by Amanda Dykes
“You had every right to.”
“No. Not to you. Not like that.”
“I’m glad you said what you did,” he narrowed his eyes as he studied the fire in the hearth. “I want to understand. And I want to help.”
Aria considered his position. What must the past few days have been like for him? Minding his business, gentling metal into function and art and holding this island together the way he did so faithfully with each creation, large or small. From the ornate gates in front of the old ruins, to humble horseshoes that kept every farm working. And then in she blew, turning it all topsy-turvy and dredging up a time he’d doubtless rather forget. Yet here he was, looking at her with such a gentle hunger in his eyes, waiting to receive whatever story she might tell. He deserved an explanation.
“Last summer,” she began, “I was in Lyon. I learned of a bicycle race a man had decided to put on. A promotion for his newspaper, but it was unlike any other race in the whole world. The Tour de France, they called it.”
Even thinking of it sent such a jolt of excitement through her. “The things those men did, James. Cycling through the night, hundreds of miles at a time…they were hungry, thirsty, tired… in pain…” she shook her head. “It was incredible. Insane, but incredible. I saw them pass through and if you could’ve watched the determination on their faces...the absolute grit. There was one man—the Little Chimney Sweep, they called him. That’s what he used to do, sweep chimneys. But here he was, leading the entire pack of professional racers on a machine he once spent his days admiring from rooftops.”
James nodded kindly, though a shadow of confusion fell over him.
She must sound like a fool, chattering on about a bicycle race. “Days and days—weeks! of cycling and when they finally rode into Paris to the finish line—guess who was at the front of the pack. Guess who won the whole race.”
James let his mouth stretch into that slow smile of his. “The chimney sweep?”
Aria jumped in her seat, nearly sloshing her sipping chocolate all over her lap. “Yes! The Little Chimney Sweep! I kept thinking about him. For years, he climbed roofs, descended ladders. Up and down over the city, every day. But he dared to think of a different way of living. Forward-moving. The very same muscles, but used in a different way.”
James sat up taller, then stood, placing his mug atop the hearth and taking up the poker. “Like your instruments,” he said.
Aria drew in a deep breath. To be understood… there was no joy like it. “Exactly. I had thought I’d seen the end of them. I asked Father once if we could donate them perhaps, but he wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. I’m not certain which. He offered funds to donate new instruments instead. I just don’t think he’s ever given up hope that one day I might play them again. I’d thought they’d live here always, abandoned, with only the occasional cleaning Father orders for the house… but that’s when I got the idea for the bicycle.”
“The instruments could have a different sort of movement,” James said with a thoughtful nod, poking a log and setting off a spray of sparks.
“And life!” Aria hopped up, joined him at the hearth.
“And,” James held her gaze, reached out to press a strand of her hair between his fingers. “The ninth symphony would have a way of playing.”
She swallowed. Hearing those words spoken quickened her nerves so. “Yes,” she said, sobering. “There is a verse,” she closed her eyes, recalling the words. “The Lord is my strength and song, and is become my salvation. Those first years, after the accident, those words were my lifeline. I had no strength, I had no song. At least I thought I didn’t. But songs are more than music.”
James nodded, and she continued. “When I look at this chance—I can’t help thinking, maybe this gift for my father— I could be strong for that. That whatever is laid before us to do, that is our song.” She stepped close to James, slipping her hand inside of his, feeling his warmth around her. “Right now, this project is what’s been put before me. Will you help me?”
With a gentle squeeze of his fingers, the dawning of joy in his eyes, she had her answer.
“ON ONE CONDITION.” James instructed the next morning. “I’ll do the casting. You,” he pointed to the clear area of the workshop—the safe place. Near the table. Far from where the molten metal would be. “Chalk the design full-scale on the floor there. And only there. We’ll need it to lay the pieces out on.” And if she would only stay there, James told himself, he could justify allowing her in again. “And you’re so much better with the scale drawings than I am,” he said. She’d always been sharp with numbers.
She grinned. “Fair enough.” Rubbing her gloved hands together, wrapped in their island-knit wool. She glanced around. “Where’s the chalk?”
Despite his best efforts to the contrary, a chuckle slipped out at her eagerness. “Just there,” he pointed to the mantle, then plucked up the trumpet, ready to disassemble and melt. “You realize this will be the heaviest bicycle known to man,” he said.
She nodded, eyes alight. “That doesn’t matter,” she said.
“And you realize it could take weeks to do this.”
“Of course,” she said. “But I know we can have it done in time. Can’t we?” a pleading look settled into her features.
James glanced at the calendar. Christmas Eve was five weeks away. It would be tight, with all of his other projects to do as well… but there were nights, too, if days ran short, and he’d gladly forgo sleep to make this happen. Especially with the idea he had brewing… but it wasn’t time to share that with her just yet.
“Yes. We can do it. Christmas Eve shall have its bicycle.”
With that, the first brick in a wall a decade thick between them crumbled. And day by day, bits of that wall fell, light slipping in through each new chink.
There was the day he forced himself to subject that first trumpet to the fires of the foundry. Aria stole close to him to watch as the metal glowed white beneath the dross.
“We’ll remove that?” she asked, pointing at the dark matter.
James took a ladle and drew the dross with a stir, lifting it out. He let Aria linger there only long enough for him to see the delight glowing in her, then he tipped his head back toward the hearth, where her chalk waited.
But he kept looking up to catch her staring at him. Just as quick, she’d look away, and just as quick, he’d make himself break his stare, too. There was something new in her gaze, and more present each time. Something that made him stand a little straighter as he worked.
A week later, on the last day of November, she traipsed in with a wreath. Without even asking, dragged a stepladder toward the mantle to hang it up.
And then the Christmas carols started again. He tried, he really tried, to lift his hard-and-fast hatred of festivities before December. It was so close, after all. Mere hours, really. But they were so wretchedly jolly, James could barely stand it.
Until she opened her mouth and, in that pure and airy soprano, began the soft strains of Silent Night. It wrapped him, the melody did, and held him fast. On she sang until she reached the fourth verse: With the dawn of redeeming grace…
She stopped abruptly, and tipped her head as if listening.
“The dawn of redeeming grace.” She picked up with the song again, repeating that line more slowly. The way she spoke the words made him think of the way she looked on their beach-treasure expeditions, turning each rock over looking for something of great worth.
Her tune carried on, Aria piecing the bicycle parts together with a deep concentration as the words faded into a hum. When she finally stopped, the air hung with those repeated words and he found he didn’t mind the way they lingered. Didn’t mind one bit.
Then, there was the day when the familiar clanking and tapping and etching of her work fell still. Worried, James sat forward from his stool in order to see her where she sat, skirts billowed in blue around her, studying him with an intensity that made him sit up straight.
He s
wiped at his forehead, as if the motion could dispel the flush of heat across his face. Finally, he stilled his hammer and fixed her with a stare right back. He could win a staring contest, this they both knew. “Well?” he said.
“The molds,” she said, at his side in a heartbeat. She reached into the wooden box to touch the sand mixture, packed so firmly around the wheel indentation. “I’d forgotten how you set these.” She traced her finger lightly along the imprint, where molten brass would soon flow—
And that’s when he saw. She wore no gloves. For the first time since the day she’d stepped back over his threshold, there were her scars.
Only for an instant did he allow himself to look. But they drew him. They tied her to him, forever marked her with his carelessness.
Swiftly, she pulled her hand back into the shadows of her skirts and stepped back. Just as quickly, he reached for his hammer to resume his light tapping, but he could feel the warmth of her continued study of him.
“Does it…” James kept hammering, ever-lighter with each word he spoke, stealing glances at her. “Does it hurt?”
She pursed her lips, glancing out the window, to the ground, and finally at her hands, running her fingers around the arm that bore the most markings. “No,” she said quietly. “Not anymore.”
He recalled her father’s words: She’s already lost so much…
“Father sees me now, you know.” She said, her skirts swishing as she moved to hand him a nail. He took it, listening. “Before… he heard me. But he never saw me. Not really.”
“…and now?”
“Now I can’t be his loophole in that silly superstition any longer. As long as that’s what I was…that was all I was.” her voice trailed off and she shook her head. “Anyway. He’s changed. When we talk in the evenings now, he listens. All his life, the world has been clamoring to listen to him. And he thrived on it. But now—there is this quiet in him, when he looks at me, when he asks me about my time at boarding school all those years. In any case,” she summoned a cheeriness back into her voice, “I want to do this for him.”
Slowly, she retreated back to her work, and James resumed his hammering with renewed fervor.
“We’re almost there, Aria,” he said, so low he wasn’t sure she heard.
Finally, the crowning day came. After weeks of melting, pouring, molding, hammering, polishing, studying, casting, recasting every single pipe, gear, pin… today was the day. Today, they’d shape the handlebars and put the last of the pieces together.
Everything was perfect. Until Aria drew up next to him, such a look of longing on her face. “Can I pour?”
He slammed his hammer toward the mold nail, missing completely and scarring the wood.
No. The word pounded in his head but wouldn’t make it past his tongue. He pleaded it instead silently, and he saw mirrored in her face the ache of what he’d done to her eight-year-old self.
“It wasn’t your fault, James.”
A dry laugh scraped through his throat, audible regret. “No? Who else could have kept you safe that day? Kept you—”
Her hand was on his arm, bearing only gentleness. “It was my idea.”
“Yes, and you were eight. It was my responsibility.”
“You were ten.” She let that small word linger. “Ten. We were having one of our larks, that’s all. One of the only shreds of light in my life back then, by the by.”
He glanced at the promise rocks, the lantern behind them flinging great shadows from their small forms. “But… I promised,” he strode to the mantel and picked up her bronze-cast rock. Please.” He pleaded with his eyes. “Do not go near the foundry.”
She looked as crushed as she used to when they were young and he wouldn’t allow her near the crucible. And it was almost enough to change his mind. But no. Never again would he risk her to the flame. Not when they were this close to giving the symphony its unlikely voice, at last.
ARIA KNEW SHE SHOULDN’T have asked to pour the metal.
But to be a part of this transformation… oh, she’d give anything if he’d just let her try. She plucked her way around the parts on the floor. To anyone other than her and James, the arrangement would look a mess—a graveyard for brass bicycle parts, of all things. But she knew just how each piece fit with the next.
As the two of them worked, the distance between them yawned greater even as the room squeezed smaller. At length James rose and moved to sit beside her, taking the crosspiece from her hands and laying it aside with a gentle click against the stone floor. Slowly, he reached for her hand… gloved, once again. She let him, but wouldn’t meet his gaze.
Silence pulsed louder every second that passed. If she could somehow make him understand…
“You’re still the only one who knows,” she said. “About the ninth, I mean. And me. I mean about the ninth and me and…” she pursed her lips, leaving the rest unsaid.
He covered her hand with his free one. They sat that way, fire crackling behind them and the past and future melding right there. This quiet between them was safe and full, something she didn’t have the heart to break by speaking of that day so long ago. Lifting a large plate of notched brass for one of the gears, she watched the reflection: James’s quiet presence, leaning forward to take hold of bicycle parts, continue his work while just sitting with her. Maybe he sensed the gift of this shared quiet, too. Maybe he was remembering that day, too. Her own reflection looked in some ways a stranger—but perhaps, somewhere in her features, there still lay a bit of that music-filled soul she’d been, once upon a time.
Closing her eyes, Aria let the steady sounds of James working beside her carry her back to that day…
_______
Aria. Even her name spoke the purpose of her life: a song. A symphony. She didn’t mind, really… she loved the music. The way she could place her lips to a reed, stretch her little eight-year-old fingers just so and make, out of nothing, a note fill the room. But what she really liked was the way her father’s stern countenance softened—ever-so—when he listened to her play. The way he told her sometimes that she was the only living symphony there ever was or ever would be—his ninth. The only symphony that didn’t have to be written, because she lived music.
The violin. The trumpet. The flute, the lyre. Woodwinds, brass, and strings—she was every part the orchestra, and the orchestra was every part of her. But still, there was something in Father that she couldn’t reach. A hunger, and she wanted to make it alright. Perhaps if she could give him a gift. Just for him. James had made her that rock… could she make something like that for Father? She could think of only one thing that meant the world to him.
On the eve of her ninth birthday, she waited until her father had gone out, then sneaked into his conservatory to remove his special baton from its glass case. Five minutes later, she was knocking on the door of the forge. Their secret knock, so James would know it was her. But no one answered.
It was alright. She’d seen him do this a thousand times. And, everyone on the island said, James was equal in talent to his father and brothers, even at his young age. Some said he was even better. She found his gloves and put them on, giggling at the way they swallowed her small hands whole. James wouldn’t mind if she used the foundry. It was ready. Or if she used some of the brass scraps from his scrap shelf. He wouldn’t mind, she told herself again and again: when she stirred the metal, pulled out the dross, dipped in Father’s conducting baton. Oh, how pleased he would be! To see it shine! He was just finished writing his tenth symphony—and now, when he conducted, he would have a proper baton. From her. His symphony girl. And maybe he would remember her because of it, everywhere he went, always in every symphony, even if he’d said she had to stay here on the island.
James would be proud, too, for the way she’d done this herself. One more dip of the baton and she pulled it out, held it out to watch the metal as it gleamed and cooled. At last, she set it down, peeled off the gloves, and turned to go.
But at the door, s
he stopped. She’d forgotten to remove the rest of the molten brass. What if James needed the crucible for something else? She must make it ready, just-so, for him. With deft speed and care, she stole back to the foundry and began to ladle it back out. She was too small to pick up the heavy cylinder and pour it into the ingot molds. But she could scoop it. Once, twice…
And then the door creaked wide open behind her and she’d never heard such alarm as she did in James’s voice. Two little words-- “Aria, no!”—a startled jump, and that was all it took. A tiny stumble backward, a collision with the table behind her, the spilling of the ladle down over her fingers, her arms. Splattered pain so deep she could not even cry. Could not feel. Could only work to find breath as she watched James run for her, the world slowing suddenly before her.
She shook her head in frantic protest as she watched her father’s baton roll, brass and all, straight into the coals of the fire.
On the eve of her ninth birthday, the Secret Symphony of Giovanni St. John fell silent.
_______
“Aria,” James’s voice was steady beside her, pulling her out of the memory and into a moment that felt like home. He spoke her name like he held a secret that might harm her. “Tell me… if you could play again… would you?”
That was a question she dared not answer.
WITH THE SUN BARELY CRESTING the thatched rooftops of the village the next morning, Aria slipped through spears of white morning dawn. Light touched the frosted world, setting everything aglow. Sleeping grass, crisp beneath her feet, carried her swiftly to her Blacksmith.
But he was not there.
No fire in the hearth, no coals in the forge, no sign of life anywhere but the frosty breath in front of her own face.
“James?”
