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like a naïve but enthusiastic student once more. Flicking through the pages she came across the names of Simon Rattle, The Pat Metheny Group, The Kings’ Singers, each with a non-committal, bland yet polite message which made her feel less fraudulent about her own contribution: ‘A wonderful hall with beautiful acoustics, matched by a beautiful audience and a warm welcome.’
    As her pen scratched on the paper she was struck by the silence, incongruous after eighty minutes of intense music. She removed her all-black concert clothes and slipped into jeans and sweatshirt, then turned up the loudspeaker in the hope of hearing the sounds of the audience making their way out of the hall, but the auditorium was quiet, as if the concert itself had never happened. She looked in the mirror and flicked back her short hair. Her stage make-up had smoothed away any expression of concern or relief and exaggerated the darkness of her eyes. It was a suitable mask for her final public performance of the evening, that of meeting the audience at the stage door. One final effort, and then her time would be her own once more.
    â€˜Ubera et dentes,’ she said: cod Latin for ‘tits and teeth’.

Chapter 3
 
    Thinking about fifteenth-century music these days produced in Andrew an almost uncontrollable urge to re-acquaint himself with his find. He checked once again that Earl was still safely asleep, slid the blue plastic folder from beneath his lecture notes and gently withdrew its contents. Here it was: his Holy Grail, his Ark of the Covenant, but indisputably real. Academic disciplines usually proceeded slowly and carefully, yet this discovery would immediately redraw the musical map.
    It was potentially the biggest early music discovery of the past fifty years: a thirty-four-part, anonymous motet written over a hundred and fifty years before Striggio’s missing forty-part Mass or Tallis’ equally grand
Spem in alium
. It was the obvious inspiration for the twenty-four-voice
Qui habitat
attributed to Josquin and the thirty-six-part
Deo Gratias
that had been assigned mistakenly to Ockeghem. The text was from Psalm Fifty-one – Psalm Fifty as Ockeghem would have known it from the Latin Vulgate Bible –
Miserere mei
, a text for Ash Wednesday. But something on this scale had to have been written for a very special occasion. Identifying the exact circumstances of its first performance would help him to determine who had written it; there was no attribution on the manuscript, nor was there any reference to it in any fifteenth-century source. All he knew for certain was that it was related in some way to Tours, France’s capital in the fifteenth century, even though he had found the manuscript in Amiens. That much he had established from the accompanying letter written by Geoffroy Chiron, who was a
chambrier
at St Martin in Tours, the same abbey at which Ockeghem had been treasurer and singer.
    The motet could have been written by any of the composers who were linked with the royal chapel – Antoine Busnois, Loyset Compère, or even a lesser composer like Jehan Fresnau. It could even be by Josquin, though he really hoped it wasn’t; as the musical equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, Josquin’s reputation needed no help at all. What Andrew really wanted was for it to have been written by Ockeghem, the figurative godfather to the younger generation of Josquin, Compère, De La Rue and countless other composers. And it definitely bore some Ockeghemian trademarks, though any of those could have been the result of influence or deliberate
hommage
. Such hope arose not merely from a despairing idealisation of the composer whom he loved above all others, but also from a rather more base inclination: the more important the composer, the greater the reflected glory. If he could prove it was by Ockeghem, Andrew’s own success would be assured.
    The manuscript never failed to raise