Page 12 of How to Ruin a Duke
It was because of the in-between social class she occupied, perhaps.She wasn’t high-bred enough for the nobles, and she terrified the young men of the merchant and working classes by running her own shop.
For a little while longer, at least.
Nanny looked up fromHow to Ruin a Duke.She had a face like a pumpkin, round and well-creased, with a smile of infinite kindness and merry gray eyes.Though they were hidden behind thick spectacles, she still required the lens.“This is an excellent book.We should buy a copy of our own.”
“When the shop is doing a bit better,” Rowena said gently.“A gentleman named Mr.Thorn is going to help me with that.”
“Oh?Is he a luthier too?”Nanny peered over her spectacles, all curiosity.
This expression always made Rowena want to fidget and blush.“No.He’s a bit of everything else, though, so he says.He wants me to increase my rates and to market the shop with new sorts of advertisements.”
“Good suggestions.I like them.”Nanny closed the book, holding her place with one crabbed finger.“And you’re paying him…how?”
Rowena explained the strange terms of their deal: the new lease to be arranged first, then twenty pounds for Mr.Thorn to send home.“And then he’ll be off, and you and I can carry on just as we have.”
Rowena couldn’t imagine life without Nanny in it.She’d been Rowena’s father’s governess before Rowena’s, Thus she had never had any qualms about confronting Mr.Fairweather.When Rowena had been born with thready membranes constricting the fingers of her right hand, her father had wanted her to receive extra help.
Nanny had harangued him for coddling his daughter, for asking Nanny to cut Rowena’s food and help her eat and brush her hair and any other little task.
“She can do it herself,” Nanny had insisted.“She’s a Fairweather.You should teach her everything you know.It might take her longer to learn, but she can do it.”
And Rowena did, sometimes crying with frustration, or from the pain in her restricted fingers.But over the years, she’d schooled her mind and body not to give up.Maybe she couldn’t do things exactly like everyone else, but she could still do them.Her way.
Even so, her father had become reconciled to her hands only when she picked up a violin for the first time.He showed her how to hold it, pressing the bow into her right hand, then brightened.Thank God it’s your right hand with the damage, he’d said.In any other profession, the left would be the more expendable, but a string player needed her left for the fingering and the right only for the bow.
Her father had made a luthier of her, as long ago as she could remember.
And Nanny?Nanny had made her a capable human.
She owed the old woman everything, so Nanny’s look of disappointment just now wrung her heart.
“Must we?”Nanny sighed.“Carry on just as we have?”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“Oh, Mrs.Newland is having a difficult time with the stairs too.I wanted her to come to tea today.I even bribed her by offering to read to her fromHow to Ruin a Duke!But she said she needed to rest on her day off.”Nanny’s longtime friend was a housekeeper for a well-to-do family in Mayfair.
“Painful knees are painful knees, despite the promise of reading about the Duke of Amorous,” Rowena replied.“I’m sorry.Should we send Alice over to her with a package of treats?”
Nanny waved this off.“Her mistress’ll take care of her all right.I just get lonely for my friend.”
“I understand,” Rowena said.“I’ve got to take the lens back down with me now, but I’ll leave Cotton with you.And I’ll come check on you every hour—how is that?I can read you bits ofHow to Ruin a Duke.”
“No need for that.I know you need to work.”Nanny stretched out her hands for Cotton, settling the hedgehog on one of her innumerable embroidered cushions.“But when that Mr.Thorn of yours arrives, send him upstairs to meet me.That’ll do just fine.”
Rowen considered protestingthat Mr.Thorn of yours, then decided that Nanny would enjoy that far too much.Besides, she rather liked the sound of it.So she only took up the magnifier—leaving the book with Nanny, with instructions to Alice to read to the old woman as Alice’s time permitted—and returned to the workshop.
With the magnifier back in its place on the worktable, Rowena tilted the lens and peered through it at the boxwood peg.Ah!There was the problem: a spot that lacked the satin-smooth finish of the rest.It was the work of a minute to fix it.Once sanded, the peg fit into its spot as neatly as if it had been carved by Rugeri himself.
Someday, perhaps, people would speak of Fairweather violins as they did of Rugeris, or Amatis, or instruments by Stradivari or Klotz or Guarneri.Rowena had never constructed a finished violin from raw wood, but…someday.Someday she would.Over the years, she had surely learned every step needed; she’d surely worked on every piece and part.
Mrs.Beckett’s Rugeri violin was a wondrous concoction of woods: a neck and sides of maple, a top of spruce, tuning pegs of boxwood, a tailpiece of rosewood, and a fingerboard of ebony.It took a forest to make a violin, and this was a beautiful one.Refitting the tuning pegs was a small task, but one that gave Rowena great pleasure.She could never afford such a fine instrument for herself—but now that she had repaired this one, she ought to make certain her work was satisfactory by playing it.
It was only responsible to do so.
She rubbed each gut string with a little olive oil, then knotted them to fasten them in the tailpiece before stretching them over the bridge, up the neck, and secure about the tuning pegs.
Then she put her own bow to the strings and drew it across.Lightly, smoothly, like a nobleman’s valet might rub a silk handkerchief over a polished boot.Notes vibrated in the quiet morning shop like raindrops in a puddle, like marbles cascading to the floor.A spill of clear sound, its ripples persisting when the note itself was gone.
