The Ladder Dancer (34 page)

Mrs Annabella stopped in baffled fury. Heron took hold of her wrist. ‘Time to go.’

She looked at him outraged. ‘How dare you! Unhand me!’

‘Oi,’ Kate said. ‘You do as you’re told.’

We let Nightingale rave about Mrs Annabella’s being a madwoman. I gave him some money for the damage to the window and the rug, and got out a shilling or two to give to the servants who ran in from the kitchen passageway. ‘Mr Patterson, sir,’ Nightingale said, fingering the sovereigns I’d given him. ‘You’re a gentleman.’

Heron and I exchanged glances. ‘I’d be grateful, sir,’ I murmured, ‘if you’d say nothing of this to anyone. The family . . .’

‘Don’t want it known she’s mad, eh?’ In his relief, Nightingale positively glowed with good humour. He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Rest assured, sir, I shall be dumb. Not a word shall pass these lips.’

‘Rogue!’ Mrs Annnabella said, in a tremulous voice. ‘You shall not escape, sir. Your miraculous recovery will not help you for long.’

‘Miraculous recovery?’ he said, wavering.

I gave him another shilling or two. ‘Buy yourself more beer, Mr Nightingale, and sleep well.’

His face lit up.

‘And,’ I added, ‘a long life to you.’

Forty-Six

Fine clothes are an ornament, not the substance, of man.

[
A Gentleman’s Companion
, October 1734]

In the middle of the next week, I went back to the Fleece. As I came under its arch, I saw a private coach being loaded, half a dozen children dashing about excitedly. Spirits looked on with good-humoured and voluble interest as a middle-aged man anxiously watched his boxes being stowed on the roof. The man was curt with the servants, obviously used to being obeyed; by the look of him, he had a few guineas to spare.

He glanced round as he heard me walk into the yard behind him, looked for a moment, then nodded. ‘Good day, sir.’

Sir
. I nodded back. What a difference a new coat and breeches made. In the eyes of the world, at least. Nightingale had summed me up by my frayed cuffs and was over-familiar. This man was respectful to my new expensive coat.

Esther, still in her nightgown and sipping hot chocolate in bed, had made me turn round several times for her approval. ‘Very fine, Charles! Mr Watson is an excellent tailor.’

‘I agree,’ I said, sitting on the edge of the bed and bending to kiss her forehead. ‘So I’ve ordered three more coats.’

She stared at me in amazement. ‘
Three
?’

‘Don’t you approve?’

‘Well yes—’

‘But?’

‘They are not
all
brown and green, I hope?’

I laughed. ‘I allowed him to persuade me to a dark plum colour, on Hugh’s recommendation, and a buff-coloured coat, on Heron’s. Esther . . .’

‘I agree entirely,’ she said promptly. ‘Whatever it is you propose to buy next, I concur. And can I order those seven shirts now?’

‘I thought you would have done so already. The provision of linen is after all the housewife’s duty.’

She sighed. ‘I was intent upon taking things slowly, getting your agreement.’

I winced. ‘Have I been so unreasonable about it all?’

She cocked her head on one side. Her hair was loose and fell about her shoulders like sunshine, trailing fine strands across her shoulders. I ran my fingers through it. She smiled and kissed the palm of my hand. ‘Yes, very unreasonable.’

‘I was wondering,’ I said, accepting this rebuke meekly, ‘if we shouldn’t spend some time this afternoon going through the estate records.’

She stared then said hurriedly, ‘Yes, yes indeed!’

‘On condition,’ I said, ‘that if we disagree about anything, your opinion prevails.’

She raised her eyes to heaven – or the roof of the bed, at any rate.

‘Charles, you will never be master in your own household if you behave like this! Yours must be the last word – they are your estates, since we married.’

‘I will never be master in my own household,’ I retorted, ‘if I don’t acknowledge what a superior wife I have, who knows more about estate management than I ever will.’

‘Flatterer,’ she murmured.

‘They’re your properties, Esther, and you’re the most fit to manage them. But I’ll do my best to help.’

She thought about it for a moment. ‘If that is the way you want it, so be it.’

‘I want peace in the household,’ I said. ‘And neither of us will have that if I have sole management of those estates. I’d lose every penny of them, you’d be hard put to keep them from going to rack and ruin.’

She laughed. ‘Ridiculous!’

I caught my breath. I loved the way the skin around her eyes crinkled as she laughed, the way her eyes lit up, the way she tilted her head back and showed me the long line of her throat . . .

‘I must be off to the Fleece,’ I said, sighing. ‘Hugh will be there already and getting impatient.’

‘And I must deal with Kate,’ she agreed. ‘Although I do not have the least idea what we are going to do with her.’

I bent to kiss her again, on the lips this time, contenting myself with a mere peck because I knew that if I indulged myself, I’d never get away. She said, provocatively, ‘How soon do you think you will be back? Shall I trouble myself to get up?’

I grimaced. ‘I have to see Heron afterwards too.’

She sighed. ‘Then I will see you tonight. Charles—’

I turned back.

‘What changed your mind? About the estates?’

‘Mrs Annabella,’ I said. ‘We had certain – ideas – in common.’

‘Nonsense!’ she said, outraged.

I shivered in an unexpected chill as the wind idled through the Fleece’s arch. I suspected we were in for a hard winter. Hugh came up behind me, peering over my shoulder at the private coach without a great deal of interest. He was in his favourite blue and the sling was very white against the darkness of his coat.

‘The coffee house rumours,’ he said, without preamble, ‘are that Mrs Annabella has gone quite mad with grief and been packed off to the countryside for her health.’

‘The rumours wouldn’t be far wrong,’ I said. The ostlers were leading out a matched pair of black geldings.

‘Is she going to be safe there?’ Hugh asked. ‘Devil take it, Charles! The last thing we want is her breaking out and hotfooting it back to town with her embroidery scissors!’

‘I’ve seen the two – er –
companions
Jenison has given her.’

‘Hefty, were they?’

‘Fine figures of women,’ I said.

‘And Ridley?’

‘I’m meeting Heron in Nellie’s coffee house after we’re finished here. Messages have been sent to his father in Narva though God knows when we’ll hear back. But I’m not going to let it rest, Hugh. That boy killed a child and ought to pay some penalty for it. At the very least he should be brought to realize the enormity of what he did.’

‘You always did hope for the impossible,’ Hugh said.

We walked round the edge of the chaos, ducked into the passageway that led to the Fleece’s kitchens. Mally was bearing a huge pie along the passageway and stopped to glare at me. Then her gaze drifted over my shoulder and her smile broadened invitingly. I glanced round to find Hugh grinning back.

‘That arm hamper you much?’ she asked, nodding at his sling.

‘Not a bit of it.’

She leant closer as she passed. ‘You could prove that to me. Tonight?’

‘Hugh,’ I said wearily.

He grinned. ‘You’re becoming a staid married man, Charles!’

We went up the stairs off the kitchen passageway, and stood on the threshold of what had been Nightingale’s room, looking at the stripped bed, the clothes tossed on to the trunk.

‘There was a good turnout for the funeral,’ Hugh said. ‘He’d have liked that.’

I thought of the Nightingale who’d faced Mrs Annabella in that other world. I’d rather liked him; I wondered if under all the sham and pretence our Nightingale had been similar. ‘I think he’d have much preferred to be at someone else’s funeral.’

‘I wonder why his spirit hasn’t disembodied yet. It’s been three days since he died.’

I couldn’t guess – three days is the general length of time it takes for a spirit to appear but it can take longer. I was, in truth, glad Nightingale’s spirit was not yet here; to turn over his belongings in its presence would not have been a comfortable experience.

Hugh picked up a ruined waistcoat, stiff with blood. ‘What are we supposed to do with all this?’

I began to sort through the paraphernalia of everyday living on the bedside table: a razor, a ring, a few coins. I put Nightingale’s watch amongst them, picked up a thick bundle of letters. ‘The clothes he was wearing when he was stabbed will have to be thrown out. The rest are to be kept until his landlady in London replies to my letter. If there are relatives we’ll send them the trunk; if not, it’ll all go to the poor.’

Hugh was trying to fold clothes one-handedly. I held out the bundle of letters. ‘Here, you go through these. I’ll see to the clothes.’

Hugh sat down on the bed and used a nail to flick up the heavy blob of wax on the first letter. ‘These just look like business matters. Jenison’s letters are here.’ He whistled. ‘Have you any idea what Jenison was proposing to pay him?’

‘London prices. And even then he wasn’t satisfied.’ I tossed aside the blood-ruined clothes, looked down on a trunk that was already neatly packed. ‘Do I need to repack this, do you think?’

Hugh glanced across. ‘There might be more letters there – even a miniature or two – some clue as to his relatives.’

‘True.’ I started lifting clothes from the trunk, trying to disturb them as little as possible. Some of the clothes were very fine; Nightingale had plainly been intent on cutting a figure in the neighbourhood. The colours were all rather too strong for me – there was a particularly bright purple that tried my eyes.

‘There’s a letter here from Durham,’ Hugh said. ‘Unopened. Looks like it came after he was attacked.’ He lifted the wax with a fingernail. ‘Good lord, it’s from Peter Blenkinsop. You know, the fellow who sings through his nose.’ He did a quick, and accurate, imitation.

‘Was Nightingale inviting him to perform?’ What a concert that would have been, I thought.

‘No, it’s in his other capacity, as landlord of the Star and Rummer Inn. Charles,’ Hugh was sounding very puzzled now, ‘it’s a bill – for four nights’ accommodation and the devil of a quantity of beer, wine, spirits. You name it, he drank it. He must have been stupefied the whole time he was there!’

I stared at him. ‘Does it say the nights he stayed in Durham?’

‘Friday night till Monday night.’

‘That fits in with what Mrs Annabella said.’ I leant against the bed post. ‘She told me Nightingale had come up to town several days before he officially arrived on the coach. He was trying to persuade her to keep quiet about their dalliance in London.’

‘He must have led her on quite as much as she suggested, if he felt he had to come up and plead for secrecy.’

‘He must have been here on the Friday, ridden back south to Durham – that wouldn’t have taken him more than an hour – then stayed in Durham four nights until the coach came through. Devil take it, Hugh! I heard one of the women on the coach say to him he’d given her a wonderfully entertaining
end
to the journey. I should have realized then that he couldn’t have come all the way from London on the coach. He caught it in Durham!’

‘There’s another bill attached.’ Hugh struggled with pieces of paper that didn’t wish to be unfolded. ‘For stabling a horse for four days.’

‘He must have ridden up from London. Quickest way.’

‘Blenkinsop says that if Nightingale doesn’t pay his bill by the end of the week the horse will be sold.’

‘Let him sell it,’ I said. ‘It’s the simplest way of getting his money.’ A horse, I thought; Nightingale had come north on a horse to Newcastle, seen Mrs Annabella, ridden south again . . .

I lifted out the folds of clothes. A pocket knife fell into my fingers. A folded newspaper with an advertisement marked.

‘There’s a letter to someone else entirely,’ Hugh said. ‘A man by the name of Richard Crowe.’

‘Crow?’ I stared at him. I’d heard that name before. No, someone had said that Nightingale sang like a crow. Ridley – at that drunken fracas at Jenison’s house.

Hugh started to laugh. ‘You’ll never guess, Charles! His name wasn’t Nightingale at all.’ He waved the letter at me. ‘This is from an old inamorata. She says,
You’d better change your name, Dick, whoever heard of a singer called Crowe?
Charles, are you all right?’

‘Crow,’ I repeated. ‘Richard Crow.’

‘With an “e” on the end.’

‘Cuthbert Ridley,’ I said. ‘Richard Crowe.’

‘What?’

‘That’s the trouble with monograms, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘You never know which way round they are.
CR
or
RC
?’

‘What are you talking about?’

I started digging amongst the clothes left in the trunk. I was barely halfway down and the coats were thick. There was a pair of boots and some shoes, a copy of an almanac, a book of stories of a very unsavoury kind. And something that chinked amongst the folds of a waistcoat. I threw back the folds and coins chinked, louder.

‘He was bound to have cash somewhere,’ Hugh said.

I tucked back the skirts of the waistcoat and there it was. A leather purse with a drawstring fastened securely. And the monogram
R
and
C
intertwined.

The bag was heavy in my hands. Hugh stared. ‘It can’t have been him! Maybe Ridley hid the purse here to implicate him.’

‘Ridley doesn’t have this kind of money. And he wouldn’t part with it if he had.’ I was busy pulling the story I’d built in my mind apart and putting it back together again. ‘Nightingale came up on the Friday to see Mrs Annabella,’ I said. ‘He must have been furious at having to humour her but he had to – if Jenison had found out Nightingale had been leading his sister on, he’d have lost his engagement here. Nightingale would have been angry at even finding himself in that kind of a situation. What would you have done then, Hugh?’