Slowly, and for her sake, we began to change the way we lived. We deliberately made sure we were never out together. We tried to stop questions when they arose. And we managed it.
Marion, being a girl, and not being nobility, did not go to school. Yet we still thought it important for her to read, to be able to broaden her mind and give her places in her thoughts to hide inside. Reading was a rare skill, in those days, but was one I possessed. And, as I had grown up with a mother who could read (albeit in French) I saw nothing strange in the idea of a girl reading.
She was, it turned out, an extremely gifted and curious reader. We possessed only two books but she adored them. She could read Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene by the age of six, and by the age of eight could quote Michel de Montaigne – I had an English translation of his essays that I had acquired years before at Southwark’s Wednesday market. The book was damaged – the pages unfixed from the spine – and I’d bought it for two pennies. She would see, for instance, her mother touch my hand and say, ‘If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.’ Or, on questioning why she looked so sad, she would remark, ‘My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.’
‘That’s Montaigne, isn’t it?’
And she would give the tiniest nod. ‘I quote others only in order the better to express myself,’ she’d say, which was itself, I sensed, another quote.
Then one day she read something else.
You see, she sometimes went outside on her own in the morning to play. And one day she came in, while I was learning a new lute song – ‘I Saw My Lady Weepe’ by John Dowland – and she looked a little like someone had slapped her in the face.
‘What is it, sweetheart?’
She seemed out of breath. It took her a moment. She was frowning at me, with an intensity and seriousness that seemed beyond her age. ‘Are you Satan, Father?’
I laughed. ‘Only in the mornings.’
She wasn’t in joking mood, so I quickly added, ‘No, Marion. What would make you ask such a thing?’
And then she showed me.
Someone had scraped the words ‘Satan Resides Here’ on our door. It was a horrifying thing to see, but more horrifying to know Marion had seen it too.
And when Rose saw it she knew, absolutely, what needed to be done.
‘We need to leave London.’
‘But where would we go?’
That seemed, to Rose, to be a secondary question. She was resolute. ‘We need to start again.’
‘To do what?’
She pointed at the lute leaning beside the door.
‘People’s ears like music in other places.’
I stared at the lute. At the darkness of the small holes amid the twisting decoration of the wood. I imagined, ridiculously, a world inside there. Deep in the shell of the lute. Where some miniature version of ourselves could live, safe and invisible and unharmed.
London, now
I had brought my lute in for year nine. I am holding it, leaning against my desk.
‘This was hand-crafted way over four hundred years ago in France. The design is a little more intricate than English lutes of that period.’
‘So that’s what guitars used to look like in the olden days?’ wonders Danielle.
‘Lutes aren’t technically guitars. They’re obviously close cousins but a lute has a lighter kind of sound. Look at the shape of it. Like a teardrop. And look at the depth. Look at the back. It’s called a shell. The strings are made of sheep’s intestines. They give it a very precise perfect sound.’
Danielle makes a disgusted face.
‘This was the instrument once upon a time. This was the keyboard and electric guitar in one. Even the queen had one. But playing music in public was a bit vulgar so that was generally left to the lower orders.’
I play a few notes. The first bars of ‘Flow My Tears’. They seem unimpressed.
‘That was a big tune, back in the day.’
‘Was that from the eighties?’ wonders Marcus, the boy with the gold watch and the complicated hairstyle who sits next to Anton.
‘No, a little earlier.’
But that made me remember something.
I start to play a chord – E minor – and keep going at it in short stabs before switching to A minor.
‘I know this song,’ says Danielle. ‘My mum loves this.’
Anton is smiling and nodding his head. And then I start singing the words to the song, to ‘Billie Jean’, in a slightly ridiculous falsetto.
The class is laughing now. Some of them are singing along.
And then, because of the commotion, Camille and her class of year sevens, on their way outside for one of her French lessons on the playing field, stop to watch me. Camille opens the door to hear.
She is clapping in time from behind the glass. She smiles and closes her eyes and sings the chorus.
And then her eyes open and are on me and I feel happily terrified or fearfully happy, and now even Daphne is out in the corridor so I stop playing. And the kids release a collective moan. And Daphne says, ‘Don’t stop for me. There’s always time for a lute rendition of Michael Jackson at Oakfield. Love that song.’
‘Me too,’ says Camille.
But of course I already know that.
Canterbury, 1616–1617
Canterbury had been where many French Huguenots, people like myself and my mother, had settled. The Duke of Rochefort had indeed recommended that my mother move to either London or Canterbury, telling her that Canterbury – a ‘godly place’ – was very welcoming to outsiders seeking refuge. My mother had ignored that advice, seeking the quiet of Suffolk instead, and mistaking, fatally, quietness with security. But the advice had stayed with me.
So we moved to Canterbury.
We managed to find a warm, comfortable cottage, paying less in rent than we ever had in London. We were impressed by the cathedral and the clean air, but other things were a struggle. Not least, work.
No one paid for musicians in the inns and alehouses there, and there was no theatre work either. I resorted to playing in the street, which was only busy on days when crowds were gathering at the gallows in the market square.
Then, when the money became too tight (after all of two weeks) Rose and Marion, now nine, gained work selling flowers. Marion was such a miraculous musical Montaigne-quoting girl. I often spoke to her in French and she picked up the language, though Rose was a little bit uncertain about this, as if all this education was going to be another thing that would separate her from the masses and mark her difference.