Miles and I run into the hallway, almost crashing into Will. Mrs. Cliffton joins us at the bottom of the staircase, and we burst into the library together and gape at the record player.
Dr. Cliffton lets out a shout and reaches for Mrs. Cliffton. She laughs, moving her arms through the air as if she could swim through the notes. She beams at him before she plants a kiss straight on his mouth.
Miles bounds toward George and, for lack of something better to do, punches him in the arm. Will whoops, and I turn to him, and he’s grabbing me to him and lifting me in celebration, the feel of his hands straight heat on my waist, the tips of my fingers blazing with sparks whenever I touch his skin.
“How did you do it?” he asks, setting me down. A million tiny bubbles fizz in my stomach.
“It was George,” Dr. Cliffton says, spinning Mrs. Cliffton out and drawing her back into him again with the crescendo of the music. The pleats of her skirt unfold like an accordion. “What makes the most well-known music, the songs that have inspired poets and artists since the dawn of time?” Dr. Cliffton looks years younger than he did at dinner last night.
The music begins to sputter and fade. But even in the silent spaces between it, the air around us feels changed. “I’ll give you a hint,” Dr. Cliffton says. “‘Fled is that music: Do I wake or sleep?’”
I don’t even have to think. “That’s Keats. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’?”
Keats, I think with a sharp pang of disappointment. Not Shakespeare.
But it’s hard to feel anything but joy when George opens his grasp to reveal a single nightingale feather, silky and russet brown, the promise of music now resting in the palm of his hand.
We celebrate for the better part of an hour. Genevieve dances into the room with glasses of punch and egg salad sandwiches. Then we all sit together in the library, drinking in the sparkling punch and the music as if it were nectar.
Dr. Cliffton makes several phone calls to inquire about ordering large quantities of nightingale feathers. “Yes, nightingale,” he repeats, enunciating and pressing the telephone closer to his mouth. He hesitates. “Larkin? I’d prefer to work with someone else. Nothing underground. Keep everything aboveboard, please.”
Mrs. Cliffton turns to Genevieve and me. “We should host a party,” she says, her hands clasping. “We could surprise everyone. Align it with the Sisters Tournament so no one will suspect anything.”
Dr. Cliffton blocks the telephone receiver with his palm. “That would give us time to make enough Variants so that people could have them that very night instead of having to wait.”
Mrs. Cliffton finds a notepad and starts making a list.
Dr. Cliffton and George spend the rest of the afternoon grinding the remaining feathers, and at the end George is rewarded with two small midnight-blue pouches shot through with silver threads.
“You know where we have to go, don’t you?” he asks me. We put on our coats and slip out the door together. “Be back soon,” I say to Mrs. Cliffton.
“Home before dark, please,” she says. Will doesn’t look up.
George and I walk the mile to Beas’s house. Knock on the door, which is wreathed with boxwood and ribbon.
“You two look like the cats that swallowed the canary,” Beas says, narrowing her eyes when she opens the door.
George holds out his hand. The pouch sits in his palm like a robin’s egg in a nest.
Her mouth falls open. Eyebrows twitch with the first spark of hope.
“Shh.” He brings his fingers to his lips. “You can’t speak a word yet. But . . . Do you happen to have a violin lying around?”
Her eyes turn to stars. She fetches her violin and leads us outside. We walk deep into the cushioning silence of the woods and sit on moss-covered rocks next to a brook. Beas closes her eyes when George dusts the freshly crushed Variants over her violin.
And then, from memory, she sets her bow to the strings and plays us the most beautiful song my ears might ever hear.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Date: December 16, 1942
Bird: Jay
Upon discovering a deceased one of their own, jays group together and sound alarm calls. They do not leave the carcass for two days, even to eat. Instead they sit and attend their dead.
Just before dawn I tuck the broken mouse under the collar of my coat and use the Tempests to run on the train tracks until I hit the edge of Sheffield. When the sun begins to rise, I jump on a train and ride two hours home.
“I could market Peace as a fresh start for an anxious or drug-addicted mind,” I explain to Phineas later that morning. “Joy to combat a broken heart. Courage to inject like a shot in the arm.”
We sit together on the porch, eating eggs. I drape a blanket over Phineas’s legs and feed my broken mouse a piece of cheese.
“And you think you can do this in humans?”
I swallow. “I do.” The mouse’s teeth catch my finger, enough to prick the smallest drop of blood. I press my fingers together to staunch it at the same time that Phineas presses his gray lips together.
“You’re a hustler. You remind me of a younger version of me.” And then he barks a laugh that turns into a fit of coughing. His spine knocks hollowly against the back of the chair. “Just don’t lose focus on the Stone,” he reminds me. “Juliet’s husband still doesn’t respond to your letters?”
I shake my head.
“Perhaps you need to pay another visit to Gardner.”
I nod, fingering the vial of Vala’s Peace.
“Now, admittedly, comes the hardest part,” I say. “Finding a human to . . . practice on.” It’s a turning point, the edge of the knife. I consider the mouse bodies that mounted in piles over the months of my failed attempts.
Phineas cocks his head toward the clanking of the sour-faced maid in the next room who is scrubbing splotches from the stolen silver.
“I doubt anyone would miss her,” he says, lighting a cigar.
I stand. Push back the small voice in my head that pleads reason, pleads restraint. Push it back until I simply can’t hear it anymore.
“Laurette?” I call, reaching into the cabinet for Larkin’s chloroform. “Can you help me with something in the cellar?”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
February 4, 1943
Keats. Keats for music.
And Freud for teeth.
I crumple the list I’ve made about Shakespeare’s disappeared seven years—?that he was looking for something valuable, that he was ill or escaping punishment for illegal poaching. But I can’t quite bring myself to put Mother’s book away again. I like the way the pages look covered in her handwriting and mine, as if our words are holding hands.
“Aila!” Mrs. Cliffton calls me to the kitchen.
“Tea?” she asks.
I nod, rubbing my hands together.
“Put some water on for us, would you?”
Genevieve has the night off, but she’s left a big pot of stew simmering on the stove. Mrs. Cliffton brings a ladle of it to her lips, then sorts through an array of spices. A flowering sprig of rosemary sticks out from her bun.
“Aila, how does Miles seem to you lately?” she asks as I light the stove under the kettle.