by Amanda Dykes
“Beautiful prose, poignant emotions, and encompassing theme of hope out of ashes, will enchant readers as this tender Christmas story unfolds with the whimsy of a fairy tale and the heart of a giant. Truly, Amanda Dykes is an exquisite wordsmith and consummate storyteller, captivating my every thought as Giovanni, Aria, and James tentatively reach for the broken pieces of their lives that seem impossibly and forever fragmented. The spiritual themes are captivating and stirring - be prepared to be inspired and moved…
… If you only read one Christmas story this year, ensure it is Bespoke.”
—REL MOLLET, editor/reviewer, RelzReviewz.com, Novel Crossing contributor, Family Fiction correspondent
“A joyful gem of a story, pulsing with warmth and light, Bespoke has all the ingredients of a first class read – characters of substance, a hint of mystery, heartfelt romance, and gorgeous prose. Encore, Amanda Dykes!”
—LAURA FRANTZ,
award-winning author of Love’s Reckoning
“Cozy, sweet and whimsical, Bespoke is everything one would wish for a Christmas story to be. Yet author Amanda Dykes masterfully layers in a quiet and thought-provoking depth that takes the reader by the heart and doesn’t let go, even after the last page is turned."
—JOANNE BISCHOF,
award-winning author of This Quiet Sky
“A little story with a big heart, Bespoke captured me with its polished, intelligent prose and characters both winsome and layered, and held me in its spell with a poignant yearning-to uncover the painful secrets of the characters' past and see the unfolding of a future shining with the promise of joy. Amanda Dykes is a fresh and compelling voice in fiction and Bespoke: A Tiny Christmas Tale sings with a timeless song of rebirth.”
—LORI BENTON,
award-winning author of Burning Sky
"A gloriously music-infused fable forged by grace. The experience in its carefully plotted and lyrical pages is not unlike a cup of apple cider as embers dance and shadows fall. I mean to make it an annual seasonal read. I think of this story and my heart-strings tug a little while a smile curves. It is not just a story, it is now a dear friend.
Marrying the eerie beauty of classical composition with a quaint little town --just pitch-perfect ---and filled with snow, holly and hope, Dykes proves her craft with every poetical line. Part love story, with fable-like essence and all faith and charity, Bespoke is that rare, cherished glimmery find…Radiant."
—RACHEL MCMILLAN,
author of A Singular and Whimsical Problem
Bespoke:
A Tiny Christmas Tale
By Amanda Dykes
Bespoke: a Tiny Christmas Tale
© 2014, 2015 Amanda Dykes
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations.
For permission requests or other inquiries, contact the author at
www.AmandaDykes.com
Scriptures quoted from The Holy Bible, King James Version, public domain.
Printed in the United States of America
Lanternwood Press
Zephyr Cove, Nevada
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015913288
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-692-49191-1
E-book ISBN: 978-1-311-53070-7
Author is represented by Wendy Lawton of Books and Such Literary Management.
Cover design by Amanda Dykes
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
“The LORD is my strength and song,
and is become my salvation.”
Psalm 118:14, KJV
_______
To the girl whose words dance with light
&
The boy whose laughter is alive with music.
May you always have a song.
WHISPERS ABOUT ABOUT THE SECRET Symphony of Giovanni St. John filled the world from every direction: The symphony that tempted fate. The symphony with a name shrouded in mystery. The one no one would ever, ever hear… or so Giovanni St. John said.
It was his ninth symphony, and as superstition had it, a composer must never write beyond his ninth symphony. To do so was to face certain death.
But thunder lived inside Giovanni St. John, and speculations over his ninth symphony flew by the time he’d penned his fifth. Even the queen placed a wager. Giovanni St. John was an unstoppable force, she said, who would pay no heed to a silly superstition. Yes, he had his quirks—his refusal to conduct unless he used his own baton, for example. Still, a great like St. John was allowed a few peculiarities. Peculiarities were not the same as superstition.
With each year, his force grew stronger. The Palais Andelle tore down a three-hundred-year-old wall to make room for a bigger audience, all to win the honor of hosting the premier of his sixth.
For his seventh symphony, he conducted with such fervor that when he raised his hand in the final movement for the famous four-measure rest, it trembled. In the silence, he slowly, slowly turned all three-hundred-and-sixty degrees to take in the faces of the audience. They held their breath. His power was palpable. When he resumed, the relief in the room flowed like a tide, surging with the swells and pulls of the finale. It was as if he’d written their collective exhale straight into the sheet music.
His eighth symphony set the world afire with rumors of his imminent demise. Surely his next would be his last. Why, Ludwig Van Beethoven himself never made it beyond his ninth. Schubert, too, and Dvořák. The queen countered again that the brooding man who dominated the stage of the world would never ascribe to such fables. He held fate in his iron-fisted grip.
But neither side knew Giovanni St. John as they supposed. For on the closing night of his eighth symphony, at the end of the London season, he laid down his legendary baton and vanished clean away for nine solid years. No one knew where. No one knew why.
Then, just when they all counted him lost, he re-emerged, brow furrowed deeper than ever, music alive with a new fury.
He’d written his tenth.
The ninth is there, he’d said. But you’ll never know it. Never hear it. Never see it. Here is my tenth. I’m alive. Listen.
Listen, they did, for fifteen years and six symphonies more, each more tightly coiled with crescendos than the last. Yet every performance was cloaked with the intrigue of the Secret Symphony. Crowds flocked more than ever to his concerts, but when he made his trademark three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, he saw not captivation but speculation. When he lifted his baton he felt their hunger, not for his current masterpiece, but for the one he would not share. And oh, did that ignite his wrath.
Legends continued to pass through opera halls from ear to listening ear. Some said he kept the hidden music in a safe in an Alpen castle dungeon. One tale claimed the missing symphony was encapsulated in the cornerstone of an Italian abbey. Others said it travelled with him always—to every soul-quaking performance, in every country. The only thing he ever said was that he’d take the secret to his grave.
But the day Giovanni St. John took to his death bed, his secret symphony began to live.
THE TOWNSPEOPLE OF THE ISLAND called it the Silent House.
James Shaw wished more than anything he could forget it—forget the way it loomed over the village, the thatched roof that sagged where it used to shine, the dark stone walls and the empty rooms that echoed with memories of music cut short.
Most of all, he longed to forget the oppressive truth: the silence was his own fault.
But the Silent House would not for
get him. There it stood, day and night, casting a shadow over his humble blacksmith’s forge. He tried not to look at it, tried not to remember the fair face and long, dark curls of the girl who used to cross her eyes and puff her cheeks out at him through the gable window when they were children. That window, just there, three stories up and two windows to the right. Where once upon a time, she’d light a candle for him on nights when the moon was bright and the sky clear, its message their secret: Meet me at the dune tonight. He’d bring the bucket, she’d bring a net, and they’d gather whichever sea-washed treasures shimmered under the night sky.
There were days when he could almost make it through without remembering, but something—a sound in the street, a game on the Castlebury green, or just a memory on the wind—would pull his concentration from his mallet and anvil. And then the sparks from his forge would still and the shadow would entangle him once more.
On this icy afternoon, it was a loud, out-of-place clatter that disrupted his focus.
In the summer months, when the sun-stretched days were long and warm, visitors filled the cobbled streets of the tiny Isle of Espoir. Some came from France, some from England, for Espoir lay halfway in between. But in the winter months, when the wet chill descended and his forge was the warmest place in the entire Isle, there were never visitors.
Never. Except today. When a team of matched bays and a grand carriage with deep red curtains draping its windows rattled down the street. James hadn’t seen such a sight for fifteen years.
He set down his mallet, moved past the mound of dancing orange coals, and leaned his hand against the stone-arched doorway as the carriage halted in front of the Silent House.
The carriage door opened on the opposite side, away from his view. The angle prevented him from seeing anything but two slippered feet as they touched down on the street, and the hem of a dress, blue like the ocean at dusk.
A woman, then. And a brave one, to face the spitting skies on this cold November day.
He heard a murmur as she spoke to someone inside the carriage, and then he saw the back of her dark twisting braid and a set of slim shoulders as she traversed the steps up to the front gate. She ran a hand up the slanted stone wall as she went, skipping the mortared seams as if she knew them by heart.
With every step she took, his certainty grew: this was her. Aria.
She paused at the gate, one hand on the treble clef scroll he’d wrought with his own tools. Then she turned, and for a single beat, the years and stories dividing them dropped away. Those dark eyes, sadder even than the last time he’d seen them, rested on him with a flicker of something that made him ache. She clutched a scroll of paper tied with a thick red ribbon in her other hand. With an odd and urgent movement, she pulled her cape over it and stared down at the ground.
The carriage jostled, and another form joined her. Familiar. Radiating the commanding presence the man had always possessed, even if he was hunched over slightly and the hand he used to beckon Aria trembled just a bit.
Aria leaned in to listen. James knew he shouldn’t be watching, but he couldn’t take his eyes off of the pair of them: this father and daughter, who’d sworn never to return.
Aria nodded and with one last lightning-quick glance at James, she turned and took the remaining steps up to the door. He watched as the Silent House swallowed her into its still, dark halls.
So. Here they were again. James Shaw and Giovanni St. John, alone with only a cobbled street and stretch of green between them… the very grass where the man had once stood, shaking with fury, giving James a warning he’d never forget.
Perhaps the man wouldn’t see him. Or perhaps he wouldn’t recognize him. Perhaps…
Their eyes met. He took one step toward James, stopped, and shook his head one slow, solitary time before climbing the steps into his house. Formidable. Unforgiving. And rightly so.
That night, despite his best efforts to avoid it, James found himself standing before the window over his workbench. His eyes traveled their old familiar path: Across the cobblestones, up three stories, and two windows to the right. And there, in her gable, a single flame flickered.
IT WAS LIKE ANY OTHER sitting room, really, except for the rows upon rows of brass instruments lining the walls. Aria stepped in, running her hands lightly over the French horn mounted nearest the reaching oak door. The instrument’s weaving curves caught the firelight, bouncing the reflection on to a trumpet, which passed the gleam along to a trombone. On it went, floor to ceiling and all around, this dance of light and brass.
Once upon a time it had been her, flitting from instrument to instrument as the light did now. She recalled the cold weight of each, the thrill of a song yet unplayed. So foreign, now.
“You’re as silent as the night, Aria.”
There they were again, those words Father loved to speak. But this time, instead of embarrassing her, they quickened her pulse with thoughts of her plan. Did he know? He couldn’t. He mustn’t.
His voice was gravelly. A weariness in every word tugged on her heart. The end of his days was near, and she had much to do still. So much to show him...
The logs in the fireplace crackled, and she took a seat next to the hearth. Setting her papers aside she retrieved a poker with her stronger hand to stir the embers. Warmth and light… and the power to destroy. Or transform, she reminded herself as she stared into the flames. She was counting on it.
“What are you working on?” Father gestured an arm to point at her small pile of papers beside her. “More of your…equations?” Even with fatigue weighing down his words, she could still hear a touch of pride in his voice. He’d always told her numbers were the backbone to any proper symphony. He watched her, light flickering over his weathered face, his silver-flecked chestnut hair.
“Yes,” she said, biting her lip to keep from chattering on as she yearned to. Just more of her numbers and lines. But this time, if her idea worked, the numbers would mend a rift decades-old.
She cleared her throat, eager to change the subject. “Are you comfortable, father?” She had work to do, but couldn’t bring herself to leave him alone if he was hurting. For a man who’d travelled the world ten times over and held the rapt attention of thousands upon thousands of people, he was as alone as could possibly be. For all his fame—or perhaps because of it—he had only her.
“Mmm,” he said, waving her question away. “I’m fine. Just considering the best formation for the strings section.”
“For Christmas Eve?” She pulled two blankets from the fireside basket: one to tuck around Father, one to cover what she was about to take.
“It must be unlike any other performance,” he said, and the quiet resolve in his voice told her again what she already knew: it would be his last.
“Have you decided which symphony?” The island orchestra, if one could even call them that, was a bare-bones crew of farmers, fishermen, and shopkeepers who proudly played two times a year on the highest dune on the island. “Treble Clef upon Trouble Cliff,” they called themselves, always with a hearty laugh. For Father to even consider conducting at such a venue, with such an orchestra… something had changed in him.
He closed his eyes and the corner of his mouth tugged upward into an almost-smile. “The Seventh,” he said. “I think we’ll play the Seventh.”
Of course. The only one that had captivated his audience as much as his un-played ninth.
“The final movement,” he opened one eye to look at her for a moment, then shut it again. “Their bones will be frozen clean through if we try for more.”
“Good.” She bent to take his hand. “That was always my favorite.” Something about that four-measure rest, as if it were waiting on life itself.
“You’ll…” he closed his eyes. “You’ll come?”
Aria stilled, letting the two words sink in. Never, ever had she been allowed anywhere near one of his symphonies. Except, of course, the ninth… but they had all worked very hard to forget that. Father said the people wer
e too nosey, that they’d only gawk at her and he would never allow that—so she’d spent her years at boarding school, known only as simple Aria Johnson.
“I’ll come, Father.” She could barely form the words, so shocked was she. His breathing steadied into deep draws of sleep. Even in slumber, intensity lived there. She stood, carefully spread the first blanket over his lap, then moved about the room gathering the things she’d need. She tucked an awkward bundle beneath the blanket draped over her arm and slipped out of the room. This wouldn’t be the first time she’d smuggled something dear to her father out of his house and over to the blacksmith’s. This time, though, it wouldn’t end in disaster.
The hallway was dark, but she knew every square inch of the grand village house. Following her old familiar path to the servant’s stairs, she tiptoed past the kitchen where Barnes sat scratching his pen across plain stationary. Barnes was the only servant Father trusted enough to bring back to the island, and the man spent every evening the same way: penning letters. To whom, Aria did not know.
Before she could change her mind, Aria stepped into a night so cold it pierced her lungs. Moonlight glanced across the sheen of her blue skirt and on across the village green, marking her path.
Just meters from the forge she paused, watching James through the window. He was grown, now, but the same dark hair and somber eyes intense as blue flame. He stood over the forge just as he used to and she watched him pound, pound, pound a rod of iron, twist it, pound, pound, pound again, twist it. Expert beats, the perfect quarter-time tempo of a master smith. But with each turn, the lines of his chiseled face grew grimmer.
She was transfixed, listening to him send his music into the night. To the cadence of his work she stepped closer and closer, tilting her head to make sense of what she saw.