“So you taught her to sing, Mrs. Morgan?” Crowther asked.
The woman nodded. “Just Morgan, sir. No need to pretty it up. Yes, I taught her. She used to come along to keep her clear of Tessa’s beaus, and learned by listening. By the time she was waist high she was earning more than her mother and feeding them both-and whatever man was about. Though even then I started holding on to her money for her, so they couldn’t get their fat paws on the lot.” She paused and sniffed. “Too late for poor Tessa, though. She was already worn down and the first chill she got in the winter of sixty-seven killed her in a week, no matter how many oranges and red meat that little girl brought her.”
Harriet looked at Mademoiselle Marin, who was staring into the flames as if she could see all her history there, burning and tumbling. Harriet thought of the little girl trying to ward off all the evils of the world with the most expensive fruit she could find. It was never a fair fight.
“Still,” Isabella said now with a sigh, “no reason you should have any interest in that. You want to know about Fitzraven, don’t you, and who killed him. My mother’s dying had nothing to do with those things. Fitzraven charmed her in a house where she worked and he taught fiddle to the eldest son. He promised her roses and marriage then ran for it and would have nothing to do with her when she was cast off. Then came some bad times and they are best forgotten.”
“Miss Marin,” Crowther said, “did you never see your father when you were a child? Did your mother make no attempt to speak to his conscience?”
Isabella nodded slowly. “Once, only once. It was on London Bridge. I was with Mother and she spotted him on the other side of the road. It was before they knocked the houses down, and the way was so crammed I thought we’d be crushed under the wheels of the carts. I was about five, I think. There was this gentleman, or at least he looked a gentleman to me, picking his way along the pavement, and my mother ran up to him and shouted at him, pushed me under his nose. It was the only time I ever saw her stand up for herself like that.” She shifted in her chair. “He pretended not to know her at first, then he said he didn’t think I was his flesh at all. She wouldn’t let him get away, not till he had to push her over. I think a couple in the crowd would have had him for that, but he was too quick for them. I remember him disappearing among the people, and my mom on her back in the mud crying like a lost thing. She told me his name, but I never thought to look for him after that, though.”
She fell quiet and put out her hand toward Morgan without turning her face from the fire. The woman took it and held it between her palms.
Harriet began to feel that if she ever met Fitzraven’s murderer, she would be forced to congratulate him. “So then, how came you by your name, your training?” she asked gently.
Morgan patted the hand in her lap and replied for her. “Well, Mrs. Westerman, after Tess passed in sixty-seven, me and the little bit carried on as we were for a year or two, then a musical gentleman took up residence just round from one of our favorite corners for a song up on the far side of London Bridge.”
Harriet thought of the street singers they would pass from time to time in the busier thoroughfares, pinched and dirty faces glimpsed only for a moment as the carriage rolled by, the horses high-stepping as though they were too fine to set their hooves in the muck. She had seen children enough at the same work, their hands outstretched and their voices pale and forced through the cold and soot-soaked air. She realized she had never thought much about their lives before, nor paid attention to their songs.
Morgan’s voice was low. “He heard Isabella and told us he was a teacher of singing and would give her lessons every week without payment. I thought at first he might be one of those gentlemen who like ladies very young, if you take my meaning, but I have to give it to him, there was never a sniff of that sort of nonsense about him. We’d go there every week and I’d sit in the corner and he began to teach her. Me too, I suppose. He’d tell us stories from the opera, and the business of the thing, and show us all the new music and teach it to her, just for the pleasure of it.”
Isabella looked up. Her eyelashes were very long, and her features seemed too delicate for a creature reared in the stink of the city. “I loved those stories,” she said. “All those gods and heroes. He had a way with his telling.”
Morgan nodded. “And I saw on his card at his door one week that he normally charged two shillings an hour for that sort of work, but he’d never take a penny from us. ‘Morgan,’ he used to say, ‘I spend all my days hammering tunes into the heads of the silliest girls in this town. It’s a pleasure for me to teach what I know to a true musician.’” The old woman wagged her finger at them. “‘A true musician’-that’s what he called her. Well, once a week turned into twice, and then three till it got to the point we were there every day during the season, and her voice bloomed with the care of it.”
Isabella said: “He paid for me and Morgan to get into the gallery at His Majesty’s and I fell in love with it. The idea that I might be on the stage myself one day was more than I could dream of. All those beautiful women, those costumes. It was as if my heart would burst just at the thought of it.” She was lost for a second in her memories, then said with a quick grin, “I have never told this story. It feels like a pleasure to tell it-isn’t that strange? I always thought it’d be a secret I kept to the grave. Yet here it comes, tripping off my tongue like an old tune.”
Crowther folded together his long fingers over his knee and wondered if every person in the world had some such story, one that could release the teller in the telling. He had his own story, but he had never found it easy to speak of it, even when the confession was forced into the open as Miss Marin’s was now. When he told his story it did not come cloaked in this nostalgia; he told it with no charm. He stated the facts and was stared at like a grotesque.
Morgan picked up Isabella’s thread. “The next time we saw him was the last. He had been a little queer in his ways from time to time, sometimes shutting his door and not crawling out of it for a week, and here was another moment of it. We have the lesson as usual then he closes the lid on the harpsichord and says, ‘Isabella, I have taught you all I can. I have made you a fine singer, but I know another teacher who can make you great. There is a man in Paris called called Le Clerc-all the great singers of Europe go to him. So must you.’ Well, we just laughed at him straight out. Here we were earning pennies on the street corner, and he wants us to go to France. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I mean it,’ and he hands us a letter addressed to Le Clerc, lots of bits of paper with official stamps on them and a little bag holding more gold in it than I had ever seen in my life. Turned out he’d been planning and saving for us for a year.”
“I was thirteen,” Isabella said, “and never been out of the city. I was so scared I thought my head would fly off.”
The image made Harriet laugh, and Isabella looked up as if she was afraid of being mocked, but seeing nothing to alarm her in the other woman’s green eyes, she simply gave the same shy smile Harriet had seen on the stage of the theater.
“So off we went,” Morgan continued, crossing her ankles. “Issy learned at Le Clerc’s school for four years, we could earn enough to pay our way in the usual fashion, and she picked up the lingo till she could jabber away like a Frenchie born. Then when Le Clerc wanted her to start singing at little concerts and that, he told her to change her name. He said no opera singer would ever succeed keeping the name Baker-that was Tessa’s name. So we settled on Marin and there we go. She did good, then better, and everyone just thought she must be French, even the Parisians, and we never bothered correcting them.”