Airs and Graces (34 page)

There was no body, and therefore no prosecution to face. I’d tell everyone the women had run off, persuade Kane he’d been imagining things – he was already halfway convinced anyway, going off with watchmen to search the surrounding streets. Fowler could go home in safety.

And I wouldn’t tell him I thought he’d killed the wrong woman.

HISTORICAL NOTE

Every effort has been made to be geographically accurate in a depiction of Charles Patterson’s Newcastle. In the 1730s, Newcastle upon Tyne was a town of around 16,000 people, hemmed in by old walls, and centred on the Quay where ships moored to carry away the coal and glass on which the town depended. The single bridge across the Tyne, linking Newcastle with its southern neighbour, Gateshead, was lined with houses and shops, a chapel and even a small prison; from the Quay, the streets climbed the hills to the more genteel, and cleaner, areas around Westgate and Northumberland Street. Daniel Defoe liked the place when he visited in 1720, but remarked unfavourably on the fogs and the smells that came drifting up the river. Places such as Westgate, High Bridge, the Sandhill and the Side did (and still do) all exist, although I have added a few alleys here and there to enable Patterson and his friends to take short cuts where necessary, and invented a stylish location for Esther’s house, Caroline Square.

Musically, Charles Patterson lives in an atmosphere that the residents of Newcastle in the 1730s would have recognized instantly. The town had one of the most active musical scenes in England, after London, Bath and Oxford. From 1735, inhabitants could hear music in a weekly series of winter concerts (and occasionally during the summer too), listen to music in church (plain simple music if you went to St Nicholas, much more elaborate and ‘popular’ music at All Hallows), attend the dancing assemblies in winter, and listen to the fiddlers, pipers and ballad singers in the street. Nationally and internationally famous soloists often visited but sadly, there is no evidence to support the story that the most celebrated musician of the period, Mr George Frideric Handel, ever visited Newcastle.

A number of real people fleetingly appear in Charles Patterson’s world. Solomon Strolger, organist of All Hallows for 53 years, is one, as is another organist, James Hesletine of Durham Cathedral. Thomas Mountier, the bass singer in
Broken Harmony
, was a singing man at the Cathedral for a short while until drink intervened; James Fleming had a stationer’s shop on the Tyne Bridge. The Jenisons and Ords were real families with a particular interest in music but the specific individuals who appear in these books are fictional. The Gregsons are also fictional; Samuel’s profession of upholsterer was what we would nowadays call an interior designer – he would have dealt with all aspects of decoration, including painting and wallpapering as well as furnishings.

There were indeed new Assembly Rooms in the Groat Market in the late 1730s although, as Patterson points out, they were designed for dancing, and far from ideal for concert-giving; there is no evidence, however, that a London architect was brought in to design them. Esther’s comment about stylish new rooms in York refers to the Assembly Rooms in Blake Street, which still survive and give some idea of what the Newcastle Rooms might have looked like.

The relationship between London and regional cities such as Newcastle was always fraught with ambiguities. The inhabitants of Newcastle prided themselves on being up-to-date with the latest fashions, and boasted of obtaining new publications, new entertainments and popular performers from the capital with great speed. At the same time they could affect a snobbish disdain for anyone who suggested that London was in any way superior to Newcastle, and Defoe himself, a man who was hard to please, admitted that the Tyne Bridge was almost as impressive as London Bridge. Alas, the bridge came to a sorry end, washed away in dramatic floods in 1771.

Charles Patterson is entirely fictional, but the difficulties he finds in making a living would have been entirely familiar to musicians of the time. If he has an
alter
ego
, it would be Charles Avison, a Newcastle-born musician and composer who was extremely well-known in his time and who dragged himself up by his own efforts from obscurity to wealth and respect. If Patterson’s career follows the same path, he will be extremely happy.