Orial slammed her door shut and flung herself headlong on the bed.

Why would no one speak of it? Were the facts of her mother’s death so horrible that they were trying to shield her from the truth?

Morbid fantasies invaded her mind, sickroom visions of decline and decay. These fever-tainted imaginings were beginning to distort her most cherished memories of her mother.

A loose tile in the bedroom fireplace concealed a hiding place where Orial had secreted her treasures since childhood. It was one treasure in particular which she sought now for comfort.

She drew out from the dusty crevice a slender volume wrapped in cloth. Opening the leatherbound book, she let her fingers stray over the yellowed title page, caressing the faded writing. The book’s title, A Treatise on Musical Notation with Divers Examples, was underwritten in a graceful script ‘Iridial Capelian’. This volume had escaped the bonfire Jerame Magelonne had made of all the musical scores the day after her mother’s death, by virtue of its slenderness; it had slipped down behind the armoire where Cook had found it some weeks later and kept it hidden for Orial.

She had copied the exercises out, painstakingly ruling each stave line with care. She had set about the task of instructing herself in the finer points of musical theory with dedication, wrestling with the problems of ornamentation and transposition, trying to perfect her musical hand. She felt a closeness in working the theoretical exercises that her mother had once worked too; here a page was blotted with ink, there a passage was underscored with several lines and a question mark, where the young Iridial had laboured over its complexities. The image of her mother, hair in plaits, sucking her pen-top in concentration as she tried to work out how to complete a difficult exercise, always made Orial smile.

What possible harm could Papa have imagined would come to her through such dry, dull exercises? Did he fear her myopia might deteriorate? Certainly, as she moved the book closer to her eyes, the narrow stave-lines and tiny notes seemed harder to read than before. She held the spectacles up to the light and squinted through each lens in turn – but there was no trace of dirt.

I must be tired, that’s all…

She unfolded her latest composition, smoothing the paper, and let her finger-tip move over the page, tracing the rise and fall of the melody. She could not but feel a swell of pleasure as she read through what she had written; it had taken a long while to translate the notes that flowed so easily on to the cithara into legible musical notation.

Her finger came to a halt over a passage where bars were crossed out, rewritten and crossed out again. She knew it was incorrect. She needed advice – musical advice of a kind that the Treatise could not give. She was so eager to learn, to improve her craft –