Rhapsody for Two

by Theresa Romain

  How to Ruin a Duke

  THE DAMAGED VIOLONCELLO still lay atop the worktable the following morning, but Rowena decided to begin the day with a smaller task: by trimming a new tuning peg for a Rugeri violin. A beautiful instrument with a spruce belly and a back of flame maple, it was owned by a young matron who hadn’t played a note since her wedding day.

  “I’d like to begin again,” Mrs. Beckett had confided to Rowena when she entrusted the violin to her the day before.

  I’d like to begin again, too, Rowena thought. She craved a fresh start, with no red in her ledger.

  Fabricating a tuning peg was a fairly simple task, and simple was what Rowena wanted right now so her thoughts could roam. Not only over how the new peg would fit, but also what she’d agreed to the evening before.

  Time with Simon Thorn. A partnership. The hope of saving the shop.

  And a pair of mischievous brown eyes, a hand on hers, and a packet of hairpins he hadn’t needed to bring.

  He would return this morning, before she opened the shop, and they would discuss further plans for drawing new business. Effective immediately, she had agreed the evening before, she would double her rates for all new jobs—except for tuning pianofortes, a task most luthiers didn’t accept. Those jobs were tedious enough that she’d charge triple.

  It seemed presumptuous to charge more than her father had after all his decades of experience. But then, as Simon had pointed out, if her father had charged the same rate for all of Rowena’s years of memory, he had likely undervalued his work. Which led to Rowena undervaluing her own.

  “And it’s not as if meat and bread cost what they did twenty-eight years ago, when I was born,” he had added. “Or rent, as you know.”

  She couldn’t argue with that.

  So, he was two years older than Rowena. She had squirreled away that fact about him, as she did every other tidbit of gleaned information: that he needed money for someone back home, wherever that was. That he’d speak frankly about many things, but not that.

  Anyway. For all her proud talk of luthiery when she met Simon Thorn, she’d never thought to consider her value separate from her father’s. He’d set a precedent she had always followed—and it had taken the arrival of an attractive stranger with a horn to make her wonder why.

  Hmm.

  She eased one of her carving tools over the nearly completed peg, shaving away tiny bits of dense boxwood. It turned easily in her hand, all silent potential. Silence was part of sound and sometimes quite the loveliest part when it allowed one scope for meandering thoughts.

  One more shaving, then she tried the peg in its intended spot. No, it wasn’t a perfect fit yet. She needed her magnifying lens to check the surface of the boxwood peg for rough spots. Gazing about the cluttered but organized work space—a place for every board, supply, tool—she saw at once that it was missing from its spot at the end of the worktable.

  “Nanny,” she grumbled.

  Nanny had got Alice, the maid, to pilfer it again. Rowena would bet on it. Nanny had grown shortsighted over the years, and she’d been impatient to read How to Ruin a Duke—just as she was to read every other one of the Gothic novels Rowena and her friend Edith passed back and forth. Rowena’s magnifying lens went missing several times a week, and it was always to be found beside Nanny, held over the pages of their latest book.

  Rowena set down the tuning peg, then gathered up Cotton—snuffling about on the floor—to keep the hedgehog from the paste jar. Cotton loved to eat paste almost as much as she loved crunching on beetles. More than once, Rowena had found the hedgehog’s little snout daubed with the concoction of flour and water and alum.

  Hedgehog bundled in her arms, she marched upstairs to the living quarters. The building stacked up three floors above the shop, but the household rarely used any of the rooms on the top two stories.

  Alice squeaked when she saw Rowena turn the bend in the stairs. Duster in hand, she fled into a room off the corridor.

  “I know you took my lens, Alice,” Rowena called after her. “It’s all right, but I need it back.”

  Alice poked her head forth. “Nanny has it. She’s in the parlor.”

  The parlor. An awfully grand name for a room in which they rarely welcomed guests. Nanny had her old friend Mrs. Newland over for tea now and again, but the days of card parties and chattering blue bloods had gone with Rowena’s grandparents.

  Alice was right: Here was Nanny in the parlor, a tidy room with cheerful paper on the walls and a worn but still-lovely carpet on the floor. The old woman sat in her favorite seat, a short sofa with a wooden frame and a hard tapestry-covered back. She’d softened the furniture with cushions over the years, each beautifully embroidered. Her swollen feet, cradled in soft slippers, rested on a low footstool.

  Nanny had indeed taken Rowena’s lens, setting it on the end table beside her sofa. The magnifier was a big, beautiful half orb of transparent glass set into an articulated frame on a stand. It was unwieldy, almost the size of the book Nanny was reading. Not for the first time, Rowena thought she should get a sliding tabletop magnifier for the household. Just a fat lens that one slid along the page.

  But right now, every penny counted. By all rights, Rowena shouldn’t even be subscribing to a library anymore, though a life without Gothic novels and romantic Society tales would be sorely lacking in savor.

  If one had no romance or scandal in one’s life—and really, the only good sort of scandal was the sort that came with romance attached—then one needed to find it on the page. And romance had been sadly absent from Rowena’s life for several years, since the abrupt departure of the awkward lover she’d once thought to wed.

  It was because of the in-between social class she occupied, perhaps. She wasn’t high-bred enough for the nobles, and she terrified the young men of the merchant and working classes by running her own shop.

  For a little while longer, at least.

  Nanny looked up from How to Ruin a Duke. She had a face like a pumpkin, round and well-creased, with a smile of infinite kindness and merry gray eyes. Though they were hidden behind thick spectacles, she still required the lens. “This is an excellent book. We should buy a copy of our own.”

  “When the shop is doing a bit better,” Rowena said gently. “A gentleman named Mr. Thorn is going to help me with that.”

  “Oh? Is he a luthier too?” Nanny peered over her spectacles, all curiosity.

  This expression always made Rowena want to fidget and blush. “No. He’s a bit of everything else, though, so he says. He wants me to increase my rates and to market the shop with new sorts of advertisements.”

  “Good suggestions. I like them.” Nanny closed the book, holding her place with one crabbed finger. “And you’re paying him...how?”

  Rowena explained the strange terms of their deal: the new lease to be arranged first, then twenty pounds for Mr. Thorn to send home. “And then he’ll be off, and you and I can carry on just as we have.”

  Rowena couldn’t imagine life without Nanny in it. She’d been Rowena’s father’s governess before Rowena’s, Thus she had never had any qualms about confronting Mr. Fairweather. When Rowena had been born with thready membranes constricting the fingers of her right hand, her father had wanted her to receive extra help.

  Nanny had harangued him for coddling his daughter, for asking Nanny to cut Rowena’s food and help her eat and brush her hair and any other little task.

  “She can do it herself,” Nanny had insisted. “She’s a Fairweather. You should teach her everything you know. It might take her longer to learn, but she can do it.”

  And Rowena did, sometimes crying with frustration, or from the pain in her restricted fingers. But over the years, she’d schooled her mind and body not to give up. Maybe she couldn’t do things exactly like everyone else, but she could still do them. Her way.

  Even so, her father had become reconciled to her hands only when she picked up a violin for the first time. He showed her how to hold it, press
ing the bow into her right hand, then brightened. Thank God it’s your right hand with the damage, he’d said. In any other profession, the left would be the more expendable, but a string player needed her left for the fingering and the right only for the bow.

  Her father had made a luthier of her, as long ago as she could remember.

  And Nanny? Nanny had made her a capable human.

  She owed the old woman everything, so Nanny’s look of disappointment just now wrung her heart.

  “Must we?” Nanny sighed. “Carry on just as we have?”

  “Why, what’s wrong?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Newland is having a difficult time with the stairs too. I wanted her to come to tea today. I even bribed her by offering to read to her from How to Ruin a Duke! But she said she needed to rest on her day off.” Nanny’s longtime friend was a housekeeper for a well-to-do family in Mayfair.

  “Painful knees are painful knees, despite the promise of reading about the Duke of Amorous,” Rowena replied. “I’m sorry. Should we send Alice over to her with a package of treats?”

  Nanny waved this off. “Her mistress’ll take care of her all right. I just get lonely for my friend.”

  “I understand,” Rowena said. “I’ve got to take the lens back down with me now, but I’ll leave Cotton with you. And I’ll come check on you every hour—how is that? I can read you bits of How to Ruin a Duke.”

  “No need for that. I know you need to work.” Nanny stretched out her hands for Cotton, settling the hedgehog on one of her innumerable embroidered cushions. “But when that Mr. Thorn of yours arrives, send him upstairs to meet me. That’ll do just fine.”

  Rowen considered protesting that Mr. Thorn of yours, then decided that Nanny would enjoy that far too much. Besides, she rather liked the sound of it. So she only took up the magnifier—leaving the book with Nanny, with instructions to Alice to read to the old woman as Alice’s time permitted—and returned to the workshop.

  With the magnifier back in its place on the worktable, Rowena tilted the lens and peered through it at the boxwood peg. Ah! There was the problem: a spot that lacked the satin-smooth finish of the rest. It was the work of a minute to fix it. Once sanded, the peg fit into its spot as neatly as if it had been carved by Rugeri himself.

  Someday, perhaps, people would speak of Fairweather violins as they did of Rugeris, or Amatis, or instruments by Stradivari or Klotz or Guarneri. Rowena had never constructed a finished violin from raw wood, but...someday. Someday she would. Over the years, she had surely learned every step needed; she’d surely worked on every piece and part.

  Mrs. Beckett’s Rugeri violin was a wondrous concoction of woods: a neck and sides of maple, a top of spruce, tuning pegs of boxwood, a tailpiece of rosewood, and a fingerboard of ebony. It took a forest to make a violin, and this was a beautiful one. Refitting the tuning pegs was a small task, but one that gave Rowena great pleasure. She could never afford such a fine instrument for herself—but now that she had repaired this one, she ought to make certain her work was satisfactory by playing it.

  It was only responsible to do so.

  She rubbed each gut string with a little olive oil, then knotted them to fasten them in the tailpiece before stretching them over the bridge, up the neck, and secure about the tuning pegs.

  Then she put her own bow to the strings and drew it across. Lightly, smoothly, like a nobleman’s valet might rub a silk handkerchief over a polished boot. Notes vibrated in the quiet morning shop like raindrops in a puddle, like marbles cascading to the floor. A spill of clear sound, its ripples persisting when the note itself was gone.

  Perfect.

  Oh, not the playing. The playing was horribly out of tune. But the peg was a perfect fit. Rowena bowed again, giving a practiced twist to each tuning peg as she drew the bow across the strings. Playing two at a time, creating perfect fifths of sound, she brought the violin’s strings into harmony with each other just as she’d brought shape to a formless piece of wood.

  It was immensely satisfying, though her bowing fingers cramped and ached by the time she was done. Only then did she recall that the day had hardly begun, that her work lay scattered all around her, and that none of it would be enough to pay Mr. Lifford, the landlord, for the continued lease of Fairweather’s.

  The lovely spring day suddenly seemed gray.

  And then, from the other side of the velvet curtain, there sounded a knock at the door. Rowena peeked around the edge of the curtain—and the day became sunny after all, the clouds brightening.

  Simon Thorn was here.

  SIMON ARRIVED AT FAIRWEATHER’S embarrassingly early in the day, yet he couldn’t manage to feel embarrassed. It was too good, too rewarding, to see Rowena Fairweather’s spring-sunny smile as she unlocked the door of the shop to him.

  “I’d not have thought you an early riser,” she said. “Most musicians aren’t, since they have to play so late at parties and balls.”

  “Maybe I’d have had a harder time getting up if I’d played at Vauxhall last night, but as I didn’t, I’m terrifyingly full of energy.”

  “Terrifyingly?” She arched a brow. “I’m not easily terrified.”

  “I should have guessed that. If I’m very lucky, maybe I can keep up with you.” He smiled. How could he not? Today she wore a rust-brown gown, and her eyes looked very blue. She was autumn leaves and spring sky.

  “I did promise to come early,” he added, “so that I could catch you before you open the shop for the day. Can you take a few minutes to walk down Bond Street with me? I want to show you something.”

  She looked back into the shop, called a few words to someone upstairs—the maid, perhaps?—and without further delay stepped through the doorway and joined Simon on the pavement. “Let’s go, then.”

  Simon blinked. “I admire promptness, but are you sure you’re ready? Don’t you want a...hat or bonnet or whatnot?”

  “Will a hat or bonnet or whatnot help me understand what you wish to show me?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then let’s be off.” She grinned at him. “I’m behind on my work, but I’m ready for a break. Behold an escapee from Fairweather’s. Have you had a brilliant idea that will help me?”

  He offered her his arm. “Not brilliant, perhaps, but adequate at the very least.”

  When she took his arm and said, “Lead on,” he changed his mind: He was damned brilliant, after all.

  It was brilliant, damned brilliant, to be outside on a cool May morning. The day had not yet decided whether it wanted to become hot or pour down buckets, and in this undecided state, it was full of possibility. A bakery exhaled glorious scents, and a costermonger’s wagon clopped by laden with every growing thing from aubergines to apricots, bright like a tangle of beads in a jewel box. Maids in neat uniforms and starched caps darted into early-open shops. Later in the day, the tonnish would yawn and stretch and promenade down the fashionable street, idly shopping—but for now, Bond Street belonged to those who worked. Those with purpose.

  Simon’s idea, he explained to Rowena as they progressed down the street, was to turn the front window of her shop into an ever-changing display. “People overlook the familiar, but they notice when something is different. See the way this print shop’s window always has something new in it? We cannot pass by without taking a look.”

  They halted before just such an example, which today featured a satirical caricature of—who else? The Duke of Amorous, who bore the dark hair and aristocratic appearance of the Duke of Emory. Unfortunately, the nobleman’s dignified appearance was undermined by his pose: clothing askew, nose red from drink, bleating “God Save the King” outside of Almack’s.

  The sort of person who cared about Almack’s would care very much that the duke had bespoiled it by singing outside of it—and now an impulsive, possibly drunken wager of a moment was immortalized in print and as a print. Poor fellow. Simon would almost feel sorry for the duke, if he hadn’t been born into immense wealth and privilege. Emory
had never had to take on an apprenticeship for which he’d been ill-suited, and at which he’d been an utter, ruinous failure.

  Well. Maybe. Simon supposed that just because someone was born to become a duke didn’t mean he was well-suited to the role.

  But then there was Rowena Fairweather: born to be a luthier, and so deliciously capable that he could not imagine her as anything else. Though he could imagine her as anything she put her mind to.

  “At the moment,” Simon pointed out, “your shop’s window contains only a sign, with a curtain blocking a view of the workshop. What if you drew that aside, so people could watch you work?”

  “I wouldn’t like that.” She clenched her right hand, tucking it under her left arm. “I’d be too distracted if people were watching me work.”

  That was fair. “A second option, then. ‘Visit Fairweather’s! Watch an instrument be built!’ Have you a violin you could take apart, piece by piece, and then put back together? Every day, you could make a change and the next step would be on display.”

  Rowena turned away from the caricature, thinking. “Now that idea, I do like. I’ve been wanting to build instruments of my own, and this could inspire me to begin. But to start at once, yes—I’ve a few instruments that don’t play well anymore. They were never well made to begin with, poor things, and over the years they’ve been treated roughly. But they could still be used to teach.”

  “You talk about them as if they’re alive. Now I feel I’ve suggested vivisection.”

  Rowena laughed. “An autopsy, maybe, to understand what went wrong in a body. That ought to intrigue the curious if we put up a sign. ‘Violins dissected daily.’”

  “I was thinking you could add another sign in the window. Something more to draw the eye than the instrument itself. For the time being, do as this print shop does: tie your messages into How to Ruin a Duke.”

  “Be ruthlessly fashionable, you mean?” A shining carriage trundled along the cobbles. Rowena followed it with her face, eyes. “Fairweather’s has been changeless for a century, but I suppose I can’t sustain the old ways alone. You think I should have cards printed for the window? Little messages or stories?”