Bespoke

by Amanda Dykes

  “Yes, sir.” James knew where they were. Anyone would. An organ’s pipes sprawled from wall to wall, shooting the height of the ceiling. The famed Broadwood—allegedly once Frederick Chopin’s own grand piano—stood guard in the corner. And the empty glass baton case perched upon a lone white column beside Giovanni St. John.

  James had never been allowed here, but he knew. This was the conservatory.

  Giovanni turned the peg until the string was so tight it squeaked in protest. “I thought I’d see the channel freeze straight through before I ever saw you in this room.” Bushy salt-and-pepper brows peaked, pinning him for an explanation.

  James locked his own hands behind his back, ready for what was coming. The verbal lashing he knew he deserved.

  “You remember these, of course,” Giovanni gestured at the tuning pegs, beginning to twist the next in line. James remembered. “I had my doubts when they all said you were the one to commission for bespoke pieces. Something one-of-a-kind, as I needed. You were only a boy, after all. But then,” this string squeaked, too, “I know a thing or two about child prodigies. I had my own one-person symphony here, once.” He paused, and for the first time, looked at James. His face was tired. “But you know that.”

  James shuffled a foot. “Yes, sir. I do, sir. And please, you must know—”

  Giovanni stood, matching James in height and levelling him with a stare. “This was crafted by Stradivari himself,” he held the violin out to James. It was so small, just the size for a child to hold. Reluctantly, James took it, awash with fear that he’d destroy this, too.

  “You did fine work on those tuning pegs, Mr. Shaw,” Giovanni said.

  James ran his fingers across the small gold pieces, remembering well the care he’d taken in casting each one, in engraving them with the letter A, afloat upon flourishes worthy of the talented little hands that played the instrument.

  James swallowed. “Thank you, sir.” He handed the violin back. This was torture. James braced himself. He wished Giovanni would just tell James exactly what he thought of him, let him hear the cruel truth once and for all. Or just punch him. Either would do.

  But the man only ran his fingers down the strings of the neck one at a time, a voiceless dirge for what was lost.

  “If I may, sir. I’ve come to ask your permission to—”

  A deep cough rattled from Giovanni St. John, mingled with a laughter rolling with the bass of a tympani. “Don’t tell me.” He waved his coughing away, shoulders still quivering with laughter. “You haven’t come to ask for her hand. Because the irony of that…” he shook his head.

  Anger churned James’s courage until it shot through him. No, he hadn’t come to ask that. But how the man could joke like that about Aria’s hands… he had to remind himself that the man was ill. Very ill, Aria had said. But that didn’t excuse him from such an atrocity.

  “No,” James said. “I haven’t.” Not today, anyway. Though every moment that passed brought him closer to the thought.

  “Good. You’ve done enough damage there.”

  James clamped his jaw tight. Took a deep breath. “I was wrong that day. I should never have let her—”

  “‘Let her’?” A dry laugh. “You’re right. You should never have even let her through the door of your forge. She had no place there.”

  “And did she have any place spending every hour of every day kept up in this room? Working those hands over these instruments?” James had heard it, for five years or more. Tiny fingers, worked until her love for music was nearly worked right out of her. He pounded nails into mold frames, she strung bows over cellos, and their songs met in the street when they could not.

  As soon as the words were out, though, James regretted them. To speak so to a dying man… he stepped back, ready to leave. He’d save the man from pouring what fury he had left into putting James in his place.

  He’d just have to tell Aria no. Help her find another way to do what she needed. Maybe he could persuade his brother John away from his farm and back into the forge long enough to help her.

  James strode toward the French doors, but froze when he saw Giovanni’s reflection in the glass. Shoulders slumped. Expression broken – just for a flash—but broken so deeply James turned to face him again.

  “You swore to me you’d never go near her again,” Giovanni said at last.

  James braced himself. “Which is why I’ve come to ask your permission. To help her.”

  “With what?”

  That, he could not say. It was Aria’s secret to tell, not his.

  Giovanni set his mouth in a grim line, any sign of regret retreating again into his weathered features. “I see,” he said. He set the violin down on the chair and strode in measured steps to the white column pedestal. He lifted the lid of the empty glass baton case, stared inside.

  James couldn’t take it. He had to speak up, assure him he’d never hurt Aria again, and would do anything to take back the irreparable damage of that day. “With respect, Sir, if I may—”

  “She’s lost much, Mr. Shaw.” He closed the lid abruptly, its solid click echoing with finality. He ran a finger along the edge of the lid. “I don’t deny that I…” Something was so close, so ready to be spoken. He cleared his throat, shook the almost-spoken words away. “Just see that she doesn’t lose more. That’s all that I ask.”

  Judging by his stance, the interview was over. And one did not argue with Giovanni St. John.

  James gripped the cold, scrolling door handle—his own father’s handiwork. But one last look at the mighty composer walking so slowly toward the window, surrounded by his own museum of instruments, and he knew he might never have this chance again.

  “Mr. St. John?” He shouldn’t be speaking. He knew it. But he couldn’t help it. He swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

  The man paused long enough to half-turn his head. And nod.

  “For everything,” James said. “I never meant any harm to come to her.”

  A pause. “I know.”

  “I’d do anything for her.”

  Giovanni turned to face him full on, now, the sunlight silhouetting him. “Well. Why don’t you start by helping her with whatever it is she’s got rolled up in that scroll of hers? She thinks I don’t see her go traipsing over to your forge. She thinks she’s keeping some secret. And I won’t pry it out of her before she’s ready. But understand this. If she needs your help… you help her.”

  A chasm opened in James then, freedom surging through him. “Yes, Sir!” Never were two words meant more.

  At last, he would make this right. And maybe… just maybe… he would find a way to give Aria her music back, too.

  THE NEXT DAY, James chased concentration relentlessly. When Aria didn’t burst through the door like she had two days before, he set to work on Mr. Hathaway’s hinges. When she still hadn’t appeared an hour later, he tried a whistle a tune to fill the silence, cringing at the flat way it fell around him.

  “You’re a fool, James Shaw,” he muttered. He was a fool for looking at the door every fifteen minutes, willing it to open. And a fool for bungling the hinges not once, not twice, but three times.

  By late afternoon, weary of the tedious day, he almost let out an audible thank goodness when Aria’s rosy face appeared at his window beside him. She knocked, tipped her head to the side in question and held up a picnic basket fringed in red plaid. “Time for tea?” she said, voice muted through the steamed glass.

  What a sight they must have made walking together, she in her ruffled grey dress and carefully-coiled hair, he in his plain black trousers and working coat, cap thrown on as a last-minute defense against the cold. They headed away from the village, through the aspen grove. The islanders, who had an infamous way of making mountains of molehills, liked to call this the “woods.”

  “Remember when we tried to get lost in the woods?” Aria gave him a wry smile.

  James laughed. Yes, he remembered it. Very well. “It was a challenge,” he said. Forty trees, a
t the very most, stood in bare winter white. “Let’s see, we tried blindfolding ourselves, walking backwards, standing on our heads.”

  Aria laughed, her voice like a song. “But it wasn’t until we spun around twelve times a piece that we managed to get lost.”

  “Well…” James remembered Aria’s seven-year-old delight at finally getting lost in the woods. He remembered he couldn’t bring himself to tell her he knew exactly where they were—that the rock tunnel lay just meters to their left, that the bluebells grew just a jaunt to their right.

  “James Shaw.” Aria halted, mouth open, fist on her hip. “Don’t tell me you weren’t lost.”

  “Alright,” he said. “I won’t.”

  She shrieked, then gathered her skirt to chase him. All the way to the dune they ran, the years of separation flying away on the sharp wind. Finally, they stopped at Trouble Cliff to catch their breath. It was a singular place—the island’s own personal Stonehenge of sorts. Rock pillars, moved there by nobody-knew-who, a century or more before, stood all in a row to mark the sheer drop into the ocean.

  “Lovely day for a picnic,” Aria said, tossing a dimpled look of amusement over her scarlet cape. She rummaged in the basket for the blanket.

  Heavy white clouds pushed in from the North. “Indeed,” James said, matching her wit with dry gravity. “I’d count on snow tonight.”

  “We’ll make the best of our picnic, then.” Flinging the red woolen blanket up and out, she laughed as it tangled in the wind. James retrieved the far corners, spreading it out, and soon they were communing over still-warm scones from the kitchen of the Silent House.

  “Father says you paid him a visit?” Aria raked swirling patterns into the sand beside her with her fingers.

  James chewed slowly, taking his time before he answered. “I did. I needed to ask him something.”

  “But you kept the secret.” Aria peaked a brow.

  “Of course.”

  “So we’ll start tomorrow?”

  They should. There was his promise to her. There was the fact that the indomitable Giovanni St. John had just told him to help her. There was the Christmas Eve deadline to be met. And yet… there was something amiss here, a thought he’d been circling all night and all day. James shook his head. “The bicycle. It’s an amazing thought, Aria.” Hesitancy lined his voice.

  She bristled.

  “…but?”

  James tossed a grey pebble, sent it flying over the sheer drop beyond them. “Nothing.”

  “Maybe I don’t know you like I once did, James, but I can still tell when you’re not saying something.”

  “I just…from the time I can remember, I was making things for you.” His dark eyes flicked to the side, out over the sea where the wind beat waves beat on the rocks below. “For your music. And I know what happened took that from you, but I just can’t help thinking, there must be a way to give that back to you.”

  She sat up straight, a deep pain playing across her face. “You think I gave up too quickly?”

  No, James wanted to shout. That wasn’t what he meant at all. But there had to be a way. Something he could do to give her back her music. How could he possibly put into words… Please, God. If he could just make her understand, just make her see how he wanted to fight for her—

  But Aria was backing away, fire in her eyes. “You have no idea.” She sucked in a breath. “You have no right… you have no idea what it took to let go, James.”

  “Aria, there was no one like you. There is no one like you. Maybe you didn’t have a choice in learning all those instruments, but who else in this whole world could have done it like you did? Your music filled this whole island. And if you’ll let me, I will find a way.”

  “Listen.” The wind pulled dark strands of hair loose, whipping them about her face. “I am never going to have the strength in my hands that I once did. It’s irreparable.” She held up her stiff fingers as if to prove her point. “And that is my fault.”

  Now that, James could not tolerate. She, blaming herself, when he was the one… “No, it’s—”

  “Don’t think Father didn’t try to fix it. Don’t think I haven’t been to every specialist on the continent, every surgeon in England.” She shook her head. “They say the damage ran too deep, the scars are too extensive.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, taking that hand in his. Wishing he could take the damage from her, bear it himself, until the weight of the desire squeezed the air from him. “I should have been there.”

  She stepped back. “No.” She was quiet, but steel surrounded her tone. “There is nothing to be sorry for. Yes, they say the scars are too extensive, but scars are places made strong again. They don’t function like they did before, but they’re strong for something. Something that matters. And I am choosing to be strong for this, James. Because if Father will never hear his ninth symphony again… at least he’ll see it play. I can do that. I will.”

  With that, she clutched her basket and strode back to the village, leaving James with more regret than ever.

  _______

  Aria wrapped a third blanket around herself that night, teeth chattering in the dark as she pulled back her father’s heavy velvet bed curtain to check on him. It wasn’t snow that had come tonight, as James had mused. Just a coldness so dry and fierce it crackled against the windowpanes of Father’s bedchamber. One of the many things James had been wrong about today.

  Father lay so still, Aria’s knees almost buckled at the sight of him. But there—she spotted a tiny exhale escape his mouth, a white cloud against the frigid air. And another after that. Shallow and raw each breath came, steady enough that she found her own strength once again.

  He’d sat up far too late after his rehearsal with the small orchestra at the church. She’d known he needed rest, but he seemed so alive, telling her about the way the farmer played the violin without a bow, and how a boy had come in late for rehearsal, smelling of salt air and fish, and piping out the clearest tune he’d ever heard on a fife. “This may be my greatest performance yet, Aria,” he’d said. “But the cellist needs rosin. His bow sounds like a deplorable screeching cat. And I need to transcribe a few things…” he’d rattled on, handing a list to their manservant and insisting that Barnes take the evening steamer to Guernsey for supplies.

  But now here Father lay, even his heavy bed curtains doing little to keep any warmth in. He was so cold…

  Aria fed the last log into his fire, then took herself downstairs. What a fool she was. No more wood in the house, and the coldest part of the night yet upon them. If she’d sent word for more wood yesterday, as she’d meant to. But then she’d gotten carried away with her bicycle plans and forgotten.

  There was only one place she could think to find ready-cut wood this time of night. The warmest place on the island…and it mattered not that the man inside was the last person she wanted to talk to right now. Father needed firewood, and that was that. She took herself across the green, shivering beneath her thin shawl.

  In hushed tones, she explained to the bed-tousled blacksmith, trying hard not to notice the dark circles beneath his blue eyes, or the way he started gathering logs from his own stack before she’d even finished talking. Trying not to wonder why he’d answered his door before she’d knocked even three times.

  She followed him back to the Silent House, fairly running to keep up with his long strides, and led the way to Father’s bedchamber. She passed him dry twigs for kindling and with deft hand he coaxed the embers into a fire so toasty the room warmed in minutes. Before she could thank him, he was out the door, across the green, and back again with a second armload of wood. Despite his hushed protests she took to stacking it, and he vanished for a third trip.

  By then, Aria was losing her resolve to resent his words earlier that day. Somewhere between his second and third trip, she found herself below stairs in the kitchen, warming milk delivered from Spencer’s dairy farm that day, melting rough-cut chunks of chocolate into it. She carried a
pot and two cups up into the dark hall and followed the echoing sounds until she found him at work in the sitting room, laying a fire there.

  One look at what she carried and he was swift to take it from her, place it on the hearth. “You shouldn’t be carrying that,” he said, but when his eyes met hers, she saw he regretted the words.

  She poured a cup of cocoa for him, and one for herself, while he moved to examine the ornately carved mahogany cabinet in the corner. “How does this work?” His brows furrowed in that curious concentration that sometimes captured him.

  She carried a mug over and handed it to him, then pulled the glass door of the cabinet open. “Listen,” she said, and pulled a metal disc out. Placing the disc inside the cabinet so that it faced them, she released the machine to do its work as it slowly moved the disc around, releasing the warmth of a jingly melody into the room.

  James’s expression broke into wonder. “A music box?”

  Tiny indentations traversed the large disc, catching the tines beneath it as they passed over. “You just place whichever disc you’d like to hear upon it,” she said. “It’s years since I’ve heard one like this play, though.” The light measures filled the room until the disc had turned its full revolution. Aria stopped the machine and motioned to the chair nearest the fire, for him to sit.

  James leaned forward, propping his elbows upon his knees while he turned the mug in his hands. At length, he finally spoke. “I’m sorry, Aria. I shouldn’t have said that just now.”

  “…said what?” She moved to the chair opposite his, and took a sip from her cup. Warm and rich.

  “About carrying the hot teapot… and about your music. Earlier, I mean. On the cliff.”

  She shook her head. “I’m the one who’s sorry, James. I spoke harshly today.”