The Hellion's Waltz

by Olivia Waite

  Dedication

  For Grandpa Toby, who has flown west.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Acknowledgments

  The Feminine Pursuits Series

  About the Author

  Also by Olivia Waite

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  “Carrisford is an honest place,” Mr. Roseingrave said happily.

  “So you’ve said, Papa,” Sophie dutifully replied.

  They were walking out of the center of town, just crossing the north river bridge. On this winter day Carrisford was picture-pretty, all clear blue sky and ancient stone. The River Ethel murmured around the bridge pilings and bore away boats full of merchants, sailors, and oyster fishers.

  Downstream the two great mills hulked on the riverbank. Mr. Obeney’s stood empty, its owner gone to build a new utopian society across the sea; beside it, Mr. Prickett’s mill did work enough for two, quaffing huge gulps of water to power the thrumming steam engines that kept the silk-winding machinery busy day and night. Upstream, the wind swirled through what remained of the ancient Castle Carrisford.

  “Look at all of them,” said Mr. Roseingrave, beaming at the people on every side. “So busy, so engaged in their labor.” He turned to twinkle at his daughter, cheeks flushed with hope, the sharp wind tugging at the ends of his muffler. “No silver-tongued thieves and swindlers here.”

  Sophie bit her lip. In her estimation, it was far too early to go making judgments about the character of an entire populace. The Roseingraves had lived in Carrisford a scant two weeks, and most of that time had been spent organizing the secondhand instrument shop: checking the stock against the previous owner’s inventory lists, setting out sheet music and partbooks, oiling wood and tuning strings, hanging the violins and guitars on the wall, placing the harps where they’d show to best advantage. Even with seven Roseingraves pitching in, the work had felt endless—the more so because it was now a full two months since Sophie or her father had laid hands on a piano.

  She flexed her fingers inside her mittens, as though shaking off a weight.

  Now, finally, they’d been called out on a piano job. A local widow, one Mrs. Muchelney, had asked them to take a look at some damage to her family instrument. If Mr. Roseingrave thought secondhand sales and repair work were a sad comedown for a man used to designing and building his own pianofortes in his own workshop—including a new type of piano action he was still hoping to patent—he didn’t show it. His cheeks glowed rose-red in the wind, and his lanky legs ate up the street beneath him.

  Sophie’s frozen heart thawed a little to see her father so happy. He’d taken Mr. Verrinder’s betrayal so painfully to heart, it had acted upon him like a wasting sickness. When he’d told the family of his plan to move them out of London and to this town near the sea, Sophie’d thought of mineral waters and hot springs and quailed to think her father imagined himself a permanent invalid.

  She hoped there was no new Mr. Verrinder to come along and blight his recovery. Thankfully, in all of London, for all her life, Sophie had only ever met one Mr. Verrinder.

  Perhaps Carrisford was simply too small to hold anyone with so much wickedness.

  They wound their way past bakeries, butcher shops, handcarts with pies of all kinds, and orange sellers. The streets grew more spacious, the houses less squashed against one another. Mr. Roseingrave set down his tools and knocked at the side door of a cozy home of three stories. “Mrs. Muchelney has a Southwell—and five children, I hear,” he murmured, hands clasped behind his back, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet.

  Sophie nodded. She knew the role she might have to play: keep the children occupied and away from the delicate instrument while her father assessed the work to be done. Hand him tools one by one while warding off small sticky fingers. She’d done it all her life, ever since her younger siblings had started coming along, year by year. There had been four Roseingraves after Sophie, but somehow five Muchelneys seemed like a larger number.

  It meant she’d likely be too occupied to set hands to Mrs. Muchelney’s piano today. Sophie writhed secretly at the tiny bright note of relief she felt about that.

  Mrs. Muchelney was round and warm as a teapot as she greeted them. “Oh, Mr. Roseingrave, I cannot thank you enough for coming today. Harriet and Susan were trying to teach one another fencing and I do not know what harm they may have done to that piano.”

  “Whatever it is, I’m sure we can mend it,” Mr. Roseingrave said, clasping the widow’s hands between his and sending her the deferential smile he saved for customers.

  She smiled back gratefully, patted his wrist with a soft, pale hand, and guided him to where the instrument stood between a pair of windows overlooking the street.

  Mrs. Muchelney’s Southwell was an old-fashioned demilune variety, the kind that looked like a simple half-circle side table until you lifted the top and found the keys waiting for you underneath. Instead of a pedal for the sustain, which would have looked odd on a table and spoiled the illusion, there was a lever to be pressed at the height of the player’s knee.

  The underside of the fallboard had been inlaid with paler wood and veneered to look like the spines of a seashell, radiating upward and outward when opened—as it evidently had been when the duelists struck, because a gash marred the shining surface, and splinters framed a jagged hole in the wooden lattice that sheltered the instrument’s working parts.

  Sophie bit her lip, and saw her father’s shoulders give a delicate shudder. “You said they were teaching one another to fence?” Mr. Roseingrave asked.

  But the widow was attending to a footman, who had bent to murmur in his mistress’s ear.

  Mrs. Muchelney’s sigh had the threadbare quality of a maternal patience long worn out from use. “Pray excuse me, Mr. Roseingrave,” she said. “The boys’ violin tutor has just arrived, and I have some similar matters to discuss with him.” She vanished through the doorway.

  “Apparently this is a very dangerous house for instruments,” Mr. Roseingrave said, his low tone shaded by amusement.

  “Susan was reading about assassins,” a voice piped up. “She said we were woefully underprepared to defend ourselves.”

  Sophie and her father turned. A girl of thirteen or so was standing there, brown haired and brown eyed, face freckled and currently bright pink with rebellion. Hands clasped before her, shoulders back, chin up. As though she were determined to bear up nobly under some coming blow, like a martyr in a child’s book of sermons.

  “What weapons had you chosen?” Mr. Roseingrave asked curiously.

  “The fire irons.” The girl—Harriet Muchelney, presumably—replied. She spread her feet and braced herself for reproof.

  Sophie smiled. “I’m sure this piano will think twice about threatening you after this.”

  Those brown eyes fixed on her, then flickered back to the instrument. “It was a gift from Uncle Albert to Papa,” Harriet explained. “We only keep it because Uncle Albert died, and then Papa died, and it makes Mother sad to think of parting with it.” She chewed her lip. “Nobody ev
en plays it.”

  Mr. Roseingrave had taken off his coat and set it aside, and rolled up his sleeves. “Let’s see if you’ve wounded it fatally.”

  It took his experienced hands only a few moments to find where the case came apart—the showy lacquered wood fell away and Mr. Roseingrave slid out the action. There were the hammers, the dampers, the springs and shanks and hinges, all the bits of wood and felt and metal that came together for the making of music. The ivory-topped naturals and ebony sharps that were such a striking feature of the piano looked so much smaller when the rest of the mechanism was visible.

  And most importantly: the strings. Inside the half-circle case, they crossed over one another in two layers, the thicker, longer bass strings stretched slantwise over the shorter notes for the treble and tenor. Exposed like this, they whispered echoes of every sound that reached them.

  Harriet gave a little gasp. The note of wonder was unmistakable.

  Mr. Roseingrave looked up at Sophie and smiled wryly.

  Sophie smiled and nodded her head gently in return. She knew precisely what he was thinking. He’d shown every one of her younger siblings the inside of a piano, one by one. They’d been vaguely curious—small hands testing the tension of the strings, pressing on the keys to watch how the action raised the hammer and the damper and then brought both back down. But before long their hearts had been claimed by other instruments: Freddie by the viola, Robbie the cello, the twins Jasper and Julia striving to outdo one another on the violin.

  Sophie alone had shared her father’s love of the piano, with its chorus of voices and hidden machinery.

  Now, apparently, Harriet Muchelney had lost her heart to it as well. The girl’s eyes were round and her clenched hands had gone slack in amazement. She lifted one hand slightly, as though tempted to reach out and stroke the strings directly, like the harp they resembled. But it was clear she didn’t dare actually touch anything.

  Sophie knew that heart-struck wonder. There was something irresistibly poignant in an opened piano awaiting repair—like a wounded bird with its feathers splayed. It needed patient attention and a soothing touch to get it to sing again.

  “Aha.” Her father’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Looks like there’s only one hammer broken inside. Not a fatal wound at all.” His long fingers worked swiftly to pluck out the damaged part, with its red-and-white felt head, while Sophie rummaged in the tool bag for a shank of the size and length Southwells usually held. The hammer head slid off the old shank and onto the new, and the action went back into its proper place, the bulk of it sliding home like a key fitting into a lock.

  Mr. Roseingrave grinned down at the keyboard. “Let’s see what she sounds like.” He struck the note attached to the repaired hammer: the A in the octave above middle C.

  The tone staggered like its knees had been broken.

  Sophie and Harriet Muchelney both winced.

  Mr. Roseingrave laughed in horror. “I see she needs tuning! Sophie, would you be so kind?”

  Her father had a genius for piano design and mechanics—but Sophie shared her opera singer mother’s perfect ear for pitch. So it was Sophie who’d learned the tuning trade, and who’d taken over when her mother’s hearing began to suffer. Between them they’d tuned every piano that bore the Roseingrave name.

  She smoothed her brown skirts down and took a seat on the bench, the ribs of the piano spread wide before her.

  Her shaky fingers wrapped around the handle of the tuning hammer and gripped tight, one pinky on the end, thumb extended along the handle for leverage. She put the tuning hammer on the head of the first pin, muted the notes to the side of the starting string, nudged the knee lever to raise all the dampers, and set her left hand on the keys.

  The familiar movements ought to have been a comfort. Instead, sweat and fear made her hands soft and slick as melting candles.

  Every string was a voice, every pin was an eye—watching her. Waiting.

  Her father coughed, softly. She didn’t dare glance back at him. The ivory was cool beneath her touch, the winter sunlight spilling in the window not enough to warm it, or to melt the chill of fear in Sophie’s bones. She sucked in a lungful of air and struck the key hard before she lost her nerve. The note banged like brass into the semi-silence.

  The heaviness of iron, sensible only in memory, clapped tight and hard around her fingers.

  It’s nothing. She repeated that silently like a prayer. It’s only one note, to test the tuning. It’s not really playing. You don’t have to think about your fingers. Just listen.

  Sophie tried to ignore the leaden stiffness in her hands, and gave all her attention to her ears.

  The note was flat, the string too slack. She moved the tuning hammer—just slightly, a light wriggle back and forth, her fingers sensitive to the tiny movements of the pin where it was anchored in the block behind the soundboard. She struck the key again, and again, the same note thrumming like a heartbeat. Another light twist of the hammer and there it was, the proper pitch, pure and clean as the first breath of spring after a long winter.

  Tears pooled in her eyes; she blinked them back.

  Sophie’s hands and hammer moved up and down the keyboard, skipping higher or lower and then tuning the strings in the gaps. It was slow going. This house had five children, and thin walls—and this piano was slight and small, not meant for pouring out oceans of sound. You had to tune it to blend well with the noises around it, or it would always sound off no matter how accurate the pitch. She tuned the bass to the sound of the carts and horses going by in the street outside, and the treble to the plaintive voice of violins being imperfectly practiced several rooms away. In fact, by adjusting the sharpness just slightly, she could cancel out some of the angrier harmonics from the Muchelney boys’ lessons: instead of wolves howling in rage, they became hounds baying on a hunt.

  “Oh,” she heard young Miss Muchelney breathe, very softly. Echoing her own relief as the jarring harmonics were tamed.

  By the time she reached the final string, she had stopped trying to contain the drops that spilled from her eyes and down her cheeks. Her father quietly handed her a handkerchief when she finished the highest note on the treble; she wiped her face, tucked it in her sleeve, and finished tuning the bass.

  When at last she set down her hammer and sighed, rolling her shoulders to get some of the tightness out, her father reached down to the keyboard.

  An arpeggio rang out, this one sweet as a bell.

  Miss Muchelney gasped again, her voice unwittingly hitting some of the harmonics hidden in the notes.

  Sophie wiped her eyes one final time and glanced up at her father.

  He gripped her shoulder—lightly, fingers extended, just the way Sophie gripped the tuning hammer. His smile was soft, without any of the sadness he’d carried around like a cloak the past two months. “Well done, my dear,” he murmured.

  Sophie gulped and nodded. He doesn’t have to know you can’t stop feeling that device, she told herself sternly. Just let him be proud of you.

  Her father may have begun to recover from Mr. Verrinder’s fraud. But Sophie still had a long, long way to go.

  This was how great crimes began: with a single secret question and no law around to overhear.

  “All those in favor?” Maddie Crewe asked.

  And every hand in the room went up.

  Really, they ought to have been somewhere seedier for this. Not this small polite room with its whitewashed plaster and homely windows and a decade-old accretion of technical books. This crime should have been born in a proper den of iniquity, with guttering candles and dubious beverages and women of even more dubious morals.

  Maddie supposed one out of three would have to do.

  The conspirators here tonight were women and girls, ranging in ages from sixteen to sixty, and mostly on the younger side of the scale. Half were factory girls in their pinafores going off to work the night shift after this, the rest were handweavers of silk ribbons, satin, cr
epe, bombazine, brocade, and velvet. Madeleine Crewe was a ribbon weaver and the current chairwoman of the Carrisford Weavers’ Library (formerly Weavers’ Library and Reform Society, changed for prudence’s sake when the magistrates had started to look askance at any group with the word reform in their name).

  This crime was half Maddie’s idea.

  The other half had come from Mrs. Money—“rhymes with stony,” as she’d explained in her gravelly voice. She was a newcomer, much better dressed than the others. Maddie had seen the girls’ eyes travel along the lines of her rich black coat with real fur at the cuffs and collar, estimating its weight and worth with eyes that knew precisely how much food the weaving of such fabric would have earned them. They’d been quite naturally wary of anyone in such a coat—until Maddie had showed them Mrs. Money’s convict love token, the twin to her own, and told them about the scheme, and asked if they wanted to help.

  Hence the unanimous yes. Helping was what the Library was for, after all.

  It wouldn’t be Maddie’s first walk on the shady side of the law. She’d slipped away from a shop a time or two with more in her pockets than when she’d come in. She’d let a lonely soldier—or his lonelier wife—buy her a meal and a drink in exchange for an evening’s company. Just to help a body get by when bread was dear. And a little light larceny now and again was practically expected of factory girls, as steady apprenticeships vanished and wages sank lower and lower. Everyone had to make shift somehow.

  And once, at seventeen, when Maddie had finally had enough mistreatment and walked away from the throwing mill, and away from its horrible overseer . . . They’d sent her to jail for breaking contract and shaved her head so the lesson would sink in.

  But hair, like hope, had a way of growing back. Maddie was free, and her auburn waves now flowed past her shoulders when she left them unpinned. She tucked one wayward lock behind her ear now, and smiled at her fellow thieves.

  “It’s likely to be dangerous,” Mrs. Money said. Her voice was soft but her eyes were hard, and she turned them on every weaver in the room, one by one. “They’ll transport us, if they catch us.”