“Oh Divad…” Her voice quavered. “We had no idea. We thought she took a laundry job. Her few coins…” She couldn’t continue.
He looked at his father. “What happened to Jemma?”
The shame Divad saw rise on his father’s face was terrible to see. Such a look of helpless failure. The man’s own skin looked heavy on his bones.
His father softly cleared his throat. “Jemma took to beds to earn coin, Divad. The kind of man that would pay her…liked to use his fists. It’s my fault, son. I should have been able…”
Divad began to feel a cascade of grief overwhelming him. Grief for Jemma; for his mother’s broken heart; for his father’s feelings of shame and failure; for his own absence during it all. He looked down at the top of the casket. Pine.
Before he realized what he was doing, he retreated to his instrument, unclasped the case, drew out the viola, and began to play without bothering to resin his bow or tune. He escaped into the only song that came to mind, “If I’m Reminded.”
The sweet sound of his viola filled the room. It held the unique qualities of both eulogy and sympathy. Long mournful notes resonated beneath his fingers as he played for Jemma. As he did, the story of her life fell into place: the discoloration in her face when she’d handed him a pomegranate; his father’s loss of his cart-trade; an empty mug at the edge of a table—a signal he hadn’t understood until now; Jemma’s lack of beauty, and the only kind of man willing to pay her—one who sought to brutalize as part of pleasure-taking.
He should have seen it before. He shouldn’t have been so absorbed in his music that he failed to see or help. He began to hate himself for blathering on about his lessons while she waited on the prospect of a few plugs in exchange for being beaten while giving up her maiden box.
His music had gotten in the way. And yet even now he used it to find refuge from a pine overcoat and the anguish of people he loved but had rarely seen in four years. Refuge from his own shame.
Sometime during the chorus of his song, his grip loosened. His bow and viola slipped from his hands and fell, crashing against the wood scuttle.
Divad’s hands became still. His left forefinger had come to the end of the original scar. His right hand remained poised with the taper punch near the surface of the new soundboard. The mark was complete; as nearly identical as he could make it. The one gouge in the antique instrument that utterly belonged to him.
His leaving for Descant to study music had meant one less wage earner to support the family. He couldn’t have known the produce trade would wane, any more than he could have imagined his sister would take to the mattress to help earn coin. Jemma had never said a word. Not to him, and not to his parents. Her modest contribution had helped them continue to survive.
“If only I had been there,” he muttered to himself, “instead of here.”
Music, even the learning of music, had begun to mean something different after that. He no longer took it for granted. And he did his damnedest to put it after his family in his list of priorities. That had meant late-hour repair for fiddle players and the like, who were willing to pay a Maesteri to fix up their decrepit instruments. He’d started to become accustomed to the wee hours sitting in this very shop. And every plug or jot he earned made its way to his father, no matter how healthy the cart-trade was at the time.
As the rain continued to whisper beyond the window, he nodded to himself. The soundboard was done. But he didn’t, just yet, stand to leave. Instead, he remained in the company of wood smells and old spruce, thinking about smokiness.
The Sellari prisoner sat bound to the trunk of a tall poplar tree. I’d asked Baylet for a deaf one, like our Shoarden men. He’d assured me this one could not hear. The man appeared to have been severely beaten—for information, I assumed. The blood on his face had dried in the cold night air, and his chin hung slack so that his sleeping breath gave out slow tendrils of steam in the moonlight.
I stood a ways off, considering what I must do.
The lesson in the score given me by Divad had become clear. Scordatura was a kind of music notation used for altered tunings, as the viola d’amore usually had. That particular instrument was rarely tuned in fifths. In fact, it might employ twenty or more different tunings, each one to suit the individual piece. The various tunings made it possible to play chords and individual notes that weren’t playable using conventional tuning.
Scordatura told the musician how to tune his instrument and where to put his fingers. But not what note to expect.