“You’ll have your pianoforte shop, perhaps a few students, and your friends. Modest and simple and delightfully musical, a life of high quality is what fits you best.”

Few people actually knew me, as it turned out. I was a Chopin nocturne—surprising, complex, and impossible to master.

Many tried. I’m happy to report that they had all failed.

Well, nearly.

2

They probably think because I am so small and young, nothing of greatness and class can come out of me; but they shall soon find out.

~Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

HURSTWELL ASYLUM

I stared at the asylum doctor who stood between me and freedom, listening to my explanation. My mind swam in the medicinal pea soup the longer I sat upright, but it latched on to one fact. “So you see, it wasn’t my father who brought me here. It couldn’t be.”

“I suppose not, if he’s dead.” The doctor, a bulldog of a man with a heavy face resting upon the cushion of his broad shoulders, availed himself of my vacated bed, perching on the edge and sinking it quite low. “Well, then. Perhaps it was another man who signed for you.” He lifted page after page on his clipboard, scanning the lines. “I just assumed. I was not here to meet him, of course. It was late when the papers were signed. Rather an emergency situation, you understand.”

“Who did sign me over to this place then?”

He scribbled on his paper, not even allowing me the dignity of eye contact, then came the instruments from his brown leather satchel. First, the listening device, its cold metal horn shoved down the top of my oversized asylum gown. “Hold still.”

I shook my head, trying to clear the remaining fog. “You will release me, won’t you? Once you’ve examined me and I’m proved fit?”

“I’m afraid not.” The cold metal found a new spot. “Wouldn’t you like to be well again? To stop hearing music and be like everyone else?”

I pinched my lips and looked down. “If I stop hearing music, you’ll let me out?”

He blinked, as if the notion of my leaving had never occurred to him. “Perhaps.” His calm smile had a numbing effect. Not the disarming sort, but the way one’s leg feels after its owner has been lost in a book too long and forgotten it was tucked under the body. “We’ll just wait and see, shall we? Now, Miss Fletcher, we’ll start with the routine information and get you admitted.”

“Fletcher?”

“Do you prefer Cora?”

I frowned. Cora Fletcher. Who was she? Not me, that was for certain. I wasn’t sure if it would help my case to mention it or merely solidify my diagnosis.

The doctor worked through a series of questions—address, sex, age, hair color—as if I’d be an inmate here long enough to need a record.

“Living conditions?”