Too Many Notes, Mr Mozart Read online

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  Contents

  Bernard Bastable

  1. The New Pupil

  2. The Fat Cat

  3. Majesty

  4. Lackey

  5. That Is The Question

  6. Festivities

  7. Gunshots

  8. Positively Last Appearance

  9. Past and Present

  10. Families

  11. Out of the Mouths of Drunkards

  12. Picnic

  13. Lessons in Love

  14. Shadows of the Past

  15. King and Son

  16. Child of Nature

  17. At Bay

  18. Finale

  Bernard Bastable

  Too Many Notes, Mr Mozart

  Bernard Bastable

  Robert Barnard was a well-established crime writer. He won the prestigious Nero Wolfe Award as well as the Anthony, Agatha and Macavity Awards, was been nominated eight times for the Edgar Award and was the winner of the 2003 CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for a lifetime of achievement. He also wrote crime novels under the pseudonym of Bernard Bastable. He lived with his wife in Leeds and had over 45 titles published in the UK and US.

  1. The New Pupil

  The footman who admitted me to the palace apartment had a bedraggled look about him: his wig was askew and unpowdered, and his braid was parting company with his shoulder pads. When I had a moment to look around me I saw that the apartment itself was in a similar condition: its gilt was peeling, its paintwork was covered with a film of dirt, and the stuffing emerged shyly from several of its chairs. Kensington Palace was hardly the height of royal luxury, but this must be one of its dingier parts. It was clear that the King had other things to spend his money on than the living quarters of his widowed sister-in-law. Well, we all knew what the King preferred to spend his money on.

  ‘Through’ere, Mr Mozart,’ said the footman, pronouncing my name in the detestable English fashion. He led the way down a long corridor with doors off it, until he came to a large, nearly empty room, quite as down-at-heel as the entry hall and corridor I had already passed through. There was a fortepiano over towards the window, and a few old chairs dotted around on a threadbare carpet. If this was the music room it did not suggest that music was a very important element in the life of this particular branch of the Royal Family.

  ‘She’ll be through in a minute,’ said the footman. ‘When they’ve finished their dinner.’

  ‘My time is at the Princess’s disposal,’ I said, in a reproof at his familiarity with the Princess’s name that totally failed to hit its target. The oaf nodded casually, grinned a street grin, and sauntered out of the chamber.

  I looked around me. There was nothing in the room to lighten the burden of a long wait – no pictures worth more than a glance, no copies of Bell’s London Life or Jerry and Tom. My time may have been at the Princess’s disposal, but I didn’t see why I should be bored to death. I went towards the fortepiano with great suspicion and played a few notes. It was an inferior instrument, just about in tune. Still, it was playable. I sat down and went through the second movement of a new sonata I was composing for Mr Novello (and probably for no one much else). It is a work for the much greater range and subtlety of the pianoforte but even on this instrument it made its effect. I had been playing for about five minutes when I heard the door opening. I stood up hurriedly and turned to the door.

  The first figure to be ushered through by the tatty footman was a tiny sprite of a child, the second a heavy-featured, kindly-looking woman of a certain age (and well into it). I bowed low to them both, and the Princess came over and gave me a plump little hand, like a large soft doll’s.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Mozart. I am sorry you have had to wait. I am to be your new pupil – and a very poor one too, I daresay.’

  She was wearing a drab grey dress – clean enough, but much washed, and her satin shoes looked similarly over-worn. Her face was not pretty or distinguished, being too pudgy for either quality, but she held herself with confidence and her protruberant eyes were notable not for Hanoverian dullness but for lightness and sparkle – they reminded me of bright marbles, or diamonds in a dirty corner. All in all the Princess had something her family had never been notable for: charm.

  ‘I am honoured to be Your Royal Highness’s new music teacher,’ I said, kissing the hand.

  ‘Your Royal Highness vill be a good pupil if you practise hard,’ said the lady-in-waiting, in heavily accented English.

  ‘Ah, there you are, you see,’ said the sprite. ‘Scales and arpeggios and things – terribly tedious. And if I were to practise hard, after ten minutes Sir John or somebody would come in and tell me I was driving them to distraction.’

  The Princess pulled herself up on to the music stool – much too high for a tiny body like her – and played a few notes.

  ‘But I intend to try my very, very hardest.’ She turned to the lady-in-waiting. ‘Do go and sit down, Späth, and Mr Mozart will find me something easy and pleasing to play.’

  I bowed and sat down beside her.

  ‘These days, Your Royal Highness, everyone seems to think Clementi is suitable for beginners,’ I said, drawing some music from my bag and putting it on the stand in front of her. She looked at it, and her big eyes were widened theatrically.

  ‘Too many notes, Mr Mozart!’ she shrieked.

  ‘But not at all as difficult as it looks,’ I said. ‘Clementi did not have the imagination to be difficult.’

  ‘You will see!’ she countered, launching into the first movement and pounding the keys with her sausagy fingers. Her enthusiasm was greater than her accuracy – much greater. In fact wrong notes positively flew around. ‘You see?’ she demanded, turning to me with a delightful smile. ‘Far too many notes. What about something slow and pretty – something by yourself, perhaps, Mr Mozart?’

  ‘Ah …’ I said, hesitating. She was very quick and took me up at once.

  ‘I see. You don’t like beginners mangling your own music.’

  ‘Not music that I prize,’ I admitted.

  ‘But please, Mr Mozart. So that when I am grown up I shall have one piece, one little piece, that I can say I play as you taught me to play it.’

  It is sometimes said, by my children and others, that I am susceptible to flattery. Certainly I am very soft where young people are concerned. I took out the slow movement of one of my early sonatas and put it on the stand.

  ‘Oh, much, much better,’ she said, studying it for a moment. When she launched into it I could hear that there was definitely a modicum of musicianship in her playing, though she had not been well taught. I let her go on with it without interruption or correction, but when she had played about half a page of it I was astonished to hear the whispered words: ‘She’ll go to sleep in a minute or so.’

  I looked at the Princess, hardly able to believe my ears. Her rosebud mouth was smiling slightly. I looked at the lady-in-waiting. She was sitting in a chair near the door, and she was indeed beginning to nod.

  ‘Späth loves
music – it always sends her to sleep,’ whispered the Princess Victoria. ‘Especially if she has had wine at dinner. I pressed her to take a second glass.’ She played on for a little longer. ‘Is she off?’ she asked.

  ‘She does indeed seem to be asleep, Your Royal Highness,’ I said. ‘Soothed, perhaps, by your playing.’

  She giggled.

  ‘Perhaps you should play it for me, to show how it really goes.’

  ‘I think you should –’ I was about to say ‘struggle through’, but amended that to – ‘make your own attempt at it first.’

  ‘It’s just that it must be so terribly painful for you,’ she said kindly, performing a scale run of exquisite inaccuracy. ‘Have you ever played before royalty before?’

  ‘Many times, Your Royal Highness,’ I said, surveying in my mind’s eye the whole unhappy history. ‘I performed at Windsor Castle when His present Majesty was just a young boy.’

  She almost stopped playing in her astonishment.

  ‘When Uncle King was a boy? But you must be shockingly old, Mr Mozart!’

  ‘Shockingly,’ I agreed. ‘Though I was also quite young at the time.’

  ‘And yet you have such a fine figure, and hardly look old at all,’ she said. ‘And Uncle King … One day I was in Windsor Great Park, when I was quite young this was, and he went past in his carriage with Aunt May and … a lady, and he stopped and took me up into his carriage and we went for such an exciting ride, with such wonderful horses drawing us, and such a tall footman behind. But there was little tiny me, much tinier then, up on the seat next to Uncle King with his enormous …’ she stopped short, obviously about to stop playing to illustrate the enormous stomach of her uncle, King George IV. ‘Lehzen says I mustn’t say anything disrespectful about Uncle King. So I won’t.’

  She played on a bit, but her mischievous expression clouded over after a moment or two. I soon learnt the reason why.

  ‘I wouldn’t say anything disrespectful about Uncle King in any case,’ she said in serious tones, ‘because everyone says he is very sick and like to die.’

  ‘I believe His Majesty has been in poor health for some time,’ I murmured.

  ‘Do you know the expression “like to die”?’ she demanded.

  ‘It has quite a poetic ring to it,’ I said.

  ‘It’s Shakespeare, or someone like that.’

  ‘I’m glad you read Shakespeare,’ I said. ‘I have written an opera—’

  ‘Oh yes, I love Shakespeare,’ she enthused, her little pug face lighting up. ‘There is an actor, Mr Braughton, comes to teach me el – elocution. Or he used to be an actor, or wanted to be an actor. I think he comes quite cheap. Sometimes I read the great speeches in Shakespeare, which is nice, though I don’t imagine anyone will want me to read Shakespeare aloud to people when I’m grown up, do you? But sometimes we do scenes together, which is very exciting. Last week we did Hamlet and his mother, with him as Hamlet and me as his mother. Mr Braughton’s copy of the play had a lot of stuff in it that wasn’t in mine. It was very interesting, though I didn’t understand it all.’

  She took a deep breath. It had been a long speech, and I somehow got the idea it had been premeditated, though I couldn’t for a moment imagine why it should have been. She was coming to the end of the sonata’s slow movement.

  ‘There!’ she said. ‘I got through it, though you couldn’t say I did more than that.’

  ‘It was a very creditable first attempt,’ I said.

  ‘Now you show me how it should go,’ she insisted, climbing down from her stool. ‘You will play it so beautifully that Späth will sleep on, and we can talk.’

  I was beginning to wonder about the purpose of these piano lessons. I had the impression that the Princess had bottled up inside her a whole host of subjects which she was dying to talk about. So here was I, an elderly and neglected composer, confidant to the Hope of the Nation. Because that was what she was. Not many years before her birth the nation had faced the prospect of the throne going, one after the other, to a series of horrible and disreputable princes, none of them with legitimate heirs, followed by a series of princesses not much better. Now there were one or two legitimate heirs to these unsavoury scions of the royal house, but it was little Victoria who saved the nation from the dreadful possibility of her uncle the Duke of Cumberland being King. I could not but be delighted at the thought of being her friend. As I sat down and began, very softly and poetically, to play the same movement, she said, ‘When Uncle Clarence becomes King, Mama says she will not let me go to court because I would meet the King’s natural children. Are not all children natural, Mr Mozart?’

  ‘Well, in a manner of speaking. But some children are … more natural than others.’

  ‘Are your children natural, Mr Mozart?’

  ‘No, no, my dear, my children are … Oh, I should not have said “My dear”.’

  ‘No, you should not. But I’m very glad you did … I was just teasing you about natural children, Mr Mozart.’ The part of my mind that was not coping with her disconcerting conversation had been enjoying playing my own early music. Now I turned to look at her, and her face was wreathed in mischief. ‘I know all about natural children,’ she said. ‘I should, shouldn’t I? There seem to be more natural children than the other kind in my family.’

  ‘We must not judge,’ I said sententiously. ‘There are many pressures on princes of the royal blood.’

  ‘And not just princes,’ she countered. ‘But I wasn’t judging – anyway. It’s just that natural children can’t succeed to the throne, or titles, or anything like that. So …’ She shot a glance in the direction of the sleeping Späth, whose mouth was open unprettily. ‘So, when Uncle Clarence succeeds to the throne, I shall be next in line. Heiress Presumptive, that’s what I shall be called. They think I don’t know, but I do. I’m thinking of what to say when they tell me.’

  ‘What to say?’ I asked, startled yet again.

  ‘Something memorable. For the History Books.’

  I suppressed a smile.

  ‘I see. Are you worried about the history books?’

  ‘Not particularly, but I should like to be in them. At the moment nobody knows anything at all about me.’

  ‘But they are interested. I should think that will all change when the Duke of Clarence becomes King.’

  ‘Perhaps. But not if Mama has anything to do with it. She says I must be kept away from the corruption of the court. It’s nothing to do with Uncle Clarence’s natural children. She keeps me away from Uncle King’s court, and she would even if he pressed her to bring me, which he doesn’t. Have you ever been corrupted by the court, Mr Mozart?’

  I had a feeling she was playing with me again, so I just looked down at her with a whimsical expression on my face.

  ‘I have never really had the opportunity, Your Royal Highness.’

  ‘Just like me! I thought you might have sensed it, at least … I think I should be allowed to go to court, so that I could see what terrible things I should avoid.’

  At this wistful point in the conversation, my second movement came to an end, and I stood up.

  ‘Oh, do please go on, Mr Mozart! Play something soft and peaceful then Späth will sleep on and on!’

  ‘I think that would be unwise, Your Royal Highness. Anybody listening outside the door might realise it was not you playing.’

  She giggled.

  ‘They certainly would. You are quite right, Mr Mozart. They might wonder what the lessons are for.’

  ‘Play it again, and we’ll see what you’ve learnt from listening to me.’

  I said it satirically, but the odd thing was that she had learnt something. When she had hauled herself up on to the stool she began it again, and played it much better. Clearly, though she had been talking the whole way through my playing, and talking very cleverly for an eleven-year-old, she had been absorbing the music at the same time. Späth dozed on.

  ‘Do you know my Uncle Clarence?’ the sprite asked, h
alf-way through the first page.

  ‘A little, my—Your Royal Highness.’

  ‘My dear, you should say. Would you say he was a healthy man, Mr Mozart?’

  That was an easy one to answer.

  ‘Remarkably healthy for his years, my dear. No doubt due to his years at sea.’

  ‘Good for seven or eight years, would you say?’

  ‘Oh, we must hope for that and more.’

  ‘Of course we must. But seven or eight would do. I would not like to be Queen and have a Regent ruling. That would be most unfortunate for the Country.’

  She gave a definite capital letter to the Country she would one day rule.

  ‘Your uncle the King’s time as Regent was generally counted one of the most glorious periods of our recent history,’ I said hypocritically, remembering with aversion all those Allied Sovereigns and gluttonous feasts.

  ‘Ah, but Grandpapa was mad, and everyone knew he could never recover and reign again. Uncle was King in all but name. It would be most unsuitable to have a Regent when I was growing up and having my own ideas about things. Particularly if there was also a Power Behind the Throne.’

  She played a horribly wrong note, and there was a snort and a cough from the chair by the door.

  ‘No, like this, Your Royal Highness,’ I said, and leant over to play the phrase.

  ‘Pay attention to Herr Mozart,’ came a voice from by the door. ‘You hev been playing most beautifully till now.’

  The Princess played on for a bit, her fat little fingers really trying to give a musical interpretation of my notes.

  ‘Is she off?’ she whispered, scarcely able to contain her impatience.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ I whispered back. I added, almost conspiratorially, ‘Her mouth is slowly dropping open.’

  ‘A sure sign … Mr Mozart?’

  ‘Your Royal Highness?’

  ‘I’ve heard it said that you’ve been of service to the Royal Family before – that you’re very good at discovering things, getting to the truth of things.’