A Dangerous Duet

by Karen Odden

  I swallowed. “Of course I’d be back.”

  “And so you were.” Her deft hands started on a potato, the skin coming off in a long strip. “And I warn’t going to say anything, but now that this has happened”—she nodded her head toward the window—“I want to know where you’re going and what you’re doing. And if you don’t tell me, I’ll tell Matthew, and he’ll make sure that’s the end of it.”

  I sat down on a stool and leaned against the wall. I couldn’t tell her everything, but I’d confess some. In a way it would be a relief.

  “I have an audition with the Royal Academy.”

  She looked up from the potato. “What’s that to do with you going out at night dressed like a man?”

  “To earn the tuition, of course. There’s no point in trying unless I can pay for at least the first year. So I . . . I took a position.”

  Both eyebrows rose.

  “I’m playing piano in a music hall a few nights a week.” I paused and added, reluctantly, “In Soho.”

  The knife clattered onto the table, and her mouth fell open. “For mercy’s sake, Nell!”

  I plunged on. “I know—and when Matthew told me about the attacks, it scared me, too. But I always go when the streets are still busy and the shops are open. There’s someone who guards the back entrance for the performers, so I never stand outside. I take lighted streets all the way home, and I’m back by eleven every night—well, most nights—and it pays well, Peggy—very well. Another month or so and I’ll have earned all the money I’ll need for the first year.”

  Her lips were pressed together so tightly they were white.

  Silently, I took another knife from the drawer, reached for a potato, and started peeling, just to have something to do besides observe the anxiety, exasperation, and dismay that were taking their turns on her countenance. She took out a sharpening steel and drew her knife across it half a dozen times. The sound always made my nerves go taut, and she knew it.

  “Peggy, please don’t be angry.”

  She pointed the knife at me. “If something had happened to you one of those nights, we wouldn’t have had any idea where to begin looking. A music hall in Soho wouldn’t’ve occurred to any of us, that’s sartin.”

  I peeled the potato carefully, so the strips of skin mounded in a tidy heap. “I know.”

  “Was it really worth risking your life? Just to go to the Academy?”

  “It’s all I’ve ever wanted, to play piano,” I replied quietly. “You know that.”

  “But you can do that in your own parlor!”

  “Not if I want to continue learning,” I protested.

  We stood there, the two of us, just looking at each other for a long moment, until finally she gave a sigh of capitulation and began dicing the potatoes into quarters and then eighths. “Well, then. Are you ready?”

  I felt a wave of relief that I wouldn’t have to argue further. “I think so. I’m playing Chopin and Mozart, and mostly they’re all right.”

  “But?”

  “But even if I play well, I may not get in.”

  She frowned. “Why not?”

  “I’m old, for them. The Academy says they take applicants until they turn twenty—so officially, I’m still eligible for another month. But most students start when they’re ten or twelve. In fact, I inquired, and they’ve never taken anyone over sixteen. I’ve a feeling the judges are going to laugh at me because I’m the oldest person they’ve ever seen.”

  She dropped the potato pieces into a bowl. “They aren’t going to laugh when they hear you play.”

  “And then I worry that I’ve chosen the wrong sorts of pieces. I can hear them now: ‘Oh, not the Mozart again.’”

  “Hmph.” She sifted through the bowl and put aside a rotten bit. “When is it? The audition.”

  “Next Wednesday afternoon.”

  Her hands paused. “Less than a week? No wonder you’ve been so scattered lately.” She covered the potatoes with a towel and set the bowl aside. “Fetch the peas, would you? They need shelling.”

  I removed the sack of peas and two small dishes from the cupboard while she began to knead the bread dough. I drew the stool forward so I could keep the weight off my foot and began to separate the peas from the pods. We worked in silence for a minute or two, until she asked, “What happens if you get in? What are you going to tell Matthew and Dr. Everett?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s no point in telling anyone unless I do.”

  She tipped her chin toward the bowls. “You’re mixing them.”

  I looked down. She was right. I’d put some of the peas back in with the pods. I fished them out and began again. “You know that Dr. Everett stopped by the other day. He caught me practicing and gave me a good talking-to. He’s worried that playing pieces like the Chopin will be what pushes me into Mother’s disease.” I swallowed, wanting to ask but half afraid of the answer I’d receive. “Do you . . . do you see her, in me?”

  Her capable hands folded the dough on the worn wooden table before she answered. “I don’t know, child. I can see your likeness to her, that’s sartin. Not just your talent, but the way a fire truck with four horses could run through the room while she was playing and she wouldn’t have noticed.” She flipped the dough again, and a puff of flour rose. “But there are other parts of her that you don’t seem to have at all.”

  “Really?” I heard the hopefulness in my voice.

  “Oh, I know the doctor says it was a disease in her brain, and he’s the one who’s been to university, so p’rhaps he’s right. But you have to remember, he didn’t know her except the last four years, and those were the worst of it. He warn’t called in until she was beyond what regular folks could manage.” She turned the dough again. “Besides, Dr. Everett’s a medical man, with his own partic’lar way of thinking. To him, it looked like a disease no one could help, like rickets or scarlet fever, that began when she was nineteen or thereabouts. But that don’t take sartin things into account.”

  I shelled the last pea and pushed the bowls aside. “Things like what?”

  Her expression became regretful. “I’m not one to speak ill of the dead, but from the time Frances was a mite, her parents made an uncommon fuss over her playing. And I daresay she got used to it. People said she loved her piano, but there’s part of me thinks she loved people looking at her and praising her just as much. By the time she was eleven or twelve, there were plenty of evenings when her parents would invite people over to hear Frances, and they’d all declare they’d never seen the like, and she should be sent away to special places for lessons so she’d be as famous as Jenny Lind and such. It made her all flushed and excitable. Even after people left, she looked”—she frowned—“hectic, like she had a fever. Sometimes she could scarce go to sleep at night, she was so riled up.”

  “Maybe that was part of the disease,” I said. “An early symptom.”

  “Maybe,” she said, sounding unconvinced. She floured the dough again. “I could understand her being headstrong and too wrapped up in herself at that age; but she didn’t grow out of it like most folks. I saw her governess try to bring her round. But when Frances complained, her parents dismissed the poor woman.” She sighed. “Oh, Frances could be pleasing when she wanted, and she was pretty, o’ course, and plenty clever, that’s sartin, but by the time she was sixteen or thereabouts, your grandparents warn’t quite sure what to do with her and left her mostly alone.”

  “You think their behavior is to blame for her condition?” I couldn’t help the note of skepticism that came into my voice.

  She dropped the dough onto the pan and looked up at me, her expression matter-of-fact. “A girl might like biscuits and sweeties, but those can’t be the only things you feed her.”

  “No, I suppose not. It just seems that mere overindulgence shouldn’t bring about a disease.”

  Peggy’s expression became stubborn, and I knew not to press the point further. Instead, I yielded with a small laugh. “Well, at least
I can’t say I’ve experienced that sort of spoiling.”

  “No, I’d say not.”

  I ran my thumb absently over the edge of the table, feeling the nicks in the wood. “Dr. Everett believes that Mother’s playing fed her moods.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know if I’d say it that way myself, but she was excitable at the piano, and certainly by the end, the piano was like a poison. It made it so she could scarce think of anything else.”

  “I wonder if she ever thinks about us now.” The words slipped out of my mouth before I quite realized I’d thought them.

  She paused in the act of opening the rag cupboard, and her expression softened. “Sometimes I think to myself that she must. Maybe at nights, when she’s quiet, or doesn’t have much else to occupy her.” She chose a rag from the pile and shook out the folds. “If ever you’re a mother, you’ll know how it is, loving your child. Why, I’d set down my life with no more thought than settin’ down this rag, if I thought it would cure Emma.”

  Her words brought stinging tears to my eyes.

  “And that’s why I can’t believe your mother didn’t have some place in her that loved you, that might’ve showed itself, except it got covered up.”

  I felt a pang of self-doubt. “Do you see any signs of that in me? The inability to love people?”

  She came close then and, in an uncharacteristic gesture, gently tucked a loose piece of hair behind my ear. “No, child. Seems to me, you have your attachments, same as the rest of us.”

  I smiled. “Well, I’m certainly not going to go running off to Europe. I wouldn’t leave Matthew for the world. Or you, or Dr. Everett.”

  “No. And that part of you is like your father. He ran off, as you say, to look for her, but we all knew he’d come back.”

  “I wonder what would’ve happened if he’d found her.”

  “Oh, he found her, all right.” Her tone was acerbic.

  I blinked. “What?”

  Dr. Everett didn’t know this. Did Matthew?

  “He went to Paris and found her in the papers,” Peggy said. “With a photograph and all, listed as a performer, using her mother’s name. Then he found out she’d paid for her passage by selling some of her dowry silver the week ’afore she left. He’d thought her leaving had been the work of a moment, but she’d been planning it all along, sly as a fox. You can imagine how that made him feel. Like a fool.”

  “But he wasn’t a fool! He trusted her, as he should have. She was his wife.”

  “Some would say, more’s the pity.” She shook her head dolefully. “Marriage is a tricky business. It’s the most important choice you can make, and most people make it when they’re too young and plum silly, thinking someone’s worth loving just because of the way he’s dressed, or some such nonsense.”

  “You were young, and it worked out happily,” I reminded her.

  That brought a smile. “He was a good, sturdy sort, my Joe was. He warn’t some fancy man with a few coins in his pocket and a pretty face. He was practical, with prospects, and he took care of me.” She gave the counter an absent swipe with the rag. “Made me laugh, too. There aren’t many of his sort left, so far as I can tell.”

  “Well, I hope I find someone like your Joe,” I said. “Fortunately, I have a few years before I need think of it.”

  Peggy’s face altered, and I knew what that small pinch of pain around her mouth meant. Emma didn’t have a few years, and she’d never marry.

  I could have bitten my tongue off. “Peggy, I’m sorry. That was stupid of me. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s sartinly not any of your doing.” She shook her head. “It’s time I got on with the dusting.” But before she left the kitchen, she let her hand rest on my shoulder, and I squeezed it in return.

  I picked up my cane and went upstairs to bed. But whereas an hour ago I would have fallen asleep instantly, now I lay with my eyes open, and it wasn’t only because my ankle was throbbing.

  For my whole life, all I’d had of my mother were stories about her—stories that allowed me only to sketch her with the barest outlines. Peggy had added new contours to the picture. Her account differed a good deal from Dr. Everett’s, but her details seemed so credible that I sensed the truth might lie somewhere in between. It wasn’t lost on me, however, that the one aspect they agreed upon was that Mother’s piano playing was dangerous to her. Their belief gave me a hollow feeling under my ribs. I fell asleep hoping desperately that the piano would never be a poison for me.

  Chapter 15

  For two entire days I remained quietly at home, using my cane, putting ice and poultices on my ankle, and observing the glaziers as they replaced the window not once, but twice, because the first pane they brought cracked not a minute after they’d installed it. Dr. Everett stopped in to check on me, and so I asked him to tell Marceline what had happened, and that I’d come to see her as soon as I was able.

  Eventually, I grew fidgety and found my confinement irksome, especially as the feeling of wanting to see Jack again pulled on me like one of his tightening wrenches on a pin.

  To my relief, on Saturday morning, my ankle was sturdy enough that I could walk without pain. Jack had told me that he spent that day at his uncle’s piano shop, so after I finished practicing, I went upstairs and opened my armoire, debating my options. My brown poplin dress was my prettiest one, with lace at the collar. But the blue lawn brought out the color of my eyes. I put on the blue, looked at myself in the mirror, and nearly changed it for the brown before I shut the door firmly. Yes, it was the first time Jack would see me in a dress, but I was being ridiculous. I wrapped a thin gray shawl around my shoulders and set out.

  Thick white clouds shifted overhead against the blue, and though it might rain later, the breeze felt cool and pleasant. I began at the end of Samson Lane and walked east. It was a well-kept street, with neat storefronts that displayed their wares in their windows: The Bluebird Patent Candle Company, with its tidy rows of hanging ivory tapers and the fragrances of vanilla and tallow wafting onto the sidewalk. The York & Co. Hat Shop, with men’s dark top hats in the small-paned windows on one side of the door and ladies’ frilled and feathered concoctions on the other. The J. Salloway Tea Company, with a small crowd outside, the mothers looking on indulgently as the children clamored for the biscuits that a young man was doling out from a tray. The Kittley Bakeshop, whose hot cinnamon buns dusted with sugar almost made me pause. Eager to set out, I hadn’t eaten much breakfast.

  Five minutes on, I came upon a store with the sign M. BERTAULT, FINE PIANOS on a neat brass square beside the door. There was a large plate glass window at the front, washed perfectly clear and framed by a reddish wood that was polished to a high gloss, as if to promise that an old piano might regain its luster here.

  Through the door, I saw a room with perhaps a dozen pianos, most with their lids lifted; Mrs. Kendrick’s revelations notwithstanding, they made me think of a fleet of ships sailing before the wind. Beside one piano stood Jack with a customer who had a narrow face, a Gallic nose, and only a fringe of dark hair around his ears. At the moment, he was laughing, and Jack’s hand rested companionably on his shoulder. Then the man sat down on the bench, and Jack raised the fallboard to reveal the keys.

  I felt a fluttering under my ribs as I put my hand on the brass doorknob. It turned with a silent smoothness that I imagined customers found as reassuring as the elegant front window. A bell tinkled over my head, and I closed the door gently behind me.

  Jack’s eyes flicked toward me, caught, widened in surprise, and held. Then came an unhurried smile that sped up the fluttering and made my limbs feel as if they were no longer connected to me in quite their ordinary way. He gave an almost imperceptible tip of his head toward the man seated at the piano. I nodded back to convey that I’d wait, and turned to survey the shop.

  It didn’t look large from the outside, but I realized that this room was only the first of several. Its walls were painted a muted blue that set off
the wood veneers. On the far wall two windows hung with patterned silk curtains flanked a door that probably led to a back alley with dustbins. To the right was a staircase leading up to the second story; to the left was an archway into another room. I didn’t want to hover where Jack was, so I walked into it and found myself facing instruments in various states of repair: uprights, grands, a few clavichords, and some harpsichords. Along one wall was a wide workbench, upon which lay steel wires of different thicknesses, strips of felt, pieces of ivory, spare black keys, and piano legs. It made me think of an operating theater.

  “Good afternoon, Mademoiselle,” came Mr. Bertault’s voice behind me.

  I turned and gave him my best smile. “I’m dressed as myself today, Mr. Bertault.”

  His eyebrows rose in delighted recognition; one would think I was a long-lost friend instead of an acquaintance of a few minutes. “Ah! Mademoiselle Nell!” He took my hand and bent over it. He glanced back to the front room where Jack was still with the customer, and his voice became apologetic. “Jacques is busy for a moment. Perhaps—”

  “Please don’t interrupt him,” I said hastily. “He knows I’m here. I don’t mind waiting. And I don’t want to take you away from your work, either.”

  “Nonsense. I shall make a tour with you. Come.”

  I let him steer me toward a group of grand pianos near the back of the store. “Are you repairing these?” I asked.

  “Yes, although some, like this one”—he gestured to a particularly shabby instrument by the wall—“are . . . what do you call them when the end is inevitable?”

  “Hopeless causes?” I supplied.

  “C’est vrai.” He waved a hand. “Not worth either the time or the money. But it is hard to turn someone away.”

  I remembered what Jack had said about his uncle losing money to Josef on purpose. Here was another example of his kindness.