It was Clara’s face that appeared in the meager glow of my candle stub, her worried little countenance, then Bridget and a few others. Finally, two women hustled a blanket-wrapped figure in, guiding her into the moonlit room and unwinding her cocoon. It was Anna, a tall, angular creature pale and hunched with fear. She huddled around the empty space near her middle where her music box belonged, and I felt a new wave of revulsion for the nurse who’d smashed it that afternoon. Anna fell into convulsions outside of the blanket, then the thunder rumbled, and she screamed, scrambling for the door.

The women caught her, wrapping her in the blanket again, covering her mouth. As my heart twisted, the thought came again. Wash her feet. Serve the least of these.

“She needs music,” Clara said. “You’re the only one who has it. Her music box is gone.”

“I still haven’t finished—”

“Well, it’ll have to do.” Bridget propelled the wrapped-up woman toward the pianoforte, pushing me along with her. “Unless you want to send her to the catacombs. That’s her next stop if she carries on this way, and there’s no coming back from it.”

Another flash of lightning, and the woman writhed and screamed, dissolving into sobs as the storm cracked through the sky. Hang those wretched storms that crept over the moors all spring, summer, and fall. I swung toward the ivories, rounding my fingers over them.

But I began to tremble.

I’d polished and tuned and oiled, yet in all those weeks I couldn’t bring myself to play. I wrote the words I am not a pianist nearly every day, and they had begun to melt my reality, reshaping it completely. I’d begun, in some hazy way, to place my pianoforte days in the same category as my vivid dreams where I saw some nonexistent woman playing and heard music that wasn’t real.

Now, sitting over those keys I felt nauseous. A heady fear swept over me at the thought of playing. I wasn’t ready to release that part of who I was—to find out it was an illusion. The silent old instrument beckoned me, begging me to dignify it with music, but what if . . . what if . . .

“Let me assure you she’s a second-rate performer who has elbowed her way into the music world on the strength of her connections. Quite amateurish as a performer, though.”

I swallowed as that odious little marquis’s words echoed back from a lifetime ago. They harmonized in an awful frenzy of notes with everything I’d heard since then. It grew into a cacophony and I couldn’t think straight.

I couldn’t seem to remember a single reason that I knew myself to be a true pianist except that my father had been the most famous teacher from here to Leeds and I was his daughter. And I had always played.