The Ladder Dancer (6 page)

‘Don’t know how it happens,’ the girl said. She flung her arms out, swung round and round. ‘Just does. One moment I’m at home, next I’m here.’ She was grinning like a child half her age, a child without a care in the world. ‘You know what it’s like.’

I said nothing.

‘Saw you,’ she said. ‘Couple of months back. In that big square. Just took a step forward and disappeared. And no one noticed!’ She grinned still wider. ‘They never do!’

That came as a relief. I’d often wondered why no one noticed my disappearances. Perhaps you need to have the ability yourself to see it in others.

‘I followed you,’ she said, ‘and you ended up in a big street, talking to a weedy fellow.’

I didn’t recall the occasion but it could easily have happened. I regarded her thoughtfully. It’s nearly a year now since I discovered my ability and in all that time I’ve carefully kept the secret, knowing the ignorant might fear it. But would this girl be as discreet?

She was grinning still, standing hands on hips. ‘Nice here, ain’t it?’ she said. ‘Quiet. I can walk and walk and no one ever yells at me.’ She broke into song, her thin voice echoing in the still clear night. A simple love song of the naïve country sort, wistful and longing, seeping into the silence.

The echoes of the song died away and I heard the faint bleat of a sleepy sheep in the distance.

‘I ain’t going to be like ma,’ the girl said passionately. ‘I ain’t going to go with every man as asks. I ain’t going to end up with a dozen babies and nothing to eat. I want out.’

‘I can understand that.’

‘So,’ she said. ‘You take me on as apprentice and learn me to play the fiddle proper, then when I’ve learnt everything, you set me free and I get to keep all the money I earn. That’s the way it works, ain’t it?’

‘Apprenticeships last seven years,’ I pointed out.

‘Lord,’ she said. ‘You gets your money’s worth.’

‘There’s a lot to learn.’

She grinned. ‘We’re agreed, then?’

‘We are not!’

She screwed up her face. ‘I’ll tell!’ she shouted. ‘I’ll tell everyone!’

‘You’ll tell them there’s another world running alongside our own, a near copy? They’ll lock you up as a madwoman.’

‘No smoke without fire, they’ll say!’

Would they? I’d always been undecided. Hugh Demsey insisted I’d be had up by the Church as a heretic; Esther thought they’d call me a lunatic. It was undeniable that rumours, once started, take on a life of their own. People like Mrs Annabella, for instance, are quite capable of discarding things they dislike or can’t understand, and substituting something more palatable. Within days, I’d probably be condemned for leading a double life with a wife in every town in the north-east; Sunderland and London are about as much of
another world
as most people can imagine.

I stared across the deserted field, feeling the nip of frost.

‘Well?’ the girl demanded.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

She recognized this for the sop it was. ‘That ain’t good enough.’

‘It will have to do.’

‘No,’ she said obstinately.

I tried to stare her down. Her eyes met mine defiantly; her chin lifted.

‘I will not be blackmailed,’ I said. ‘The only way you’ll persuade me to help is by showing yourself amenable.’

She started to sneer. I said sharply, ‘I don’t mean in that way. If those are the depths to which you’re prepared to sink then you may as well stay where you are. I want information.’

‘What about?’ she said sullenly.

I almost stopped myself. There was an element of callous cynicism in what I was about to do; she’d certainly believe that if she told me what I wanted to know, I’d reconsider taking her on, and that was not possible. But the image of that child’s body, laid out on a table in the Old Man tavern for the inquest jury to gawp at, urged me on.

‘Your mother,’ I said. ‘I take it she earns money by selling herself?’

She shrugged. ‘They ain’t choosy down our way.’

‘Has anyone ever threatened her?’

She cackled with laughter. ‘Never had to! She never said no to no one.’

‘I was thinking of respectable gentlemen who might have been with her. She might think to get some extra money out of them by threatening to tell their nearest and dearest. And one of them might decide to try to silence her.’

‘She never went with no one respectable in her life. Anyhow, it was the baby what died.’

I nodded. ‘But that was purely chance. If the sailors hadn’t been so quick, your mother might have died as well.’

She considered this. ‘Nah. No one wants rid of her but me.’

Had it been a chance encounter, then? Had the woman simply been unlucky, in the wrong place as the horseman rode by? If that was the case, the child’s death was even more tragic.

‘You were there,’ I said. ‘I heard you singing. What did you see?’

‘Nowt,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t see my own hand.’

Thinking back to the fog, I believed her. But random chance – a death with neither rhyme nor reason behind it! How was I ever to prove anything?

‘Do you know a man called Cuthbert Ridley?’

She was beginning to get bored. ‘Nah. Don’t tell you their names.’ She smoothed down her petticoats as neatly as Mrs Annabella ever did. ‘You thought enough yet?’

‘Not yet, no.’

She grinned. ‘Don’t take too long. I’ll be back.’ And she danced off across the moonlit field.

Nine

A gentleman is always up to date in his accounts, and spends wisely.

[
A Gentleman’s Companion
, December 1733]

I turned round, took one step, and found myself back in the dead end alley in my own world. Shivering, I walked briskly out on to Westgate, worrying about how much time might have passed. Then I heard St Nicholas’s church clock strike and realized with relief I’d only lost half an hour or so.

What the devil was I to do about the girl? It was only a short walk, across Westgate and along a side street, to Caroline Square where Esther lives – where
I
live – but I managed to work myself into a fine frenzy of indecision. No one would actually believe the girl. Would they? Even the most ridiculous stories can gain credence, and I’d no wish to be thought a lunatic. But taking the girl on as an apprentice was out of the question. The assumptions that would be made! Besides, there’s no railing against facts, and the fact is that a violin is simply not a suitable instrument for a woman.

I’d hardly opened the front door of the house when Tom, the manservant, appeared in the hall. He’s barely twenty years old but proud of being the only male servant in the house, and assiduous in the performance of his duties. George was faster, however; Tom had hardly opened his mouth when the spirit slid down the banister, yelling. ‘Notes for you, master!
Two
notes! On the table!’

I glanced at Tom. He straightened, put on a bland face. I’d caught his first reaction, however; he was furious.

‘George,’ I said, ‘it’s Tom’s job to inform me of such things.’

‘Just trying to help, master!’

‘I can see that,’ I conceded.

‘You always used to tell me to keep busy!’

‘Yes, but—’

‘But, master?’

But you’re dead, George, and there’s nothing you can do except hang around for eighty years or so, getting in the way.
‘Tom must earn his keep,’ I pointed out, ‘and it’s not kind to trespass on his duties.’

‘But I can do things much faster than he can!’

‘It’s not your job, George.’

‘But master!’ He dropped into the wheedling tone all boys of a certain age have, that they’re fondly convinced will persuade you to do exactly what they want. If they use the tone long enough, they’re usually right. I let him talk. If he’d been alive, I’d simply have snapped at him to bring him into line; now he was dead, things were more complicated. An angry spirit can cause havoc; if he chose, George could make the house impossible to live in.

I sneaked another look at Tom. He was patently very anxious. I managed to interrupt George. ‘Is Mrs Patterson in, Tom?’
Mrs Patterson
. My heart missed a beat. Ridiculous!

‘She’s in the estate room, sir,’ he murmured.

I dismissed them both; Tom went with dignified calm, George grumbled his way upstairs. I headed for the back of the house, glancing quickly at the notes as I went. One was from Hugh Demsey, detailing the fine time he was having in London and promising to be back in a week at most (which certainly meant four or five weeks at least). The other was from Robert Jenison.

At the end of this peremptory missive, he had the audacity to describe himself as my ‘obedient servant’.

The estate room is small and crammed with shelves and boxes and letter books and all the other paraphernalia necessary to the administration of Esther’s estates in Northumberland and Norfolk. No doubt there are ten times as many documents sitting in various lawyers’ offices about the country. It’s the most daunting room I’ve ever been in. Esther – my
wife
– was sitting at the desk by the window, a bundle of correspondence in front of her. She was wearing a gown of pale green; the last of the sunlight glinted on the golden tendrils of hair curled against her gracefully bowed neck. I longed to run my fingers over that soft skin, that curve of neck, to take a strand of hair and—

No, this really would not do. Certainly not in the middle of the day. And at that moment, she looked up and I saw she was steeling herself for battle. But she merely smiled and said, ‘You look tired. Let me ring for some brandy.’

Tom came and went again. George presumably had taken himself off to some dark corner of the house, or was tormenting the cook. I enjoyed looking at Esther while she murmured platitudes about the weather. The gown showed off her neat figure wonderfully. I loved the way she moved – elegantly but businesslike – the way she cast a sideways glance at me. She had a smudge of ink on one cheek that I longed to rub away . . .

‘Have you solved the mystery?’ she asked.

I dragged my thoughts back. ‘I visited the mother.’ I told her about my trip to the hovel where the woman lived, and about my encounter with the girl (though without mentioning the other world) and her desire to become my apprentice. Tom brought the brandy and disappeared again. To my surprise, Esther gave the girl some serious consideration. ‘It is impossible, of course—’

‘Of course.’

‘But one has to admire the girl for her desire to better herself.’ She sipped her brandy. ‘Do you think Mr Orrick might be able to do something for her?’

I couldn’t imagine the curate being effective in dealing with young women. ‘I’ll ask,’ I said without conviction. The conversation had taken a serious turn so I regaled Esther with my adventures at the Jenisons. Esther shared my views of Mrs Jenison’s feather pictures, chuckled at Jenison’s raptures over the ladder dancer, and admitted, slightly ruefully, to pitying Mrs Annabella.

‘I don’t,’ I retorted. ‘She’s the worst kind of elderly spinster.’

‘I was a spinster too until three weeks ago,’ she pointed out.

‘Only in the sense of being unmarried,’ I said. ‘Nothing more. You could never be as coy and fawning as she.’

‘She has to placate the people on whom she is dependent. She cannot afford to do otherwise. There was a time, not so long ago, I was in a similar situation.’ She looked at me shrewdly. ‘What else are you not telling me?’

She knew me too well. Ruefully, I told her about Cuthbert Ridley. She listened with a frown growing between her eyes. The sort of frown I longed to kiss away.

‘You can’t suspect a man simply because of his initials, Charles!’

‘He’s not a nice man,’ I said, remembering that last look he’d cast me.

‘Neither is the fishmonger but he is a man of appalling rectitude.’ She pondered for a moment. ‘I am acquainted with the family, of course. Ridley’s, I mean, not the fishmonger’s. The mother is a very good woman. The elder son is not well, I think, and the other is perfectly ordinary and dull. The father is away somewhere.’

‘Narva, according to Heron. Negotiating with timber merchants, apparently. Who else do you know with the initials
CR
?’

She shook her head. ‘No one. But that is nothing to the purpose. The horseman could have been a visitor to the town.’

‘Heaven forbid!’ I said. ‘In that case, he’ll be long gone and we’ll never catch him.’ I looked at her curiously. ‘You believe me, don’t you? About it being murder. What changed your mind? This morning you were accusing me of overreacting.’

She nodded. ‘I have had time to think about it. I trust your judgement, Charles.’

I could find nothing to say. I caught my breath, looked into my brandy. It was a greater compliment than I’d been prepared for.

Esther started to say something, stopped. I sipped my brandy, pretended I hadn’t heard. She said, with sudden vehemence, ‘Charles, we cannot go on ignoring this problem.’

I fell from joy straight into anger. ‘There’s no problem. Give me the relevant papers and I’ll sign them.’

‘I believe you would find it more satisfactory if you were to understand the workings of the estates.’

‘Alas,’ I said lightly. ‘I was never one for financial dealings.’

‘Nonsense,’ she retorted. ‘Any man who can survive on no more than sixty pounds a year without falling into debt understands financial matters very well.’

I felt cornered. ‘You’d hate to give up the management of your estates.’

‘
Your
estates.’

‘I’m quite happy to let you carry on dealing with them. You’re so good at it.’