Chords and Discords (3 page)

“I’ve heard of her.”

“Good, is she?”

“I’m told.”

“And the husband.”

“Never heard of him.”

“She’ll have insisted on them employing him. Probably wouldn’t come unless they did.”

“That’s no consolation, Hugh.”

“Well, at least they haven’t fired you altogether.”

“Three shillings!” I said savagely.

“Don’t let’s start that again,” he said hurriedly. He hesitated. “Charles – tell me to go to the devil if you like but – how much money
do
you
have?”

I pulled out my pockets dramatically. Two halfpennies fell out. Hugh bent to pick them up, and gasped in pain.

“You’ll not get to Darlington, let alone York!” I pushed him back on to the bed.

He had gone pale but rallied. “Let me fund you.”

“No.”

I sat down again and stared at him with obstinacy equal to his own. After a moment he sighed. “At least it’s only three weeks till the end of the quarter. You’ll get paid then,
surely.”

“Some of ’em haven’t paid me for last quarter!”

Hugh considered this carefully. He was still sickly pale and a trickle of sweat ran down his right cheek.

“What about Heron? He’s appointed himself your patron.”

“I can’t dun Heron! Fastest way I know to lose a patron.”

My whole mind revolted at the idea of asking Heron for money. He’d look at me with that expressionless face of his and say nothing. He already had a poor opinion of the generality of
mankind – my asking for money would make him think I was as mercenary as the rest. Patrons buy tickets for concerts, they subscribe to compositions, they recommend you to their friends and
talk publicly of your virtues. They do not lend you a few guineas now and again when you’re hard up – not unless there are special circumstances, like illness. And I’ve always
been as healthy as an ox.

Hugh pushed himself up from the bed, swayed, bent to pick up a pile of clothes. “Of course, there is one other possibility.”

“What’s that?”

He took a deep breath. “You could marry a rich woman.”

“No,” I said forcibly. “No!”

We both knew which lady he meant. As I went down Westgate again, still simmering with rage, I passed once more the road that led up to Caroline Square where I had had my
disquieting glimpses into that world lying next to our own. In the house where the lady in question lives.

I have long since ceased to question the vagaries of fate and taste that lead us to form attachments to another person. In my own case I had had the folly to form a liking for a lady a dozen
years my senior, of a much higher social standing than myself, and of considerable wealth. There is not much greater folly than that.

I had hardly seen the lady, Esther Jerdoun, since Christmas; she had been here and there about the country – up north to Berwick, down south to Norfolk – engaged with land agents and
lawyers from morning to night, over estates she inherited from her cousin. There could be nothing between us; the best I could hope for was that she would patronise my concerts and my publications
and be polite to me when we met. I thought I could count on that. But I could no more ask her for money than I could ask Claudius Heron.

March is a damnable month. Wind funnels down the narrow streets and makes you stagger and weave against its force. The river down in its valley is turgid; smoke and coal dust blow into your
eyes, and burrow into your throat. I struggled down to the Sandhill, trying to get those late November days out of my head. Ridiculous to brood over it – it was all past and done with. On the
Sandhill, the fish market was in full spate. Seagulls screeched overhead; fisher girls shrieked with laughter; their menfolk shouted. Housewives haggled over fish for dinner. Over all their heads
loomed the ugly hulk of the Guildhall, with gentlemen lounging on the balconies, surveying the bustling scene of commerce below.

I spent some of my few remaining coins on a bowl of buttered barley at one of the sellers outside Nellie’s coffee house and ate it with my back to the wind. The smoke had somehow got into
the barley as had the taste of fish, and the bitter taste of resentment. I left it unfinished. An hour yet until my next lesson and I’d probably find that family out of town too. I was
reminded of my stay in London, three or four years ago, of tramping from house to house trying to sell concert tickets to Lord this and Lady that, gentlemen and ladies who had only to look at me to
see that I was not glamorously Italian. A mere Englishman. Only a tradesman. Damn them, damn them all. How did they expect me to live?

Someone was watching me. I felt the gaze, like a prickling in my back. It was probably Heron again; if he was in town he usually ate at Nellie’s. Was I going to have to swallow my pride
after all and apply to him for money? I saw no alternative. I hunched my shoulders, steeled myself and turned.

Not Heron, but the organ-builder William Bairstowe stared at me from the middle of the road.

Carters shouted for him to get out of the way; he did not seem to hear them. The wind threatened to lift the wig from his head, and whipped the skirts of his coat about his thighs.

He strode towards me.

As Bairstowe came up to me, he dug his fingers into the pocket of his waistcoat and brought out a guinea. He held it up in front of me with a contemptuous look.
“You’d like this, eh, sir?”

The ‘sir’ sounded like a slap in the face. I said: “You have the wrong man.”

“Patterson.” He waggled the coin in the air. A woman looked at him curiously as she stepped round him. “Notebasher and caterwauler, eh?”

“I don’t need insults, sir,” I said, loading the last word with sarcasm. “Forgive me but I have an appointment with a
gentleman
.”

He tossed the guinea into the air. “Ten of ’em.”

Ten guineas was half a year’s wages for an organist. I stared. “What the devil for?”

“Finding a scoundrel and a knave.”

“I know too many already,” I said dryly.

“Twenty,” he said.

My God, was that a trace of desperation in his voice? Twenty guineas – I’d have to play a hundred concerts to earn that much. Despite my annoyance, I hesitated. Bairstowe must want
something very badly.

His hand, I saw, was shaking as he slid the guinea back into his pocket. A couple of children jostled him as they ran past, manhandling a fish twice as big as they were. “Well,” he
demanded, “do you want the money or no?”

Of course I wanted it. I braced myself against the wind and the stink of fish.

“Why not go to the constable?”

“He’s a fool,” he said contemptuously. “I want someone who’ll do a proper job.”

“I’m just a musician – ”

He sneered at me. “We all know what happened afore Christmas. Despite it was so well-hidden.”

Dear God, was the affair halfway round the town? I had thought it well hushed up. Bairstowe surely could not know the whole of it, only that I had found a murderer.

‘You sorted it.” He snorted. “That’s what I want. Someone sorted, good and proper. A fellow causing me grief.”

He chinked the guinea against another in his pocket. I hesitated. Just for a moment but he saw it. “Can’t talk here,” he said and strode off.

My pride hurt to be ordered around in so peremptory a fashion but I followed. Across the Sandhill, up Butcher Bank and on to Silver Street in the shadow of All Hallows’ squat tower.
Jenison was churchwarden of All Hallows, I remembered. He and his cronies had hurt my pride too. Damn them all.

Maybe I was about to get a chance to prove I wasn’t dependent on their goodwill.

Bairstowe turned into the narrow alley that led to the organ manufactory. The wind funnelled down the alley and bore me with it, over dog turds and apple cores. For a moment I could see nothing
but darkness at the far end of the alley; like a night sky. I heard the wind moaning and a woman singing. An old song, murmured very softly, somewhere close, ebbing and flowing on the wind.

We came out into a large yard, gloomy but by no means the black pit I thought I’d seen. As the spirit had said, it was ‘in a state’. Debris was piled in almost every corner;
heaps of half-rotten timber, scraps of lead, flattened organ pipes, fragments of leather. Two large seasoned timbers were propped against a wall; the yard was sheltered, but even so the wind
shifted the smaller of the timbers along the wall.

To the left, the door to a house stood closed; the solid bulk of the church loomed over the house and cast a shadow across the yard. On the far side of the yard was another building. long and
low, with many windows. My attention was caught by a black stain on the cobbles outside it. Dried blood. I looked again at the shifting timber and wondered precisely what had happened to the poor
shoplad.

Bairstowe seemed to hesitate, cocking his head as if he thought he’d heard something. He muttered and pushed open the workshop door. The smell of old wood enveloped me. In a dim musty
interior, I saw saws and other tools hung in racks about the walls. Organ pipes stood everywhere: square wooden pipes, round pewter-dark tin-and-lead pipes. In one cleared space lay a soundboard
with a small rank of flute pipes stood upright on it. The size of the work made me think it was for a small house organ, something the gentry like to install in their libraries to impress visitors.
But it looked dusty, as if Bairstowe had not worked on it for an age.

I was half-distracted by all the paraphernalia. I have an ambition to be an organist myself, partly, it is true, because such posts afford a yearly salary, but also because I like the sublime
sound mere wood, and metal, and air can produce. A world away from the puny voices of the harpsichords I generally play.

Bairstowe turned to me with that contemptuous smile of his. He had his hands in his waistcoat pockets; I saw that they were still trembling.

“You find this fellow for me,” he said. “Discreetly, mind – and I’ll slip you twenty guineas.”

I regarded him sourly, making guesses at his problem. Perhaps this ‘fellow’ owed him money – a great deal of money, if he was willing to part with twenty guineas. But anyone
who owed Bairstowe a large sum of money must be gentry or even, God forbid, nobility. How the devil was I supposed to bring someone like that to book? I’m the son of a fiddler, and a musician
by profession; no nobleman is going to grant me an interview, let alone pay his debts on my request.

But there were those twenty guineas and God knows I needed them.

“A debt?” I said.

“You fellows are all the same,” he said scornfully. “Think of nothing but money. That’s all musicians are good for. Like that fellow at the church.”

He meant the organist at All Hallows, Solomon Strolger. Bairstowe’s contempt for Strolger was boundless – if there was anyone in the town who didn’t know of it, he must be deaf
and blind. What I suspect galled Bairstowe most was that Strolger was magnificently indifferent to Bairstowe’s emnity.

“A thief then?”

“Like the sound of your own voice, don’t you?” he said brutally. “If you keep quiet, I’ll tell you.”

Twenty guineas, I reminded myself, and bit back the urge to walk out into the street. I folded my arms instead and tapped a foot meaningfully. But now he had leisure to speak, he was curiously
reluctant. His mouth worked as if he was trying to summon up the courage to talk; his fingers toyed with the coin in his waistcoat pocket.

“Threats,” he said at last, spitting the word out as if it was poison.

“ To do what?”

He said nothing.

“Damage the workshop? Run you out of business?”

“Kill me,” he said in a low voice. “That lad.” He jerked his head towards the stain outside the door. “He got what was meant for me.”

“I understood it was an accident.”

“Understood,” he mimicked in a prissy voice. “You
understood
wrong. God, have you no sense?”

“If you want me to find this fellow for you,” I said, levelly, “you could at least attempt to be polite.”

He sneered. “Twenty guineas says I can do what I like. I’m the one with the power here and don’t you forget it.”

He really was remarkably unpleasant; he laughed at the sight of my reddening cheeks. But he was also right.

“Notes,” he said. “Six of ’em, pushed under my door, threatening to kill me.”

I held out my hand.

“Burnt ’em,” he said.

“All of them?”

“The lot. They were rubbish. A child could have written better.”

“What did they say?”

“Rubbish,” he said again. “
I’ll kill you
and
Look behind you
and
Be afraid
.”

“No signature?”

He crowed with laughter. I gritted my teeth. “If you want me to find this man, you have to let me go about it in my own way.”

“No signature,” he said. “No mark neither.”

“And that’s all there was – just notes?”

He hesitated just long enough for me to know he was about to lie to me. He jerked his head at the windows. “Just broken glass. And a dead cat nailed to the door. That’s all. Except
for the lad killed in my place.”

There was no proof of what Bairstowe said; he might be inventing the whole matter. My instinct was telling me to let the matter be. My empty pockets were telling me I couldn’t afford
to.

“Who do you think sent the notes?” I asked finally.

“That’s what I’m paying you to find out.”

I swallowed anger. “Suggest someone.”

He chewed on the idea, said finally: “Heron.”

I echoed incredulously: “Claudius Heron?”

“Or that Jenison fellow.” He kicked fragments of wood under a workbench. “Neither of ’em will pay me.”

This was preposterous. “I doubt they’d kill you to avoid paying a debt.”

Another laugh. “These gentry fellows like to pretend they’ve got fortunes as big as the Tyne Bridge. Probably not got a penny.”