Sedition (7 page)

“Keyboard Practice.”

“Oh dear! Not very romantic,” Mrs. Drigg exclaimed.

“For goodness’ sake, Agnes,” said Mrs. Frogmorton. “We’re talking about marriage.”

“Of course, I just thought—”

“I daresay,” Mrs. Frogmorton snapped. “Monsieur, which man wrote this—this variable thing?”

“Herr Bach,” Monsieur told her, “about whom we have been speaking.”

“I think we’d all prefer a piece by an Englishman. Doesn’t have to be dead.”

“You find me a suitable piece by an Englishman, madame, and I will be happy to oblige.”

“Alathea?” said Mrs. Frogmorton, conscious of trying to include her. “Do you have any suggestions?”

Alathea shook her head.

“Marianne?”

Marianne, unable to think of any English composer, dead or alive, blustered, “Will this aria attract husbands for us?”

“Herr Bach himself described this work as ‘prepared for the soul’s delight.’” Monsieur was flexing his fingers again. “What could be more apt? You girls, like the piece, are already delightful. Your delight will add to the delight of the music. The occasion will be delightful. Never will there have been such delight.”

“Are you mocking us?” Mrs. Drigg burst out.

Monsieur grew grave. “I offer an important work, a serious work, a holy work. Matrimony is an important undertaking, a serious undertaking, a holy undertaking. When music and matrimony themselves are married, the marriage is the music and the music is the marriage. I have the only copy of this serious and holy work in London, perhaps the only copy anywhere. Who would dare to mock?”

He confounded them all except Alathea, who continued to gaze at him in silence. A bead of sweat trickled down Mrs. Frogmorton’s neck. Just above the gauze fichu, it veered to one side and started a new course. She felt Monsieur’s eyes follow it into the chasm of embonpoint that, today, Frilly had abandoned in favor of fighting with his replacement turning the spit.

“Now,” Monsieur said in more normal tones, “do you wish your girls to play this music or not?”

Mrs. Frogmorton felt another trickle of sweat and a surge of misgiving, which could not be so easily swatted away. This musical notion seemed suddenly foolish. Mr. Frogmorton should have brought it up for discussion at breakfast, over a cup of tea, not at dinner, over wine. Two decanters that night. She had been too easily persuaded. “Mesdames?” said Monsieur with some impatience.

“If it’s suitable, the girls will play it. If it’s not suitable, they won’t,” Mrs. Frogmorton said. “I would have thought that obvious, Monsieur.”

Monsieur clicked his heels. “Very well. We have chosen the music and with my help, all the girls will…” He searched for the precise word. “They will startle,” he said.

“Startle?” It was the first time this word had been used in Mrs. Frogmorton’s parlor. The Frogmortons were not people who “startled.”

“We begin tomorrow,” Monseiur said. “No time wasting. Please ensure that the girls wear suitable garments. Tomorrow I will hear them each in turn. After that, they will each have a lesson twice a week and practice for three hours every day including lesson days. If they do not reach my standards by practicing three hours, they will practice four.” He bowed and vanished.

Immediately, Marianne and Everina were clamoring. They did not want to “startle.” Nor did they want to trail to Manchester Square twice a week for something as dreary as a lesson. They refused, refused, refused to practice for three hours a day. Half an hour had sufficed on the harpsichord at the Misses Lees’ Academy for Young Ladies. “I don’t like this Monsieur,” Marianne shouted with childish pique. “None of us wants to play holy music.” Georgiana was teary, Harriet annoyed. Only Alathea appeared unmoved.

“Enough!” Mrs. Frogmorton barked, and sailed over to berth next to Mrs. Brass. Mrs. Drigg stood behind. Mrs. Frogmorton spoke loudly. The girls would do as they were told. They would learn from Monsieur. They would play. They would startle, secure husbands, and be done with it. Harriet knew her mother in this voice. Complaining was a waste of effort. She dug Marianne and Everina in the ribs. “When we’re married,” she hissed, “our mamas will do as we say. When they knock, we’ll not be at home.” Mothers and daughters glowered over the red Turkey carpet. Upstairs with the pianoforte, Monsieur’s eyes were bright. He stretched and bent slowly to touch his toes, legs straight, an athlete limbering up. The morning would come soon enough. He was ready.

*   *   *

A
T THE
V & B, the fathers were easy, slurping from coffee bowls without ceremony, breaking wind without apology, stretching, and mingling pipes and legs with their usual familiarity. The die was cast; they could relax, though Brass had been stirring things, asking what would happen if Harriet married a duke and Marianne a baronet. Would one set of grandchildren have to bow to another? And what would happen if one girl was left unwed?

“We can’t arrange for them all to be of the same rank,” Frogmorton said. “We must take what we can get.” He cared nothing for the distinction between dukes and earls. As practical as his daughter, Frogmorton admired any family whose forefathers hacked, trampled, and murdered their way to the top of England’s tree, and stuck there. Strong blood was what he desired for his grandchildren and in that regard, Harriet’s marriage constituted less a social aspiration and more a place of safety. To find such a place, Frogmorton thought, was every father’s duty.

“And they’ll make no distinctions in private, surely?” Drigg could not bear the thought.

Brass flexed a leg. “It might do my Georgiana good to be top of the pile. Give her a bit of body.”

Drigg seized the opportunity to snipe. “If you want my opinion—”

“I don’t.”

“Georgiana’s figure is unnatural,” Drigg said.

“Like Everina’s teeth?” Brass mocked.

Drigg flushed. Everina’s dentures, so expensively, glaringly white, were an uncomfortable running joke. “At least we can get those fixed. You can’t buy Georgiana a pair of hips.”

Brass pushed back his chair, veins bulging, fists clenched.

“Gentlemen, please!” Frogmorton raised his hands. “Drigg, apologize. Brass, sit down.”

Frogmorton was fed up with Brass, a perennial exasperation. Brass had started out the luckiest of the four. His parents owned a brewery before being carried off by cholera. The chief brewer, sorry for the boy, offered home comforts and even love but Brass was a thankless charity. Sullen and thuggish, he fought and scowled his way out of the brewer’s affections and was quickly apprenticed in a silk factory, where he encountered Sawneyford. The brewery was sold, and with his inheritance Brass had bought a fighting dog. Sawneyford was useful because he knew how to sharpen its teeth.

“Tell me again how the pianoforte’s different from the harpsichord,” Frogmorton said. “I suppose we should know.”

“Well, you make the tone by, em, touch. It’s very subtle,” Drigg replied.

Frogmorton frowned. “You’re sure it’s quite decent?”

“More than decent,” Drigg reassured. “It’s perfect for our daughters.” A vision of Annie briefly surfaced. With some effort, he obliterated it.

“Good. Now, Sawney. We haven’t heard much from you. Are you still happy with the plan?”

“I suppose so,” Sawneyford said.

Outside, the light was beginning to fade and the coffeepots arranged on the hearthstone in strict height order (Mrs. W.’s little foible) cast dwarfish shadows. The cat who liked to warm his behind on the coffee urn’s lid had gone hunting. Mrs. W. was piling up discarded papers, bowls, and pipes before the evening rush.

Brass raised his coffee bowl for a toast. “Here’s to the concert, and since you suggested it, Drigg, I’ll hold you responsible if Georgiana ends up an old maid.” He drank the dregs and grimaced. Ottoman beans. Looked like tar, tasted like tar. Frogmorton and Drigg drank too. Sawneyford picked up his bowl, half raised it to his lips, and put it down again.

The men pulled on their coats. In the street, Frogmorton waited for his gig, Drigg had his usual difficulties hailing a chair though there were plenty about, and Brass sidled off on foot to sniff out a cock fight.

Sawney Sawneyford was last to step back into London’s sticky spread. He was the child of the commercial City of London, that square mile of wheeling and dealing, speculating and calculating, as well as the child of the broader city. Indeed, much more their child than the child of the jostling, poking brother and crying sister who physically brought him into being. The City was the womb through which his world reverberated. How he arrived at the silk factory in which he had met Brass was of no interest to him, just as he had no interest in an uncle/father press-ganged and drowned at sea, or an aunt/mother still crying, or the whore who had cut the cord after servicing a customer—you’re in a hurry, sir, extra for that, sir, three pence and a pint of ale to wash out the taste, sir—and who, on a whim, had decided not to dash his head against the cobbles but to push him through the pavement boards, where he was found by a human rat living underneath. The rat, drunk, mistook Sawneyford for her own. The mistake forever unrealized, she sold him at four: agile fingers were valuable to the factory loom. Sawneyford was quick: he kept his fingers and his place. At ten, he met Brass. At twelve, Frogmorton and Drigg. At thirteen, his first bet of over a penny. At fourteen, three successful betting scams. At fifteen, a deal. At eighteen, a banking account. At twenty, a house. At twenty-one, a living wife. At twenty-six, a dead wife and Alathea. A-la-thee-a. She had offered Sawneyford something quite unexpected and he had taken it. He headed toward a tannery for sale in Bermondsey and considered the pianoforte without enthusiasm. He reassured himself: Alathea might be no good at it. He kicked out. Who was he fooling. She would be good at it, damn her, she would.

*   *   *

A
T
T
YBURN
, Annie and her father observed an uneasy truce. The gap left by the pianoforte remained unfilled and every time Cantabile passed, he shed a tear for Annie’s benefit. Annie took no notice. Her mother was bad. Spring was the most dangerous time. Nature softened, and its softening suffocated the weak. Annie never knew whether to close the curtains around her mother’s box bed for warmth or leave them open for air. The concert girls were pushed aside for the moment, as was Monsieur. Annie had seen his coat and heard his voice but they had not met. She had barely left her mother’s side.

Now she was anxious for the doctor, expected imminently. It was a relief that Drigg’s money had made the man more willing. It was also a relief that her father refused to have anything to do with the stacks of coins Annie collected from the bank and stored where she alone would look for them. The coins would last for months. Their clink was a kind of music and she did not underestimate its value.

For hours she had been laying cloths on her mother’s forehead and tripping to and fro with pans of boiling water. Steam helped her mother breathe more easily. Francesca Cantabile murmured thanks and stroked Annie’s hand. Annie murmured back. Enough steam. Time drifted. Only when her mother’s breathing eased did Annie’s mind turn back to Manchester Square. At first she imagined the pianoforte. The image changed. She imagined the girls’ rosebud mouths. She imagined them crushed against Monsieur’s, their white teeth nipping his tongue. She dabbed her mouth. Bile had sprung upward, stinging her lip.

A shout from below. At last! She ran to let the doctor in. He had seen too many deformities to notice Annie’s lip. He pushed past her up the stairs to listen and poke, advise and ruminate, turning Mrs. Cantabile over as though she were a ragdoll. The news was not good, but not the worst either. He took his money and left. Annie straightened her mother’s nightclothes, smoothed the pillows, and sat quietly, holding her mother’s hand again until they both dozed off. Annie woke an hour later, cold and stiff. She checked her mother’s pulse, then closed the bed curtains as the doctor had advised. Mrs. Cantabile’s eyelids flickered. “Thank you, my Annie,” she whispered. “You’re a blessing to me.”

“Sssssh, Mother,” said Anne. “You’re a blessing to me.”

“We’re blessings to each other.” Mrs. Cantabile smiled the sweet smile Annie should have inherited. Annie pressed her cheek against her mother’s as she had done since she was a little girl. It was an accommodation they had come to: an acceptable kiss. It made Annie want to howl.

FIVE

At half past eight, Mrs. Frogmorton was already a cumbersome presence in her drawing room. She kept the drapes shut through some notion of secrecy, though the room was too high for peeping Toms. The lamps hissed. She stood on a chair to turn them down. No need for waste. The fire, stacked high, shed light enough and there were four three-candled candelabra on the pianoforte itself. Monsieur arrived, in brown again, workaday. He gazed with renewed disgust at the room, whose furniture, all depressingly resistant to woodworm, cast shadows as bulky as his employer’s. An old suit of armor hanging between two of the three long windows hinted at a baronial past, the effect rendered comic by the greaves, not a pair, and the helmet stolen from a dressing-up box. A screen embroidered with Chinese dragons nodded to the privacy of the lesson, though Mrs. Frogmorton had ensured it did not completely obstruct her view. The floor was highly polished—no carpet. Monsieur was, for a moment, tempted to skate across it as he had skated on the river when a boy. Instead, he padded over to the pianoforte, removed two of the candelabra, and murmured his condolences to the keyboard. Mrs. Frogmorton stared at the instrument. Square tailed, with pedals angled like a bowlegged girl, it seemed unlikely that such a thing could attract a husband for Harriet. Monsieur Belladroit was soon busy under the pianoforte lid, twisting, tightening, prodding, dusting, stroking. Mrs. Frogmorton sighed. As chaperone, she was stuck here. She gathered Frilly to herself, rang for more coal, and plunged her needle into a small piece of tapestry. She would be bored. She was used to that.

Marianne arrived. Monsieur set to work. Had Marianne any skill at the keys? Of course, she replied. Then she should play something for him, so he could judge how best to progress. Marianne stopped after two bars of Couperin. “This thing doesn’t make what I call music,” she declared. “It’s all uneven, and so dull. My harpsichord’s much better.”