“I wouldn’t even know how to begin helping all the patients at Hurstwell. I’m a musician, not a doctor.”

She looked ahead, her face drawn. “What’s it like, to have a gift like that? To be able to give it to the world anytime you please?”

I watched the longing etched into her face.

“Don’t have anything to offer that sweet babby, when it come right down to it. Not a thing. What if babby girl was a mite touched in the head, like her ma? Couldn’t bear to watch her walk through it. And if she isn’t, what would she want with a ma like me? But I’d give her beautiful music if I could. A little something to express what’s inside me, so’s she knows how I feel about her when I haven’t got nothing to say.”

My heart stretched in endless directions, a longing to connect this woman to her dream. To spark a bit of light in Hurstwell’s darkness. It wouldn’t take much, really.

December. That was an incredibly long time to sit still here doing nothing. We worked silently for a while, alternating at the crank, then I heaved a heavy sigh. “I’ll need an abrasive sponge and some water, maybe a few wrenches for tuning. And plenty of rags.”

She cocked a smile. “I can manage that.”

I started slipping out by myself after two nights of restless sleep, feeling my way along that passage and coming face-to-face with that glorious Broadwood bathed in moonlight. I brought candle stubs and the items Bridget had filched from the kitchen and perched on the bench, tracing the gold lettering across the front of the piece.

A Broadwood. The case was miraculously intact on all sides, and there was no detachment from the base or shrinkage of the baseboards. The bracing under the soundboard seemed whole and firm. Blessedly, John Broadwood built pianofortes that were simple in design but superior in craftsmanship. Besides that, someone had cared for it in recent years. Someone who knew how.

I lifted the lid, marveling at the way each piece fitted together so perfectly as if it were all hewn from the same piece of wood. That’s when I saw it—a hand-carved signature just inside the casing with a flourish of flowers around it. J. Broadwood, it read.

Signed!

A rarity indeed, yet here it sat to rot away in this place where value was so often miscalculated and beauty misunderstood.

On the most torrential days with Father, the maid named Jessie used to sneak me a small cup of fruit while I was locked in the larder, and I’d never tasted anything so sweet. I delighted in those few bites, in the fact that no matter what Father did to me, he couldn’t take away my delight in that fruit in that moment.