Sophie wanted to follow its path with her tongue.
“Tell me,” Maddie pleaded.
Sophie blew out a long and tortured breath. She knew she could say no. Maddie would understand. Sophie could almost hear how she’d say it. She’d be very calm and very kind—but some part of her would know it was a poor trade that Sophie kept her own secrets after she’d demanded Maddie offer up so many of hers.
And Sophie would feel like the worst kind of swindler.
“Fine,” she said, deciding. She sat up and huddled amid the blankets like a troll beneath a bridge.
Maddie leaned back, radiating attention like a stove putting out heat.
Sophie looked away. This was the thing she liked least about herself, and she was going to tell it to the person she most wanted to think well of her. “I don’t suppose you ever heard of a chiroplast?”
“Never,” Maddie said. “Sounds horribly medicinal.”
“It’s a sort of a framework,” Sophie said. “Designed to train students in proper hand position for playing the piano.” She demonstrated, hands out, wrists flat and flexible, fingers softly curved. “It’s a long piece of wood that goes the length of the keyboard, with metal frames you put your fingers into. They hold your hands in correct position, and they slide left and right along two guide rails. The theory is that it forces the student’s muscles to only move the proper ways, and the teacher does not have to struggle with constant correction or explanation.”
Maddie shivered and rubbed at her hands. “It sounds awful.”
“It was.” Sophie swallowed. “I wore one every day for a month. It was all to lead up to a concert. The day when we would demonstrate the true success of Mr. Verrinder’s method of teaching. There were twenty of us—some as young as seven or eight. We would be playing the same piece at the same time. One teacher producing almost two dozen students in one class.”
Maddie’s eyes were sharp and her rosy mouth pursed in disapproval. “Sounds like a factory.”
“It felt like one sometimes.” Sophie shivered. “Every one of us strapped to the keyboard, playing in unison. The sound was... not beautiful, but somehow mesmerizing. Mr. Verrinder walked from each to each, checking the fit of the chiroplast. Several of them I’d been instructing already, individually, but many of the youngest were brand-new to the piano—I could only show them enough to perform by rote the part they were assigned. According to Mr. Verrinder, we didn’t have time forrealinstruction before the concert.”
“Ah,” Maddie said knowingly. “He was leaning on your teaching as much as on the device.”
“He promised I’d be well compensated—and famous, too. Applauded. Appreciated.” And he’d seen the stars in her eyes when she’d looked at him, and he’d smiled, and he’d managed to promise a thousand other things without ever once saying the words.
Somehow that was still the part that hurt worst of all. Probably because of the small voice in her head that whispered that on this point, Sophie had deceived herself.
“Go on.” Maddie put her hands demurely in her lap.
Something about the prudishness of the pose, even as Maddie’s dress threatened to fall down to her waist, gave Sophie something solid to fix on, and pull herself back to the present. She took a breath and pressed on. “The crowd for the concert was enormous—twenty students’ families and neighbors—every music teacher and piano maker in London must have been there. I thought I was going to be sick I was so nervous. Mine was the most complex part, the showy center of the whole piece. Before I knew it we were walking out into the room, twenty Roseingrave pianos gleaming and ready for us. Mine raised a little higher than the rest. My father fit to burst with pride. And then...”
“Yes?”
Here it was: the worst part. Sophie steeled herself. “We didn’t even get through the first movement before someone stood up from the crowd and denounced Mr. Verrinder as a fraud. He’d stolen the chiroplast from someone else—an inventor and teacher. And the inventor wasfurious.Not least because—as it turned out—the invention didn’t really work as he promised. It was a supplement to teaching, not a replacement for it.”
Maddie let out a long breath.
“Mr. Verrinder protested his innocence, but the man claimed he could prove the device’s failure. He turned to the youngest pupil—Sarah Prewett, her name was—and demanded to see her play a scale.” She still felt her stomach twist at the memory of the look on Sarah’s face. “And she couldn’t. One of the first things every student learns, the foundation for everything that comes after—and she couldn’t play it. Because a scale requires you cross the thumb underneath the fingers—and the chiroplast doesn’t allow for that motion. So Sarah had never practiced it.” She hunched her shoulders as the echo of the crowd’s mockery rang in her ears. “I’d been playing for years before Mr. Verrinder came along. I should have noticed that lack. But we’d been so focused on the concert piece that I hadn’t thought about what weweren’tteaching the girls.” She swallowed against the sour bile of regret and pushed onward. “Sarah started crying and ran off. When we looked for Mr. Verrinder—well, turned out he’d run off, too. And he’d taken hundreds of pounds of investments with him. The whole time we’d been practicing he’d been collecting money for lessons, for unbuilt pianos, for a license to use his method. My teaching career was over before it had even really begun.”
Maddie breathed out. “That’s awful.”
“It hurt even to look at a piano after that,” Sophie said. “We sold everything from the warehouse for less than its value, then sold the warehouse too. To move here and start afresh. And do you know what I keep selfishly thinking?”
“What?”
“That if I’d been a better performer—if I’d held the audience enraptured as I was meant to—everything would have gone off without a hitch.” She hunched beneath the weight of her own failure.
“That’s absolute nonsense,” Maddie said, “and I can tell you why.”
Sophie clutched the coverlet at her throat, hardly daring to breathe.
“Mr. Verrinder wascountingon people watching you and not him. I’d bet good money that at the end of that concert he was planning to disappear anyway. He knew you’d hold their attention. You would have, if the original inventor hadn’t interrupted.”
“But I’m not...” Sophie curled half in on herself.
