Wolf Notes and Other Musical Mishaps

by Lari Don

  The woman laughed. “Back off, Brodum, they’re not yours yet.” The dog let go.

  Helen yawned again and rubbed her eyes.

  “Up you get!” called the woman, in a voice used to obedience. “You should get home. Your parents will be worried about you. There will be a hot breakfast waiting for you.”

  “Not hungry,” Helen mumbled. “Still full of food … need another snooze.”

  She lay down, surrounded by paws, closed her eyes and muttered, “Funny dream … furry dream … ate too much cake…” She kept her breathing slow and deep, fighting the urge to whack the dogs aside and sprint away.

  “Prod them awake” and “make them run” the other voices urged.

  “No,” sighed the woman. “Let’s find other prey. These children are too full and sleepy to lead us a decent chase. If we find them on their feet another night when the stars are hunting above, then we will chase them until they fall.”

  Helen pretended she was asleep as the pack of hounds leapt over her and light footsteps ran past her. She pretended so well that Yann and Sylvie had to shake her awake.

  “You were great!”

  “No one has ever escaped the Wild Hunt like that before!”

  Helen yawned for real this time. “They won’t fall for it again, so we should head home, but don’t run!”

  “I believe you now,” she added, as they pulled the foil blankets off Yann, “about the faeries invading your forest. It’s too late, but I believe you.”

  “So you got your proof then,” Yann said archly. “What was it? The beautiful boy Lily?”

  “No,” said Helen. “The dogs. Their breath was icy cold. And that woman’s voice was even colder.”

  “Why is it too late?” demanded Sylvie, as Helen shoved the blankets untidily into a pocket of the rucksack.

  “It’s too late, because I promised I would leave if you gave me proof. But I can’t leave now. I have to break my promise. I have to stay and get James back.”

  Sylvie growled. “No! You promised to go. If you stay, the Faery Queen will get her music.”

  Yann frowned, then agreed with Helen. “You’re right. Now that she has stolen the boy, the danger is not just to you. Perhaps you should stay. So I release you from your promise to me, healer’s child, because I know you won’t play for the Faery Queen once we free the boy, will you?”

  Helen thought of that cold voice and shook her head. But she didn’t make any more promises.

  Yann and Sylvie accompanied Helen to the track. The centaur and the bandaged girl kept going along the treeline, as Helen walked slowly towards the lodge. All that yawning had tired her out far more than meeting new friends and foes, and nearly being eaten by faery hounds. She fell into bed without even unlacing her boots and fell asleep dreaming of applause so loud it spanned several worlds.

  Chapter 5

  The sun was high in the summer sky when Helen woke. She was stiff, still had her boots on, and had pine needles poking into her scalp.

  Someone along the corridor was playing incredibly fast scales on a flute; someone else was flushing the toilet. From the boys’ wings she could hear Tommy, the percussionist from Glasgow, warming up thunderously. He wasn’t going to make any friends here. Not at this time in the morning.

  Helen wasn’t sure she was going to make friends here either.

  She’d been so proud of being the youngest person selected for this summer school. But now she was here, she wished the age gap wasn’t so big. She was still eleven. She’d only just finished her last year at primary school. All the other students were teenagers, already at secondary school.

  The only thing she had in common with them was that they were all excellent musicians, but that wasn’t enough for friendship, especially when Professor Greenhill still had to choose her soloists. They were competitors, not colleagues.

  Now Helen knew there were fabled beasts and magical beings in the forest, planning to drive the students away or lure them into another world, it was going to be even harder to chat to the others like this was just another music class.

  Though if she was going to be stuck with them in a faery mound for centuries, perhaps she should make an effort. So she had a quick shower and walked down to breakfast all fresh and smiling.

  The night before, the students had been allocated to different wings: the girls to the Murray and Sinclair wings on the west of the lodge; the boys to the Campbell and Gordon wings on the east.

  The Professor, her deputy and the visiting tutors were staying in the old lodge building which had been the original “big house.” The students were in four wings built last century to turn it into a hunting, shooting and fishing lodge. The McGregors were in the final stages of renovating the lodge to turn it into tourist accommodation. The four wings would be for families, so each wing had its own kitchen and bathroom.

  The renovations weren’t quite finished though, Helen thought, as she stepped over a dusty toolbox on the way to the kitchen.

  The students had to make their own breakfast in their own kitchens, but would have lunch and tea in the old lodge dining room. Helen could hear the four other girls in the kitchen, arguing about whether they should each make their own breakfast or whether they should take turns, a different person making breakfast for the whole wing each morning.

  Helen walked into the kitchen at an unfortunate time. Zoe, one of the other violinists, was facing the door, in mid-sentence. “… Aha. The girl wonder! Our very own primary prodigy! Are you old enough to work a toaster? Does mummy let you use electrical equipment?”

  Helen sighed. Since she’d arrived at Dorry Shee she’d bandaged a wolf and faced down a pack of eternal hounds. She ought to be able to handle a teenager from Edinburgh. If she didn’t stand up for herself right now, she would be the “wee girl” all week. Anyway, she needed the kitchen to herself to make a picnic.

  So she smiled sweetly. “Would you let me make you breakfast? That would be fun. At home, I sit in a high chair and daddy makes me toast fingers. Would you like toast fingers, Zoe?”

  Zoe scowled, and Helen wondered if she had gone a bit far, but the three other musicians round the table laughed. Juliet, the flautist, thanked Helen politely when she put the toast, butter, jam and honey on the table. Alice, the cellist, patted a chair for Helen to sit beside her.

  But Helen didn’t sit down, she pottered around making extra slices of toast until everyone else had gone upstairs. Then, in between bites of her own breakfast, she made jam sandwiches and cheese sandwiches, took the top six chocolate biscuits out of a new packet, rinsed a couple of red apples, and filled a plastic bottle with tap water.

  She heard someone’s feet stomp down the stairs and hid the picnic in a bag under the sink. Now she could enjoy a day of music lessons, before taking the food to James in the evening.

  The kitchen door crashed open and Zoe marched in, wearing clumpy shoes that made her a head taller than Helen. “Aha. Still licking jam off your fingers? I hope you wash your hands before you touch your violin.

  “I just want to tell you it’s very important to know your place in an orchestra and I am senior to you, so that violin solo is mine. Do you understand? Do you promise not to get in my way, baby girl?”

  “I’ve decided not to make too many promises this week. But don’t worry, Zoe, being a better fiddler than you is not my main priority.”

  “Quite right, you just concentrate on learning what you can from me. And please remember, ‘fiddle’ is baby language. Big people call it a violin!” She stomped back out again.

  Helen grinned. Being better than Zoe wasn’t her main priority, but it was near the top of the list. If any audience was going to hear her play this week, they would hear her play a solo.

  So she mustn’t be late for her first lesson with Professor Greenhill. She dashed upstairs for her fiddle, then out of the door leading from their wing into the old lodge. She found herself in the dining room and slid to a halt. Which way was the Professor’s study?


  She noticed that all the windows at the south end of the dining room were huge, giving an amazing view of the loch and mountains in front of the lodge. All the windows at the back of the room were small and poky.

  It was like the lodge was facing the mountains, gazing at the picture postcard landscape, but ignoring the forest at its back. Helen grinned, tempted to give a panto yell of “it’s behind you!” This summer’s drama was happening among the dark trees, out of sight, not in the brightly-lit mountains.

  She shook her head and jogged towards the door near the front windows. It led to a long corridor decorated with big maps of Scotland; a corridor decorated narrower by piles of cardboard boxes full of “What’s on in the Highlands” magazines, and empty display stands for flyers.

  At the end of the hallway, she arrived at a closed door with a laminated white sign:

  PROFESSOR FAY GREENHILL’S STUDY PLEASE KNOCK

  (PLEASE DON’T KNOCK IF YOU CAN HEAR MUSIC)

  The flautist from breakfast, Juliet, was sitting outside listening to the flute music floating from the room.

  Helen sat opposite her. “Are you next? I thought I was in at ten.”

  “No, I’m waiting for my friend, Amelia. She’s had the first lesson of the whole school.”

  “Have you been listening? Does it sound like the Professor is a hard teacher?”

  Juliet shrugged. “There’s been a fair bit of good music in the last ten minutes, but it started off with a lot of nervous silence.”

  Helen grimaced. “I’m pretty nervous too. Playing in front of the great Professor! I bet I play my wolf note about a million times in the first five minutes.”

  “Your wolf note? What’s that? I thought violinists used horsehair, not wolf hair!”

  “I don’t think wolf hair would be long enough to string a bow!” Helen smiled. “But we do have wolf notes, because some violins, especially old ones like mine, have one note that makes the whole instrument reverberate strangely, kind of eerily, like a wolf howling. When you learn which string and fingering produce your wolf note, you try to avoid it. The more nervous you are, the more danger there is of you playing it.

  “Almost every cello has a wolf note, even the modern ones. Don’t flutes have a dodgy note?”

  Juliet shrugged. “The flute doesn’t … but flute players can do. Every time I change register suddenly, one particular note cracks. It makes me really nervous when I see that note in a piece of music near a big change.”

  “Does that note have a name?” Helen asked.

  “Nothing as fancy as a wolf note. I just call it ‘that horrid note!’ If your wolf note is caused by the violin, not by your playing, why don’t you just get a new violin?”

  Helen laid her hand protectively on her fiddle case. “When my grandfather bought me this for my tenth birthday, he told me it was made in Perthshire, two hundred years ago, by a fiddle-maker called Duncan Gow, who claimed he was a direct descendant of Ossian, the great Celtic bard. There are only a dozen of his fiddles left in the world.”

  Juliet laughed. “Do you believe that?”

  Helen grinned. “Not really, but it’s a good story … and it’s a great violin. My wolf note is a high B on the G string, which isn’t that common, and I’m pretty good at avoiding it by using the D string, when the melody allows. Anyway, I love my fiddle, I don’t want a different one.”

  The music in the study stopped. The two girls fell silent. The door creaked open and a girl with a wide smile and a narrow blue flute case came out. Juliet put an arm round her friend’s shoulders as they walked up the corridor.

  Helen faced the open door. Her first summer school lesson. The reason she’d worked so hard.

  “Come in,” said a soft warm voice.

  Helen had only seen Professor Greenhill twice before. Once, when she auditioned last winter, when she had been so nervous she’d hardly looked up from her music stand; and then again last night, when the Professor had balanced on a dining room table to welcome them all to the summer school and tell them a few details about the midsummer concert.

  The Professor was famous for her teaching rather than her playing. She had discovered and taught some of the best violinists, flautists, pipers and drummers in the last thirty years, several of whom were attending the summer school as teachers. She was also famous for her books on musical traditions and her popular compositions for small orchestral groups.

  As Helen unpacked her fiddle and tightened her bow, the Professor looked up from her notes.

  “Oh! You’re the girl from …” She glanced at her red leather folder again and smiled. “Of course, you’re the girl from the Borders. I remember how enchantingly you played at your audition. Why don’t you warm up for me with a nice jaunty hornpipe?”

  Helen sighed with relief. She could choose a tune that went nowhere near her wolf note.

  Professor Greenhill was tall and wore a tight tweed skirt and jacket, with a pair of high, spiky, patent-black shoes. A narrow scarf of many swirly colours was tied neatly round her neck and a pair of silver-framed glasses perched on the middle of her nose. Everything about her was neat and polished except her long white hair, which kept falling out of its bun as she nodded enthusiastically at Helen’s playing. She seemed content to listen, encourage and appreciate. She was the perfect audience and, because of that, Helen played her best.

  Helen felt the tension of last night slip away. This was why she was here; to learn and to play. To be a musician was the most wonderful gift in the world. Nothing else mattered.

  “Now you’ve warmed up, Helen,” the Professor said, as she knotted her hair in a bun again, “why don’t you try the midsummer solo sections?”

  Helen had been rehearsing this music for weeks. Every time she had played it, her little sister Nicola had danced around the kitchen. Even though she knew this was a mini-audition, her chance to impress before Zoe and the other violinists had their lessons, she still grinned the whole time she played, as the music flowed perfectly from her bow.

  The Professor nodded joyfully, shaking her hair loose again, and made gentle helpful suggestions.

  When Helen had finished, the Professor smiled. “You are a very skilled player, with lots of passion too. Lovely. Now, off you go. I will hear your wonderful interpretation of my humble tune again soon.”

  Helen stepped slowly into the corridor. She could have played in that study for the Professor forever if there hadn’t been a queue of students building up outside.

  She walked dreamily out of the lodge front doors, but the cool air blowing off the loch woke her up. She stood for a moment, staring at the magnificent mountains ahead of her, watching dozens of tiny silver burns flow down their rocky sides into the loch.

  Then she remembered she had a small boy to feed that night, so she hoisted the violin case onto her back, and headed for the McGregors’ cottage. Helen knocked. Mrs McGregor opened the door.

  “How’s James?” Helen asked.

  “How nice of you to ask! He’s awake, but I think he’s coming down with something. He’s sleepy and doesn’t want to eat.”

  Helen looked into the small living room. The little girl was at the table, rattling buttons in a bowl; the boy was sitting straight up on the couch, covered by a blanket.

  Helen stared at him. He had been lying down last night, now he was sitting up! Surely a wooden statue couldn’t do that! If James was at home after all, then the Faery Queen didn’t have a hostage and no one would have to play at her revels.

  “Hello!” Helen said.

  “Hello!” the boy replied, with exactly the same intonation.

  “How are you, James?”

  He didn’t answer, just stared ahead with half-shut eyes.

  His mum said, “He got a bit of a chill last night. He’ll be better soon.”

  “Better soon,” he agreed.

  Helen frowned. He was just repeating other people’s words. He wasn’t really talking.

  Then the boy turned to Mrs McGregor, with a sligh
t creak that might have been the couch, or might have been his stiff shoulders, and gave her a blindingly bright smile.

  She laughed. “That’s my boy!”

  Helen shivered. She’d seen a smile that bright last night. She’d better take the picnic into the forest tonight after all.

  She sighed. “Would you like me to play with Emma for a while? She’s the same age as my wee sister and it would give you both some peace and quiet.”

  Mrs McGregor smiled. “That would be great. I’m too busy to play with her just now, with James under the weather and their dad away on an outdoor activities course in Fort William, so I’m sure Emma would love someone to play with.”

  Helen held her hand out to Emma. “Let’s go and make a noise somewhere else, shall we?”

  Emma trotted along beside her to the rehearsal room in Murray Wing. It was just as messy as Yann and Sylvie had left it after their attempted sabotage: the bookcase squint against the armchair; loose music all over the couch; the bent music stand flung in a corner; the ripped drums under the shelves.

  Perhaps teenagers didn’t notice mess. Or perhaps they assumed someone else would tidy it up.

  Helen offered Emma an intact African drum to bang and spent five minutes clearing up to the noise of elephants crossing the savannah. Helen grinned. Her own wee sister used drums for animal noises too.

  She sat down beside the three-year-old. “What does James like to eat?”

  “Birthday cake,” answered Emma, still tapping the drum.

  “Cake?”

  “Just birthday cake, but he doesn’t eat the candles.”

  “I’m glad he doesn’t eat the candles. Does he like apples?”

  “No.” Emma’s voice was firm.

  “What about chocolate biscuits?”

  “No. I like chocolate biscuits.” Emma smiled up at Helen.

  “I’ll get you one in a minute. What does James eat then? Does he eat sandwiches?”

  “Chocolate biscuit?”

  Helen wasn’t going to get any more answers until she had produced a chocolate biscuit. She nipped into the kitchen and got Emma two chocolate biscuits.