Secret Lament (22 page)

“She has been examined,” I said, “by Gale the barber surgeon, at the request of the constable, Bedwalters.”

Mazzanti made a dismissive gesture. “What do fellows like that know? She was not abused, sir, not in the least.”

Perhaps the natural partiality of a parent could not abide the thought; nothing would move him on the matter. Signora Mazzanti started fussing over the blend of tea; the shop had sent the wrong
one, she had asked specifically for the one she usually had in London. I interrupted. “If she was not abused, why do you suppose she was killed?”

Mazzanti sipped his tea with cold indifference. “I deny your authority to ask me these questions, sir.”

“And I suspect your refusal to answer me,” I retorted, stung. “Sir!”

He sat up, slopping the tea on to the knee of his breeches. “How dare you! Do you have the nerve to accuse me of – of – ”

“Of course not,” Heron said smoothly, annoying me. I had worked hard to get a genuine reaction out of Mazzanti; an angry man would say more than he otherwise might. But Heron went
on, obviously intending to calm him, although his own fingers were tapping irritably on the mantelshelf. “Patterson merely wants to establish what happened and to bring the culprit to justice
– surely an outcome we would all desire?”

“Yes, yes,” Signora Mazzanti said, the tea dish trembling in her hand, darting a little frightened glance at her husband. “We all want that.”

I contemplated the odd emphasis she gave to that sentence. Mazzanti sat back, crossing his legs again and sipping genteelly at the tea. His hand, I noticed, was trembling.

“I repeat, Heron, I have yet to hear a good reason why Mr Patterson is interfering in this matter.”

He turned his cold gaze on me, lifted his head and gave me a condescending sneer. The tea slopped from side to side in the dish. “He was after all the one who found Julia and he has no
convincing explanation of what he was doing there.”

Heron lost his fragile hold on his temper. “Damn it, are you suggesting Patterson killed the girl!”

Signora Mazzanti started to sob. I seized her tea dish as it threatened to spill.

Mazzanti remained unperturbed. “He made advances to Julia.”

“The devil I did!”

“She told us all.”

“I did not!”

“Didn’t she, Ciara?”

Signora Mazzanti wept.

“The idea is preposterous!” Heron snapped.

“I hardly knew her,” I said. How the devil had Mazzanti done this? He had turned the conversation against me. It was all self-defence, clearly. What more could I do but protest my
innocence – aware that the more I protested, the less convincing I sounded? “Is this a distraction, sir? To hide the fact that you neglected your daughter?”

“How dare you!”

“If you had taken better care of her, she would not have been able to slip out of the house unseen.”

“To meet you!” Mazzanti retaliated.

“Devil take it – ” Heron began. I had motioned him to silence before I realised what I was doing; he turned away in annoyance, turned away, gripping the edge of the mantel.

“She didn’t have to be killed,” Signora Mazzanti said with a wavering sob.

“I suppose,” Mazzanti said, “that you were annoyed by her rebuff and forced her.” He was gripping his tea dish so tightly, I was surprised it did not crack.

“I thought you said she was not raped,” I pointed out.

“It didn’t have to come to this,” Signora Mazzanti said, behind her fragment of lace handkerchief. “We were all so happy.”

“Were you trying to persuade her to elope with you, Patterson? Did she change her mind?”

“What are we going to do?” Ciara Mazanti moaned. “We’ve no money, no engagements. How are we going to live?”

“So sordid, Mr Patterson,” Mazzanti said scornfully. “To be running after young girls not old enough to know their own minds. Was it her money? Her future career? Or was it
just lust?”

Heron snarled. “Damn it, I won’t listen to this!”

Mazzanti leapt up, the tea spilling everywhere. Heron crowded in on him, all traces of the gentleman disappearing. Mazzanti shouted; Heron yelled back. Mazzanti grabbed a handful of
Heron’s coat; Heron cocked a fist and struck out. He caught Mazzanti on the chin and the Italian staggered back into the chair, stumbled, went down taking the chair with him in a great
crash.

Ciara Mazzanti wailed in panic. I was trying to clamber over the teatable to separate the two men but only Heron was close enough to grab and I had already insulted him enough. But there was
nothing for it. He was reaching down to seize hold of Mazzanti and was likely to do him real damage. Heron was the younger by a good fifteen years, and he wasn’t half-drunk.

I was reaching across the table when Ciara Mazzanti caught hold of the skirts of my coat. “Don’t! Don’t!” she pleaded. Don’t rescue her husband? Don’t hurt
him? The woman was mad. I pulled free. Mazzanti was tangled in the chair, swearing in English and Italian – the first Italian I had ever heard him use. Heron had one hand entangled in
Mazzanti’s coat.

I seized Heron’s arm. Beneath the brocaded coat, he was icy cold.

“Sir!”

Heron took no notice. “Get up, damn it.”

“He’ll send for the constable,” I hissed in his ear.

Mazzanti was trying to crawl backwards across the floor. The door flew open. Mrs Baker burst in, brandishing a saucepan. I pushed past Heron, managing to pull him away from Mazzanti as I did
so.

“Just an accident,” I said brightly to Mrs Baker. “Signor Mazzanti tripped over the footstool.”

She looked round at the scene: Signora Mazzanti weeping in abandon, Heron standing with his coat disordered and his fists clenched, his lean cheeks red with fury. And Mazzanti squirming across
the floor, swearing as blasphemously as the ruffians who had attacked me.

Heron strode to the door, managing the sketchiest of polite bows to Mrs Baker.

Mazzanti rolled over on to hands and knees, crawled across the floor. I reached for his arm to help him up. He shook me off. Ciara wept on. Mazzanti used the overturned chair to pull himself
upright. He looked at me, tried to draw himself up haughtily, and stumbled across the room in search of brandy.

I took Mrs Baker’s arm and led her from the room. We shut the door on Ciara Mazzanti’s weeping and her husband’s sharp complaints.

“However do folks come to that?” Mrs Baker said, as we stood in the hall; she cradled the saucepan in her arms as if for consolation. “They were children once, hopeful and
pretty and promising. However did they come to this?”

What are a few secrets to a woman? Meat and drink.

[Letter of Sir John Hubert to his brother-in-law, October 1731]

I escaped, feeling fraught and harassed. I have never known how to deal with weeping women. What had I learnt? That they were both turning a blind eye to the truth. Julia had
not been raped, she had not intended to elope, she was a good girl. All this might have been the reaction of grieving parents, who cannot bear to think about what happened to their darling. But
neither of them cared a jot except for their own well-being.
How are we going to live?
Signora Mazzanti had wailed. True, the removal of the one secure wage earner in the house made their
situation unenviable, but I would have liked to have seen a little genuine grief.

I was in sore need of someone to pour balm on my soul – or at least someone I could complain to. I accosted the spirit that clung to the house next door to Mrs Baker’s and asked it
if it could find Hugh Demsey. There was a moment’s silence, presumably while the spirit passed the message on.

“Such a coming and going,” it said happily. “Though I could do with a little less of that psalm fellow.”

“Proctor?”

“Stands outside here singing all the day. Last night, for instance. In a right state, he was. Told him to go home but he said he was keeping vigil.”

The day was bidding to become as hot as any before it; I retreated to the thin strip of shade at the edge of the street.

“All night,” the spirit said in amazement. “At least when I was living, I only had to go to church on Sundays. And that other fellow too.”

“Which one?”

“Don’t know his name. Never seen him before. Tall, dark, looks like he’s not slept much.”

Not much of a description to go on; at a pinch, it could have fitted both Philip Ord and Ned Reynolds, who were very different men in looks.

“What did he do?”

“Stare. Just stare. Stare, stare, stare.” The spirit slid down the water pipe to confide in me; he was a bright excited gleam. “Like a man possessed. Eyes popping out of his
head.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Never a word.”

“Did you see him here before the girl died?”

The spirit considered. “No, no, I can’t say I did.”

A sightseer then? Or –

“Not Bedwalters the constable?” I suggested.

The spirit sniggered. “I know him. He’s plump – eats too much.”

I couldn’t remember seeing Bedwalters eat at all. “Have you found Hugh Demsey yet?”

“Oh Lord, yes, sir. Ages ago. He’s looking for you as a matter of fact. Wants a chat. He’s gone to the theatre in Mr Usher’s timber yard.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And if you ever find out who the unknown man was – ”

“I’ll send a message to you straight away,” the spirit agreed, and I knew by his excited tone that he indeed would.

I walked up the Side towards the timber yard at the top. If anything, the spirit’s sketchy description sounded most like Corelli, though he would probably be at sea by now. But I wondered
again why he had fled at all; any untoward activity could surely have been covered by the story he had given Bedwalters about spies. What had he really been doing?

The timber yard gates stood open and a heavily laden cart was manoeuvring through the gap. I stood back to let the men work, fanning my hand across my face to create a cool breeze. I could hear
the regular scrape scrape of saws, and the thud of hammering. Men called encouragement to the cart driver; two very young boys sat on top of the tree trunks on the cart, squealing with glee.

The cart got through at last and I squeezed past, and walked across the busy yard towards the theatre. The double doors to the theatre were closed. Or rather one stood just ajar – a bad
sign, for if a rehearsal was going on, surely the doors would have been wide open to let in the air. There was no sign of Hugh.

I was looking about me as I approached the doors, remembering the time in this yard when I had almost fallen at the feet of Julia Mazzanti – the other Julia, in the world that ran
alongside our own. Then the sun went in and I felt rain on the back of my hand. Darkness gathered with extraordinary rapidity. I glanced up. Lowering clouds scudded across the sky; wind caught at
my coat tails and tore the clouds apart to reveal the moon, a thin unhelpful sliver of light.

The day flickered out of existence and it was full night. I had stepped through again to that other world.

I must have brought this on myself by thinking of that other, still living, Julia. I stood, disconcerted, alarmed that a stray thought could have such an effect. Stars speckled the night sky
above me, were covered by the fast-moving clouds; a flurry of rain splattered against my face, driven by the wind. Well, I was here now; I must be careful and learn as much as I could.

One thing was obvious. The worlds were not moving at the same speed. I had stepped from mid-morning to full night and from a hot heavy June to a chill wet – well, the temperature suggested
perhaps October.

The rain splashed on my shoulders and dampened my hair. I ran to the shelter of the theatre, jerked open the door and hurried in.

And saw in the darkened, unlit theatre, two figures embracing.

They were twenty or thirty feet away, mere shadows in the darkness, and all I could tell from the outline of their clothes was that they were man and woman. The woman was resisting the embrace,
pushing at the man, turning her head to avoid his kiss, trying to wriggle out of his hold.

I coughed, loudly.

They broke apart. The woman swung away from the man and came towards me, head held proudly high. From that stance alone, I recognised Julia Mazzanti. The man turned abruptly away. I stared hard
as he stalked off into the darkness but in seconds he was a mere hint of movement. I had not the slightest idea who he was.

Julia Mazzanti came to a halt in front of me. Her face was just touched by the light of a guttering lantern burning somewhere behind me, outside the theatre. Her hair, slightly disordered,
gleamed, as did the yellow ribbons wound through it. Her expression was defiant. I realised with a shock just how much sympathy I felt for her; she was a woman besieged but fighting back, and I
admired that greatly.

Her gaze flickered over my clothes in distinct amusement again but she spoke cordially. “Good evening, Mr Patterson. Were you looking for me?”

“I’m looking for the truth,” I said, then regretted my honesty. How could I explain what I sought without telling her that in my world her counterpart lay dead?

“Impossible,” she said, with a gleam of bitterness. “Truth is always buried very deeply, Mr Patterson. She paused, then said with some determination, “I wonder, have you
seen Mr Proctor, sir?”

“The psalm teacher? No.” I wondered if in this world Proctor was as meek and uncertain as he was in mine. “Did you want him for any particular reason?”

“Tuition,” she said, quickly. “He is giving me some advice on my singing.”

Proctor is an excellent singing teacher. What would the Proctor of my world not have given to have Julia as a pupil? I reminded myself again that this was a different world from my own, and a
different Proctor – he would bear a substantial resemblance to the man I knew, but there might well be pertinent differences. Perhaps here he was more decisive, less meek, less – I
hesitated, but I could not deny it – Proctor was a frightened man; he feared the world, and his religion, real though it was, was a defence against that world.

Ciara Mazzanti turned away from what she feared, Ned ran away from it, Proctor took refuge in God. I thought of Esther and what she was asking of me. Was that not what I was doing too? Running
away? Pretending that if I ignored the situation it would go away? Was I as timid and fearful as the others whom I despised for their timidity?