And he fully expected that I, seated for the very first time in my life before a piano, would know what middle C might be. Perhaps all the girls in France were born with sonatas bubbling through their veins.
The sheet music in front of me swam with dots and lines. It might as well have been penned in ancient Etruscan.
“Miss Jones,” Monsieur Vachon prompted, only with his accent it became Meez Jonzzz.
“I …” My hands hovered above the keys. Was middle C one of the ones in the middle? Wouldn’t that make sense? Was it ivory or ebony?
I’d tried to explain to him before the class began that I couldn’t do this, that I had no notion of how to play, but he’d brushed me off. “Everyone must play,” he’d pronounced. “This is Iverson.”
I supposed now he understood I wasn’t really everyone.
I heard Mittie heave a sigh from her chair against the ballroom wall. She’d already had her turn, pecking out a tune that had reminded me of one of the kitten poems. Perky, insipid pap.
Monsieur’s patience began to fray.
“Here.” A finger reached past me, pointing to one of the ivory keys. From my seat of mortification I noticed that he had hair all over his knuckles, too.
“C,” he enunciated in my ear, and I quickly mashed my own finger down against the key.
The note hit the air slightly muffled. I hadn’t done anything with the pedals, as I’d seen the other girls do, and it died its solitary death without a fuss.
But then the magic came. Another note, another C, lifted around me, soft at first and then louder, exquisitely pure. I raised my head, searching for its source, but no one else was holding an instrument. In fact, the only other instrument in the entire chamber was a harp, and it was still shrouded in its sheet.
The ballroom had wooden floors and long, decorative tapestries, a frescoed ceiling painted into a cloudy heaven. The chandeliers suspended above us were also covered in sheets; only the bottom curving loops of crystal beading showed, swaying gently with a draft.
All the rest of my class gazed back at me from their line against the wall. Their expressions ranged from boredom to impatience to happy spite.
Sophia turned her head to whisper something to Lillian, who giggled. Mittie crossed her legs to swing her foot from side to side.
C, sang the silent music. My finger pressed the key again, and then C changed to another note, and my finger found that one, too. And another. And another.
I needed both hands. I was using both hands to play the song that saturated the chamber. My head felt clear and my heart felt at peace for the first time in so long. I heard the song as it happened, and it was as if it sank into me, became part of me. The piano was now part of me, too, the voice I did not have otherwise. Melody, harmony, my hands moving faster and faster along the keyboard, creating sounds I’d never imagined.
I wasn’t thinking about any of it. I just let it be, and the music came.
Then it ended. The song finished and the ballroom fell into silence. I echoed the final passage and let my fingertips rest atop the keys, relishing their sleek warmth.
“Mon Dieu,” said the monsieur. At some point he had come to stand right beside me; I hadn’t noticed at all. He gazed down at me with wondering eyes. “You told me you could not play.”
“No, I—” I pulled my hands back to my lap. “I never have before.”
“Never before?” he repeated, with an incredulous arch of his bushy lion’s brows. “What is the name of that piece? Who is the composer?”
“I don’t know,” I said, nervous. “I … made it up.”
I hadn’t, though. I hadn’t made it up. It had been the song of the ballroom. The song sung by the stone walls and rock-crystal drops of this room.
I swallowed. Monsieur Vachon had brought a hand to his chin. He was rubbing it, scowling, trying to decide if I was attempting to make a fool of him.
One of my fellow students coughed the word cheat.
“At the—where I came from,” I said, “we had no piano. We had nothing. Not even books of music. I’ve never touched a piano before today.”
“You cannot read this?” He indicated the sheet music.
I shook my head.
“And you just now created what we heard? All at once, sans répétition?”