She lowered her voice. “What did you see? Anything exciting?”

I shrugged. “There are many odd things at this place. Things a body would never expect to see. Things I probably wasn’t meant to see.” I stopped there, remembering her penchant for gossip.

She hugged the sheet to herself. “It’s like my very own penny dreadful.”

“You’ll have to wait for the next installment, then. Tomorrow’s my half day off.” It hadn’t come a moment too soon. I found myself starved for home, for a night of escape from deep shadows and mystery. From uncertainty around every corner, and the gaslights that showed so much—but hid even more.

“That’s when most of ’em disappear, on their half days. They simply don’t return. You won’t do that, though, will you?”

“Wouldn’t I?”

“You’re not like the others, and I know you won’t just abandon us to this place. To this deplorable trap.”

“Trap?” I frowned, watching the shadows play across her face. Her hand—was it shaking?

Her eyes widened, and I knew there was more, a cavern of story below the one I’d heard about the stolen kiss.

“What are you afraid of? Tell me what it is.”

She turned away, but the haunted look across her features only deepened. “Who says I’m afraid?”

“You thought of something. Just now, there was a look on your face. Won’t you tell me what it is?”

“I cannot say.” Her eyes shifted about the room. “One never knows who’s listening at Hurstwell. Especially in the dark.”

“In daylight, then?”

She twisted the sheet in her fingers. “Maybe.” Then she shook her head. “M-maybe.”

10

Without music, life would be a mistake.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

I sat on the stool of a lovely refurbished Bösendorfer, hands in my lap as the sun warmed my back through the windows. “I think it’s time, Marcel.”

My longtime manager, the erratic Frenchman who’d set out to manage my career and apparently my personal reputation, looked up at me with raised eyebrows. “And why is that?”

I’d come to his studio first upon leaving Hurstwell, determined to make him begin scheduling performances again in spite of my mourning period, but I’d forgotten how hard it was to make Marcel do anything. I shut the lid over the keys with a sigh. “I’m not truly mourning—I never was. You know that more than anyone. There’s no reason I shouldn’t return to performing as soon as possible.”

He looked at me over the edge of the Manchester Chronicle, spectacles slipping down the bridge of his nose. “Would you believe, there’s a run on blue thread. No one wants to pay for it, and they’ve slowed production, even in London. Who’d have ever thought—”

“Marcel.”

“Mm?” He flipped out the paper, lowering it a tad more, his gaze placid.

“I want to play again.”