Sedition (5 page)

“Of course,” said Alathea. “Don’t you want to know how men are made?”

“I—I,” stammered Harriet, “I don’t think about them,” she said lamely. Alathea raised an eyebrow. Harriet raised one back.

“I once saw Sam relieving himself against the garden wall,” said Everina. “It was—”

“Don’t be coarse, Everina.” Marianne was at her most reproving.

“You looked too,” retorted Everina. “You said—”

“That’s enough,” Marianne barked.

Alathea shrugged. “All I’m saying is that if you’d been Raphaella, you’d have wanted him.”

“You mean, fallen in love with him,” Marianne contradicted.

“As you like,” said Alathea. “Anyway, he and Raphaella began to play duets together. They were marvelous, and Raphaella soon found the two hours the musician spent at their house each day were the only hours that meant anything. But though she waited and waited, he never asked her to marry him. At first she wondered whether he ranked himself too far beneath her. But he always came through the front door, never the servants’ entrance. Then she wondered whether he had too little money for marriage. But his clothes were respectable and his horses shining. Then it came to her: he didn’t know she loved him. She hadn’t made it plain, so she plucked up her courage and told him straight. And he did something terrible.” She left the words hanging for a moment. The girls were agog. “He laughed.”

Marianne sniffed. “That doesn’t seem so terrible.”

Alathea said, “She told him he was everything to her. She told him she would abandon family and friends for him. She told him she loved him more than music. She offered herself to him body and soul. And he laughed. He might as well have stabbed her in the heart with the heel of one of Harriet’s new shoes.”

Harriet scrutinized Alathea’s face. Was that a tremor of real pity or a tremor of contempt at their gullibility? Harriet was never sure of anything about Alathea.

“Did she slap him?” Everina was asking. “I’d have slapped him.”

“She didn’t touch him,” Alathea answered. “She felt the fault was hers. If a man who could make such music with her didn’t love her, she couldn’t be loved by anybody, so she cut a string from her harpsichord—it was bass A, a mournful note, don’t you think—and when the musician left, she followed him into the City. At the top of Threadneedle Street, he turned and saw her. They exchanged glances. The musician raised his hand. He raised it high. Then he waved good-bye and ran away. That’s when she twisted the wire into a noose, borrowed a flower girl’s stool, slipped one end of the wire over the arm of a barber’s sign, and—” Sam returned for the cake stand as Alathea raised her chin in imitation of the girl. Alathea’s chin dropped. “Snap,” she said gaily.

FOUR

No. 23, Manchester Square, March creeping in. The pianoforte materialized out of the morning, shrouded in blankets on an undertaker’s cart. The complanatory vibrations were loud enough to alert servants and mistresses all down Spanish Place and into the square itself. There was a pause for gawping amid discussions about the removal of winter drapes.

Grace Frogmorton stood at her own window (whatever the temperature, she removed neither winter drapes nor woollen petticoat until May). She patted a new hairpiece and frowned. A bald turnspit dog, recently retired from kitchen duties, whined to be picked up. “What’s this, Frilly,” Mrs. Frogmorton said, bending stiff knees to oblige. She had been expecting the pianoforte for the past four days and now she was mortified. An undertaker’s cart! Typical of Drigg.

She often wished it had not been Drigg who had rescued her husband when Archibald’s early apprenticeship with a corn merchant had ended abruptly. One moment sweet, dusty corn; neat figures in the ledger; a tutorly finger explaining the balance sheet; two oat-fed daughters to ogle. Next, a roar, a club, a charge of short shrifting, a smash and grab, yellow corn peppering black mud, the mob swirling and shrieking, the corn merchant’s daughters swirling and shrieking, the corn merchant blustering, begging, and finally hanging from a gallows made of his own rigged scales. Frogmorton and two other apprentices were lucky only to be tossed into the Thames. Drigg’s strong arms had hauled Archibald out, and it was true that Drigg’s eyes and ears at the docks had proved indispensable to her husband’s ventures. Nevertheless, Mrs. Frogmorton had never thought much of him. She hoped the servants at That Place, as she called Spanish-occupied Manchester House, were not looking, or, worse still, The Spy, as she called the Spanish ambassador himself.

Neither Alderman nor Mrs. Frogmorton knew anything of Annie Cantabile or her father. Drigg had meant to disclose everything next time the men met in the V & B but had lost courage, and declared only that he had bought a pianoforte and that the cost had been eighty pounds—slightly more than quoted but less, he asserted, than the pianoforte’s true worth. A teacher would present himself in due course. Long friendship brings trust. Drigg’s story had been accepted without question.

Since nothing had been said of a man coming atop the instrument, Monsieur Belladroit’s elegant dismounting took Mrs. Frogmorton by surprise. She drew back and would have declared herself out if a maid had not already indicated she was in by calling her name. She must go down. On her front doorstep, Monsieur seized her hand and kissed it delicately before raising a face finely boned with remarkably straight eyebrows and shoulder-length hair tied in a plain brown bow. Frilly commenced a monotonous bark. Mrs. Frogmorton pulled the dog closer, reducing the bark to a yap and two marble eyes bulging out of her bosom. “I was not expecting a man,” she said.

“Just the pianoforte tuner and teacher, madame. Excuse me.” He hurled a torrent of incomprehensible invective at the kite tail of urchins behind the cart, produced a pistol, and fired. The urchins fled except the one Monsieur managed to bring down. The boy howled and hopped, spraying blood. Monsieur wiped the pistol’s barrel. He turned back to Mrs. Frogmorton. “I shall unload.”

Mrs. Frogmorton was both impressed by his marksmanship and alarmed by his accent. A foreigner. “The boy,” she said.

“What boy? I have not brought a boy.”

Mrs. Frogmorton raised her hand to indicate the shot boy and found a beribboned note pressed into it. “Claude Belladroit. My credentials.” French—that was it, thought Mrs. Frogmorton. Those
th
’s hissed into
z
’s. Those rolled
r
’s. This man was French. She felt quite flustered. He must be a Catholic, and probably part of the nonsense going on over the sea. Yet it was those neat, straight eyebrows that now gripped her attention. She had never seen such eyebrows. Had they been plucked into shape? And his lips quivered, as though waiting for her permission to smile.

“Madame?” He appeared anxious for her approval.

Mrs. Frogmorton stood straight. She understood that she was being charmed. That was what foreigners did. She resented it. The man did not seem to notice her resentment. A quick flash of small, even teeth, then a sharp berating of the muscle hired to shift the pianoforte. They must hurry since Madame Frogmorton had emerged without overshoes or cloak, Monsieur said. Quick quick now. Mrs. Frogmorton was startled. Her husband would never have noticed if she was cold. Monsieur ran up the steps and Mrs. Frogmorton could only follow as he zealously inspected the downstairs rooms. In the street, the pianoforte was dismounted, body first, the mechanism groaning.

As the pianoforte was brought indoors Monsieur verbally beat the muscle without cease. “This is a home, you clowns, not a warehouse! Take care of the statuary. Mind the pillars. Do not brush the paint. Do not displace a speck of dust on any of this big brown furniture, should we find dust in this home, which I doubt. Get on! Do I have to carry the instrument myself?” Once the pianoforte was safely in the hall, he ran out and threw the carter a tip like a slap in the face. He ran back into the house. “Upstairs?”

Mrs. Frogmorton meant to expostulate. Instead she said, “Upstairs on the right. The harpsichord has been moved to accommodate.”

The only flaw was the fuss Monsieur made over the instrument’s exact placing in the drawing room. Mrs. Frogmorton wanted it under the chandelier, sideways to the door, the centerpiece to a room whose furniture, however she placed it, was never elegant, and whose welcome, despite a generous fireplace, never convinced. Monsieur wanted the pianoforte in the corner farthest from the fireplace, tail toward the middle of the room. Mrs. Frogmorton could never remember how Monsieur won, nor why she forgave him. She only knew that she was being ushered out politely but firmly so that Monsieur could “bed the pianoforte in”—a phrase Mrs. Frogmorton had never associated with musical instruments. Foreigners, she thought. They turned even plain English upside down.

Harriet arrived home just after midday. The other girls visited later to be told of the concert plan. Marianne and Everina Drigg were quick to say that pianofortes had not been thought well of by the Misses Lee at the Academy for Young Ladies, where the sisters had been expensively educated. Marianne also declared that as the oldest of the girls and the one who knew most about music, she should have been consulted. Harriet had been dismayed at the thought of effort. Georgiana Brass had just been dismayed. Alathea had been curious, though she had not asked to know more. It made people uncomfortable if you found out things for yourself.

The following afternoon the girls and the three mothers were gathered in the Frogmortons’ downstairs parlor, a room as unsuccessfully put together as the drawing room though decorated more lightly, with chinoiserie on a pair of blue-veined marble-topped tables, and on a third, a clock with a camel feature that Mr. Frogmorton had received as a present for a favor he did not care to recall. The settles, solid and English, had come from the sudden sale of another Manchester Square house, the paneling too. Mrs. Frogmorton had spotted the bailiffs from her bedroom window. There was velvet wallpaper above the panels, plain cushions, striped curtains, and a fireplace that kept most of its heat to itself. Mrs. Frogmorton never sat in this room when she was alone, preferring the little antechamber attached to her bedroom. There was a small stove in there that, once she had closed the door, she often tucked beneath her skirts.

Agnes Drigg was troubled by the fire. It told her she had made a mistake ordering the Stratton Street drapes taken down. The drapes should have stayed up because in Manchester Square it was still winter and Manchester Square was never wrong. Mrs. Drigg knew better than to look to Elizabeth Brass for reassurance since Mrs. Brass had no notion of drapes or anything else. Stuck in a poky house in Covent Garden for the convenience of Mr. Brass’s membership of Bedford’s gaming club, Mrs. Brass, like her daughter, found daily life a series of unanswerable questions, whether it be breakfast eggs or moving, which she longed to do, if only to stop the ladies of the night earning their money in her porch, some of it from her husband. The last question Mrs. Brass clearly recollected answering was Mr. Brass’s proposal of marriage. She realized soon after that her own judgment must never be trusted again.

All the mothers were conscious of a pang. “This will signal an ending of sorts,” Mrs. Frogmorton had said while the girls were still upstairs, ushered up by Harriet to admire a music box she kept next to her bed. “Our girls will fly away.”

“Surely we’ll be welcome at their new hearths,” Mrs. Drigg tried to comfort.

“Of course, Agnes, but we’ll be encumbrances. Mothers are. At least, mine certainly was.” Mrs. Frogmorton could already see doors closed, secrets kept, grandchildren steered away.

“At least Alathea will be, well, you know,” said Mrs. Drigg.

They nodded in deep understanding. None of the three had known Mrs. Sawneyford. As a consequence, her looks and character were a regular subject of speculation, particularly as Alathea grew older and more bewildering. Mrs. Frogmorton and Mrs. Drigg thought the girl should want a mother. Alathea did not want a mother. That was perfectly clear. They thought she should want to be embraced. She did not. They thought she should want to confide. Not a word. Yet ignoring her would be unchristian. So she grew with their daughters, tolerated but never liked, included but never truly welcomed.

“We’ll treat Alathea as if she were our own,” said Mrs. Frogmorton with some effort.

“We’ll try,” said Mrs. Drigg, also with some effort. A mutual nod accompanied a mutual sigh.

Summoned downstairs, Harriet, Everina, and Marianne sat primly on the settle, their skirts jostling, Harriet once again wearing the bloodied shoes that her maid had made an attempt to clean. Alathea draped herself over a high-backed chair. On Marianne, spotted calico would have looked dull; on Alathea it created an intriguing map of curves. Georgiana, on another high-backed chair, had arranged her bones in a tent of figured silk through which her neck stuck like a flagpole. She had agonized over the choice of gown and now realized she had dressed for an entertainment, not for an introduction to a music master. Her miscalculation consumed her.

Mrs. Frogmorton, conscious of her hostess’s advantage, moved about the room like one of her husband’s larger freighters. “You will be taught separately in the following order: Harriet, Georgiana, Everina, Marianne, and finally Alathea. Sunday is—”

“Surely I should be taught first,” Marianne interrupted.

“Why?”

“I’m the oldest.”

“What difference does that make?”

“I just think—”

“For goodness’ sake, Marianne, we’re not deciding an inheritance.”

“I didn’t say we—”

Mrs. Drigg fell into a twitter. “But actually, Grace, isn’t that a good idea? Marianne and Everina will need to come in the carriage and their father will want to get to the City afterward, and although they could walk—”

“Walk!” Marianne was outraged.

“No, of course not. Oh dear. I wish we lived here, Grace. It’s so nice in this square. When we moved to Stratton Street it was with the best intentions and now we’re surrounded by Jews. Jews! Think of it! Better to have Catholics.” Mrs. Frogmorton frowned. “Or perhaps not,” said Mrs. Drigg hastily. “I never quite know. What do Catholics actually do in their houses, I wonder. What view do they take on winter drapes, for example? Not that winter drapes are important. Though of course they are. Too early, yes, too early.” She subsided.