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she followed him into the City. At the top of Threadneedle Street, he turned and saw her. They exchanged glances. The musician raised his hand. He raised it high. Then he waved good-bye and ran away. That’s when she twisted the wire into a noose, borrowed a flower girl’s stool, slipped one end of the wire over the arm of a barber’s sign, and—” Sam returned for the cake stand as Alathea raised her chin in imitation of the girl. Alathea’s chin dropped. “Snap,” she said gaily.

 
    FOUR
    No. 23, Manchester Square, March creeping in. The pianoforte materialized out of the morning, shrouded in blankets on an undertaker’s cart. The complanatory vibrations were loud enough to alert servants and mistresses all down Spanish Place and into the square itself. There was a pause for gawping amid discussions about the removal of winter drapes.
    Grace Frogmorton stood at her own window (whatever the temperature, she removed neither winter drapes nor woollen petticoat until May). She patted a new hairpiece and frowned. A bald turnspit dog, recently retired from kitchen duties, whined to be picked up. “What’s this, Frilly,” Mrs. Frogmorton said, bending stiff knees to oblige. She had been expecting the pianoforte for the past four days and now she was mortified. An undertaker’s cart! Typical of Drigg.
    She often wished it had not been Drigg who had rescued her husband when Archibald’s early apprenticeship with a corn merchant had ended abruptly. One moment sweet, dusty corn; neat figures in the ledger; a tutorly finger explaining the balance sheet; two oat-fed daughters to ogle. Next, a roar, a club, a charge of short shrifting, a smash and grab, yellow corn peppering black mud, the mob swirling and shrieking, the corn merchant’s daughters swirling and shrieking, the corn merchant blustering, begging, and finally hanging from a gallows made of his own rigged scales. Frogmorton and two other apprentices were lucky only to be tossed into the Thames. Drigg’s strong arms had hauled Archibald out, and it was true that Drigg’s eyes and ears at the docks had proved indispensable to her husband’s ventures. Nevertheless, Mrs. Frogmorton had never thought much of him. She hoped the servants at That Place, as she called Spanish-occupied Manchester House, were not looking, or, worse still, The Spy, as she called the Spanish ambassador himself.
    Neither Alderman nor Mrs. Frogmorton knew anything of Annie Cantabile or her father. Drigg had meant to disclose everything next time the men met in the V & B but had lost courage, and declared only that he had bought a pianoforte and that the cost had been eighty pounds—slightly more than quoted but less, he asserted, than the pianoforte’s true worth. A teacher would present himself in due course. Long friendship brings trust. Drigg’s story had been accepted without question.
    Since nothing had been said of a man coming atop the instrument, Monsieur Belladroit’s elegant dismounting took Mrs. Frogmorton by surprise. She drew back and would have declared herself out if a maid had not already indicated she was in by calling her name. She must go down. On her front doorstep, Monsieur seized her hand and kissed it delicately before raising a face finely boned with remarkably straight eyebrows and shoulder-length hair tied in a plain brown bow. Frilly commenced a monotonous bark. Mrs. Frogmorton pulled the dog closer, reducing the bark to a yap and two marble eyes bulging out of her bosom. “I was not expecting a man,” she said.
    “Just the pianoforte tuner and teacher, madame. Excuse me.” He hurled a torrent of incomprehensible invective at the kite tail of urchins behind the cart, produced a pistol, and fired. The urchins fled except the one Monsieur managed to bring down. The boy howled and hopped, spraying blood. Monsieur wiped the pistol’s barrel. He turned back to Mrs. Frogmorton. “I shall unload.”
    Mrs. Frogmorton was both impressed by his marksmanship and