Chords and Discords (31 page)

“But you’ll be away longer?”

“No point in going all that way for a few days! My mother hasn’t seen the two youngest at all, you know. Must give her a few weeks to get to know them. Two months at least.” He
winked at me. “Don’t tell the churchwardens, though.” He poked me in the arm. “Which means I am going to need a deputy.”

I stared at him blankly.

“ To fill in while I’m away,” he pressed, “and to play one or two Sundays after I’ve got back. Will you consider the position?”

I was so startled by the unexpected offer that I could say nothing.

“Nothing plain, mind,” he said, severely. “Good strong tunes and ornaments in your voluntaries, and a nice measure in your psalm tunes. I can’t stand all these fellows
who insist on just playing a chord or two. What kind of music’s that?”

I remembered Strolger’s over-elaborate, over-exuberant playing. Not my taste at all. Well, if he wasn’t here, he couldn’t know what I played. “What salary?” I
said.

We haggled over the price and settled finally on less than I would have liked but more than he wanted to give me. I came out of All Hallows a deputy organist, halfway to one of my chief
ambitions – and felt no joy in it.

I had one thing left to do.

There are few times when the town is completely silent, so it seemed like fate, or the will of God, when I walked up on to the Tyne Bridge and found all the shops shuttered,
the roadway deserted. Lanterns burned above two shops, but beyond the bridge the hill of Gateshead was almost completely dark under a star-flecked sky. Long after midnight, I had walked down the
Side from the Fleshmarket, down past St Nicholas’s church, down on to the Sandhill. Past the ruined remnants of the town wall and on to the Key. On to the bridge.

My footsteps echoed.

In the darkness, lit only by the waning moon, it was difficult to spot the blue stones that marked the centre of the bridge, or the dark gleam that was Edward Bairstowe. I leant against the
bridge parapet and peered over. The water below was dark as Hades in the shadow of the bridge; only a glimmer or two of light, shining from a moored ship on to the gently rippling water, showed
that there was anything there at all.

Bairstowe was uneasy. He said: “Who’s that? Who’s there?”

“Patterson.”

“Oh, you,” he said, with some obvious relief. “A fine fuss you’ve been making. I’ve heard what happened in the church.”

Curious to know how good his information was, I encouraged him to talk. “About your sister-in-law’s death?”

He was gleeful now. “I must thank you for that, sir.”

“Thank Holloway. He shot her.”

“So I heard, so I heard.”

He must have heard the true story from his spirit friends, for the tale among the living was still that the maid was to blame. I looked out along the river, at the few faint lights in the
brothels and taverns on the Keyside, at the glimmer of house lights on the south bank of the river amongst the outliers of Gateshead, and wondered if I could ever look upon it the same way again.
There were spirits, a whole world of spirits, out there – I had always known that, but I had thought them the relics of friends and even family, acquaintances with whom I could pass a
greeting, friends to linger in conversation with.

But now, could I trust any of them? Would I not always be wondering if allegiances change with death, and the living become the
other
, and the community is with the dead? Or is it merely
that Edward Bairstowe and his friends, and the lowest sorts in the town, who have always been the lost, ready to fight the entire world for envy, still feel the same after death and still wage
their old battles?

“Odd you should regret Mary Bairstowe’s death so little,” I said, feeling the cold gritty stone beneath my fingers. “You were thick as thieves once, weren’t
you?”

He said, in a tone that spat anger, “I loved her. Oh, none of what you’re thinking, sir! There was nothing carnal between us. She wasn’t a woman to lust after – she was
one to talk with and scheme with and plan with. God, what a mind she had on her! And that fool brother of mine never knew what she was really like.”

“William is a remarkably unobservant man,” I agreed. “He never guessed you were plotting against him, that night on the bridge. He never knew he was in danger until those notes
started coming.”

“She had to write those,” Edward Bairstowe said. “Or get the maid to do it, at any rate. Else there would be no scapegoat when he died. She knew he’d tell someone –
she was counting on it. But she thought he’d complain to one of the whores at the brothel. She never thought he’d have the sense to ask you to look into it.” His voice thickened.
“I can still appreciate her good qualities, sir. She was unique amongst women.”

“I agree,” I said dryly.

“But I underestimated her,” he said almost conversationally. “I thought she and I were plotting against William, but she was plotting against the pair of us. She wanted all the
money for herself. Well, I can’t blame her. I should have thought of it myself.” He laughed softly. “That doesn’t mean I forgive her, sir. I forgive no one who crosses me.
What’s that?”

Something in my pocket had chinked against the bridge parapet.

“You didn’t expect me to come so late without protection?” I said. “Not after your recent exploits.”

“Ah,” he said. “Believe me, sir, I do regret those attacks on you by my dear departed friends.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “But you will.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

I eased myself to the ground with my back to the parapet. “You’ll forgive me if I light my lantern. It’s damnably dark here, not to mention chill.” The houses on the
other side of the bridge hid the moon which was beginning to sink down the sky; we were in almost total darkness here. “What I cannot conceive, sir,” I mused, “is what profit you
got out of this business.” I dragged the tinderbox from my pocket, struggled to strike the flint. “Mary Bairstowe and the maid were off to London to spend the fruits of their plotting;
Holloway would have lingered long enough to sell the land and then followed with the money. But apart from any brief enjoyment of my bumps and bruises, I cannot see what you get from the
matter.”

“Mary Bairstowe’s death,” he reminded me.

“Yes, but that was none of your doing. It was a tragic accident.” In the light of the lantern, I could see the stone now, the sheen on it, the darkness of the faintly luminescent
slime.

“Alas, sir. The habit of plotting is not so eagerly set aside.”

“Don’t insult me,” I said. “I refuse to believe you did it all merely out of mischief. Shall I tell you what I think?”

“Pray do,” he said cordially. “I am enjoying this chat, Patterson. I get to talk so little, to the living, at least.”

“I think you have been brooding all this while on one hope.”

“Revenge,” he said, without hesitation. “On William, on Mary, on the entire world. Do you know what it is like to be confined here?”

I almost flinched at the venom in his voice.

“You have already played that tune.”

“William thwarted me, that night on the bridge. If he hadn’t danced back out of the way of the knife, I’d never have slipped. And it was an accident, not
self-destruction!”

I was astonished that he could still maintain that story, in the face of the evidence. “One cannot argue with death,” I said. “Death always knows the truth.”

“No!” he said vehemently. “No!”

“I should have looked closer at that column in the
Courant
when I first read it,” I said. “But I rectified my omission; I went back and looked again. Claudius Heron
first told me the story of an elderly woman frightened to death in an attack by spirits. It was a matter of days before your own death, was it not?”

He was silent.

“Heron told me there were bystanders who stood by laughing, not even attempting to help the woman. I thought he could not be right, that he was merely displaying a jaundiced view of human
nature. But the paper confirmed his story. In fact, according to the
Courant
, there were those who even gave the spirits a helping hand, by kicking the elderly woman as she lay on the
ground. And there were moves to arrest those bystanders and charge them.”

He said nothing. I pressed: “Would I be wrong in guessing you were one of those bystanders, sir?”

“Guess what you like,” he snapped.

“Mary Bairstowe told you that you had been recognised, did she not? That’s why you were so eager to be rid of William that particular night. Such an inhospitable night for any plot
of that sort, in the rain and the sleet and the freezing cold. But you feared arrest and were desperate to get away from the town. It was that night or none. What were you going to do? Take what
money William had on him and ride off to London, trusting Mary to sell the land and send you your share of the money?”

He swore at me.

“But at the very moment you went to attack your brother,” I continued, “what did Mary Bairstowe do? Did she shout out that the constable was on the way, or the mob? And in fear
of facing the hangman’s noose, you panicked, despaired, took your own escape. You were always a coward, were you not? Attacking a poor woman lying on the ground is hardly the act of a
courageous man.”

I knew he was never going to admit the truth but I did not particularly care. “And so,” I went on, “to the matter of your brother and his seizure.”

“The hand of God struck him down,” he snapped.

The moon had all but disappeared now. In the thin light of the shielded lantern, the spirit seemed unsettled, sliding from one end of his stone to the other. I felt a stab of hard, vicious
pleasure at his unease. After all the pain he had caused other people it was time he suffered a little himself.

“It was my understanding,” I said, “that until this business the only spirit in a church in this town was the spirit in the porch of St Nicholas. But Solomon Strolger put me
right about the fellow in the organ loft of All Hallows. You have heard of him?”

“One hears of so many people – ”

“I asked around after him. One of the whores tells me he was a man called Jem.” The spirit was silent, shimmering. “He was often seen with you, I understand. Died four years
ago.”

“You cannot hold me to blame for that,” he said, resentfully. “I was dead a year myself.”

“Great friends, I’m told you were. He was a schoolmaster with expensive tastes and few scruples as to what he did to pay for them. He and some friends went out one night to steal the
lead organ pipes at All Hallows, but had a falling out. He fell, and died of his injuries.”

“I am wrung with pity,” he said. He had never so much reminded me of his brother.

I eased my back against the hard stone of the bridge parapet. “He at least does not forget his friends. He sent you a message to say that your brother had come to mend the organ at last,
after all those years. And quite apart from wanting to make sure he didn’t find the deed, you couldn’t resist a last plot for revenge.”

“This is vastly entertaining, sir,” he said, sounding as if he was trying to stifle a yawn. “I am so glad I asked you to come and keep me company. I wouldn’t have missed
this for the world.” But the spirit was still shifting restlessly across the top of the stone.

“I know only too well how spirits can buffet,” I said reflectively, “and you told Jem not to hold back.”

“Really, Patterson, such imaginings!”

I shivered. A chill night breeze was finding its way through my clothes. I was ready to finish this business.

“Of course if William had been hale and hearty it would hardly have mattered. He would have had a few uncomfortable moments and another fright like the one he had in the chare a week or
two ago. But that first attack was meant only to scare him. This one was much more serious.”

He started to protest; I overrode him ruthlessly. “Come, sir, your own father died of a similar attack in the prime of life. Choleric men often suffer from such ailments. And you had the
example of that elderly woman in front of you. To put it plainly, sir, you told Jem to attack your brother and to continue until William succumbed and died.”

“Prove it!” he snarled.

“And all within reach of that deed, which you had hidden there, thinking he’d never go near the place because of his enmity with Strolger. William even handled the pipe and set it on
its soundboard. But he didn’t do the job properly – he didn’t attempt to tune or voice the pipe or to test it by playing. If he had he would certainly have known something
amiss.”

“Prove it! Prove it! Prove it!” He sneered. “You can’t.”

The sheen was almost sparkling now; it was gratifying to know I agitated him so much.

“I can’t prove it,” I admitted. “But I don’t need to.”

He clearly sensed me shifting. “What are you doing? Damn it, Patterson!”

I pulled from my pocket a chisel, taken from William Bairstowe’s own toolkit – I had thought that a fine thing, a fitting gesture. When I pushed it into the earth around the stone,
the ground resisted slightly, then gave way. I worked round the stone, easing the cobble. I had already remarked that it was loose, and it was soon unsteady in its hole.

“Damn it, Patterson. What are you doing?”

“You wanted revenge,” I said. “And so do I. For the attacks on me, on my friends, on the woman I love, and yes, even on your brother who is, apart from you, just about the most
objectionable man I ever met. But most of all, sir – ” The stone came fully loose and I used the chisel to lever it out of the hole. “Most of all, I want justice.”

“No!”

The touch of the stone was unpleasant on my hands – I could feel the chill emanating from the spirit. I tried to cup the stone on my palm, to touch only the grimy healthy underside of it,
but it was a large cobble and heavy, and my fingers touched grease and slime. I shivered and almost dropped it.

“As I told a friend, it is difficult to have justice on a spirit. One cannot call out the constable to clap it in chains in Newgate.”