Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,13

asked again. If she loves me she will hear my heart.

Madeleine shook her head. He was stubborn and cock-sure. His music grew more inward and melancholy each day. He demanded service to his own talent and would not acknowledge another’s. But she loved him and after her animals were settled she sat by the lamp each evening and stitched with her stiff hands. She made a strapless dress of black silk. It had a nipped-in waist and fell on the bias to the floor in soft folds with a hidden zipper up the side. After seven nights Madeleine finished it up, wrapped it in clean paper, folded it neatly into a box. She lined the bottom of the box with clean shelf paper. Then she tucked in a pair of antique dancing boots with small sculpted heels and long squared toes. Raised leaves of shiny gold and cranberry and royal blue swirled over the black brocade and eight round gold buttons arced down the outside shaft of each boot. They had travelled from across the sea packed in Meggie Dob’s mother’s trunk. They came with a long buttonhook, its ornate sterling silver handle boasting a tangle of tiny vines and roses. These things were from another time. Meggie Dob had sometimes danced in these playful boots, but Madeleine, with her rocker-bottom feet, was never able to put them on, though she loved their fanciful colours. She wrapped another piece of paper over the boots and tucked the buttonhook in beside them, closed the box and tied it with a bit of twine. Then she gave it to Donal, who took it and didn’t even look inside.

Love is expressed better in fine words than in silent sincerity, she said to Donal.

He answered from his hood of bone, What would you know about love, living with buddy and the cows and a herd of goats?

Donal’s bass did not ring perfectly with Dagmar’s fiddle no matter how carefully he tuned. It bothered him. One evening after they played together he said to her, Did that sound right to your ear?

She laughed and said lightly, Whenever you play, it sounds right to me. You’re a worrier and that’s sure. She waited for him to put aside his instrument but he clutched it and fiddled with his tuning. The truth was she was in love with him, and though she played what he wanted her to play, though she stayed back from dancing with the girls in the woods at night to open her door to him, though she grew him vegetables from her garden to take home, he never could bring himself to say that he noticed.

He said, There are wood owls that repeat songs to each other exactly an octave apart.

He adjusted his pegs and she came up close and playfully stroked the wood of his double bass. She said, Let me tune your instrument, and touched her fingers to his on the tuning screw at the bottom of the strings.

Don’t. I just got it right, said Donal. He smelled her thick earthy hair and he desired her. He wanted to touch his lips to hers but he clutched his bass and let his gaze fall.

She turned sharply then and said, It’s late, Donal. I’m off to bed.

Donal carried his double bass outside and through the darkness back to the gloom of Madeleine’s front room. Slowly he loosened all the pegs. The strings limp and silent he retuned, searching for the low C that bothered him most, and he dropped from the traditional tuning in fourths to a new tuning in fifths. With it he could play a clean octave below Dagmar’s fiddle. He delicately twisted the tuning pins at the bottom of the strings, ran his fingers up their long length and adjusted the pegs again, turning and squeezing them into the wood of the neck. Then he struggled to find the old notes at new places on the fingerboard. For the first time in his life his low strings did not sound flat to him and his open strings were resonant and round as a fiddle’s highest E. Tuned in his eccentric new way, the bass, he discovered, had the intonation he had always missed and he listened to his own playing with the awe of someone who has found a new species. He was excited by the sound and struggled to teach his fingers a new set of fingerings, which was as difficult as twisting the tongue around a new