The Lost Melody by Joanna Davidson Politano

Author:Joanna Davidson Politano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Romance;FIC042110;FIC042030;FIC027170
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

I started slipping out by myself after two nights of restless sleep, feeling my way along that passage and coming face-to-face with that glorious Broadwood bathed in moonlight. I brought candle stubs and the items Bridget had filched from the kitchen and perched on the bench, tracing the gold lettering across the front of the piece.

A Broadwood. The case was miraculously intact on all sides, and there was no detachment from the base or shrinkage of the baseboards. The bracing under the soundboard seemed whole and firm. Blessedly, John Broadwood built pianofortes that were simple in design but superior in craftsmanship. Besides that, someone had cared for it in recent years. Someone who knew how.

I lifted the lid, marveling at the way each piece fitted together so perfectly as if it were all hewn from the same piece of wood. That’s when I saw it—a hand-carved signature just inside the casing with a flourish of flowers around it. J. Broadwood, it read.

Signed!

A rarity indeed, yet here it sat to rot away in this place where value was so often miscalculated and beauty misunderstood.

On the most torrential days with Father, the maid named Jessie used to sneak me a small cup of fruit while I was locked in the larder, and I’d never tasted anything so sweet. I delighted in those few bites, in the fact that no matter what Father did to me, he couldn’t take away my delight in that fruit in that moment.

That’s precisely what the pianoforte became for me in those long summer days at Hurstwell. It grew more manageable to sit straight and quiet on those hard benches, to walk about with my head down, to swallow the slimy cabbage and old bread without complaint when I knew I could return to the candlelit room at the end of the day and slowly draw out the beauty of an old, forgotten relic. Several nights a week I slipped into that room for an hour or two, gingerly scrubbing rust from the strings and cleaning dust and grime off every crevice I could reach.

It breathed life back into my gray soul, watching this thing of beauty be uncovered and restored to brilliance. In time, rotted spots on hammers were replaced by carefully filed-down scrap wood, the cloth under the key levers was cut out and paper spacers put in its place to level the keys. I’d used a small wrench to carefully tighten each pin and bring the strings into tune, grateful for the exacting father who had taught me to tune nearly perfectly by ear, and thus I sank quite easily into the simple tasks that had made up so much of my life before.

Things were different than I’d envisioned for my life, but I’d let circumstances paralyze me for too long when before they had always mobilized me. Inspired me to act. My heart still wished to pursue normalcy, freedom, and my idealized set of circumstances, but this was my locked larder now, and merely enduring it would be a waste of life and heart.

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