer. Directly in front of Drigg was a large desk, a stool behind it. Set in the right-hand wall, a fireplace, fire unlit.

Drigg shuddered. Overlaying the smell of tallow was a smell much more fungal—an undertaking smell. He ventured past the desk, dodged the shrouds, and was further unnerved by the drafts that caused a permanent whispering and twanging, as though a concert was either finishing or just about to start. He stiffened his spine. “Hulloa! Hulloo there!” He could feel dust spores in his throat and his nose prickled.

From somewhere emerged the proprietor, balding, thin as drawn steel and draped about with wire and ivory, felt and pivots, jacks, stops, mutes, and pins. His hammer was poised for a burglar.

Drigg blurted, “I wish to buy a pianoforte.”

Cantabile at once recognized a City creature, a coffeehouse man. Which coffeehouse? Lloyd’s? No Lloyd’s man came this way. Garraway’s? No banker’s sheen. Batson’s? Possibly, though the man lacked sawbones’ smuggery. Cantabile kept the hammer raised. The Bedford? A man who shouted “Hulloa!” supping with poets? No. The Virginia and Baltick. That was it. Plain as plain. A V & B man. Cloth and furs. Thick thread and dead animals.

Cantabile did not see himself as a vendor of keyboard instruments. He was a musical craftsman like his late father and, also like his late father, he had achieved renown in their native Milan but no fortune. London had promised more discerning customers but in this Cantabile had been disappointed. Sales had been good—his reputation preceded him; it was the customers who appalled. He found it painful to part with creations over which he had crooned and labored, to imagine them under the thumbs and fingers of buffoons, money grubbers, and imbecile girls. He drove harder and harder bargains. Shortly before customers refused to buy from him, Cantabile refused to sell. Only when starvation threatened did an instrument depart. Cantabile did not care who saw him weep.

Starvation threatened today but he moved sideways and gently closed the lid of the pianoforte he was currently refining. This pianoforte was not a work of art, it was a work of genius. Under-dampers of brass and a sounding board of seasoned beech achieved resonances beyond anything Broadwood or Erard could boast. Innovation, materials, and the dexterity of a master combined with uncanny precision so that every grain and splinter, block and hammer, string and pad, screw and hinge was perfect. Cantabile had gilded the small rose in the middle of the sounding board as tenderly as an artist paints roses in a woman’s cheek. He loved this instrument without reserve. It contained more of him than his child. It was, indeed, the child he should have had. He stroked it with spread fingers. Not a wisp of the V & B should taint it.

Drigg gave the piano no more than a glance, since it was brown and unattractive. Cantabile saw the dismissal and took umbrage. This beauty, this divinity, passed over as nothing by a V & B man! He reached for the pistol under the counter, then stopped himself. He had a better weapon at his disposal. “Annie, Annie,” he thundered.

His daughter materialized. Drigg was knocked backward. Under her cap, Annie boasted lustrous chestnut hair. From wide forehead to sculpted nose, she was pretty. Below the nose, catastrophe. A harelip created a whole new gummy feature in her chin and Annie gave Drigg the full benefit.

Ah, Annie. She was beyond price. Cantabile had vomited when she was born and ordered her swilled away with the afterbirth. His wife objected. The baby was a baby, she said, her baby. In a moment he everafter counted as cowardice, Cantabile gave in. He had had no peace since. He had not gotten over his daughter’s deformity as his wife had. The stabs of tenderness that caught him unawares mocked him when he looked at her face: a book with split pages, beauty above, monstrosity below. And ridiculously unstable. Annie’s mouth drifted. He could not stand the smudginess of it. It tore at him, what the girl might have been and what she was. When Annie was three, he had sought help, but surgeons were afraid of adding to the damage. A harelip was not dangerous, they said. Dangerous? Of course it was not dangerous! It was horrible. Was that not as bad? Cantabile took her home again, a small, solemn, lisping child, who would learn to eat facing the wall.

She did have her uses. With Annie in sight, Cantabile could leave a pot of money in full view of the street and as soon as she could sit at the keyboard unaided, he set her to play in the window, a display that had helped custom fall away so satisfactorily that the show was soon no longer necessary. Instead, Annie buried herself in the brick fortress, absorbing music and the craft of instrument making as other children absorbed fairy tales and the craft of pickpocketing. Her presence agitated Cantabile, yet he could not do without her. When her mother took ill, Annie turned nurse and she worked harder on the instruments than any apprentice, playing better even than her father. He might have been jealous, but as she grew, the lip grew more prominent and kept her meek. Father and daughter lived like porcupines, prickles up, Cantabile’s sharp with aggression, Annie’s blunter, for defense.

The effect of Annie on Drigg, however, was not what Cantabile expected. The fool was too mannerly to stare and leave. At last, Cantabile was forced to say, “Annie, this—this gentleman wants to buy one of our instruments.”

Annie stood boldly upright, tilting her chin, which, as anybody who got past her lip might have noticed, was dimpled. She did not smile—her smile made even her mother blench. Apart from not smiling, Annie faced the world head-on. Her mother thought this brave. It was not. Despite everything, Annie was a dreamer. Some girls might have dreamed of physical correction, but Annie’s dream was far more intoxicating. In it, she played her father’s most sophisticated pianoforte to a public audience. This dream audience gawped at first, then it listened, marveled, and stood to applaud. In the audience was her father’s only friend, Monsieur Belladroit, met in Paris on Cantabile’s journey to London, a regular correspondent and occasional visitor, and in her dream, when the concert was over, Monsieur took Annie’s hands in his, knelt at her feet, and loved her. This was the intoxication and this future audience was why she waited patiently for the man in their shop to find the words of farewell he was politely seeking and why, when such words eluded him, she made herself pleasant. This man might take a concert ticket. If he stared now, he would not stare then. Anyway, she did not share her father’s horror of sales. Something must pay the rent and for the medicine needed to ease her mother’s lesioned lungs. “Are you familiar with pianofortes, Mr.—” she asked, wiping grimy hands on a large cambric handkerchief tucked into her belt. She had been scraping wood.

“Er, Drigg. Tobias Drigg.” He could not look away.

“Were you thinking square?” Annie took a lamp and led Drigg from the dingy front showroom to dingier storage where the heavy structural work was done. Bony frames and belly rails clattered together. “Watch out!” Drigg ducked too late. His hat and wig were swept off. He retrieved them and followed Annie more closely. There were no windows. Drigg had only fleeting impressions of ivory sheets, bunched quills, and the dull sheen of half-polished lids. So many unfamiliar shapes. So much unsilent silence. His shoulder caught on an iron hook. He pulled free, overbalanced, and stubbed the toe of his boot on a pile of curing leather. “God’s teeth!” he muttered. “Is there to be no light?”

Annie lifted the lamp. Immediate transformation. The place was an ordinary workshop again, filled with ordinary instruments.

“These are very popular,” Annie said, pointing to three harpsichords. “Many people find them highly satisfactory. All have cypress soundboards—my father follows the Italian way—and two choirs of strings. Listen.” She made her way to the nearest instrument and rippled out the scale of D major with her left hand. “Try one yourself.”

“Pianoforte, not harpsichord,” Drigg said at once. “That’s what we want.”

“Really?” Annie lowered the lamp and padded over to a bigger square instrument sitting on its own. Drigg followed. Annie raised the lamp. Drigg’s eyes locked back onto her lip. Annie kept the lamp high. Now he wished she would not. “Here’s a pianoforte,” she said. “May I know the color of the room in which your instrument will live?”

“Color? Green, I believe,” said Drigg. He peeled his eyes away.

“Well then,” said Annie, her voice low and pleasant, her lisp not unnattractive. “This maple would do very well. As you can see, we don’t go in for painted frames. Appearance should never take precedence over sound. You may like to know that we sold one of these only yesterday to the Duke of Granchester for his daughter Blanche to play.” She lied easily. She was a good saleswoman.

The mention of the duke had exactly the effect Annie sought. Mr. Drigg calmed himself. “The Duke of Granchester,” he repeated.

Annie put down the lamp and lit a bright candle. “Yes. Just look at the quality of the inlay.” They both looked. “Lady Blanche is not a fine player,” Annie confided, spitting slightly. Mr. Drigg curled his fists. “Your daughter will be more accomplished. If I’m not mistaken, your daughter is the person for whom the pianoforte’s intended?”

“Two daughters,” said Drigg, trying to move inconspicuously away without bumping into anything. “But not only for them. I am purchasing a pianoforte for all our daughters—I mean to say my two, Marianne and Everina, and for the daughters of three friends. They have a daughter each.” His sudden loss of color had nothing to do with Annie and all to do with the weight of his responsibility to these friends and all their daughters.