Sedition (9 page)

Alathea smiled at Mrs. Frogmorton. Such a strange thing, a smile. Alathea knew as much about them as she knew about tongues. She knew how the pull of the cheek, one, or both, and the releasing of the lips to expose just this or that amount of tooth, or no teeth at all, or no teeth to start with, could alter the thing entirely. She knew how to keep Mrs. Frogmorton looking at her smile (at the moment, both cheeks drawn back, lips beginning to open) so that she did not look elsewhere. This was essential since things with Monsieur were warming up considerably. When she was ready, Alathea dissolved her smile slowly, first relaxing her cheek muscles, then allowing her lips naturally to relax into their usual position. The whole affair took nearly half a minute.

Mrs. Frogmorton’s irritation subsided. The girl was only smiling. She couldn’t help being the way she was. Mrs. Frogmorton returned to her seat. Another leaf to embroider.

Alathea turned her attention back to Monsieur. Monsieur, not wanting Mrs. Frogmorton to appear again, swallowed a small gasp, then nearly choked on a bigger one. The luncheon lamb fat refluxed. He turned a gasp into a burp.
Mon Dieu!
When he could breathe again, he smelled like Marianne. Alathea rose, leaving Monsieur Belladroit gripping the pianoforte stool. “Good-bye,” she said, “see you next week.” She nodded at Mrs. Frogmorton as she passed. Mrs. Frogmorton caught a whiff of musk, and of something else that she couldn’t quite place. She put away her needlework and followed Alathea down the stairs.

A full five minutes passed before Monsieur put the music away and ten before he was fit for the street. His shirt stuck unpleasantly to his stomach. He closed the door of No. 23 behind him and walked swiftly in the direction of Tyburn. He had forgotten his surprise at Alathea’s music making. He had forgotten his melancholia. All he remembered was that hand. He was both in awe of and revolted by its expertise. Alathea was so young. How had she dared? Never mind the daring. Where could she have learned such arts? He checked his breeches as he walked. He did not feel in control of his legs. He slowed, stopped, and leaned against a wall.

It was the dead hour between three and four. Few people were about. Behind curtains, women drooped. Behind desks, men rubbed inky thumbs and counted the hours still to go. Whores inspected themselves frankly in the glass before applying their paint. Even the sewers were still. Monsieur tried to breathe in some of the deadness. He did not want to blurt out what had happened, not to Cantabile or to anybody else. In his own time, he walked on, trying to notice ordinary things: the way you heard carriage wheels before carriage horses’ hooves. The same with Mrs. Frogmorton: the rustle of hoops before the stamp of serviceable heels. A corpse was being manhandled out of a doorway. A little girl was crying. He breathed the breath of ordinary life. Brushing himself down again, he walked more quickly, searching the mud for a lucky coin, as he sometimes did in Paris. Just outside Cantabile’s he did find a penny, though it was so dirty he did not pick it up.

The shop was, as usual, closed against the world. Monsieur fumbled for his key and pulled his pistol against a gang threatening to fleece him. The weight of the stock restored him fully to himself. After locking the door behind him, he paused, not because it was dark—he knew his way—but because somebody was playing. Mozart. The second movement of the sonata in C. He leaned against Cantabile’s desk. It must be Annie. Her father could not play like this. My, he thought, she must have come on in the—how many years since he last saw her? Five? Six? The movement’s little dramas, so often syrup, were individual droplets: simple, understated, with every regard for timing. Monsieur felt the droplets gather and rinse Alathea away. He made his way into the warehouse. Annie had her back to him.

“Annie?”

Annie had been waiting. She dreaded Monsieur’s first view of her after so many years. She was no longer a child, with the sweetness of a child’s face reducing the calamity of her lip. He would see her as she really was. She needed all the courage Mozart could give her. She hesitated long enough to say “Monsieur,” then she grasped the lamp, sparing herself his first reaction by turning so that she was entirely lit and he was still in the dark. “I knew it must be you,” Monsieur exclaimed before the light spilled over her. “How well you…” He faltered. Annie held the lamp closer so he would know for certain that what he was seeing was not a trick of the candle. She gave him time. She played Mozart in her head. “It is…” He faltered again.

When she was twelve, Monsieur had found Annie’s lip bad. He had thought it might improve as she grew older. Now that she was seventeen, his shock was greater because of the permanence: this is how Annie would always be. The pity of it! She could have been lovely. “It is very good to see you.” His reaction was more marked by his attempt to hide it. “It has been a long time. Too long,” he finished lamely.

Annie lowered the lamp. The introduction was done. Nothing untoward said. Everything untoward said. “I’m sorry my welcome is a little late, Monsieur.” Her voice betrayed nothing. “I’ve been with my mother. Come, please. You must be hungry.”

She led the way to the stairs and took him up into what her mother had once called the dining room, though it was really the kitchen, its furnishings three hard chairs, a small doorless cupboard containing plates and glasses (the doors were burned for heat last winter), a mesh-fronted box they used as a larder, and a table. She poured a glass of the fine port Monsieur used to like and searched for signs of seduction. Blotches of lip paint? A smudge of powder? A band of perspiration? Monsieur flipped his coattails as he sat. A waft of musk. Annie smelled it at once. She could not name it, but she would not forget it.

Monsieur took a large swig of the port and tried to make conversation. Annie’s lip glowed. Never, Monsieur thought, had a man experienced quite such a day as this. “How long since I stayed here last?” He looked in Annie’s direction.

“Five years, Monsieur,” she replied.

“Five years! And how is your mother?”

“Better tonight, and sleeping now.” She refilled his glass. Now that he was actually in front of her and looking at her just as she was, against her will Annie’s dream revived. Certainly, it underwent rapid moderations. Monsieur did not need to kiss her and there was no question of marriage. She would be his friend. He would take her into his confidence. In due course, he would share details of the girls’ tumblings and he and she would laugh at them together. That would make the seductions and even any marriage easier to bear. She made a great effort to put him at his ease. “People are flocking to hear Herr Haydn,” she said, sitting squarely in the light. The more he saw of her, the more he would get used to her. “Have you heard him?”

“No. Have you?” Monsieur picked up the poker and put it down.

“No.”

“I would like to, Annie. Perhaps you and I—”

Her heart leapt. She could not stop it.

Mr. Cantabile thrust open the door. “Ah, Claude.” Monsieur never finished his sentence. Annie wondered whether her father had chosen his moment deliberately. She got up, fixed the lamps, closed the curtains, and produced the dinner. Monsieur was aware of being good to her in the way men are good to a dog of whom they are fond but wish to keep at arm’s length.

When the evening drew to a close, Annie checked on her mother before going to her own room. She undressed, got into bed, and tugged the blankets under her nose. Then, despising herself, she got up and opened the door. Monsieur’s room was beyond hers. She heard his footsteps. They were quite slow. She got back into bed and pulled up her knees. Was that a hesitation? She pushed her knees down only when it was clear that Monsieur was not going to put his head around the door to wish her good night. She had known he would not. Nevertheless, it was bitter. Annie decided that Monsieur’s girls would pay for his omission. She would select a first target and her aim would be deadly.

SIX

A fortnight passed before Alathea knew for certain she was being followed by a new and rather different stalker. March was now April and although winter seemed to have returned for a last blast, she took to walking more slowly, just to be sure. She had fun with most of those set on her trail, leading them for miles, sometimes south toward the river’s wharves, sometimes east to the lanes around the law courts, sometimes west to Piccadilly to hover outside the offices of the London Corresponding Society, where she had once, by chance, managed to get her tail apprehended by pointing to him when arrests for treason were being made. Today she was simply squelching her way home from Newgate Street. She knew these two miles well. Three times in the last three years she had required an abortionist and her father had recommended Newgate’s Salutation and Cat as where everybody went, everybody, that is, who could afford more than a slurp of poison and a knitting needle.

On her first visit, Alathea thought her father mistaken in the place. Instead of a huddle of miserable women, she found a man standing on a chair extolling the virtues of some utopia to a group of more or less interested drinkers. A pamphlet was pressed on her. She would have left had her arm not been taken by a respectable lady arising from a makeshift office in the corner. Alathea was sent up two sets of narrow stairs. The pamphlet had provided at least some distraction from the heap of instruments to be employed should the administered potion fail. Once, the potion had worked and Alathea had stumbled home an hour later. Twice, there had to be poking, plucking, stretching, sucking, scraping, clamping. On those occasions, she remained in that room for two days, at first unconscious, then, when her eyes could focus, reading the pamphlet steadfastly, turning the phrases “strong tyrannize weak; government of all for all” into bulwarks against bodily horrors. Odd words caught at her particularly: pantisocracy, Susquehanna, the former some kind of society of incorruptibles, the second the name of a river. Even in her distress, she was struck by the irony of the abortionist above and the incorruptibles below, and when the pain was bad, she clung to the name of the river as to a talisman. After she understood that she would never need the abortionist again (nor a midwife, for that matter), she returned to the Salutation and Cat to hear more about utopia and the river. Today she had been expecting a new speaker—a poet, no less—but he had not turned up and his replacement, wretched with cold, had abandoned utopia in favor of complaints about too little sugar and nutmeg in his egg-hot. Alathea had left after half an hour, emerging into the street at just the wrong time. The Thursday market was drawing to a close and it was hard to move for carts parked back to back. From an open cage, six angry geese hissed and nipped at her. She hissed back and glanced behind. Up to now, her stalkers had always been men, which was why, this time, she had taken so long to be sure. A girl.

She pushed through the crowd. The shadow pushed after her. She stopped to haggle over a knuckle of ham. The shadow stopped. She paused to give the ham to a beggar. The shadow paused. When the crush thinned and grand houses gave way to shacks, Alathea whipped around. Even then she caught only a glimpse, what with the rain and umbrellas. Certainly a woman. This made the shadow much more interesting. She rejected her usual practices. She would draw this stalker home and take her prisoner.

Once the road was clear, Alathea set her course and kept steady until she could smell the pickle factory that made all new Soho Square residents sneeze. She looked behind. The stalker was sneezing. Her first time here. At the corner of Charles Street, Alathea glanced back again. The shadow had recovered. Alathea walked briskly past Trotter’s warehouses, the academy, the surgeon’s house (one of two), and avoided four gentlemen just finished with the whores at No. 12. The stalker avoided them too.

Alathea made for her front door. The house was imposing, though Alathea felt no pride in it. It had not been chosen; her father had acquired it in lieu of a debt. The number plate had fallen off and they had not bothered to learn what the number was, referring to the house only as “Soho Square.” It was too big for the two of them, but neither wanted to be cozy. Neighbors often conjectured about the inside, having never been invited in, and in truth, Alathea and her father knew little more about the inside than a stranger, since few covers had been removed from the furniture and other household goods left in their entirety by Sawneyford’s debtors. To all intents and purposes, the house was uninhabited.

On the doorstep, Alathea bent to scrape the mud from her overshoes, rain trickling down her neck. The shadow hung back and Alathea was nervous of a quick disappearance. The stalker was too far away to grab. Alathea needed her to come nearer. She took a gamble. She stood straight, got out her key, and let herself in (they had one servant only; he never attended the door). She kicked off her overshoes so that she could run, then jerked the door open again, preparing to dive out in pursuit. She stopped short. The shadow was standing directly in front of her, face hidden behind a veil of unusual thickness, right hand half raised as though to ring the bell. No tail had ever rung the bell before.

Annie was fumbling. Under the loose cuff draping her right hand, she held a small jar of acid. With the other hand, she was trying to pull off the stopper. She must do this instantly. Any kind of conversation and she might lose courage. Come off! Come off! The stopper stuck. Her hands were shaking, her thumbs and fingers slimy from the rain. She should have brought a knife. A quick slash across the face would have been more certain. The moment was passing. Her veil was sticking to her nose. She panicked. She would run away and return another time. She spun around. Alathea darted forward and seized her arm. The acid bottle dropped and smashed, white vapor hissing like the geese. Both girls jumped and Annie cried out. She was still held. After a brief tussle, she was propelled by Alathea’s knee over the doorstep into the hall with the door slammed and locked behind her.

The two girls stood, panting slightly, water puddling from soaked hems. Alathea could sense that the person beneath the soggy veil was young. She wondered, is this girl my father’s mistress? She let Annie go. “Are you looking for my father?”