Chords and discords, p.1
Chords and Discords, page 1
Chords and Discords
Roz Southey
Praise for Broken Harmony, Roz Southey’s inventive debut historical mystery:
... points for originality... different, absorbing, and with an unhackneyed setting...
- Alan Fisk, Historical Novels Review
paints a wonderful background... a complex plot which intrigues, teases and cajoles the reader into a complete suspension of disbelief, and the quality of the writing hurtles one along until the end.
- Amazon
Southey’s sure-handed use of period detail...
- Publishers Weekly, USA
what really makes the novel come alive is its setting... she seamlessly incorporates the historical information into the novel... The dialogue, too, rings true: just ornamented enough to feel right for its time... A charming novel...
- Booklist, USA
A fascinating read, and certainly different.
- Jean Currie, Round the Campfire
... it is good to see a publisher investing in fresh work that... falls four-square within the genre’s traditions.
- Martin Edwards, author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries
Creme de la Crime... so far have not put a foot wrong.
- Reviewing the Evidence
First published in 2008
by Crème de la Crime
P O Box 523, Chesterfield, S40 9AT
Copyright © 2008 Roz Southey
The moral right of Roz Southey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.
All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Typesetting by Yvette Warren
Cover design by Yvette Warren
Front cover image by Peter Roman
ISBN 978-0-9557078-2-7
A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library
Printed and bound in Germany by Bercker.
www.cremedelacrime.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
About the author:
Roz Southey is a musicologist and historian, and lives in the North East of England.
www.rozsouthey.co.uk
My thanks ...
... to Lynne Patrick at Crème de la Crime for her unfailing patience and generous help, and to Lesley Horton for her expert editorial guidance.
... to my sisters, Jennifer and Wendy, and to my brother-in-law John, who have given me endless moral support throughout the years, and to my husband, Chris, who never stopped believing I really could write a publishable novel.
... and especially to my parents, Charles and Edna Williams. Many years of sitting in village church choirs listening to my father playing pipe organs taught me to appreciate the largest of musical instruments and the way its music seemed to be born out of the air; my mother’s wide-ranging reading habits amazed librarians everywhere. Although it’s fair to say she would have preferred me to have written a good saga ...
For my mum
Edna May Williams
1918-2008
‘the loveliest person in the world’
The present high winds have done much damage in the town...
[Newcastle Courant, 28 February 1736]
It was cold, it was wet, and it was windy. Freezing rain splattered against my face and spotted the cobbles at my feet. Wind swirled, tugging at the skirts of my coat and threatening to bowl my tricorne all the way down Silver Street into the Tyne below. In short, it was March, and no one dawdles on streets in March unless there is a very good reason. So why were those fellows fidgeting at the entrance to an alley near All Hallows Church?
I am as curious as the next man, even when shivering and damp. Besides, what better had I to do? I’d just come from the first cancelled lesson of the day. The family had evidently removed from the town for Lent. With no public amusements – no theatre, no dancing or card assemblies, no concerts – one might as well withdraw to the yawning boredom of a country house. And if a few bills have been forgotten, belonging to say, the odd musician, well, these things can’t be helped. Never mind if the musician in question (your obedient servant, Chas Patterson) is down to the last guinea in his pocket.
I accosted a fellow with a grubby bagwig and asked what had happened. He squinted at me. “Someone’s dead.”
And I had been hoping for something to cheer me up.
“Murdered,” he said, with relish. “Blood everywhere.”
I should have turned my back and walked away. Just before Christmas I’d got myself involved in murder, and I didn’t much like the consequences. But I had nothing to do and one way of passing the time seemed as good as any other. I peered through a gap in the crowd and glimpsed a yard at the other end of the alley. A middle-aged woman was glowering at a weeping girl; Bedwalters, the parish constable, was staring down at something I could not see. This was the alley leading to the organ manufactory – perhaps the dead body belonged to William Bairstowe, the organ builder. Someone must have taken violent exception to his rudeness at last.
“All this fuss!” said a voice behind me, scornfully. I glanced round. The voice came from a door on the other side of the street; when I looked closely, I saw the gleam of a spirit lodged on a stone bunch of grapes carved into the door lintel. The spirit slid round the carvings towards me; the living man must have died on the doorstep and his spirit, like all spirits, could not leave the place of his dying.
The spirit sniffed. “No one made a fuss like this when I died.”
“But this is murder.”
“No such thing!”
“No?”
“I have the true tale.”
“Oh yes?”
“From Mrs Forbes’s spirit, who lives opposite, who had it from Mr Ross’s spirit on the churchyard wall, who had it from the girl’s spirit in the alley.”
Spirits can pass a tale from one end of the town to another in the time it takes a living man to cross the street. I wondered why the girl’s spirit had no name.
“So who’s died?”
“Bairstowe the organ builder. Hit on the head by one of his own pipes.”
I thought of the largest diapason pipes in the organs of my acquaintance. One such would have given him a nasty bump, I supposed, but could it have killed him?
“Blown over by the wind.” As if to corroborate the spirit’s evidence, the wind bowled an empty basket along the street.
“The wind was very strong last night,” I mused. It had blown against my window and the rattling had kept me awake several hours. “An accident, then?”
“Of sorts.”
I sighed. The spirit wanted to be encouraged. It’s always wise to keep on the good side of spirits – when spiteful, they don’t mind too much what they say. I hope that when I am finally lodged in some place for the inevitable eighty or a hundred years after my death, I do not turn sour and vicious. “You don’t think so?”
“Well, have you seen the state that yard is in? Asking for trouble. Have you seen it?”
“No.”
A note of doubt crept into the spirit’s voice. “You are Patterson? Charles Patterson, the musical fellow.”
I stared uneasily at the gleam on the damp lintel. “I had no idea I was so well known.”
A chortle. “You are notorious, sir, after your exploits before Christmas!”
My heart sank. “I do know William Bairstowe,” I said, hoping to distract the spirit. “But I haven’t been in his yard since my childhood.” I hunted for a way out of the conversation. Was I really that anxious to know how Bairstowe came by his death? Anxious enough to brave the wind and the splattering rain, and the lonely, garrulous spirit?
“Never seen such a mess,” the spirit said. “Wood everywhere, stone, lead. Pipes all over the place. Piles of rubbish. Don’t know how he works there.” It paused. “Well, he doesn’t work much, does he? Or he didn’t. Anyhow, he’s paid the price now. Wind took the lead and hit him on the head with it and now he’s dead.”
Thankfully, as the spirit threatened to burst into verse, I saw the man with a grubby bagwig beckon from the crowd. I wen
“A lad?” I echoed, startled.
“Courting the maid,” the fellow said, with a wink. “Weeping fit to float a ship, she is.”
And out they came in procession: Bedwalters first, standing respectfully aside to let two labourers carry out a hurdle with a body on it, covered by a sheet. The crowd strained for a sight of blood but there was none. Then came a girl, burying her face in her apron, then the middle-aged woman – that was Mrs Bairstowe no doubt. A second wife, if I remembered my gossip correctly. And behind her, bracing himself in the narrow entrance to the alley, was William Bairstowe the organ builder, heavy and red-faced.
We doffed our hats, and stood getting windblown and wet as the procession turned out of the alley and made its way down the street. The crowd began to disperse and the spirit slid away to call to someone else. I pushed my tricorne back on to my head and turned to go, then caught William Bairstowe’s gaze as he stared across the street. For a moment I thought he was about to call to me, but his mouth twisted into a grimace instead and he swore at a child that bumped into him. The next moment he had swung back into the alley.
Not the sort of man I like to keep me company. Still, I thought, no need to worry myself over a fellow I’m likely to meet twice a year at most.
No one can predict the future.
1
The GENTLEMEN DIRECTORS of the SUBSCRIPTION CONCERTS are desired to meet at the Assembly Rooms, Westgate Road, on Friday the 5th Inst. March at 11 o’clock in the Morning, to consider the next season’s concerts.
[Newcastle Courant, 20 February 1736]
The rain had blown up into a full-scale squall by the time I reached the Assembly Rooms on Westgate Road an hour or so later. I was wet and angry over yet another cancelled lesson. This one had been on Butcher Bank, a place I always hate visiting. Rain had washed most of the blood and discarded offal down the gutters, but the street still stank. And all to hear the servant telling me the family had left and wouldn’t be back until after Easter.
When would anyone pay me? At the end of the March quarter they would all be in the country; they might come back to town after Easter, but by the end of the June quarter they would be sweating out the summer heat in their country houses again. September quarter? Perhaps, but is it worth coming up to town before the amusements start at the beginning of October? December quarter? Well, of course bills are always paid in full at the end of the year. If one remembers. After all, it’s only the tradesman.
I’d be starving by December. I had hardly enough in my pockets to get to the end of the month. Damn it, what was I going to do?
I came to the street that led into that most genteel of areas, Caroline Square, and paused to glance in. Tall elegant terraces of townhouses surrounded a central garden where trees reached bare branches to the sky. The events before Christmas had been intimately tied up with one of the houses in that square – the house in the far corner – and I had not been back there since.
It was not only the memory of murder that haunted my sleep, but the recollection of a greater mystery. In Caroline Square I had caught a glimpse of another world, lying next to our own, a world very like ours, yet in some particulars unlike. There were no spirits in that world, for instance, but there were our own counterparts, sometimes identical, sometimes subtly different; I had met my own self there. Someone had likened these worlds to the pages of a book, lying next to each other but entirely separate. Yet it is possible, for those who know how, to step directly from one world to another.
It seemed I had this entirely unwanted ability. And I had nearly died as a result.
I took one last look and moved on. The memories unnerved me still.
The stuffy warmth of the Assembly Rooms settled round me as soon as I closed the door on the wind and the rain. God knew how many fires must have been burning in the building. The gentlemen who were meeting here today were all men of substance who could afford the expense: gentlemen with coal on their estates, ships in the river, stocks and shares in their banks. Men who knew themselves to be much better than me, without knowing very much about me.
The Steward of the Rooms greeted me with a face down which rivulets of sweat ran. “They’re upstairs, Mr Patterson,” he said. “In the small room.”
Rain stained the windows and cast patterns on the stairs as I climbed. At the top of the first flight, a door stood open on to the narrow gallery where the band played for dances; beyond and below stretched the elegant assembly room itself with its marbled columns and sparkling chandeliers.
I paused to glance down; the chandeliers were devoid of candles and looked stunted and forlorn. Barely a week since the last concert and the last dancing assembly, and the floor was already dusty. Not until June would it be polished up again, and new candles put in the chandeliers and the doors opened for the dancing assemblies in Race Week. Half a guinea every night of the week for the lucky few musicians hired – no more than eight and sometimes less. There are eleven professional musicians in the town so we are always squabbling over the places. I shall argue as much as the rest of them, with as little dignity; lack of money changes a man’s character.
Up another flight of stairs. The door to a second room stood open. A polished table gleamed like water in the light of dozens of candles augmenting the poor daylight; red wine glinted in crystal glasses. The gentlemen at the table had not noticed me yet so I had leisure to stare at them. The twelve Gentlemen Directors of the concerts. Well-bred gentry who had never had to do more work than to scan a page of accounts now and then, or wealthy tradesmen who could employ others to do their work. Twelve gentlemen who knew their worth, from Mr Jenison, at the head of the table and of an ancient lineage, to Mr Sanderson, the clockmaker, and Mr Griffiths, the brewer, at the foot of the table.
Oh, and Claudius Heron, another of the wealthy gentry, who was leaning back in his seat with one hand outstretched to finger the stem of his wineglass. Heron had shared that unsettling experience with me before Christmas though we never mentioned it. He was the only one to notice my arrival and turned his head to regard me with a perfectly neutral expression. No pleasure or dismay in it, just the slightest quirk of an eyebrow. That’s when I knew there was trouble brewing.
“Ah, Patterson,” Jenison said, deigning to notice me. “This is Patterson, our harpsichordist,” he explained to the gentleman on his left, a newcomer to the group. I tasted the bitter tang of resentment. I was a harpsichordist, true, but in the last season of concerts I had been their musical director too, which was musically and financially more rewarding. Why did Jenison not use that term?
“As you know, Patterson,” Jenison said, “we have met today to peruse the accounts of the last year’s winter subscription concerts, and to consider the matter of the Race Week’s entertainments, and indeed next year’s concerts too.”
Nobody around the table was meeting my gaze. My feeling of alarm intensified. What the devil had they decided?
“I was under the impression, sir,” I said carefully, “that the concerts would run in much the same manner as this last year.”
“Indeed. With – um – one or two minor alterations.” Good God, was the man embarrassed? No one was coming to his aid; the other gentlemen appeared greatly interested in the antique table at which they sat. Claudius Heron regarded Jenison steadfastly.
“Twenty-one concerts, of course. At weekly intervals.”
I maintained a grim silence. The gentlemen were full of fine plans and would never listen to reason. It’s all very well to put on a concert every week, but you won’t get the audience to turn out every week, particularly in cold weather. In any case, for two weeks out of four, the moon will be new and only a fool travels in the country at night without a full moon – you might as well send out an invitation to robbers.
“One guinea subscription for the entire series,” Jenison said. “Or, for those who prefer to buy on the night – three shillings a ticket.”
I couldn’t help it; my voice rose incredulously: “Three shillings!”
Jenison looked up sharply. “You have an objection, Patterson?”
“Not at all, sir.” All I could do was practise a little guile and hope to persuade them to reconsider their plans. “I know,” I said with care, “that your intention – and that of the gentlemen here present – is to make the concerts as good as any in the country.” I nodded respectfully round the table. “Better even than in London.”
