Chapter 1

Whenever a frightened young singer opened her mouth to him for the first time, Hance remembered Mary Guaire.

She had made the same noises as Marsden tightened the sparkling beads around her throat, turning the Queen of the Night’s aria into a mess of bubbling squeals as the bejeweled garrote severed the route between breath and life.

The lamentable business had occurred long ago, when people played fortepianos and electricity was an experiment with lightning. But every time Hance had cause to envision Mary Guaire, he could never entirely dispel the impulse to flee, and he could never quite accept that there was no need to throw a candelabrum on a body, meaning to hide the deed amid the carnage of fire.

That morning, as a late summer rain slapped the window, he sat back from the harpsichord and waited as the girl cowering at the music stand in the center of the room whimpered to a halt. She knew she lacked talent. He could tell. She bore the stigmata of humiliation: the wound-red cheeks. The crinkled flesh in the brow. The runny eyes. And yes, the voice of a dying Mary Guaire.

He wanted someone to put him out of her misery, though he sensed that sort of self-interest was unbecoming to a college professor. The girl was looking at him in fear and to him for guidance. He considered Mary Guaire for one last instant and beheld the girl with what he perceived as the kindness he felt when encountering small fluffy mammals. "It's not an audition for a major opera house. This is your first semester here. You’ve declared voice as your minor instrument. Would you like to start with something else, something simpler?"

The girl’s eyes glittered. “Um, I thought Arianna’s Lament was simple. I mean, it’s not like I want to study opera. I’m not an opera singer. I want to study your kind of music.”

“My kind of music?”

“Early music. Baroque music. Monteverdi. Schutz. Purcell.”

Clearly, she had listened to performances that made “his” kind of music sound easy. She lacked the skill and self-assuredness to convey the same effect.

He wanted to tell her the truth about herself. To dislodge her from her delusions. To spare her from becoming the farce of the department when her peers heard her practicing. To stop her parents from indulging their child’s fantasy by paying for her lessons. Telling her the truth about her abilities would probably hurt her more than breaking up with her boyfriend—if she had managed to entice a boyfriend. But not telling her would be like leaving a baby on a highway. “Do you like to sing?”

“Oh, yes.”

Her admission betrayed no joy. Hance noticed she had acquired the scent of salted apples. Stop it, he thought before the fragrance went to his head. “What do you like to sing?”

She looked at the book opened before her on the music stand. Hance thought she would leaf through to another song. She did nothing. Hance surmised she couldn’t bring herself to repeat, “Your kind of music.”

He would shove that music down her throat—so to speak. He would more than show her his kind of music. He would make her feel it. He sat up, turned an introductory chord into an arpeggio, and sang Possente spirto, from l’Orfeo, the opera composed by Claudio Monteverdi in 1607.

Whether the girl knew the story of the mythical shepherd, Orfeo, who retrieved his dead wife from Hell was of no concern. All that mattered to Hance was the sound he sent out. He had a bright tenor unsullied by vibrato and other affectations of modern operatic style. As he delivered phrase after breathless phrase, inserting the rapidly repeated notes called trilli and other complex motifs of the period, the girl’s eyelids receded, showing the white around her dim gray irises. Her own breath came quickly, deeply, as if the flimsy icon of an incipient woman was preparing her pallid, unsuspecting form to receive him in a way he would no longer give himself to a woman. 

The way Mary Guaire had once boasted of preparing herself to receive him.

He stopped before the girl dared to sing along, perhaps emitting the remnants of Mary Guaire’s last gasps.

“So you see it’s not all that simple.” Did he appear as unflustered as he intended? “There’s a lot going on. Think of yourself as a piano. Your anatomy” (he refused to say “body) “is a sounding board. Your voice is the string. Your breath is the hammer that strikes the string. At the same time, you’ve got to use your throat and facial muscles to form the word, place the tone, and regulate the pitch.”

The song’s sudden end had doused the girl’s desires. She was back to her ordinary, helpless self.

“But you make it all sound so—“

“Easy?”

“Yes.”

He almost said “I know.” “It’s work. Music is called a fine art, but the performance of music is really a fine sport. It takes training and devotion.”

“Do you think I can do it?”

“It’s not what I think that’s of consequence. It’s never what I think.”

He didn’t mean to taunt the girl.

He taunted himself.