Chapter 16: The Rumour
Althea learned the rumour the way bad news usually travelled at the Alden: not in an announcement, but in a pause. She was crossing the corridor after a theory class, her folder pressed against her chest, when two second-year students stopped talking as she passed. One of them looked at the floor. The other looked at her hands, as if her hands might give something away. Althea kept walking. She told herself she was imagining it. She had been imagining a great deal since the audition, and most of it had turned out to be kinder than she feared.
In the practice room, Nolan was already waiting, his own score open and untouched. He did not look up at once, which was unlike him. When he did, his smile arrived a beat too late.
"Have you heard anything odd today?" he asked.
Althea sat down on the bench beside him. "Odd in what way?"
He hesitated, and that hesitation told her more than any sentence could. Someone, he said, had been asking questions about "The River Remembers." Not about whether it was beautiful. About whether it was hers.
The name attached to the questions was Henriette Moreau. Althea had met her only once, briefly, in the hall after the audition, when Celeste had introduced her mother with a practised smile. Henriette had worn a coat that looked as if it had never met rain. She had looked at Althea's dress, then at Althea's face, and said how remarkable it was that someone with so little training could produce something so complete. At the time Althea had taken it as praise, though a small part of her had heard the edge beneath it.
Now, according to Nolan, Henriette had said something different at a donors' lunch. She had not accused anyone directly. She had only wondered aloud, in the manner of a person asking an innocent question, where a nineteen-year-old night cleaner with no formal training could possibly have found a piece like that. Perhaps, she suggested, it had been passed to her. Perhaps it belonged to someone else, someone unheard. Perhaps the Alden should be careful before it celebrated too quickly.
Nolan repeated the words with visible discomfort, as if handling something dirty. "I do not believe it," he said quickly. "Nobody who heard you play could believe it. But it is being repeated."
Althea listened in silence. She thought of the hymn her mother had sung in their kitchen, of the nights she had sat at the church upright while Esther turned pages with stiff fingers, of the battered keyboard at home where she had worked out the harmonies one tired hour at a time. The piece had not arrived whole. It had grown the way a river grows, from small streams she had known all her life. To hear it described as stolen felt stranger than anger at first. It felt like being told her own memories belonged to someone else.
By afternoon the whispers had reached the waiting room and the stairwell. A girl Althea barely knew asked, with false brightness, whether Althea had written the piece herself or merely arranged it. A boy in theory class stared at her notebook as if it might confess. Even Mrs. Feldman, brisk at the registrar's desk, gave her a longer look than usual before handing over a form, though whether that look was suspicion or sympathy Althea could not tell.
Celeste found her near the tall windows at the end of the corridor. For a moment Althea braced herself, expecting triumph. Instead Celeste looked miserable.
"I did not start this," Celeste said quietly. "My mother — she hears a thing and repeats it as if repeating makes it true. I told her to stop. She said she was only protecting the school."
Althea studied her. Celeste's hands were clasped tightly, her polished composure frayed at the edges. She was not apologising for her mother exactly, but she was not defending her either. That, Althea realised, was a kind of honesty.
"Thank you for telling me," Althea said.
Celeste nodded and walked away, her footsteps sharp on the stone floor. Althea remained by the window, watching the late spring light fall across the courtyard. She thought about what Wendell had once told her: that a true melody could survive being doubted, because it had survived worse things than doubt. It had survived poverty and exhaustion and long nights when nobody was listening at all.
That evening, walking home through East Philadelphia, she did not cry. She felt something steadier and heavier settle in her chest. The audition had asked her to be brave for one minute. This, apparently, would ask her to be brave for longer. She reached her street as the lamps came on, and from inside the house she could hear Esther humming, low and certain, the first line of the hymn that had started everything. Althea stood on the step for a moment, listening, before she opened the door.