Mr. Roseingrave had taken off his coat and set it aside, and rolled up his sleeves. “Let’s see if you’ve wounded it fatally.”
It took his experienced hands only a few moments to find where the case came apart—the showy lacquered wood fell away and Mr. Roseingrave slid out the action. There were the hammers, the dampers, the springs and shanks and hinges, all the bits of wood and felt and metal that came together for the making of music. The ivory-topped naturals and ebony sharps that were such a striking feature of the piano looked so much smaller when the rest of the mechanism was visible.
And most importantly: the strings. Inside the half-circle case, they crossed over one another in two layers, the thicker, longer bass strings stretched slantwise over the shorter notes for the treble and tenor. Exposed like this, they whispered echoes of every sound that reached them.
Harriet gave a little gasp. The note of wonder was unmistakable.
Mr. Roseingrave looked up at Sophie and smiled wryly.
Sophie smiled and nodded her head gently in return. She knew precisely what he was thinking. He’d shown every one of her younger siblings the inside of a piano, one by one. They’d been vaguely curious—small hands testing the tension of the strings, pressing on the keys to watch how the action raised the hammer and the damper and then brought both back down. But before long their hearts had been claimed by other instruments: Freddie by the viola, Robbie the cello, the twins Jasper and Julia striving to outdo one another on the violin.
Sophie alone had shared her father’s love of the piano, with its chorus of voices and hidden machinery.
Now, apparently, Harriet Muchelney had lost her heart to it as well. The girl’s eyes were round and her clenched hands had gone slack in amazement. She lifted one hand slightly, as though tempted to reach out and stroke the strings directly, like the harp they resembled. But it was clear she didn’t dare actually touch anything.
Sophie knew that heart-struck wonder. There was something irresistibly poignant in an opened piano awaiting repair—like a wounded bird with its feathers splayed. It needed patient attention and a soothing touch to get it to sing again.
“Aha.” Her father’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Looks like there’s only one hammer broken inside. Not a fatal wound at all.” His long fingers worked swiftly to pluck out the damaged part, with its red-and-white felt head, while Sophie rummaged in the tool bag for a shank of the size and length Southwells usually held. The hammer head slid off the old shank and onto the new, and the action went back into its proper place, the bulk of it sliding home like a key fitting into a lock.
Mr. Roseingrave grinned down at the keyboard. “Let’s see what she sounds like.” He struck the note attached to the repaired hammer: the A in the octave above middle C.
The tone staggered like its knees had been broken.
Sophie and Harriet Muchelney both winced.
Mr. Roseingrave laughed in horror. “I see she needs tuning! Sophie, would you be so kind?”
Her father had a genius for piano design and mechanics—but Sophie shared her opera singer mother’s perfect ear for pitch. So it was Sophie who’d learned the tuning trade, and who’d taken over when her mother’s hearing began to suffer. Between them they’d tuned every piano that bore the Roseingrave name.
She smoothed her brown skirts down and took a seat on the bench, the ribs of the piano spread wide before her.
Her shaky fingers wrapped around the handle of the tuning hammer and gripped tight, one pinky on the end, thumb extended along the handle for leverage. She put the tuning hammer on the head of the first pin, muted the notes to the side of the starting string, nudged the knee lever to raise all the dampers, and set her left hand on the keys.
The familiar movements ought to have been a comfort. Instead, sweat and fear made her hands soft and slick as melting candles.
Every string was a voice, every pin was an eye—watching her. Waiting.
Her father coughed, softly. She didn’t dare glance back at him. The ivory was cool beneath her touch, the winter sunlight spilling in the window not enough to warm it, or to melt the chill of fear in Sophie’s bones. She sucked in a lungful of air and struck the key hard before she lost her nerve. The note banged like brass into the semi-silence.
The heaviness of iron, sensible only in memory, clapped tight and hard around her fingers.
It’s nothing.She repeated that silently like a prayer.It’s only one note, to test the tuning. It’s not really playing. You don’t have to think about your fingers. Just listen.
Sophie tried to ignore the leaden stiffness in her hands, and gave all her attention to her ears.
The note was flat, the string too slack. She moved the tuning hammer—just slightly, a light wriggle back and forth, her fingers sensitive to the tiny movements of the pin where it was anchored in the block behind the soundboard. She struck the key again, and again, the same note thrumming like a heartbeat. Another light twist of the hammer and there it was, the proper pitch, pure and clean as the first breath of spring after a long winter.
Tears pooled in her eyes; she blinked them back.
Sophie’s hands and hammer moved up and down the keyboard, skipping higher or lower and then tuning the strings in the gaps. It was slow going. This house had five children, and thin walls—and this piano was slight and small, not meant for pouring out oceans of sound. You had to tune it to blend well with the noises around it, or it would always sound off no matter how accurate the pitch. She tuned the bass to the sound of the carts and horses going by in the street outside, and the treble to the plaintive voice of violins being imperfectly practiced several rooms away. In fact, by adjusting the sharpness just slightly, she could cancel out some of the angrier harmonics from the Muchelney boys’ lessons: instead of wolves howling in rage, they became hounds baying on a hunt.
“Oh,” she heard young Miss Muchelney breathe, very softly. Echoing her own relief as the jarring harmonics were tamed.
By the time she reached the final string, she had stopped trying to contain the drops that spilled from her eyes and down her cheeks. Her father quietly handed her a handkerchief when she finished the highest note on the treble; she wiped her face, tucked it in her sleeve, and finished tuning the bass.
When at last she set down her hammer and sighed, rolling her shoulders to get some of the tightness out, her father reached down to the keyboard.
An arpeggio rang out, this one sweet as a bell.
