The First of July(7)

Theo’s brief foray into Vierne ended. He clattered about some more, and then Benedict could hear his footsteps on the wooden stairs. “Like it?” Theo said as he emerged. “A bit of green and purple for you.” There was only a hint of teasing in the comment. “I’m practicing it for the midweek recital.” He picked up the rest of his music. “Come on, let’s have a pint at the New Inn.”

Without waiting for an answer, he turned back down the north aisle. Benedict, following, watched as Theo walked, oblivious, into the light cast by the stained glass, his face and hands, his white cuffs, moving through a wash of color.

As they passed through the screens into the nave, the Clerk of Works was there, staring at an elaborate tomb. His face was as creased by the extent of his responsibilities as was that of the pious occupant of the tomb, carved in relief. As they approached, he turned and Benedict felt pain in his right arm, a deep, almost nauseating ache, and he touched the rough tweed of his jacket. Mr. Henshall, the Clerk, was wearing a sling, his arm in plaster.

“Fell over a bit of timber a pair of useless apprentices left by the porch,” Henshall said. “What they were thinking of, if anything, who knows? I don’t know what to make of these boys, I really don’t. To break my arm in my own cathedral, well, it’s a shaming thing.”

Benedict let his arm drop gently. Nerves tingled. The pain made him giddy, but Theo sped up as they reached the west door.

“A drink in the New Inn, yes, but first to the docks,” he said. “There’s a very fine Dutch schooner in, used to be a barquentine but they cut her down. And I want to see old Camm’s Agnes and The Crystal Palace and Kindly Light taking on loads.”

Theo’s knowledge of ships and his intimacy with their masters, their journeys, and their cargoes both intrigued and disquieted Benedict. Theo kept a list of the week’s sailings and drank with captains and harbormasters down by the docks. Benedict had sometimes wondered if Theo gambled in the dock taverns. Recently he’d asked Benedict to lend him money. On the first occasion Benedict had handed over the paltry contents of his pocket, Theo raised a eyebrow at the handful of coins.

“It’s a mug’s game, this music,” he said. “I’ve a good mind to run away to sea. I could always take an accordion.”

A few weeks later, Theo asked whether Benedict had alms for a starving organist. Benedict had, painfully, said no. He had nothing. Theo made a joke of it and turned away before Benedict could explain that, unlike the first time, he’d simply had nothing to give; if he had, Theo could have taken it it all.





CHAPTER FOUR


Harry Sydenham, New York, July 1913


THE FIRST TIME HARRY SYDENHAM had Marina all to himself was at the Aquarium in Battery Park. Long afterward, he thought it had probably been a bad choice; but he had wanted to go somewhere that was outside the usual New York social round. Somewhere any ordinary New Yorker might go, and yet where they would never run into anyone she knew. Even then, he thought it might not have impressed her well-connected family to know that he was escorting their only daughter down to Lower Manhattan.

Once outside, he and Marina leaned over a wall, with the breeze in their faces, looking across to Ellis Island and watching the ferries on the choppy water. The Indians had called the Hudson Mahicantuck—“river that flows both ways,” she told him, surprising him with her knowledge. The wind and the screaming gulls were enough to make conversation hard. Eventually they’d found the sort of restaurant she had clearly never entered and which might have been in a back street of Naples. She had been as excited by this as he was every day by aspects of the city she took quite for granted, and her appetite for unfamiliar dishes—oils, rich tomato sauce, rough bread—had delighted him.

Even after he had married her, he never told her of the two places he liked best in New York, fearing that she would think them too ordinary, too vague; not places so much as worrying states of mind. On the far side of the Brooklyn Bridge, he would stand by the waterfront and gaze across the East River, the water obsidian black and glittering with the lights of Manhattan’s sleepless nights, or he would walk through Central Park on a misty, frozen winter day, past the menagerie and under a sky of soft pink-blue and a vaulted tracery of bare branches. It was the other-worldliness that drew him back to the far side of the river: observing the electric dazzle from a distance, he was hidden in darkness like an assassin. In the muffled distortion of the icy park, hearing tropical noises from the zoo and footsteps passing on parallel paths, he became, again, invisible.