Sedition (33 page)

Alathea’s astonishment as the ball embedded itself where it had not been aimed was obvious to everybody. Everybody heard Sawneyford’s appalled howl—the most unequivocal sound Sawneyford had ever made. Only Annie saw Alathea’s incredulity. This must be a dream, because how was this possible? The music was an unbreachable shield! Then wild disbelief directed not at her father but at Annie.
Annie!
It was impossible, surely, that Annie, the girl who needed no lessons at the pianoforte, had not shared Alathea’s faith in the pianoforte’s power. Impossible that she had not trusted the aria’s perfection. Impossible that she had not understood how Herr Bach would protect them both. Christ! Oh, Christ!
Annie!
Alathea’s shattered incomprehension was a trauma beyond the trauma caused by the wound. It blistered Annie’s soul long after Alathea’s forehead hit the keys, creating discord after discord as she rolled sideways to the floor, blood flowing in streams over and through the diamonds.

Cantabile stepped over the blood, noting with distaste that the blot on Alathea’s face came from Annie’s lip, bitten when she fell to her knees. “Why did you do that, Annie? Why did you destroy this girl? Were you jealous of her? Was that it?” He gazed without emotion at Alathea. “Now there would have been a daughter.” He flicked Annie’s veil back over her face and began shouting that if Frogmorton or any of his City fiends touched the brown pianoforte, he, Vittorio Cantabile, would strangle them. He was seized from behind. The fathers threw him out and set an armed guard on the door.

Today, as they walk, Frogmorton, Brass, and Drigg, thick booted and thickly clothed, are still being threatened by Cantabile. He, in his thin working jacket, is hopping along behind, restrained by two of Brass’s heavies. Cantabile has buried his wife. He is trying to forget his daughter. His only concern is his pianoforte. The men take little notice. They dream they have Monsieur in the cart. In truth, Monsieur is in Paris. Worse, Georgiana has gone after him, fleeing from Covent Garden, still in her white gown, not even a cloak against the winter night, clutching a bag of jewels that Elizabeth Brass, with rare energy, bundled up for her. When Mr. Brass discovered Georgiana had fled, his fury had been loud and coarse, yet he did not send after her. Let the ruined daughter go, and the stinking jewels. Brass has another plan. Monsieur might have fooled idiot wives about his nether regions but he would soon fool nobody. Brass has dispatched a very particular man for that job. The contract is never fulfilled. On his way over the channel, the man dispatched is afflicted by conscience: he would happily kill Monsieur, but this other thing seems too drastic. He never finds Monsieur. Monsieur is, though, found by Georgiana, and dogged by a sense of irritated responsibility, he remains with her until her death, twenty-five years later. She bears him three children and sends for her mother to help look after them. Her father would be welcome but he never comes. He spends what would have been her fortune on fighting dogs.

In the cart is the brown pianoforte. With no Monsieur to lynch and Herr Bach already dead, the fathers turned on the instrument. Absurd, of course, but the pianoforte is the one thing on which they can take physical revenge. Drigg had been for breaking it up even before Alathea was carried away. Calmer counsel prevailed. In the event, it had taken only twenty-four hours to decide what to do and, with Christmas intervening, today is the designated day.

Like a criminal, the instrument is tied by the legs. The procession reaches the common, empty except for a group of boys supervising a cockfight. The carter asks, “Where now?” Frogmorton gestures to the gallows in the middle. The wheels crunch over the half-soggy, half-frozen dew and the men stamp after it, breath steaming. They all help lever the instrument down. They take care. As with a traitor brought for hanging and evisceration, they want their prisoner intact. The strings twang gently as the frame is placed on the base immediately in front of the gallows platform. If the pianoforte had a stool, it would be ready to play. The stool, though, was judged not guilty, and the same judgment was made of the inferior piano. Both are still in the Allemonde saloon. The carter tosses out fagots and kindling. Drigg raises the pianoforte lid and places fagots inside the body while Brass stacks fagots around the legs.

Cantabile is brought to a halt a little way off. He is crying like a baby, cursing Drigg, cursing his daughter, cursing Claude Belladroit. Drigg wants to shout “Curse yourself,” but since the other men are silent, he is silent too.

The carter asks if he should light the kindling. “Yes, light the thing,” Frogmorton snaps. For a moment, he can hear Harriet playing. Past pride heightens present humiliation. Burning the pianoforte. What a sign of impotence. Had Cantabile stopped his cursing, Frogmorton might have halted the whole charade. But Cantabile curses on and Frogmorton stands, feet apart, recalling the forced calm of his wife in the carriage home, a calm that broke behind her closed bedroom door without even Frilly as witness. The tempest lasted ten minutes. Afterward, Mrs. Frogmorton emerged and carried on as usual, except she was deflated, diminished, unstitched. When Harriet announced she was marrying Thomas Buller, her mother registered neither pleasure nor displeasure. She would recover, the alderman thought. She would find some stuffing and stitch herself together. But it wasn’t right that she should have to, not right at all. The carter strikes a light. Cantabile shrieks. Frogmorton wishes they could burn him.

Drigg suffers more acutely than Frogmorton. The sight of both his daughters flaunting themselves like tipsy heifers will never leave him. The servants knew before the Drigg carriage brought them all home. Mrs. Drigg has told him to put the house up for sale, and her first act the morning after the concert was to dispatch the girls’ entire trousseaus to a City charity for unmarried mothers. (In the curious way things often turn out, Marianne herself became an unmarried mother, though her new career rendered charity unnecessary.) Mrs. Drigg then drew the curtains, pulling one down as she blundered about. She could not face the neighbors. She could not face the girls. She could not face her own mirror. In the face of all this not facing, Drigg can do little. The girls, on the other hand, and for reasons unfathomable to their father, are in a state of high elation.

Everina took an early decision: she decided Alathea had been right. After all, despite the concert’s unhappy end, it had been followed by propositions pushed through the Stratton Street door on a daily basis. Men had seen what the Drigg sisters had to offer and wished to offer for it. She showed the propositions to Marianne and scoffed when Marianne wept at their crudity. True, these were not the offers their parents had hoped for, but look! The concert was barely over and already money, servants, houses were being paraded—all for them! “We can do as we like,” Everina said. “We only have to decide.”

“But there’s nothing here about marriage,” Marianne sobbed. “Propositions aren’t proposals. Harriet’s had a proper proposal.”

Everina made a face. “Only from a plain mister.” She tossed her head. “We don’t need proposals. Look how much fun we had. I don’t think our mother ever had fun like that. We’re celebrated all over the newspapers, Marianne. We’re more famous than anybody in a story, and we’re real.” She giggled. “The expressions on people’s faces! They loved us!” She thrust out a handkerchief. “Come on, wipe your nose. We should thank Alathea, and”—she gave Marianne a sly nudge—“she’s never going to upstage us again.”

This last, at least, cheered Marianne. The sisters did not have to disguise from each other that they went to see Alathea because they were sure she would not want to see them. Marianne made suitably pitying noises. They were both shocked by the house. On the way back to Stratton Street, they wondered what had happened to the diamond dress, and Marianne openly conjectured that Alathea was in a partnership with the underworld. “It would be just like Alathea to have conjured up a demon,” she said, referring to Annie, whom she had briefly glimpsed unveiled. Everina had hardly been conscious of Annie at all. They never spoke of her again.

The sisters grew closer. Instead of squabbling, they began to frequent taverns, playhouses, trinket shops, and the parlor of a man offering tattoos—places to which they were guided by new friends. A world of novelty opened up, and it was productive. Offers continued to flow in abundance. The girls encouraged competition. When their mother returned to her father’s fish stall, Marianne and Everina opened the Stratton Street drawing room in which, intoxicated by their newfound freedom, they held bawdy court until the house was sold and they moved, together, to lodgings paid for by the sons of three peers. Things progressed from there. Luckily for Drigg as he watches the execution of the pianoforte, he cannot see the future.

*   *   *

T
HE KINDLING
is smoking. The carter takes his guinea fee and leaves. The cockfighting boys truss their birds and wander over, diverted by the sight of four men rooted around a burning pianoforte, a skinny devil screeching in the background.

The men are silent. With flames licking its underbelly, the pianoforte tries to remain silent too, and also upright and dignified. It refuses to buckle, wishing to sink gracefully, not like a cow with foot rot. It knows its worth, even if its murderers do not and never have. It has been sublime. The flames leap. The pianoforte cannot help itself. Its strings give voice as they melt: short, high hums, then snap snap snap with brave twang and stuttering cadence. The sounding board’s hisses are gentle, its cracks apologetic. The pianoforte would like to die to the strains of Herr Bach’s aria, if only somebody would help. Where is Alathea? The keys begin to drop away. First the white, then the black. The pianoforte is being stripped. The lid, not yet alight, slips, to cover the nakedness. There is wood and soft iron, ivory and leather, brass and steel, and a tarnished soundboard rose. There is nobody to comfort the instrument in its distress. Cantabile certainly cannot, having neither the practice nor the gift. He can only watch and grind his teeth. The end comes in a heap of charred fragments, blackened coils, brass screws, and mangled, tangled strings pointing every which way, as though unsure from which direction help might come.

The boys are quickly among the smoking heap, scrabbling for loot. At this point, Brass’s servants let Cantabile go. He rushes at the boys. They tease him and, once they have nudged out anything of value, kick the remains of the pianoforte’s guts in Cantabile’s direction. He gathers the pieces as a mother gathers the bones of a child. The boys hold up their birds, beaks firmly tethered shut. “Want to see some real sport, old man?” they shout, friendly enough. Cantabile does not answer. His hands are full. He cannot even shake a fist.

Frogmorton, Brass, and Drigg make their way to Threadneedle Street and into the V & B, their first visit since the concert. They have been at home and in their offices. They have been in Pall Mall trying to rectify matters with the Allemondes. They have met at Manchester Square, whose hall was the pianoforte’s condemned cell. In the V & B, the familiar fug envelopes them. Mr. W., emptying coffee grounds into a measure, nods. Frogmorton nods back. Mrs. W. offers the comment “Chilly day” and wipes the men’s usual table. There is some whispering, but few City men have heard about the concert and fewer are interested. Trade is king, and trade is threatened by war, not by pianofortes or concerts or daughters’ marriages. The tallow dips splutter. The water urn, dirtier than it was this time last year, swings and gurgles. A new cat is warming its behind. The last copies of
Spence’s Penny Weekly
have long since been thrown in the fire, except for the one still stuffed under the table leg.

Two noticeable changes. Mr. W.’s lewd pictures have been exchanged for patriotic song sheets, and there is a new awkwardness among the men. They remove their hats, push away the chair that might have been Sawneyford’s, and sit quietly until coffee arrives. Frogmorton shakes his head at the coffeeboy. No, they don’t want pipes.

“Well,” Brass says.

Drigg interrupts. He just needed somebody else to start. “How did Grace not know?” he says quickly to Frogmorton. “I mean, how could she not
know
?” This question has been asked before, many times, during these two weeks.

“Monsieur was convincing,” Frogmorton says wearily. This answer, too, has been given before, many times. “I told you what he told her. You were convinced.”

“But she was acting chaperone!”

“She did what she thought was right.” Frogmorton puts down his coffee bowl with unaccustomed care. “As I keep saying, nobody could be more sorry.”

“Agnes has collapsed,” says Drigg. “Marianne and Everina are out of control.”

“I heard Everina say that the creature who jogged Sawneyford was a witch,” says Brass. “I hardly saw her. Did you?”

Drigg takes a breath. “She’s Cantabile’s daughter. She was there when I bought the pianoforte.”

“His daughter?” The notion seems to tickle Brass. “Well whadaya know. I’m glad she isn’t mine.”

“Have you found Georgiana?” Drigg asks.

“No,” says Brass, “and I don’t intend to.” He wonders whether to keep his contract on Monsieur’s offending parts to himself. He does not. There is strained laughter. It seems the only response. Brass stretches his legs. Drigg stops fidgeting. More coffee is poured.

“How’s Sawneyford?” Frogmorton asks. “Has anybody seen Alathea?”

A glance, flickering around. Alathea. Brass whistles. “Wasn’t that something.” They know he is not referring to the shooting.

“I reckon the diamonds in the choker alone were worth at least a thousand pounds,” Frogmorton says. They cannot talk of the other thing. They cannot even think about it. They must not. Even Brass must realize it is forbidden.

“More than a thousand,” Drigg declares.

“Did you count them?” asks Brass.

“Fifteen,” says Drigg. The laughter is more genuine.

“More valuable than that damnable music,” Brass says. “Didn’t Grace say Monsieur described it as holy?”