THE VIRTUOSO SCHOOL WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF MANHATTAN, on a surprisingly serene street in Chelsea. We weren’t far from Peter Morgan-Vilk’s apartment, in fact, and I put my umbrella up against the rain, not out of worry for my hair or clothes, but because I wanted a shield ready against recognition if I needed one.
The school itself was quiet, furnished in the spare style my mother had always liked, and yet there was a hominess to it I hadn’t expected. Natural light. Wooden rafters. A pair of girls holding hands, running late to class. It made me nostalgic for a school life I’d never had. Somewhere in the background a girl was playing her cello, but I didn’t recognize the piece. It might have been of her own devising.
We were shown to the admissions suite, where we were greeted, to our disappointment, by a girl in a smart dress who had us fill out a dossier. “I thought Hartwell worked Wednesdays,” I whispered to my uncle, but he shook his head imperceptibly.
“Don’t worry,” he said at normal volume. “We’ll get you in, you belong here,” and the man walking into the suite laughed a bit to himself.
“I admire your confidence,” he said.
Leander stuck out his hand. “Walter Simpson.”
“Michael Hartwell,” he said. “Why don’t you come into my office and tell me a bit more about your daughter?”
“My niece,” Leander said, with his thousand-watt smile, and this time when he reached out to guide me into the room, my hesitation was all pretend.
“This is such a gorgeous place,” I said, sitting down and smoothing out my skirt. “I keep hearing music! It’s wonderful.”
“I know it’s late in the year for a transfer,” Leander said.
“Of her senior year. Miss Simpson will have already applied to colleges, by now, yes? I don’t know how much we can help her.” Hartwell flipped through my file again, then shut it. He gave me a sympathetic smile. “May I ask why you’re looking to change schools now?”
I stared down at the shiny tops of my Mary Janes. “My tutor died,” I said. “Unexpectedly. My parents thought I should come be with my uncle in the States for a change of scenery. And besides, I didn’t apply to conservatory yet. I thought I’d perhaps take a gap year.”
“Her tutor’s loss has been quite the blow. They’d worked together for a long time.” Leander stole a look at me. “She’s going to hate me for this, but—”
I colored. “No, don’t! You promised you wouldn’t!”
“You should play for him.” He reached into his bag and pulled out my violin case.
“Uncle,” I protested.
“No. Show him what you’re made of. Show him why you’re a good fit for this school.” Leander turned to the counselor. “That’s the idea, right? She’ll be able to pursue professional opportunities, and she’ll have the finest instruction. Play for him!”
Hartwell sat back in his leather chair. “I’m no judge. She’d have to play for the music faculty, at auditions.” Then the corners of his mouth turned up indulgently. “Is she any good?”
I drew my instrument up to me like the living thing it was. It hadn’t been in my hands now for so long—an extravagance and a danger, lugging it around with me, a hobby of mine that I couldn’t hide. I could almost feel it breathing there under my fingers.
“That’s a Stradivarius.” Hartwell’s eyes glittered. “Interesting.”
I put it up under my chin, arranged my fingering. I always thought a little about the sky when I held my violin. A bird wheeling. The sun. That sort of thing. It was difficult to explain.
A very, very cursory Google search had found that Michael Hartwell was a significant donor to both the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. Hence, the violin.
Leander gave me a moment to settle. Then he said, “Mr. Hartwell, I think she’ll make you weep. Play him an original, Charlotte?”
Had my eyes not already been closed, I would have startled like a hare. This hadn’t been in the design at all, which already skewed far closer to the truth than I wanted it to. I had proposed that Leander play my father. We’d be Americans recently returned from abroad. We would say that I wrote songs on my guitar about our quaint life in Surrey and how I missed it so. I would ask Hartwell to introduce me to his daughter, the songwriter; I would be a fan. He would be flattered, he would feel appreciated, perhaps be more willing to talk.
Leander had refused. Bring your violin. Be my niece. Let me take the lead.
I never let anyone else take the lead, not when I was involved. I never deviated from the plan unless I had to, and “had to” had a very narrow definition. (I could comfortably bluff my way through having a gun put to my head.) But I didn’t trust my instincts today, not with all that fear still rattling around in my chest. I’d taken a step back.
Was this willingness to give up the lead maturity, or hesitation? I didn’t know. It had been one thing with DI Green, who could give me directions but wasn’t there to see me follow (or not follow) them. This was something else.
And now Leander was calling me Charlotte when the name on my form read Harriet Heloise Simpson, and he was telling me to play a composition that I hadn’t, well, composed.
Had Hartwell noticed the name? He must have. I couldn’t risk opening my eyes to check. Whatever my uncle was playing at . . . but more than a moment had passed now, long enough for an eighteen-year-old girl to believably compose herself, but anything longer, and—
I began to play, pulling from a folk tune I remembered from a village concert as a child. My parents had never taken us. There wasn’t much art in their blood. But I had been eight and obsessed with my fiddle and Milo had been home for the summer, and when our housekeeper told us about the festival, he’d seen the longing in my face.
“You’re indulging her?” my father had asked. Not judging, not surprised.
Milo shrugged. “She wants to hear the band,” he said, the only time I could remember him pushing back against my father, and he hoisted me onto his skinny shoulders and took me into town.
We didn’t have much down there—a Tesco, a wine bar, a few nebulously purposed shops that sold “gifts,” the usual lineup for a tourist haunt by the sea. But that night, we had a gazebo on the village green, and a quartet playing folk airs, and my brother kept me on his shoulders as we watched. People weren’t used to us being out, as a family. We Holmeses were the vampires up the hill. But I clapped my hands along to the music, and my brother bounced me in time to the beat, and soon an elderly gentleman approached and asked me if I wanted to dance with him. Milo heaved me down and watched, bemused, as I was spun and spun and spun in my dress and then sat dizzy onto the ground.
“Did you like that?” he said, when it was over. The old man had bought me a taffy apple at the stand, and I held it out on the walk back to our land, too afraid to eat it.
“Yes,” I remember saying. “I liked how sad it was.”
Because the day had ended. There would be no more days just like it. If I ate the apple, it too would be gone, and soon enough Milo would be back at the school that was changing him.
My brother didn’t press me to explain.
I took that day and laid it under this one. I spun those two parallel moments into a song and then played it, and I played for some time.
When I opened my eyes, Michael Hartwell was weeping.
“Charlotte,” he said, and the hair on my neck stood up. “That was beautiful. I’m so—I’m so sorry.”
I set down my violin on my lap. Then I said, “You know who I am, then.”
Hartwell said, “I’ve been shown photos of you, yes.”
“But not me,” Leander said, standing.
“No. Only the girl. Charlotte.”
My uncle put himself more fully between me and Michael Hartwell. “You’re here,” he said, as Hartwell wiped his eyes, “but you did your residency at Washington Mercy in psychology. Is that right?”
Hartwell, I noticed, was shaking; perhaps it was an aftershock from his tears. “Yes.”
“What does Moriarty have on you?”
“Nothing,” Hartwell said, “nothing.”