Thursday arrived wrapped in an unrelenting downpour.
Rain drummed against the diamond-paned leaded glass windows of the carriage house sitting room, streaming in distorted sheets down the antique glass. Inside, the room was thick with the scent of camphor, arnica, and damp wool.
Maya sat at the upright Bechstein, her hands resting quietly in her lap.
For sixty-eight hours, she had lived inside a cloistered monastery of her own making. She had eaten when Mrs. Gable brought food; she had slept four hours a night on the floorboards with her rucksack beneath her head; she had soaked her forearms in basins of steaming water until the skin turned wrinkled and red. Her hands had stopped cramping. The swollen tissues around her carpal tunnels had subsided under the relentless discipline of slow, deliberate practice.
Yet she knew the difference between preparation and readiness. She had reconstructed the architecture of the notes, but she had not yet tested the bridge under the weight of an oncoming train.
The door to the sitting room swung open without a preliminary knock.
Entering the room was a man whose presence immediately compressed the space around him. Valery Morozov looked less like an artist and more like an old Baltic dockworker who had survived three shipwrecks. He was broad-shouldered, carrying a heavy belly beneath an unbuttoned black wool overcoat that was dark with rain at the shoulders. His white hair was a wild, untamed halo around a red, craggy face dominated by bushy eyebrows and sharp, pale-blue eyes that looked as though they had spent fifty years inspecting recruits for execution.
Behind him slipped Arthur Ellison, leaning on his cane, and Trent Ellison, who remained near the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest, his face an impenetrable mask of cold, defensive anxiety.
Morozov did not look at the furniture. He did not look at Arthur. He did not acknowledge Maya’s presence with a greeting. He walked directly to the Bechstein, pulled a pair of heavy horn-rimmed reading glasses from his pocket, perched them on his crooked nose, and struck a single note in the upper treble: F-sharp.
The hammer struck. Morozov listened to the decay of the note for four seconds, his head tilted.
"Action is heavy," Morozov rumbled in a deep, gravelly Russian baritone that seemed to vibrate in his chest. "Good. If an action is too light, the fingers become lazy like fat dogs. A musician must fight the machine."
He turned his body slowly, facing Maya. His eyes traveled from her neatly combed dreadlocks down to the gray wool sweater, lingering for a brutal, humiliating five seconds on her bare feet resting flat on the hardwood floor.
"You are Maya Vance," Morozov stated. It was an accusation, not a question.
"I am," Maya replied, her voice calm and level.
Morozov snorted, a sharp, dismissive sound through his broad nostrils. "Arthur tells me you played Leonid Hambro’s phrasing on Saturday night. Leonid was an old romantic fool who cried whenever he heard Schubert. But he had ears. He knew how to balance an inner voice."
The maestro pulled off his wet overcoat, threw it carelessly over the back of an antique armchair, and pulled a battered, tape-reinforced orchestral conductor’s score from his leather satchel. He dropped it onto the small side table with a heavy thud.
"I do not care about your viral videos on the internet," Morozov said, pointing a thick, blunt finger directly at Maya’s face. "I do not care that this boy mocked you on a terrace, and I do not care that Arthur wants to feel like a saint before he meets his Maker. I care about Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff. The Third Concerto is not a novelty act for charity. It is forty-four minutes of sheer psychological terror. If the soloist drops the pulse by two beats in the Alla breve, the horns will eat them alive. If the soloist loses their stamina in the Finale, the piano becomes a dead wooden box."
He stepped up to the side of the Bechstein, planting his heavy boots wide on the floorboards.
"You have no orchestra today," Morozov barked. "I am the orchestra. I will sing the tuttis. I will tap the tempos. You will play the exposition, the development, and the large ossia cadenza of the first movement. If I hear one measure—one single bar—where you are faking the polyphony with the pedal because your fingers are weak... I will close this score, I will walk out that door, and you will not play in my hall. Do you understand this?"
Trent, standing by the doorway, held his breath. He watched Maya’s face, expecting the street woman to shrink back, to show the cracks of an amateur who realized she was completely out of her depth before an international titan.
Maya did not flinch.
She adjusted her posture on the bench, pulling her shoulders back until her spine was a straight, centered column of quiet power. She looked up at the fearsome old Russian conductor. Her dark eyes were devoid of fear, devoid of deference, filled only with the cold, crystalline stillness of someone who had already stared into the abyss of freezing winter nights and survived.
"Don't tap the tempo on the wood, Maestro," Maya said, her voice quiet, resonant, and entirely fearless. "Your boots will be behind the pulse. Sing the clarinet entry at measure twenty-eight if you want to keep up with me."
Trent’s eyes widened in disbelief.
Morozov stared at her. For three endless seconds, the room hung suspended on a razor’s edge. Then, the old conductor’s mouth twitched beneath his thick mustache. A terrifying, predatory grin spread across his craggy features.
"Measure one," Morozov growled, raising his right hand like a claw. "Allegro ma non tanto. Play, girl."
Maya laid her hands upon the keys.