by Amanda Dykes
He’d once been in charge of the foundry—the other half of the shop where metals were melted, refined, cast into sand molds and cooled into their new form. It suited him, he’d always said, giving things new shape. Yet here he was now, on the forge side instead, where his older brothers had once reigned with their heating and pounding.
Three signs above the door attested to this change, too. One below the other, swinging in the breeze.
Shaw and Sons
Bespoke Metalwork
Forge
…Not “Forge and Foundry,” as it had said when she was a girl.
A slamming door at the back of the building snapped her to attention. James was gone from his window.
She clutched her bundle beneath her cape and willed herself up to the weathered wooden door. She lifted a hand, stiffer than usual, to knock.
When her knock went unanswered and all was quiet inside, she lifted the latch and let herself in. This was a place of business, after all. And on the island, business hours were whenever someone needed something. Even so, she knew she shouldn’t be here. If Father knew…
Warmth from the fires inside enveloped her and she took a step into the room, so familiar with the scent of coal smoke mingled with the sweetness of hot metal. Nobody in sight. The old stump James had brought inside for her chair during their games of marbles all those years ago still stood right in its old spot, next to the overturned pail he’d perched on in his gangly youth.
Something dark and small, just the size of one of their polished pebbles, rested on her stump.
Was that--? No, surely… surely he wouldn’t have kept it. She picked it up, turned it in her hand. The rock’s smooth surface was mapped in her mind from years gone by. Carefully, she set it back down and scanned the rest of the room.
The canvas-draped casting table stood like a solitary ghost in the corner to her right, far from the reach of stray sparks. She set her bundle down atop it, lifted a corner of the rough cloth—
“Please don’t,” a low voice said behind her. Steadiness and depth in that voice—and an edge of something broken.
Aria turned, and there he was. James. The one she’d have run to with a string of laughter trailing behind her once. …But now he stood, every inch a man. A stranger, almost, though his brown hair fell tousled over his forehead just as it always had after a long day’s work. White shirtsleeves pushed up to his elbows, arms full of firewood, his stance was marked with a gravity bigger than the room could hold.
“James,” she said. “I mean—Mr. Shaw…”
His dark brows pushed together and he drew back ever-so-slightly. “Miss St. John.” His tone was cold. He moved across the room, began unloading the wood into a perfectly patterned stack against the wall. “We’re closed.”
We? Aria scanned the perimeter of the room again. One tin cup hanging on the wall. One Blacksmith’s apron pushed by a breeze on its nail by the door. By all counts “Shaw and Sons” was now just one man: the youngest son.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll go.” She made for the door, but her glove snagged on an ash pail perched on a shelf. It clanged to the ground, a cloud engulfing her. With a cough she scrambled to scoop up her mess.
“Let me.” He knelt and placed one hand against her arm to still her, voice low. Even through the satin of the glove, even past the barrier of numbness that lived always in her arms, she could feel his warmth and strength.
“Aria,” he said, shaking his head. A thrill shot through her, to hear him speak her name. He sat back on his heels, settling his gaze on her in his old steadiness at last. “What are you doing here?” The words would have sounded cold, were it not for the trace of wonder threading them together.
“I’m—just—”
“It’s been fifteen years.”
“I know.” She hung her head. “I should have written you.” And might he… have tried to write her? The fear that he hadn’t stung, though she knew very well that her father had ensured no letters from James Shaw could ever reach her. “I should have at least sent word.”
James shook his head. “I never expected you to write. Not after…” he cleared his throat. “I just didn’t think you’d ever come back here.”
What could she say to that? That being ripped away from her best friend, from this island, had unraveled her? That she’d wanted to return a thousand times? She leaned back into scooping the dust but he stilled her once more, letting his hand linger this time. He, one of three people in all the world, knew what the gloves covered. It’s not your fault, James. The words beat against her ribs, trying to find a way out.
He cleared his throat and put his full concentration into scooping up the ashes. “You still have that habit, you know.”
“Which habit?” She continued smoothing the fine white dust into a pile on the floor, despite the look he gave her.
“Ignoring the questions you don’t want to answer.” He cocked a dark brow, a smile dawning. The first she’d seen on him as a grown man. “What are you doing here?”
She darted a glance at her parcel on the casting table. “I’m here to try and undo the mess I’ve made,” she said. By the way he narrowed his eyes, it would seem he knew she wasn’t just talking about ashes.
He followed the direction of her gaze. “In what way?”
She pursed her lips. This was going to sound peculiar, no matter how she put it. But it was now or never. “I need your help.”
He stood, hand outstretched to help her. Such a simple gesture, and yet in it she felt more at home than all the hours she’d spent in the Silent House since arriving. Setting the pail aside, he moved to unfold the woolen grey blanket.
“Wait. First… let me show you this.” She pulled out the scroll from inside her cape pocket and handed it to him. Curiosity marked his face as he slid the red string off, paper crinkling as he unrolled it.
She watched the familiar dark lashes narrow around those blue eyes. Concentration. Analysis. Quick understanding of what he saw before him and then—a shadow. “You want to make this?”
Aria nodded. “Together,” she said, gesturing a circle in the space between them.
“Out of…?”
She reached for her bundle and peeled back a corner of the blanket until a twist of brass gleamed. Folded back the next corner, and the next, until the full figure of the trumpet lay in her outstretched arms.
“No.”
His answer was so swift and firm, but she stood her ground. Lifted her chin and hid the way his answer cut her. She held the instrument out further, waiting. Finally, he reached out to touch it.
He traced the small curve of the tuning slide, then on to the finger valves, letting his touch linger on the first, then the second…tapping lightly on the third and finally, carefully, compressing the formation to play an A.
Always together, she could almost hear her young voice, the moment she’d taught him how to push the two first buttons down side by side. Like you and me. She murmured those words aloud, and he withdrew from the trumpet as if it was already molten. “No,” he said. “You can’t melt that down.”
“I can,” she said. “It’s mine. You know he gave it to me.”
“No, you can’t. And besides.” He ran his hand over the dark scruff of the day shadowing his jaw. “It’s not enough metal.”
“I have more,” she laughed. “Lots and lots more. A whole orchestra’s worth.” She watched the words do their work, the way he tipped his head to the side, looking from her, to the brass, and back again.
“Aria—” he said, then clamped his mouth shut around the name. “Miss St. John. Please. Take this. You can’t melt that down.” He pressed the trumpet into her arms. “Your father gave it to you. And that,” he pointed at the instrument, “is someone’s work of art.”
He rolled the scroll back up, walked to the door and held it wide open. His message was clear: leave.
But she wouldn’t budge. “Yes,” she said. “He did. To play. And yes, it is someone’s mas
terpiece, but…” she shook her head slowly, “they meant it to be played, too. And you and I both know that isn’t possible. I mean to make something of these instruments.” She held her arm fast around the trumpet, fingers stiff and slow as they tapped against it, demonstrating the old injury. “I will play them once more. In a different form.”
He flinched. “But certainly not…for something like this,” he shook his head. “You can’t.”
Aria lifted her chin, setting the trumpet back down. “I can’t? Or you won’t.” She gestured at the canvas-covered table, then took measured steps toward him.
He averted his gaze, staring hard at the wall across the room, holding her scroll out to her. With her ever-gloved hands, she wrapped her fingers around his, pressing the scroll close in his palm and to his chest.
“At least think about it,” she said. “Because James, I remember your work. What you used to do with this foundry, the metals you melted, the way you gave them new life… and yes. I’m crazy enough to turn my brass instruments into this,” she tapped on the scroll, “but I can’t do it without you.” She pulled in a breath. “I wouldn’t want to do it without you.”
At last, he found her gaze. There was a hunger there, a desperation for something—but quick as hope flickered, it was gone. “No.” He slid his hands from beneath hers as if he could still feel the burn of them. As if her injuries hadn’t been healed for years now. “Never again.”
“Very well, then. You leave me no choice.” She rummaged in her cape pocket, pulling out the token she’d carried with her from the island to boarding school and every day since. She’d needed it, the promise of it, to keep her going. And now, she needed it again. “You promised,” she whispered. She placed it on the windowsill, and slipped out the door.
She couldn’t bear to look back and see what those two words had done to him.
YOU PROMISED.
He had. James glared at the bronzed pebble on the windowsill.
Promises are for keeping, she’d told him once. He’d looked at her wide young eyes, at all that she, as a little girl, stood to accomplish in the world. A future like that…a girl of only eight years old who could play every instrument anyone could invent or imagine… he couldn’t give her much, but he could give her a promise.
So he had. He’d made a sand mold for their favorite sea-plucked pebble and she’d watched him tamp it down, press it in, lift it out to leave its perfect impression.
He could almost see the longing on her face when he poured the bronze; she’d been begging and begging to try pouring herself. But he wouldn’t let her. It was too dangerous.
When it was finished, he’d kept the stone and she’d kept the bronze-cast version of it. “Here,” he said. “You keep this promise safe with you, I’ll keep mine with me, and wherever you go, no matter what, I’ll take care of you.”
She’d wrapped her little fingers tight around it. Her fair face was solemn beneath freckle-splashed cheeks. “Promises are for keeping you know…”
He plucked her pebble up now, turning it in his palm. All these years later, she’d kept it. And now it was his turn. Except that there was the not-so-small matter of her father’s warning.
The echo from the past fading around him, James strode over to the foundry, lifted the pebble he’d kept on her chair and studied it only to remember why he must never so much as touch the foundry again. With the pebble in one hand, her bronze replica of it in the other, he pressed his eyes shut. God, forgive me.
Before he could think twice, he set the pebbles side by side on the mantle and lifted the draped canvas from the foundry, a shower of dust choking the air. There it all was: the round form of the crucible, sand mold frames, implements to reshape and redeem hardened, impure metal into something new. The tools, once his old friends, now cruel reminders of how he’d single-handedly destroyed the ninth symphony of Giovanni St. John.
He unrolled Aria’s scroll, placed the two stones on either end to keep the paper from furling, and took in what lay before him.
She was crazy. But then she’d always been this way—seeing possibilities that no one else would ever, in any lifetime, think of. On the paper before him, a cluster of instruments was sketched: trumpet, French horn, trombone, tuba. Then an arrow drawn from the cluster to what she wanted to make.
James clenched his jaw. What was she thinking? The instruments—the finest in the world, gifts from renowned artisans to her father, and from her father, to her… she wanted him to melt them. Into this.
A bicycle.
Well. If she wanted him to do this, she was going to have to explain herself a little more than her scribblings did. Granted, her “scribblings” were some of the finest, most precisely sketched plans he’d ever seen—down to the measurements, fittings, scale, part quantities— but still. He needed to know. Why in the world would she do that to those instruments? And for a bicycle, of all things.
A bicycle that he couldn’t push out of his thoughts, try as he might. Not as he closed down the forge, not as he tromped up the stairs to bed, not even in his dreams.
When morning broke and he’d lit the first fire of the day to chase off the November chill, he set about business as usual: Put the kettle over the fire to cook his oats. Stoke the forging fire. Re-shroud the foundry, so he wouldn’t have to look at it. And when he stood safe at last behind his forging bench, hammering away on Mr. Hathaway’s garden gate, James began to feel a sense of normal once more. If he tried, he could almost ignore the lifeless foundry as he had every day before this. Ignore the carefully-sketched plans anchored down by the promise rocks, forget the girl who’d grown into a woman and upturned his universe last night.
Right on cue, she burst through the door. “I’m here to help!” Her cheeks were rosy and eyes alight with anticipation. No one ever came through his door with such delight, and certainly no one who tempted his gaze away from his work like she did. It was dangerous.
His hammering fell silent. He furrowed his brows.
“Come, now.” She tucked emerald gloves beneath sleeves the same color. “It will be fine, James. Just like old times. And if we’re to be done by Christmas Eve…”
“Christmas Eve?” That was fast. For a project like this—too fast.
She nodded eagerly, a dark curl bouncing at her neck. “For the concert.”
He laid down his mallet and clamped tongs around the scrolled piece. “I haven’t said I’d do it.”
She gave a quick glance at the weighed-down paper, and tilted her face in question. “Haven’t you?”
He released the metal scroll, red with heat and new shape, into the tempering bucket. The air popped with the sizzle as it cooled, and he looked at Aria. The way she waited, that barely-contained spark of mischief in her eyes. He gave a deep sigh. He had, after all, made a promise.
But he’d given his word to her father, too. That he’d stay away from her. He swallowed, taking up another rod of black metal. “Aria…” he turned the rod in the fire, watching the black morph into its red glow. “Does your father know you’re here?”
Her smile vanished. “Father sleeps most of the day, now.”
“So he doesn’t know.”
“He can’t know, James. This is for him.”
“Giovanni St. John is going to ride a bicycle.” James knew he shouldn’t be smiling at the thought, but he couldn’t help it. The picture of the great composer, toddling about the island cliffs and farmland on a bicycle…
“It isn’t funny, James!” She stepped so close he put an arm out to stop her.
“Careful,” he said. “It’s hot.”
“I know what I’m doing.” She shoved his arm away. “And no, Father is not going to ride it.” She dropped her gaze to the floor between them.
“You’re right,” James said. “Because I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”
“But you must!”
James raised his mallet to deliver the first blow on the anvil. “I have to finish this gate, Aria. I’m sorry.” It was
only part of the reason, but it would have to do.
“Fine.” Her skirt swished as she made her way to the door and he was filled with an odd mingling of relief and disappointment. Until she reached for the broom in the corner instead of leaving, and started to work. She filled the room with a jaunty tune, humming as she swished cobwebs from the corner and swept the already-clean hearth three times.
James shook his head, covering a deep laugh with a fisted cough. The young woman standing before him was resolute beyond even the stubbornness of the little girl he knew.
She hummed her way through Greensleeves, whistled her way through Claire de Lune while fairly dancing with the broom, and on her third round of sweeping she started in on Christmas carols.
Christmas carols made James unreasonably angry when sung before December. …and something in the way she kept glancing at him from beneath those long lashes told him that she remembered that little fact all too well.
He jabbed his tongs into the bucket to cool and folded his arms over his chest. “Alright.” She kept singing. Wintry snowy words of yule that made him cringe.
“Alright,” he repeated.
She stilled, resting the soft curve of her chin atop the broomstick. “What was that, Mr. Shaw?”
“I have something to take care of before I can say yes.”
“Very satisfactory!” She said, and resumed her sweeping.
“You don’t have to do that, you know.” He pointed at the broom.
“Oh, I finish what I start, Mr. Shaw.”
That’s what he was afraid of. For what she’d begun, with this bicycle plan… he was afraid he’d have to tell her no, once and for all. But that would be up to Giovanni St. John.
Which meant James would have to face him. Tomorrow.
IF THE SILENT HOUSE had a heart, a single room that pumped life into every vein of its being, this would be it. The very spot where James stood, facing Giovanni St. John.
“You know where we are, of course.” Aria’s father spoke. No greeting. No eye contact. No acknowledgement that the last time they’d spoken, the man had sworn himself and his daughter away from this island forever. None of that. Just him, sitting on a stool in the center of the cavernous room, turning the peg of a violin ever-so-slowly. Yellow November sunlight shrouded the man from the arched windows beyond.