Chapter 17: Proof
Althea did not sleep well that night. She lay awake listening to the house settle, turning over every version of the rumour she had heard, trying to find the shape of a defence. The trouble was that the piece had never been written down in one clean copy. It lived in fragments: a melody pencilled in a school notebook, a harmony tried on the church upright, a rhythm worked out at two in the morning on a keyboard with one sticky key. To someone who had not been there, that scattered history might look like no history at all.
In the morning Esther found her at the kitchen table, staring at a cold cup of tea. Esther listened without interrupting, her hands wrapped around her own mug for warmth. When Althea finished, Esther stood up and went to the cupboard above the stove, where she kept old things that mattered: letters, photographs, and a stack of church programmes tied with a piece of string.
"Your mother sang this hymn before you could read," Esther said. She untied the string with slow, careful fingers. "Here. Look."
The programmes were from New Hope Community Church, some of them more than ten years old. The paper was soft at the edges. In several of them, printed in the order of service, was a hymn title in plain type. Beneath it, in one programme from a spring service, someone had written in pencil: "Lorraine sings." In another, from a Christmas Eve service, a note in Esther's hand read: "Althea, age nine, plays the first verse."
Althea touched the paper gently, as if it might tear. She had forgotten those services, or rather she had folded them into the general warmth of childhood without keeping the dates. Here they were, fixed in print, proof that the melody had a home long before the Alden had ever heard her name.
Wendell arrived that afternoon, summoned by Esther's telephone call. He brought with him his own contribution: a battered folder of his notes from the church, where he had written down the chords Althea had tried during their early lessons, dated in his neat hand. He also brought something Althea had forgotten entirely — a small cassette recording from a church concert, digitised years later by a volunteer, in which a twelve-year-old Althea could be heard playing a simple version of the same melody, stumbling once, then finding her way through.
"It is not polished," Wendell said, smiling. "That is the point. A stolen piece arrives perfect. A grown piece arrives like this — unfinished, then truer."
Althea gathered her own notebooks, the ones with taped pages and crossed-out bars, where the piece had changed shape over months. The handwriting changed too, from a child's careful print to a teenager's hurried scrawl. No forger, she thought, would bother to fake a decade of mistakes.
Professor Adler agreed to meet them in her office the next day. She listened to the recording, examined the programmes, and turned the notebook pages slowly, asking quiet questions about dates and services. She did not rush. When she finished, she looked at Althea with an expression that was both relieved and angry.
"This should never have been necessary," Adler said. "But it is conclusive. I will speak to Dr. Ashford and to the faculty. The rumour will be answered properly, not whispered away."
True to her word, Adler addressed the matter plainly. She did not name Henriette in public, but she made clear, in a faculty notice and in conversation with students, that the origin of "The River Remembers" had been established from church records and the composer's own notebooks. The whispers faded quickly after that, as whispers do when they meet daylight. Nolan apologised for having doubted, even though he had not. Celeste, to her credit, said nothing more about it at all.
Yet something in Althea did not simply spring back. Walking through the Alden corridors the following week, she noticed how carefully people now chose their words around her, as if she might break. The rumour had collapsed, but it had left a bruise on her trust. She had learned that talent could be questioned not because it was weak, but because it was unexpected. That knowledge would stay with her longer than the gossip had.
Before she left Adler's office, Althea thanked her quietly, and Adler answered with unusual warmth, saying the Alden owed its students fairness as well as rigour, and that a school which could not admit a mistake would teach its pupils to fear truth.
On Sunday she played at New Hope, not the full piece, just the hymn as her mother had sung it, simple and unadorned. Esther closed her eyes in the front pew. Wendell nodded from the piano bench beside her. In that familiar room, among people who had heard the melody grow, Althea felt the truth settle back into place: the music was hers because her life had made it, note by note, year by year.