The Architect of Song Read online

  The Architect of Song

  By A.G. Howard

  To my two moms:

  Ola Faye Ruggles and Carol Rene Howard.

  One of you brought me into this world and had to leave too soon. The other welcomed me into her family and treats me as her own.

  Thank you both for believing in me, supporting me, and showing me the strength of a mother’s love.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Architecture, in general, is frozen music.

  ~Friedrich von Schelling, German philosopher 1775-1854

  Chapter 1

  A silent mouth is melodious.

  An Irish Proverb

  Melancholy. Melody. Separate words, separate meanings, united by a memory pressed upon my heart. In my childhood, my mama sang to me. In her gardens, in the midst of fragrant foxgloves and hollyhocks taller than my five-year-old head, her voice took wing—a sound more lovely than a nightingale, more moving than a storm-crested sea. At times, the tune would break with sorrow or poignant happiness, and her tears would flow. I treasured nothing more than the melancholy melody of those fractured notes.

  Now that I am deaf, I’m haunted by two regrets: that I didn’t memorize the sound of Mama’s precious voice … and the eternal absence of song in my soul.

  Claringwell, England

  November 3, 1883

  During my mama’s final days in this world, I read aloud from her book of assorted proverbs to comfort her.

  She used to say each important scene of our lives could be summed up by a proverb. Yet I found none that captured the pain of her body taken by consumption. For three months I watched, helpless, as winter settled in her blood and froze her from the inside out. Even at age nineteen, my heart suffered as that of a child.

  “Juliet, my sweet China Rose …” Her lips formed my nickname often toward the end, and I ached to hear her say it one last time. To really hear her.

  In some ways, my impairment softened the torment, her coughs and whimpers falling on incapable ears. Still, my other senses gave no such reprieve. I felt her cries when her withered hand seized my fingers for anchor; my nostrils stung from the pungent mint oils slathered across her chest and throat in hopes to aid her labored breath; and I could never un-see the pale cloud of sickness dimming those beloved eyes, once filled with color and light.

  Well-meaning friends visited during her last hours. I envied them the ability to hear her words as opposed to reading her lips. I brooded, composing songs of self-pity in my mind. If our guests had but stopped to listen, they would have heard.

  Silence has a melody all its own.

  After her death, people came in droves to attend the funeral. Mama was beloved by many. Papa’s only brother, Uncle Owen, and my and Mama’s live-in maid, Enya Alderdice, accompanied me in the carriage that followed the covered equipage hearse. My attire from head to toe matched the horses’ ebony coats.

  Arranged on a hill, the cemetery’s headstones appeared small and insignificant in the late afternoon light—like an overgrowth of stony mushrooms bursting from the brown and yellow landscape. I shivered beneath my veiled cap and fur blanket as the carriage swayed on the gales of a north wind bearing ice and sleet. The scene chilled me—such a cruel foil to sweeter times when I would dance with Mama during warm spring showers, our bodies tingling with laughter and song.

  The rain softened upon our arrival, easing the trek for the pall bearers who laid Mama’s casket within the ground. Uncle Owen cradled one of my gloved hands. In the other, I clasped the silver locket which held my parent’s portraits … memories weighing heavier on my shoulders than the clouds draped across Cemetery Hill.

  I lifted my veil to watch the priest’s lips give a benediction.

  At the age of eight, a severe case of mumps cost me my hearing, as well as my papa’s life, for I gave him my illness. Uncle Owen, not only Papa’s brother, but his partner and friend, stepped up to carry the family business and offered a lifeline to Mama and me. For eleven years thereafter, both of them supported me in living a lie. Never once did they force me to acknowledge my deafness to strangers. Instead, they showed me how to mask my differences, by using my other senses to compensate.

  Unlike children born with a hearing defect, I had already mastered speech and could yield responses. The hardest feat was controlling the volume of my voice, but I soon learned to adjust the tension on my vocal cords. Mama told me I often spoke too quiet. Yet to be soft-spoken was considered a virtue for a lady, so strangers simply believed me well-mannered and refined.

  Those strangers underestimated me, for I was putting each and every one of them upon the slide of a microscope. I honed the art of reading lips and facial expressions, and learned how often they contradicted one another. There had been scales covering my eyes that lifted away upon the absence of my ears, and I came to see the underlying truth behind every spoken word. In that respect, my “limitation” proved to be a gift. One I preferred to keep safely secreted within until I deemed it safe to reveal it.

  My greatest defense against a silent and stoic world.

  A cold droplet of rain splattered on my nose as everyone’s eyes closed in prayer. I used the pause to search within the folds of my pelisse overcoat for a China rose—the apricot-pink of a summer sunset—to set upon Mama’s grave.

  I aimed a sidelong glance in Uncle’s direction, waiting for his cue to place it. I resisted the urge to lean against him. To draw strength from him. I knew that today, he needed me to be strong on my own.

  Even at thirty-seven, he retained a distinguished appearance, almost eagle-like. His large, golden-hazel eyes, wise with noble insight, his fair skin smooth with a hint of distinguished wrinkles, his prematurely white hair, wavy and thick beneath his cap like a nest of downy feathers. He looked more like my handsome papa with each year.

  My attention fell to the weather-worn tombstone at the other side of my feet. Lord Anston Emerline: Loving father and husband.

  A middle-class baronet, a dyer of fabrics and cloth. A doting father, cut-down by his daughter’s childhood illness.

  Adrift on memories, I didn’t realize the prayer had ended until Uncle nudged me. I kissed the rose and tucked its stem into the slight opening where the ground met the base of her tombstone—in hopes to hold the blossom from blowing away in the storm. My gloved fingers traced her inscription, Lady Emilia Emerline: Beloved wife, mother, and friend. There was a catch in my throat that grew to a sob. I feared how loud it was when the faces around me looked on with pity. Uncle knelt beside me, arm draped over my shoulders, his body trembling alongside mine.

  After some minutes, he tenderly blotted my cheeks with a handkerchief, followed by his own, then stood. While he dusted off his breeches, I plucked two petals from Mama’s rosebud. One, I carried t
o Papa, stuffing it into the cracked facade of his aged stone. The other, I eased into the band of my glove, the petal cool against my palm as I slid it in—an attempt to bind the three of us together for the long and lonely night ahead.

  The grave diggers began the task of sludging mud atop Mama’s casket. Grief burned within my chest, and I turned my back as Uncle bid the mourners goodbye. They scattered to their carriages, black and gray cloaks gleaming like rotted leaves driven to the gutters.

  I inhaled a cleansing breath as the last hackney-drawn coach pulled out onto the road. I was relieved that we were at last alone. A certain viscount had been vying for my family’s estate the past few months. I’d refused to personally meet him, and had worried he might make an appearance at the burial today, to stake his claim when I was at my most vulnerable. My home was not for sale, regardless that he’d raised his bid to three times its worth.

  All along, Uncle had been encouraging me to consider the offer. “An unmarried maiden has no use for two acres of land and a townhouse with six bedrooms.” Even without working ears, I felt the bite of those well-intended words. That house was the only tangible piece of my father and mother still standing. Papa built it for her with his own hands, and Mama decorated each room for him with love. And I would never be parted from it.

  As if hearing my thoughts, Uncle clasped my elbow. “Ready to go home?” he mouthed the question and I glanced at Enya waiting beside the carriage, studying her boots. Pink patches stained her pale skin where she’d blotted tears away.

  “Not yet.” Eyes stinging, I fiddled with the petal tucked inside my glove and looked at the graves surrounding us, aware of my hypocrisy. I didn’t wish to part with my home. Yet, I had no desire to go there. To stand in the empty rooms once filled with laughter and life. At that moment, I felt as if I belonged with the dead.

  Chest rising on a sigh, Uncle observed the heavy clouds overhead. “The weather’s ill-tempered, tiny sparrow.” His lips, glistening with raindrops in the hazy light, framed the words. Sadness and exhaustion tugged his whitening eyebrows. “There is nothing more to do here. Let your mother rest. We will visit again another day.”

  I stood rooted to the ground. “Just a short walk amongst the headstones.”

  My uncle offered me the umbrella. He said something to Coachman Giddings. After helping Enya into the warmth of the carriage, the plump hearse driver leaned against the carriage and drew out a cheroot to gnaw upon.

  Uncle Owen started to accompany me.

  I stiffened. “Please. I should like to go alone. I am no longer a child.”

  A worry line scrawled his forehead. He would always see me as the dreamy-eyed little princess who used to drape daisy crowns on her head, who sat upon his knees as he shared picture books of castles and handsome heroes riding white steeds. He didn’t want to accept that I’d given up on fairytales and princes years ago.

  “Don’t be long,” he finally conceded. “The sun will set soon. And take care not to trip over any graves. They are difficult to see in the fog.” Reluctant, he released me and settled next to the coachman.

  Ribbons of water drizzled from my umbrella. I wove through crumbling headstones, past two life-sized angels of masculine granite perfection: one carved and ravaged by time, the other youthful and smooth. Despite their subtle differences, they both stood tall and stalwart, protecting the living from the dead.

  Or perhaps the dead from the living …

  That unbidden thought made me shiver. My mood soothed as the rain softened to a gentle mist, and the scent of earth, damp and clean, drifted upward. The clouds parted and I closed the umbrella. Sloshing through puddles so deep my stockings soaked to the ankles, I stopped at the furthest end of the graveyard. Tentative rays of warm sunlight curled around my shoulders, illuminating a scene a few feet away at a fenced-in enclosure.

  A man dressed in black stood with his back to me, built with the same tall stature and muscular grace as the angel monuments. A governor’s cane crooked around his elbow as he clenched the outside of the ivy-wound gate with gloved hands. Glistening through particles of mist, a sunbeam fell upon a lone headstone centered inside the fence, spotlighting it. The man’s shoulders shook as if he wept.

  I glanced behind me. The carriage was hidden from view by a six-foot wall of English hedgerows. I considered reaching out to the mourner, knowing his pain intimately. Instead, I tugged my veil down and started to leave, stopping only when his head began to jerk back and forth, banging on the bars, as if a rage had broken loose—so intense, the thuds of metal against his skull shuddered through the ground and into the soles of my shoes.

  I couldn’t move, nailed in place by morbid fascination.

  His hat flipped off. The wind carried it to my feet and he turned my direction. Gasping, I dropped my umbrella and backed up. My heel caught on the edge of a headstone, and I fell on my rump. The large crinoline cage that held my skirt’s hem aloft so I could walk protruded like a bowl turned on its side and impeded my view. I couldn’t see the stranger until his gloved palm appeared next to my shoulder.

  A groan scalded my throat. I accepted his help, replaying his emotionally unstable outburst at the gate. I was alone here; would Uncle be able to get to me in time if I had cause to scream?

  Upon standing, I sought the man’s face, wondering if his forehead had suffered any bruises or gashing. The sun met the horizon, and in a final searing display, it burst behind him, blinding me. He’d replaced his hat over his thick, dark hair. The brim’s shadow obscured his eyes, and lush whiskers blurred his squared jaw. For all intents and purposes, he remained faceless.

  Only his lips stood out … full and lovely. They formed words I couldn’t read clearly through my lace veil, so I remained mute to hide my deafness. He crouched to wipe mud from my shoe with a hanky. His gloved fingers gently grazed my stockinged ankle and stirred a hot flush of sensation that tingled in my abdomen and rushed to my cheeks. I jerked away.

  As if oblivious he’d touched me, he handed over my umbrella, tipped his hat, and left. His off-set gait might have been awkward on another man, but he held his spine straight, his shoulders and chest forming a counterbalance. His weight eased from the governor’s cane to his good foot with a meter so rhythmic, he appeared to glide on the waves of an ocean.

  Intrigued, I watched until he vanished around the hedges in the direction of my uncle and the carriage. I debated following. Uncle might worry that I’d been unchaperoned in the back of the cemetery with a man, but curiosity got the better of me.

  I rushed to the padlocked gate to read the epitaph on the tomb within … to see what had caused such a volatile reaction in the stranger.

  One word stood out across the slight distance: Hawk. If ever there had been a surname, time’s razor had shaved it away. Movement at the grave’s base distracted me before I could look any closer. A flower—stem covered in prickles—danced on the chill wind in a fringe of dying, yellow grass. It was odd that a blossom would bloom so many weeks after the first frost.

  The shimmering silver petals folded downward, hugging the stem like a woman’s skirt, to expose a raised central cone the blue of an autumn twilight. During all the times I’d gardened with Mama while growing flowers for our hats, I’d never seen such an upended blossom, or such unique colors.

  An overwhelming ache began to well within me. My fingers itched to touch the petals, to burn from the stem’s prickles. I needed to absorb what the flower knew all the way to its roots. Seated atop a tomb, it was closer to death than I had ever been—closer to Mama and Papa than I could be now. If I held it in my hands, perhaps I would somehow be closer to them, too.

  I dropped the umbrella and flipped back my veil. I glanced toward the hedgerow. No one had come searching for me yet, so I found a large stone and pummeled the rusted padlock on the gate until it snapped open with a pouf of red dust.

  Inside the enclosure, I used a stick to dig up the flower with roots still intact. While shaking mud from the stem, I noticed ano
ther gate on the backside of the fence. It opened to a path worn through a wild and writhing thicket that hedged the enclosure. Someone from those woods had been keeping a vigil over this grave.

  As though in reaction to my discovery, a sharp wind gusted from the north and the sky became a gray-green swirling mass.

  I trembled in the dimness, my attention snapping to the overturned dirt at my feet, shocked at what I’d done. I had desecrated a holy resting place. Would God unleash his stony angels and condemn my soul to Purgatory? What would that faceless gentleman do, or the anonymous grave keeper in the thicket, were they to find me standing here, a robber cradling her plunder?

  I swallowed the lump from my throat. My gloves squeezed the flower’s stem. The silver petals glowed in the dimming light. A floral scent drifted up, redolent and spiced like cider—an exotic thrill that fed my waning courage.

  The harshest bite of winter was just around the bend, and this beautiful creation—so unique, so fragile—would not survive. Its well-being was now my responsibly, and I would not abandon it, no matter the consequences.

  I tucked the flower beneath the flap of my pelisse overcoat, raced out of the enclosure, shut the gate, and snagged the umbrella.

  When I arrived behind the English hedgerows, I spotted the top of the stranger’s hat bobbing on the other side, a few inches taller than the six foot barrier. I peered through the leaves. Coachman Giddings and Uncle Owen leaned against the carriage, deep in conversation with him. His back was turned, broad shoulders tense in the dissipating light.

  Perhaps he was relaying how a brash young woman had spied upon his private grief then fell on her backside with all the grace of a circus clown. I bided my time and stayed hidden, trusting Uncle to keep my secret.

  Once the stranger had climbed a white steed and trotted cautiously down the road back to town, I plunged from the bushes and stumbled by Giddings’ horses. The crinoline beneath my skirts slapped the lead mare. She bucked and reared, her mouth and eyes wide with terror, aiming to trample me beneath her forelegs.