The Fire Concerto

by Sarah Landenwich

Genres: Women's Fiction; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

A beautifully written, evocative literary page-turner about a brilliant nineteenth-century female pianist from Poland lost to history and another woman’s quest to ensure she is not forgotten—with a shocking twist of a finale.

Clara Bishop hasn’t touched a piano since a concert hall fire nearly took her life a decade ago, ending her career as a rising star in the world of classical music. Significantly scarred and unable to play, she has turned away from everything and everyone associated with music, especially her ruthless mentor Madame, whom Clara blames for her injuries.
       ​Her life is upended when Madame dies, leaving Clara an unexpected inheritance: an ornate nineteenth-century metronome with a cryptic message hidden inside. Convinced this is not a gift but a puzzle Madame wants her to solve, Clara comes to suspect that the unusual bequest is the long-lost metronome of the composer Aleksander Starza—a priceless object missing since 1885, when Starza was murdered by the brilliant female pianist Constantia Pleyel.
​       ​As Clara works to uncover the metronome’s haunted past and protect it—and herself—from those who wish to obtain it, she discovers that nothing about Starza and his murder are what they seem. History has remembered Constantia Pleyel as an unstable artist who killed Starza in a fit of madness. The truth could rewrite the history of music—and give Clara the second chance she has been longing for.

This moving tale is perfect for fans of Brendan Slocumb's The Violin Conspiracy.

Release date: June 10, 2025

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 320

Sample

Austin, Texas

1997

THE INVITATION ARRIVED ON A FRIDAY, care of The Andromeda Club. Concealed as it was inside a plain No. 10 envelope with a stamp of Benjamin Franklin squarely affixed to the right-hand corner, it did not immediately cause alarm. The manager of The Andromeda held it out to Clara Bishop, who was mixing a Manhattan behind the bar.

“Your mom sent you something,” Julián said.

Clara glanced at the proffered envelope, registering her mother’s looping script, the broad C of Clara’s name written in a hurried flourish. In the light shining down on the bar she could see the outline of a smaller envelope inside, the muted pink of a magenta Post-it stuck to its front.

“Put it in the back, will you? I’ll get it later.” It was 4:55. In ten minutes every table would be full with the happy hour rush. Clara enjoyed the Friday shift, when the patrons of the bar were buoyant with the prospect of the weekend. She did not want to dampen the night with mail from her mother.

Julián frowned. Short and stocky, with an endearing layer of pudge around his middle, he had a movie-star smile that lent his boyish looks a dashing quality. Just now, however, he regarded her with a look of patient disapproval that made her think he would have made an excellent elementary school teacher.

“Your mom knows Texas provides home mail delivery, right?”

Clara tipped a bottle of vermouth into a mixing glass. “She thinks it’s more reliable to send things here.”

“I wonder who led her to believe that.”

Two years ago, Clara told her mother that a package Ruth mailed to Clara’s house—a book entitled You Can Be Happy No Matter What—never arrived. She used the same excuse later that year for a newspaper article about a tennis star who recovered from third-degree burns and went on to win the Illinois state championship. Ruth had declared the postal system of Texas “primitive.” Now all mail from Chicago was diverted through The Andromeda Club.

“You would understand if you met her,” Clara said, and plucked the envelope from Julián’s outstretched hand. She folded it in half, shaking the smaller envelope down to one side so she could shove it in her back pocket. It was probably an invitation to a cousin’s wedding or baby shower, one of the endless family events Clara always declined to attend. She twisted a curl of orange peel onto the rim of a coupe glass and walked the Manhattan to a woman at the end of the bar.

“Up, light on the vermouth.”

“Thanks.” The woman looked up from a pager, her eyes skimming the scars on Clara’s cheek. Clara noticed the look but smiled anyway.

“Let me know if you’d like anything else,” she said, and turned away.

The door to the bar opened. A dozen serious-faced young people walked in, trailed by a cherubic man in his sixties wearing a Dark Side of the Moon T-shirt—Art Druckerman’s graduate Nietzsche seminar from the university. They were followed by Barb and Lisa, who lived in the apartment over the bar, and a group of front-desk workers from the Driskill Hotel still in their slacks and starched shirts. Soon the bar hummed with the energy of Friday night.

The Andromeda Club was not a fashionable place. It was old but not historic; dated but not yet vintage. It possessed nonetheless a kind of timeless class that had kept it steadily beloved for over twenty years. It was cool and dim and faultlessly clean. The cocktails were classic and strong. Smoking was not permitted, as the owner was asthmatic. The brick walls were lined with photos of Austin from the 1800s—the Driskill Hotel, the Millett Opera House, Congress Avenue when it was still a broad drag of rutted dirt. In the afternoons when Clara arrived for her shift and sunlight filtered through the picture windows that faced Fourth Street, the black leather of the booths appeared faded, the blond planks of the floor dull and scuffed. But at night, the room glowed. The ceiling was painted like the night sky, with the blush disc of Andromeda swirling above the bar. Parlor lamps with emerald tassel shades cast each table in tranquil luminescence. Blue pendant lights hung from the ceiling at staggered lengths like stars dripping from the sky. Clara liked the shabby elegance of it, which was comforting and reliable in the way of a very old, very finely made wool sweater. She liked the owner, Dave, a former astronomy professor at UT who ran the club at a loss and gave every employee five hundred dollars at Christmas. And she liked the regulars, mostly artist types and academics who preferred a smaller, quieter place to the college bars and honky-tonks down the street. Saturdays, the stage in the back of the room hosted live bands. Sundays, Dave showed classic films on a reel-to-reel projector. A piano player, Jerry, performed live from the baby grand in the corner three nights a week, mainly jazz standards and arrangements of pop songs, though every now and then Clara heard something less familiar that she guessed were Jerry’s own compositions. She never asked. She didn’t want him to know how closely she listened.

“Look who’s back for another chance at your heart.” Julián inclined his head toward the entrance, where a man in black pants and a Ramones T-shirt was holding the door for a group of white-haired women leaving the bar. The man caught Clara’s eye and smiled. She smiled back, careful to make it friendly and nothing more.

“Tonight’s the night.” Julián waved over Clara’s head. “I’m gonna ply him with drinks and convince him to do it.”

“Don’t.” Clara mixed gin and tonics for Barb and Lisa as the man made his way through the room and took his usual seat beside the server window.

“You go,” Julián said, nudging her in the ribs.

“He’s on your side,” Clara whispered.

“Not anymore.” Julián slid a martini onto a tray and breezed past her. “Who am I to stand in the way of a budding romance?”

Clara jabbed him in the love handle as he went by. On the piano, Jerry had launched into a Ray Charles set. She heard him fumble a few notes of “Come Back, Baby,” searching for the right melody. It’s an F, Clara thought. Then a G-flat.

“Hey, Luke.” She turned to the man and flipped a coaster onto the bar. “What can I get for you?”

He was around thirty, like Clara, and golden and athletic in a wholesome sort of way that contrasted pleasantly with his band T-shirts and black Dickies. They met two months ago when he came to The Andromeda for a jazz guitar performance that was so poorly attended, Clara and Luke were the only audience. Since then, he’d shown up at the bar twice a week. She knew from the small talk they’d exchanged that he ran five miles every morning and was a sound tech at The Continental Club. She also knew that the Jim Beams he ordered were half the price anywhere down Fourth Street.

“The usual,” Luke said. He smiled, the faint lines around his eyes creasing, and she noticed for the first time that one of his front teeth was slightly chipped. It was the kind of face you could imagine smiling at you in the morning when you woke up. The thought made something in her chest ache.

She pulled the bottle of Beam from the shelf. Her own standard uniform was a black T-shirt, black Levi’s, and black Chuck Taylors. If she wanted to dress up, she wore black Ariat boots. Apart from her scars, which distinguished her in a different kind of way, her appearance was unremarkable. She was pale and tall (gangly, her mother liked to say), with long legs and bony arms. Her eyes were brown and wide, and her hair was a nondescript ash blonde she wore in a high ponytail, with blunt bangs she cut herself. Sometimes she wondered if it was this plainness that interested Luke—something about her simple clothes and makeup-less face that announced that she was like him: alternative, underground, into music. In fact, none of this was true. She had spent her childhood in satin and patent leather. T-shirts and jeans were a repudiation of a stilted youth that had been no real youth at all. But she knew the ensemble would not suit her much longer before she became the oldest cliché—the middle-aged woman who couldn’t grow up.

Next to Luke, an older man in a tweed jacket eyed her while he sipped his scotch, trying to decide what was wrong with her face.

“How’s business?” Luke asked. He didn’t notice the man, or pretended not to. The fact that he never noticed is what convinced Clara it was an act.

“Pretty busy. Friday night, you know. You?”

“A pipe burst at the venue this morning. All tonight’s shows got canceled. I haven’t been off on a Friday in a year.” He scratched the side of his neck, and Clara tensed, sensing what was coming.

“I’m headed to the Elephant Room later on,” he said. “There’s a local trio playing that’ll blow you away. You should come when you get off.”

This was the moment she could nudge things along—tell him she’d love to but couldn’t, or suggest they get a drink some other time. She was saved by a crowd of twenty-somethings, who burst through the door in a cloud of noise that made everyone in the room look up.

“Sounds fun,” she said. “But I’m closing tonight. Have a good time.”

The twenty-somethings swarmed the bar and ordered beers and whiskey-Cokes, then stood around the tables waiting for a rockabilly show to start at a bar down the block. While Clara poured a round of pints from the tap, she saw a pretty brunette in a plaid miniskirt and Radiohead T-shirt slide onto the stool next to Luke and stick out her hand. By the time Clara went over to take her order, the woman was touching Luke’s elbow. He glanced up, an apology in his eyes that Clara pretended not to see.

“Could be you.” Julián leaned against the bar while Clara mixed the woman’s Jack and Coke.

“Could be.”

“He’s a nice guy.”

“There are a lot of nice guys.”

“Please.” Julián made a face. “Throw him a bone or stop leading him on.”

“I work here. I don’t make him come and talk to me.”

“No, you’re just turning him into an alcoholic. Think of all the extra push-ups he has to do to burn that off.”

“He’s not my type.”

Julian shot her a look of disdain. “Right. You two would look so weird together in your matching black pants. Just say yes!”

“Too late.” Clara set the drink before the woman, then went out into the bar to gather empty glasses.

Julián groaned. “You’re going to die alone, you know,” he called after her.

The Nietzsche students had pushed two tables together and were circled around Druckerman arguing hotly about the existence of free will. “What does it mean to be good, anyway?” she heard one of them say. “Look at the last hundred years. Look at the last thousand years. Brutality is our nature.” Clara observed the young man without turning her eyes toward him. He was thin and attractive, with intense eyes and a voice aggressively set on being right. Had anything bad happened to him to convince him of humanity’s evil, or was it simply fashionable, as with so many of the graduate students she overheard at The Andromeda, to assert the obvious as if it were a thunderous revelation? Of course brutality was human nature. It was kindness that was hard. Wasn’t that the whole struggle of civilization? She picked up his empty pint glass and wiped the ring of water beneath it. She was already walking away when someone behind her called out.

“Hey! You dropped something!”

A young woman at the end of the table was holding the envelope.

“Thanks.” Clara balanced her tray on one forearm and reached out her other hand, then stopped short. In the glow of the table lamp, she saw for the first time the outline of a small, dark circle through the white sleeve of the envelope—slightly textured, like a coin. A wax seal. Her chest went cold as if she had drunk a glass of ice water too fast on a hot day.

The young woman blinked at Clara through red-framed glasses. “Do you want me to put it on your tray for you?” Her eyes darted over Clara’s scarred hand and up the ropey tissue of her arm.

“I’ve got it, thanks.” Clara took the envelope and crumpled it once more into her pocket.

Back at the bar, she put the empties in the sink and filled the tub and tossed in the disinfecting tablets that made the water run blue and frothy, glad Luke and the woman in the Radiohead T-shirt were behind her so she wouldn’t have to look at them. She dunked the glasses in the blue water and let her hands sink in the water too, her scars distorted and dissolving beneath the blue liquid. Barb and Lisa asked if she had seen the cartoon of Governor Bush with a Pinocchio nose that had been graffitied in the alley, and the older couple next to them ordered a second round of vodka gimlets. Clara laughed with Barb and poured the drinks, all the while thinking of the envelope that now seemed to rasp so audibly against her jeans. Though she could not comprehend what it might contain, she knew that whatever was inside would resuscitate a thousand withered memories that she did not want here in The Andromeda Club, where she could pretend that the person who sent it had never existed at all.

“Another whiskey!”

Clara looked up. One of the rockabilly guys was waving a twenty at her from down the bar. She took her time placing the clean glasses in the drying rack before pouring him another Jameson. He downed it in a single gulp, then walked unsteadily down the hall toward the restrooms. When he left, Clara noticed his date wobble on her barstool. She filled a glass of water from the tap and walked it over.

“Drink this,” she said, nudging aside the young woman’s half-finished whiskey. “You want some pretzels? We have some. On the house.”

“No, thanks,” the young woman slurred. She had bright red curls and wore a black lace dress that looked too small around the shoulders and had chafed one side of her neck. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two.

“How about a cab, then?” Clara asked.

“I’m good.” The young woman pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from her purse and put one in her mouth.

“No smoking in here.” Clara pointed to a sign on the wall. “There’s a patio out back.”

The young woman’s bottom lip stuck out in a pout. With the cigarette still clamped in her mouth, she raised her sleepy eyes and looked at Clara as if noticing her for the first time. “What happened to your face?”

In an instant, Barb reached across the woman to push the whiskey glass away. “You’ve had too much, missy,” Barb said gruffly. “Time to go home.”

Clara didn’t even flinch. She was not the type of person to be cowed by thoughtless criticisms. She had a lifetime of performance to thank for that.

“No more drinks for people who insult the bartender,” she said lightly, and tore the couple’s tab from a notepad and set it on the bar. But she could feel everyone watching. Mostly she could feel Luke. In her peripheral vision, she had seen him become totally still.

Unembarrassed, the drunk woman swiped her Marlboros from the bar and stumbled off her stool toward the patio.

Julián returned with a tray of empty glasses, having missed the spectacle. “The paper towels are out in the women’s room,” he said. “Can you go fill the dispenser?”

“Gladly.” Clara tipped a smile of gratitude in Barb’s direction, then removed her apron and headed down the hall. The sound of the bar dampened as she pushed into the empty bathroom. The tension in her chest loosened in the quiet. She changed the paper towel roll and refilled the Dial soap, then wiped up the droplets of water that speckled the sink. In her own bathroom at home, she used only the overhead light, having unscrewed the three glaring bulbs above the vanity mirror the day she moved in. Under the forensic glow of The Andromeda’s fluorescents, every peak and valley of her scars was visible, like the topography of the moon had shrunk to the map of her face. She turned her cheek to the side to examine it, then turned her face in the other direction, where the skin was smooth and perfect, an erasure of the past. A familiar, burning regret welled within her. Banishing the feeling before it could take root, she turned her back on her reflection and pulled the envelope from her pocket. She was debating whether to open it or bury it in the garbage when the door to the bathroom flung wide.

A streak of red curls blurred past, followed by the banging of the stall door. Soon Clara heard quiet retching in the toilet. She was walking toward the exit when she heard a stifled sob. Beneath the stall wall, she saw the hem of the black lace dress as the girl sank to the floor. Clara looked up at the ceiling, annoyed that she was the only one here to comfort the crying girl who had insulted her. Still, she walked back to the sink and ran water over a paper towel, then crouched down to pass it beneath the stall.

“Here you go,” she said gently. “You want me to get somebody for you?”

A hand with chewed hangnails reached out and took the paper towel. “No. He doesn’t care about me.” The girl exhaled a ragged breath. “I’m such an idiot.”

“You’ll feel better tomorrow,” Clara said, then regretted it, remembering how many times people had said that to her, all of them knowing it wasn’t true. Sometimes you felt worse tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.

“You’ll be okay,” she corrected, and stood. “Now—how about that cab?”

At two o’clock, Clara herded the last straggling graduate students out the door, and she and Julián closed up for the night. Julián offered to give her a ride, but Clara declined. She liked to bike at night. Back at the beginning, after the fire, she thought about moving to Alaska or Finland, somewhere cold and dark. But that winter, holed away in her parents’ house in Chicago, she discovered that cold could penetrate her scars. It bore into the bones of her burned arm and hand, the dead tissue expanding like a river freezing against its banks. By February, the entire right side of her body was frozen. The doctors told her it was just the nerves adjusting and the pain would eventually subside. Her mother used the mysterious symptoms as an excuse to suggest that Clara spend some time away. In the reverse act of her entire childhood, during which all Clara wanted was to get away from her parents, Ruth rustled up the idea of Austin, where the Bishops’ neighbor kept a second home, and where the coldest it usually got was a film of frost on a windshield. It was a city of music, but nothing like the music Clara had devoted her life to. Guitars twanged from every bar, but never once did she hear Chopin or Rachmaninoff or even tinny Mozart in a department store elevator. Three months in, she decided to stay.

She saw the rockabilly crowd smoking cigarettes in front of a dive bar down the street, their drunken laughter audible even from a half mile away. Clara mounted her bike and headed in the opposite direction. Luke and the woman in the Radiohead T-shirt left the bar around eleven. Clara tried not to watch as they walked out the door together, just as she’d tried not to look at the woman’s flawless skin for the rest of the night while the two of them talked about the state of prog rock and their shared love of the Replacements. What was the point? She had spent years obsessing about other women’s beauty. It hadn’t changed anything about her own face and wouldn’t ever. Years ago, when her mother was still taking her to plastic surgeons and they had both allowed themselves to believe medicine could reverse what had been done, Clara had rubbed oils and creams into her skin each night and counseled herself that in a year—then two—three—five—she would be good as new. But the oils and creams couldn’t change the mottled look of her cheekbone, where the skin had been grafted from her thigh, or regrow the part of her eyebrow that had been forever singed away. Nor had they eased the stiffness in her knuckles or the hot shocks of pain that flickered across the palm of her hand. Forever into the future, her scars would be the first thing anyone saw. Luke would be no different. She could tell by the askance way he looked at her, his eye contact slightly off-center as if he were trying to prove he didn’t see them. Clara had dated enough people to know that they wouldn’t make it past the second date. He was the type who would want to open the baggage, talk things out, plumb her past. This was why she poured his whiskeys light.

She biked over the Congress Avenue Bridge, where the tall buildings of downtown reflected off the choppy glint of the Colorado River. Across the water it was darker, the glow of the city receding behind her. She passed The Austin Motel and Allen’s Boots before turning at St. Mary’s United Methodist, where the yard sign said Come as you are. Someone had spray-painted K. Cobain beneath the words. Clara pedaled past the sign into the leafy neighborhood, coasting by a row of tidy bungalows before dismounting at a chain-link gate.

Bingo, her elderly St. Bernard, was waiting at the door, tail thumping against the screen. He raised up on his stout haunches to greet her.

“Hey, big guy,” Clara said, ruffling the thick fur behind his ears.

He waited at the top of the steps while she retrieved his ball from the corner of the porch swing, then bounded after it into the yard.

The house was a little bungalow with vinyl siding painted the color of a daffodil. It sat back from the road so that the shotgun yard stretched before it to the sidewalk. With its unruly landscaping and rusty porch swing, it was the type of house her parents would frown at if Clara ever allowed them to visit. She bought it seven years ago with the last money left from the sale of her Chicago condo. Despite her own initial snobbery, she had grown to like it. The yard especially. Never a gardener in her former life, she had discovered that damp earth soothed the smoldering nerves of her fingers. Loamy soil was a balm no cream or ointment had ever been. Now the yard was a wild zigzag of succulents and flowers. A bed of moss rose flowed from the porch to the front gate, and six giant blue agave plants erupted from the dirt. Like so much else in her life, she had bent around the circumstances and grown into someone different.

She sank onto the porch swing, removing the envelope from her pocket. The paper was creased and abused by now, the blue ink of her name smeared like a setting watercolor. Her parents had known she would be named Clara from the moment she was conceived. Not for Clara Schumann, as Clara used to tell the reporters who came to her concerts and competitions, but Clara from The Nutcracker. Her mother had been a ballet dancer, slim and strong and vain, with an artist’s devotion to beauty and a lawyer’s abhorrence of mistakes.

Clara tore open the envelope and withdrew the smaller one inside. The pink Post-it affixed to the front offered only the simplest of explanations. This came for you.

The maroon seal was loose, either from the Texas humidity or because her mother had tried to steam it open over her silver teapot. Clara slid a long, slender finger beneath the wax. It separated from the paper with a soft cluck.

The piece of cardstock she withdrew was thick as fabric, heavy as a quarter in her palm. There was no specific address to her as a person. No “dear.” No “hello.” Not even her name at the top of the invitation. Just three typed lines, after ten years of silence:

Final Concert of Zofia Mikorska.

Saturday, the 24th of May, at the residence.

Private. Show your invitation at the door.

At the bottom, scratched with the nib of one of the antique pens that had scarred the scores of Clara’s Bach and Rachmaninoff and beloved Starza was a single handwritten word: Come.

Out in the yard, Bingo barked. He stood at the base of the oak tree, watching a pair of bats flit between the branches.

“Bingo!” Clara called. “Come!” The dog trotted toward her, his eyes yellow in the darkness.

Come. Clara knew the voice, the scrape of the pen. It was not an entreaty. It was a command.



IT WAS RAINING IN CHICAGO—a cold, drenching rain that curled the petals of the flowers and bullied spring back into the ground. Clara stood on the sidewalk before Madame’s giant house, glad she had remembered to bring an umbrella. The taxi ride to Hyde Park from the airport had been long, impeded by the slick streets and the steady throb of weekend dinner traffic. Clara spent the drive looking out the window at the familiar thrum of Chicago, the Alka-Seltzer she had gulped on the plane sloshing around in her empty stomach. Now, she pulled her jacket more tightly around her shoulders. Eleven years had passed since she last stood before the iron gate that surrounded this house. A lifetime had elapsed, and yet everything looked just the same.

A dark mansion in the Tudor style with a severely sloped roof and heavy brown timbering, it had always seemed to Clara like the misty manor out of a ghost story. The iron gate creaked on its hinges. Ivy smothered half the house. Most memorable to Clara, the long walkway to the broad red door was menaced on both sides by a thicket of towering rose bushes. Every Tuesday when Clara was a child, she had walked close to her mother’s slacks in the very center of the brick path, terrified a thorn might prick and poison her like in Sleeping Beauty. Once when she was nine, she tripped over her Mary Janes and fell hands-first into their thorny arms. She left blood on the piano keys that day—a tiny, clandestine smear on the underlip of middle C. As she played, Madame’s furious breath on the top of her head, she imagined some other unhappy child finding it and seeing in the dried little drop the message Clara was here.

Hurrying up the brick path twenty years later, Clara found the house was no less daunting. The rose bushes had grown taller. The bricks of the walkway were surrendering to moss. Upstairs, the diamond-paned windows of the second floor were dark, but from the east wing of the house where the gallery was, light blazed onto the lawn. The sight of it made her want to flee. But she did not want Madame to think she had come all this way and still been afraid. She mounted the porch steps.

A man answered the door before the bell’s reverberations had finished echoing. Clara had expected him, though this particular man she had never met. There had always been a man like this, obsequious and urbane, at every performance Madame hosted. This one was about Clara’s age, tall and slim, wearing a navy blazer and a starched white shirt.

“Good evening, miss.” She saw his gaze dart over her scars before returning to her eyes.

“I’m here for the concert.” Clara pulled the invitation from the pocket of her coat. The black polyester jacket with its chic silver belt, like the black dress she wore beneath it and the black ankle boots below, were new. It shamed her that she had bought a new outfit for the occasion, the old urge to please ticking up the back of her throat. At the mall in Austin the day before she left, she had selected a sleeveless blue shift, sapphire-colored, one that would spare no one—and most especially Madame—the damage to her burned arm and hand. She was all the way to the register when her courage failed. The one she actually bought was plain black wool, the sleeves all the way to the wrist.

The man glanced at the invitation, his eyes lingering on Madame’s scrawled note at the bottom. When he handed it back to her, he smiled in a way Clara recognized—an expression friendlier now that Madame had deemed her among the chosen. “I’m Stephen,” he said, and asked to take her coat.

The floor was the same black-and-white chessboard tile. The same bronze umbrella stand stood in the corner, the same red and gold tapestry on the wall behind it. A high-backed chair with green and blue peacocks embroidered on the upholstery was the sole piece of furniture. Every week when Clara was small, her mother would rise anxiously from the chair when Clara made the long trek back from the gallery. “How did it go?” she would ask, which even then Clara knew really meant “How did you do?” Ruth never observed the pink skin on the back of Clara’s neck (“Head up! You look like a turtle!”) or the pinch marks on her arms (“You move like an automaton! Loosen your limbs!”) or the hot tops of her ears, stinging from the blindfold Madame cinched around her eyes while she played. Ruth never noticed, and Clara, for reasons she did not quite understand, never volunteered.

Stephen emerged from the coat closet and clasped his hands behind his back. “I’ll escort you to the gallery.”

Clara followed him down the long hallway, where voices were audible from the end of the corridor. Here, the marble floor was covered with a red Persian rug embroidered with animals of the hunt. Gold stags leapt over oak leaves in an endless race to death. Oil paintings lined both walls, each one familiar in its triangle of light: a portrait of a woman in a black Victorian gown; a still life of Baroque instruments in a firelit room; a m. . .