CHAPTER TWENTY

The neighborhood always looked worse in summer than in winter, thought Constable. But never a slum, not quite that. Nothing like that, really. As Constable let himself in, the piano music floated over him. If he hadn't been so wrapped in his worries he would have heard it two streets away. All the windows were open because of the heat.

He probably should have spent more on the house, bought something in a better area. But he just didn't have that kind of cash. Aside from this separate, secret establishment for the boy, he had his official household near Buckingham Palace to maintain as well, dinner parties to give. And there was all the entertaining at his club.

The boy's piano playing was improving, there was no doubt about that. The easy Mozart sonata rose above mere notes into a perfectly executed miniature. He measured phrases with a subtle ear, using just enough rubato on the minor cadences to show he heard every change of key and felt it.

The boy probably didn't care where he lived, anyway. As long as he had a piano he was oblivious to his surroundings. Too serious for a child of nine.

If it hadn't been for Paul, Constable wouldn't have worried so much. For himself he didn't care. It was Paul's future that tormented him.

The illegitimacy was nothing, that made little difference these days. As long as Constable stayed safe and beyond reproach, the boy was safe too. But if Constable should go under? He still hadn't quite given up hope, still tried to think of a way out. Even if it meant coming forward with some of the truth. Anything to keep it all from surfacing.

It all started a year after Constable managed to pass the sewer reform bills, just when Great Western Gravel merged with Southwark and Vauxhall. Great Western was contracted to do most of the sewer reconstruction work under the streets.

When he really thought about it, the turning point must have been the day he saw Bucks for the first time. God, if only he'd been elsewhere that morning.

The man had been so respectful, then. Obsequious, but not oily. He had approached Constable after a meeting with the shareholders of Great Western Gravel.

"Sir, might I have a word with you?" Bucks had asked, hat in hand. "I know you're looking for a works manager."

"I don't handle that sort of thing, my man. If you inquire at the office they'll tell you with whom to speak." He had kept walking, but Bucks walked with him.

"Yes, I know that. But you're the only one who might understand a system I know about, from engineering before, in Manchester. To save money. Lots of money.

Constable had kept on walking, so quickly that Bucks's breaths came short through the explanation. Bucks assured him that the shortcuts Constable had the power to enact would have no effect on the purity of the water. Simply minor adjustments to too-strict regulations.

The first "adjustment" saved a thousand pounds, most of which went to lease this house and furnish it for the boy. The rest went to Bucks.

Constable had tried to make a few trips down into the works, to see exactly where the alterations and shortcuts were happening. He found that the dripping, glistening underground passageways were unbearably claustrophobic. He couldn't concentrate on any of the foreman's complicated explanations and would emerge into daylight more confused than before.

The money came in a regular way, and Constable found himself spending it as soon as it appeared. Soon Bucks became more secretive and less inclined to answer Constable's questions.

Just as Constable had determined to rid himself of the whole loathsome project somehow, cholera had broken out in London. And this John Snow had turned up, nosing into things, stumbling along like a fool and to Constable's amazement actually finding something. Fine, he thought. Find what you can. Do it soon.

It made sense, Greeley's noncontagion theory. It made perfect sense. Constable clung to the thought tenaciously, willing all other suspicions out of his mind.

Paul had come halfway down the stairs to meet Constable.

"I've learned a new piece!" he called out. Too impatient to wait he turned and ran back up the stairs and started playing again. Constable followed him.

At the top of the stairs he felt a rush of blood to his head, a sudden weakness so debilitating he had to grip the rails to keep from swaying. His heartbeats skipped erratically and pulsed with violence. This was more than a mouse in his heart. A weasel. Or a toad. He stood until the beats were steady again, waited a full minute while he counted. One forty-four. The boy didn't notice the delay.

Paul finished the Mozart again. "Wasn't it good?"

Constable heard Paul's voice through a roaring in his head, and had to wipe chill sweat from his forehead. "Well done, Paul," he managed to call out, then walked into the room. "Where is Mr. Romney?

"Practicing violin." Paul sounded impatient. The feeble and flat scratching was so soft Constable hadn't heard it before.

He had placed the boy with this relative of an old servant. An aging violinist who used to play with the Covent Garden Opera House orchestra, it was he who had discovered the boy's music.

"Here, listen, I wrote this one myself." Paul pushed a creased sheet of manuscript paper onto the music rack.

The boy's feet dangled from the bench, too short to reach the pedals. He began to play again without a trace of either shyness or precocious showing-off.

Constable recognized the melody, a simple Bach chorale he himself had sung to the boy when he was just a toddler. But now it was strangely altered, so that its minor intervals were emphasized. Paul had written out a set of six variations alternating in a minor and major key. They were intricate, sober, and mature.

Paul was a pale child. His thin hair, very straight, was cut in a line across his forehead. He looks just like me, thought Constable. I wonder that he's never noticed it before. The boy's only resemblance to Lillian was in a wide bridge to his nose, a tendency to get freckles, and a reddish highlight to his dark brown hair. And of course, the music.

It was impossible for Constable to look at him without imagining where the boy might be now if things had turned out otherwise; a street rat in Calcutta, eaten by disease, worn to a skeleton. Living in some hole, treated like a dog for his white skin and Indian talk. If Constable hadn't rescued him — perhaps he would have been better off, after all.

When he stopped playing his face smiled with the same enthusiasm a normal boy might have for a game of cricket.

"Did you like it?"

"A very grown-up piece. What about your school work?" He finished another count. One sixty.

Paul began to pick at a loose chip of ivory on one of the piano keys. "Oh, it's all right, I suppose. I just don't like reading much. Aren't there any schools where they do only music?" The restless scratching at the ivory irritated Constable, who didn't answer.

"Where is my mother?" Paul asked, looking up, casually, a little nervous, and smiling in an adult way. A planned smile. He must have been brooding for days on the right moment to ask this question.

Constable was as taken aback as if the boy had struck him. He hadn't asked about a mother for years. Constable had a vision of Lillian at Lady Tewksbury's, holding on to Snow's arm and staring at him, white faced. It was the first he had been able to focus on her since that night.

"Your mother is in heaven, Paul." He immediately regretted the answer. It was just the sort of lie he hated. And what if things turned out differently?

"Oh, I see. With the rabbits?" Paul didn't wait for an answer, but began to fiddle with a tune as if he had only asked about a toy or plans for supper. He broke into a Mozart sonata and paid no more attention to Constable. It was impossible to tell if the answer satisfied him.

The lyrical tune and mathematical perfection of the Mozart formed an easy background to Constable's thoughts. He poured himself a sherry and sat by the piano in a worn armchair. He was finally able to concentrate on Lillian. It was all so simple. He would ask her to marry him. Tomorrow. He would tell her about Paul. They could marry in two weeks, in any registry office.

He would tell her everything. The struggle he'd had to try to see her, when they said she was lying dead in the other room, with a dead child. The escape across the desert from Jampur. Well, perhaps not all of that. The wet and screaming boy delivered to him, two years later in Calcutta, as he was waiting to ship out. With an unsigned letter in illiterate Hindi, which wandered, begged for money, and really explained nothing.

The child had been dressed in shreds of fabric so filthy it was only as he went to burn them that he recognized Lillian's initials on the cloth, a piece of a bed sheet. The boy had been painfully thin, with bruises around his eyes, burn marks on his feet. He would touch nothing to eat except a weak rice gruel.

The day the boat left, when Constable heard the first long wail from the harbor, there had been a moment when he thought of leaving the boy with the childless woman who ran a seamen's boarding house; she had offered, happily. It was a thought long enough to plan details, money arrangements. She would have raised him well enough. No one would ever have known.

The moment passed. He kept the child.

And if the worst came to pass, if he was caught and tried, at least the boy would be back with his mother.

One twenty. Not bad. He tried to imagine sitting in the parlor in his Portland Square house, Lillian across from him, sewing, Paul playing the piano in the next room. For the first time in weeks he felt relaxed and calm. He believed it could all happen.