Imogen Robertson - Anatomy of Murder

“How. .” Harriet paused to pluck the right word out of the air “. . oddly pathetic.”

Harwood tilted back his chair, running his eyes over the gilt and splendor of the King’s Box. It was twice the size of the other private boxes, though the Prince’s Box at the other side of the stage was also generous, and had a little divan at its rear. All the boxes were ornate, but here everything was just a little more. The velvet draperies had a few more folds, the chairs a little more room for gilded wreaths, the upholstery a little more plush. Harriet found herself thinking that where she sat this afternoon, a king would sit in the evening. It gave her a little cold thrill of connection.

“Indeed,” Harwood went on, “I know Fitzraven was not here for the music. He obviously made some useful connections in Italy. He told me he had received a letter of introduction from someone-he did not say from whom-to Lord Carmichael’s house, for instance, and had been invited back to attend that gentleman more than once. He did not go there for love of art. Lord Carmichael has little to recommend him, I believe, other than his wealth.”

“Lord Carmichael?” Crowther said. Harriet was impressed with how much disdain Crowther could invest only two words. She wondered briefly if there might be some sort of mathematical formula for it. Perhaps she should suggest it to her new acquaintances at the Royal Society.

Harwood smiled at the ceiling. “I see you know Lord Carmichael, Mr. Crowther.”

“I knew the gentleman in my youth. A man I would go some way to avoid. It seems Mr. Fitzraven was not very particular in his choice of friends.” Harriet looked at Crowther with surprise. He seldom spoke with such passion about anything he had not recently dissected.

“I would agree,” Harwood replied evenly. “However, he is a peer, very rich, and since making his acquaintance Fitzraven reveled in the connection.” He let the queen’s chair tip back onto four legs and turned with a slight smile to Harriet. “I say this so you do not mistake Fitzraven’s devotion to this place,” a casual wave of his hand took in performers, music, audience, waves of gilt, “for a devotion to art or music. He was one of those strange hollow men. I do not think he existed in his own self at all. He was all light reflected. Sometimes from us here, sometimes from a creeping acquaintance with the great and good.”

Harriet rested her chin on the palm of her hand. “Can you tell us, sir, what were Fitzraven’s last duties for this place?”

Harwood considered. “I should imagine preparing the parts for the duet you have just heard. He readied them on Wednesday for its first rehearsal on Thursday morning.”

Crowther turned toward the manager and said very evenly, “Mr. Harwood, are you sure you have been quite frank with us about the nature of Mr. Fitzraven’s duties here?”

Winter Harwood met his look, and said with a polite inclination of the head, “Of course, Mr. Crowther.”

Jocasta was almost back at her own door again, and walking so quick that Boyo had a job of it to keep up with her, when she came to a sudden halt. He stubbed his nose on her ankle and yelped.

“I don’t want to speak of it now, Boyo,” Jocasta said. “I’m too ruffled and fretted.” She stayed where she was, though, the people passing on the pavement occasionally turning to give her a quick, sidelong stare, then moving on. She sighed and thrust her hand into another pocket under her skirts, pulling out a handful of dirty coins.

“All right then, Boyo. I will if it’ll keep you quiet. Though we must work in the morning if you want meat this week.”

Boyo smacked his lips and Jocasta turned again and made her way back toward the chophouse, jingling her money.

The investment in transporting Isabella and Manzerotti from Italy had, it seemed, been justified. For an evening so early in the season the crowd that night at His Majesty’s was remarkable. The Hay Market was almost completely blocked with carriages from five o’clock. The torches outside the Opera House doors flared and roared, casting folding shadows up the brickwork. The scrum that thundered for entrance into the pit and stalls extended far along the pavements toward Northumberland Palace, and up and down its lengths went a dozen boys and girls selling copies of the libretto for a shilling and nuts for a penny. Two other children with piles of books in their arms like schoolboys late for the bell scurried between the carriages, handing more copies of librettos through the windows. Shillings were pulled from silk purses by long, gloved fingers and dropped into the boys’ waiting palms. A couple of street singers, one turning the wheel on the hurdy-gurdy around her neck, sang the crowd songs from the previous season above the general noise and put out their hands for tribute. A man with a brazier had set up shop roasting chestnuts beside them and the air filled with the sweetness of the black papery skins.

Among the general noise and excitement the Londoners were getting on with the serious business of looking at each other, till, as the bells of Westminster rang out six o’clock, there was a groan from bolts in the locks and the high entrance doors were swung open by liveried footmen. At the same moment the door to the pit was loosed, and the stagehand who opened it was almost crushed by the weight of people rushing in waving papers and arguing for cheap tickets at the tops of their voices, long before they were in earshot of the harried clerk at his booth. Through the smarter entrance to the lobby and private boxes passed brocade and silk, feathers and high headdresses all bulked up with horsehair and smothered in powder. Fans flicked open and closed, little high-heeled shoes in ivory and red picked their way over the grot of the pavement. Tailcoats flicked up as the men showed their legs and bowed to the ladies. A murmur of spray diamonds and stones glinted their way into the lobby. Those of the crowd who were not fighting their way in kept up a commentary on the dresses and faces passing by. When one lady descended from her carriage in a skirt of particularly daring design, a shout went up from the jostling observers. Mr. Harwood heard it from the relative peace of his office and smiled.

The party of Mr. Owen Graves, consisting of himself, Mrs. Service, Miss Rachel Trench and Lady Susan Thornleigh, were not so extravagantly dressed, but the crowd knew them anyway. Susan heard her name whispered as she stepped through the throng with her guardian’s hand on her shoulder, and kept her eyes down till almost at her elbow she heard a voice ask her: “Off to listen to the music then, my lady?”

She turned and looked up into the full fat face of a woman with her arms crossed under her breasts. She did not know the woman but the face looked kindly enough so she smiled at it and replied, “Yes, thank you, ma’am. I like music.”

The fat lady roared with laughter. “Aww! Ma’am, she says! Bless the little chicken leg!” Then, as Susan felt her guardian’s hand steer her firmly forward, she heard the voice continue, “Oi! Ursula! You’ll never guess who just ‘ma’am-ed’ me! Lady Susan Thornleigh! Yeah, all them murders! Little bit that she is!”

Susan lifted her chin and kept her eyes straight ahead.

Crowther was in the library of the house in Berkeley Square, which, despite his having his own establishment, had become acknowledged as his domain. He had covered some pages with a record of his observations of Fitzraven’s body when Mrs. Westerman entered the room and took a seat in one of the well-stuffed leather armchairs in front of the fire.

“Do you regret refusing the invitation for the opera, madam?”

Harriet shook her head, and Crowther returned to his writing. Despite the pleasure she had taken in the rehearsal this afternoon, an opera was not how she wished to employ the time available to her. From the sights and stories, when they did not put too much of a strain on her good sense, she could take some amusement, but music itself seemed to her a language she understood only partially. When she attended concerts or indeed any gathering where music was more than a stimulus to dancing, she felt as if she were being told fairy tales in Portuguese. Some sense of the drama reached her, some element of the subtle excitement everyone around her seemed to be able to taste, but she could not understand fully what she heard and was unable to work out the proper sense of it.