Chords and Discords (26 page)

More grunting. Sweat stood on his forehead. I looked about for water to give him but there was none. The right hand clutched feebly at my sleeve as he struggled to speak, and I struggled to
comprehend. He could not form the words. He dropped my sleeve and showed me his right hand, fingers wide outstretched. Six times more, he fought to do the same, closing and opening his hand
convulsively. Thirty fingers he showed me.

I bent over him again. “You want me to go on looking for the man threatening you?”

Tears were coursing down his face.

“You know,” I said. “You know now who has been threatening you.”

He stared at me mutely, his hand plucking convulsively at the blanket. And those pleading eyes tore at me – I could not begin to fathom what he was trying to say, or what he wanted me to
do.

“I have been trying to find the deed,” I said. “The deed to this land, the one your brother hid. So you can sell the manufactory.” Somehow, all this seemed unspeakably
pointless, even sordid. The man probably had only hours to live and I was talking of money. But again he made a tremendous effort to say something.

“You know where it is?”

More grunting.

It was impossible to understand him. In the end, I covered his shoulders with the blanket, fetched water from the kitchen and moistened his lips. Then I searched the room for the deed but there
was hardly any place it could be hidden – only a press with some linen in it, and Bairstowe’s clothes tossed casually on to a chair. He stared at the ceiling unseeingly while I
searched. I had the impression he did not know when I left.

I went back to the stairs. Halfway up the flight to the attics, I could hear the women’s voices more loudly. Mrs Bairstowe’s I recognised at once. But did the other belong to Jennie
McIntosh? It was not the quiet, timid voice she usually employed but a clear ringing tone with a hint of a pleasant Scotch burr. The women were laughing, swapping gossip about someone evidently
known to them both.

I went up another step, another, and glimpsed them sitting in a bright room, with sweetmeats in a dish between them and wine in sparkling glasses. The maid had taken off her cap; her dark hair
hung loose below her shoulders and her bodice was loosened and her breast exposed. And I saw Mrs Bairstowe lean towards her...

I went down again quickly, quietly, before I was seen, and let myself out into the yard.

In the alley, I turned back to look at the house. Close by me came the faintest of whispers, and I saw, in the light seeping from the attic window, a faint curl of smoke, as
from a candle that had just been extinguished. The smoke dissipated, dissolved into the air.

The alley was silent. The spirit had gone.

I crawled into my bed exhausted and fell asleep at once, without dreaming. When I woke, I lay staring into darkness, somewhat disorientated. There were noises in the street
below, cautious noises. Perhaps some of the miners were coming home very late, or very early, and were anxious not to disturb the landlady. It was still dark, I must hardly have slept at all.

I remembered William Bairstowe alone in his bed, in the darkness, while his wife and maid laughed in the bright room above...

The noise outside came again. A shuffling and a soft clattering, as if something knocked against the wall just beneath my window. Annoyed, I crawled across the bed and lifted the curtain. A
shadowy figure moved in the street below, bending to pick something up from the ground. A woman with full dark skirts and a darker cloak drawn about her. She straightened and looked up, and her
face caught a streak of moonlight.

Catherine, Esther Jerdoun’s maid.

I was dressed and halfway down the stairs before the next handful of pebbles clattered against my window. Panicking. Outside, the maid started in surprise as I seized her
arm.

“Oh, thank God,” she whispered. She was trembling but took a deep breath. “She’s gone.”

“Mrs Jerdoun?” I hardly recognised my own voice.

“Within this last hour.”

“What time is it?”

“The hall clock said two when I left the house.”

I bit back my fear. The woman was distressed enough. And I needed her calm and sensible, to tell me everything that had happened. And quickly.

I rubbed at her hands; they were cold to freezing – the night was chill and she had clearly thrown on the first clothing she had found, a thin gown. But her trembling eased, as did her
ragged breathing. She gave me a tiny tight smile. “Can we walk?” she whispered.

She took my arm, and we walked down the moonlit street, conversing in quiet murmurs to minimise the danger of being overheard by man or spirit. Blood was pounding in my head. Esther,
Esther...

“What happened?”

“It was a trap,” Catherine said, vehemently. “I’m sure of it! The boy’s spirit alerted me.” (The boy whose spirit inhabited Mrs Jerdoun’s house had
formerly been my apprentice, George.) “He came to wake me. Evidently he heard a noise at the front door and went down to investigate, only to realise that a spirit from outside the house was
talking to Mrs Jerdoun at her bedroom window.”

It sounded like a deliberate plot to get George out of the way. He had apparently been indignant, feeling proprietorial about the house, as the only spirit who inhabited it. But the unknown
spirit had been there only moments, and George had not been quick enough to reach him and hear what was being said.

“And while he was wandering about the house trying to find the interloper,” Catherine said, “someone pushed a note under the door, and Mrs Jerdoun went down to fetch it. I
think the unknown spirit must have warned her it would be there. According to George, she picked up the note, read it, went back upstairs, dressed and went out. He thinks there was someone waiting
outside but naturally he could not go out to check.”

That, of course, is the worst of being confined to the place of one’s death.

“Did he not speak to Mrs Jerdoun? Ask her what was happening?”

Catherine looked at me with a rueful smile. She was not a particularly attractive woman, in her thirties perhaps, short and undistinguished in person, with mousy brown hair. But the smile
transformed her face.

“He died as a boy, Mr Patterson, at that age when women are a source of growing fascination but extreme embarrassment. He would not dream of going anywhere near Mrs Jerdoun’s rooms.
He can hardly bring himself to utter a word to her, he adores her so much. But he had the sense to come and wake me. Though I wish he had done it sooner.” She drew her cloak closer about her
against the chill night. “She was gone long before I worked out what had happened.”

We had walked up into the Bigg Market in the thin moonlight and now turned down towards St Nicholas’s church. Even at this late – or early – hour, lights burned in some of the
taverns. The sound of laughter and of singing drifted through ill-fitting windows and doors.

“I found the note,” Catherine said, dragging a piece of paper from the folds of her cloak. “She must have thrown it on the bed when she went back to dress. Her nightrobe was on
top of it.”

The moonlight was not bright enough to allow me to read the note so I moved to the pool of light cast by a lantern above a shop. The top of the paper had been torn off unevenly and the
superscription had been misspelled:
Mrs Jerdoon
, it said, in an untidy childish scrawl.

I stood looking at the note for a moment without taking in what it said. A childish scrawl. Had the writer of this note also written the threatening notes to William Bairstowe? At any rate, the
scrawl surely made it clear that Mrs Jerdoun’s disappearance was connected to William Bairstowe’s affairs. Catherine was hovering at my elbow in increasing anxiety. I read the note.

We have the musicl gentlman
, it read.
If you want to see him agen, bring 20 ginease.

They had trapped her. They had led her to believe they held me prisoner but were willing to ransom me. But in heaven’s name, why?

And then the full force of the plan burst on me. They now had a weapon to use against me. They could threaten to harm Esther if I did not do as they wanted. But what was that? Did they merely
want me to abandon my interference or did they want something more specific? The deed, for instance?

I stood there in the cold street, torn between desperate anxiety for Esther and a strange kind of pleasure that she had rushed straight off to try and rescue me, despite the risk to herself. But
how had they known that Mrs Jerdoun’s safety was so important to me? And who were they? God, Esther’s well-being depended on my help and I had not the slightest idea where she might be
or who was holding her!

A shout came from the nearest tavern, the sound of men brawling. Catherine was looking at me steadily, calmer now. “Mrs Jerdoun is no swooning weakling, sir. They’ll not find her
easy to deal with.”

“I know that,” I said, with a ghost of a laugh. “Do you know if she took any money with her?”

“She might have,” she said. “She had some left over from her travelling but I don’t know where she kept it.”

“Or jewellery?”

“No, sir. That was my first thought. I checked it before I came out. There is not a piece missing.” She looked at me anxiously. “What are you going to do, sir?”

“Go after her.”

“But where?” She leant forward, her face reddened by the lamplight. “I questioned George, sir, to find whether any place was mentioned. But he heard nothing.”

I was looking again at the note, as if it might somehow inspire me. My attention was caught by the top of the sheet. The paper had been folded over, then torn along the fold. But at the right
side, it had torn unevenly, leaving a small triangle of the piece that had been removed. And on that tiny triangle seemed to be a mark –

I angled the paper this way and that under the uncertain light of the lantern. Yes, it was a printed line, a fragment of a curlicue of extravagant decoration.

Like an ornamental decoration to the letter Y, perhaps.

“Sir?” Catherine pressed.

“I saw a paper very like this earlier today.” After seeing Richard Softly, I had thrust the fisher girl’s note into a coat pocket; I fished it out, crumpled and faintly grubby.
Catherine peered over my arm, as I held the two papers close together.

“They are very similar,” she said. “If that piece had not been torn away, they could have been much the same size. Oh!”

I had shown her the outside of the fisher girl’s note at first; now I turned it over and she saw the letterheading, the name of John Holloway in beautiful elaborate swirls, with a curl or
six under the Y.

I stood at the foot of the Side in shadow, staring at Holloway’s shop which caught the full glare of the moonlight. It stood closed and silent, the light lining its
ancient timbers and leaning windows. The street was utterly deserted; I heard only the faint hoot of an owl, the sharp bark of a fox.

The note had to be from Holloway. He had torn off his letterhead to hide his identity, not knowing that Softly had stolen a sheet for his sister and that I would recognise it. He must have spent
the day in Shields, as Hugh’s note had told me, then returned to hear the news of what had happened to his brother-in-law. That had spurred him to capture Esther to use as a weapon against
me. Did that mean there was something untoward about Bairstowe’s apoplexy after all? Holloway must think I knew something he wanted kept secret. But in heaven’s name, what?

I bit hard on fear, and tried to think logically. Holloway had kidnapped Esther. Would he have hidden her in the shop? Surely not – suppose she shouted for help? Of course, to prevent such
an eventuality, she could have been tied up, a cloth tied about her mouth. Even the possibility filled me with rage.

I crossed the road and walked purposefully for Holloway’s shop. As I came up to the door, I could hear whispering – the never-ending conversations of the multitude of spirits who
inhabited the place. Then one of the spirits said distinctly: “Quiet!” A silence began like a pool at my feet, spread out like ripples, eddied and finally settled on the entire
building.

I walked down the alley to the back of the house. There was not a light anywhere. If Holloway was here, he was hiding from me. I was inclined to think I was wrong; he had taken Esther somewhere
else. But in God’s name, where?

I could at least leave a message for him.

“Spirits!” I called. My voice echoed oddly in the emptiness of the confined yard, startling me with its harshness. “Tell Holloway I want the lady. If any harm comes to her,
I’ll make sure he hangs for it.”

Silence. I snapped: “Is that understood?”

A faint whisper – like an echo. “Understood...”

And, as I started back down the alley towards the street, a second murmur: “Do
you
understand?”

At the last moment, I did understand. I swung round but it was already too late. A flurry of footsteps, a snatch of heavy breathing, the heavy reek of gin –

Then pain and darkness.

After a time, I seemed to dream of floating, of rocking as in a ship or a carriage. Of sliding across a floor. Of being smothered in stinking blankets.

And woke to a worse reality: I lay in darkness, on cold stone. I could smell vomit, and the reek of damp rot. My head felt as if it would burst with pain.

A rat squealed.

I tried to turn over, gasped in pain, had to wait until dizziness subsided. I put out a hand into the darkness, felt the cold rough stone of a wall. Pulling against it, I dragged myself to my
feet. Dizziness almost overwhelmed me; I leant back thankfully.

Men’s voices in the distance. A rustle closer by – the rats, no doubt.

At least I was still fully clothed. I felt in my pockets. My few coins had gone as had the two notes.