The Ladder Dancer (35 page)

‘Get drunk.’

‘Exactly. He was a stranger in the town and Jenison had recommended the George to him. I wager he went there, Hugh – the stable boy saw someone that night who matched his description. Or the description of his horse, at any rate. That’s why he refused Jenison’s offer of rooms there – they’d have recognized him, and he didn’t want it to be known he’d been in the town before he was supposed to be. The stable boy gave him directions to the bridge; he was riding south to Durham to wait for the coach there. But he went the wrong way, probably got lost. Which would have made him even more angry. And when he ended up on the Key, being Nightingale, he had one more urgent need to satisfy.’

‘The whores.’

‘But he was too drunk to perform properly – which worsened his temper yet further. He rode off without caring who or what was in his way – and knocked the woman into the river. He may never even have realized what he’d done. He was too preoccupied with thoughts of Mrs Annabella.’

Hugh sighed. ‘He was playing a dangerous game.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘a fatal one.’ I dropped the purse back into the trunk. ‘But he should have known. He spent all his life dancing on ladders, after all. He must have fallen off more than once.’

A silence.

‘So Ridley’s innocent after all,’ Hugh said.

I grimaced. ‘He didn’t precipitate the child into the river, certainly. But innocent, no. Ridley’s not dancing on ladders, Hugh – he’s on the edge of a precipice.’ I tossed the clothes back into the trunk. ‘Let’s throw all this in together and leave it for Jenison to deal with. I’m sick of it all. I just want to get home.’

Hugh gathered up the bits and pieces from the table and tossed them on top of the clothes, together with the letters. I looked at the heavy bag in my hands, the intertwined initials.

I buried it deep in the pile of clothes and turned my back.

Every effort has been made to be geographically accurate in a depiction of Charles Patterson’s Newcastle. In the 1730s, Newcastle upon Tyne was a town of around 16,000 people, hemmed in by old walls, and centred on the Quay where ships moored to carry away the coal and glass on which the town depended. The single bridge across the Tyne, linking Newcastle with its southern neighbour, Gateshead, was lined with houses and shops, a chapel and even a small prison; from the Quay, the streets climbed the hills to the more genteel, and cleaner, areas around Westgate and Northumberland Street. Daniel Defoe liked the place when he visited in 1720, but remarked unfavourably on the fogs and the smells that came drifting up the river. Places such as Westgate, High Bridge, the Sandhill and the Side did (and still do) all exist, although I have added a few alleys here and there to enable Patterson and his friends to take short cuts where necessary, and invented a stylish location for Esther’s house, Caroline Square.

Musically, Charles Patterson lives in an atmosphere that the residents of Newcastle in the 1730s would have recognized instantly. The town had one of the most active musical scenes in England, after London, Bath and Oxford. From 1735, inhabitants could hear music in a weekly series of winter concerts (and occasionally during the summer too), listen to music in church (plain simple music if you went to St Nicholas, much more elaborate and ‘popular’ music at All Hallows), attend the dancing assemblies in winter, and listen to the fiddlers, pipers and ballad singers in the street. Nationally - and internationally - famous soloists often visited, but sadly there is no evidence to support the story that the most celebrated musician of the period, Mr George Frideric Handel, ever visited Newcastle.

A number of real people fleetingly appear in Charles Patterson’s world. Solomon Strolger, organist of All Hallows for fifty-three years, is one, as is another organist, James Hesletine of Durham Cathedral. Thomas Mountier, the bass singer in
Broken Harmony
, was a singing man at the Cathedral for a short while until drink intervened. The Jenisons and Ords were real families with a particular interest in music but the specific individuals who appear in these books are fictional.

Strange though it may seem, ladder dancers also existed in real life; occasionally advertisements for such acts appear in London newspapers. None, however, ever seem to have found their way north to Newcastle. In addition, a ‘Signor Rossignol’ (an Italian ‘Mr Nightingale’ from Naples) enjoyed enormous popularity in the second half of the century, ‘singing’ concertos, symphonies and other pieces, as well as imitating birdsong, but nevertheless died penniless and forgotten in Yorkshire.

Charles Patterson is entirely fictional, but the difficulties he finds in making a living would have been entirely familiar to musicians of the time. If he has an
alter ego
, it would be Charles Avison, a Newcastle-born musician and composer who was well known in his time and who dragged himself up by his own efforts from obscurity to wealth and respect, even being invited by local gentry to dine at their tables. If Patterson’s career follows the same path, he will be extremely happy.