Chapter Two
I saw her in the moonlight,
In the starlight,
In the drawing room,
On the piano, softly playing.
As it turned out, what we did on the farm was raise sheep for their meat. This mostly consisted of ensuring they had enough food, good shelter from the vicious winds that came in from the Southern Ocean, had all the water they needed, as well as medical checks and care. Basically, it was our job to make sure that they lived in some sort of sheep paradise until … well, you know. Anyway, the busy time of the year was lambing season and that wasn’t for a while yet, so the farm introduction didn’t take that long, although it took a lot longer than it strictly needed to. Conversations with Mr. Brown were generally composed of short, to the point, sentences interspersed with long silences. Anyway, I soon had time on my hands and, as you might expect, I set out to explore the house. Somewhere there was a piano and I was going to find it, whatever Florence said. Somewhere there was a night time pianist and I was going to find out who they were.
You might wonder why I didn’t just let it be, like Florence had suggested. Well, I couldn’t. My life was uncertain enough as it was without weird mysteries like this. If there was another person, somehow, living in this house, why wouldn’t Florence talk about them? Why wasn’t I introduced? Whatever uncertain foundations for my life that I had managed to re-establish were in danger of being stripped away. There was a terrifying possibility that everything I knew about the Florence and the farm was false. I could feel all the anxiety I felt after my parent’s death coming back. I was nervous and jumpy and my mind kept going back to the night of my parent’s death. I needed to know what was going on.
It was late afternoon when I started my search. I started from the main entrance hall and checked all the rooms in sequence. Past the formal reception rooms, a sitting room and an elaborate dining room, I found a very large room with a parquetry floor and mirrors on the walls. It must once have been a ball room or something similar. In the south-eastern corner of this room there were a set of double doors. These were locked. This was strange. As I said, most of the house was unused but not locked up. In fact, in all my search of the house, these were the only locked doors.
I found a lot of interesting things in my search; like a room full of books covered in dust and cobwebs and a circular room at the base of a tower with a set of spiral stairs leading up to the next floor and down to the cellar. These couldn’t be accessed from any other part of the house and I made a resolution to come back and explore them later on. However, the music of the piano had sounded too clear to have come from some tower or cellar. So, for the moment, I kept searching. The upper floors of the house were mostly bedrooms of various sizes and not very interesting. Although one room had French windows that opened onto a balcony that had such a spectacular view across the garden to the sea that I wondered, not for the first time, why Florence and I were living in the cramped servant’s quarters when we could be living in rooms like this. Nowhere, however, did I find a piano. It had to be behind the locked doors.
At dinner that night I asked Florence why those doors, and only those doors, were locked. Once again, she was evasive and avoided answering the question. She kept trying to talk about sheep. When I persisted in asking what was behind the doors, she got angry.
“Don’t you go around, worrying about old rooms,” she said. “You just do your chores and make sure you get all your study modules finished. You have an approved assessment period coming up and you still haven’t read all your assigned texts. How can you hope to progress if you waste your time chasing around empty rooms? I said forget about the piano and I meant it. Just drop it! Do you hear? Just drop it!”
I nodded meekly but her anger only added to the mystery and, far from putting me off, it made me even more determined to find out about the piano and the pianist - and about what was behind those locked doors.
That night I was lying in bed reading one of my study texts, an old and very long book about an attempt to destroy an evil ring, when it started again. Somewhere in the house, someone was playing the piano. It was the same sad, really sad, music as the night before with the notes again falling like tears and rising as suddenly as the broken sobs of grief.
This time, however, I didn’t stay in bed and I didn’t take the time to listen. I got up, wrapped my dressing gown around me and set off. I was going to find the piano player and I knew where to look. Fortunately, the full moon meant that it was bright enough for me to see my way without turning on any lights. I didn’t want to anyone to know I was up and looking for them and I didn’t want Florence to know that I was disobeying her order. I made my way through the empty house to the ballroom. The double doors in the south-east corner were now open and the music was clearly coming from the room beyond them. I crept carefully towards the open doors, trying to be as silent as I could.
There was a large room on the other side of the doors. It was comfortably furnished with soft chairs and was clearly meant as a retreat from the more hectic and formal activities of the ball room and reception areas: what used to be known as a drawing room. The room was flooded with moonlight from the bay window that occupied the whole eastern wall and this reflected brightly off the silver serving dishes on the sideboard.
In the bay window itself, there was a small grand piano on which a girl, who appeared to be about my own age, was playing. She was very pale and dressed in what looked like a white night dress. Her hair shone silver in the moonlight. As quietly as I could, I entered the room, sat on one of the chairs and listened to her play.
She played well but both her style and the music she had chosen filled the room with an almost overwhelming sadness. It was as if the piano itself was weeping. She played on and on and I sat and listened for a long time, silenced and kept still by the very sadness of the music. It called to my own heart; sadness calling to sadness. Eventually, as the moon rose to the top of the bay window and the moonlight started to fade in the room, she paused in her playing. I started to clap.
“That was really good,” I said.
She turned and looked at me, almost in panic. Then she got up and without saying a word, ran towards one corner of the bay window.
“Hey” I called. “Wait! I didn’t mean to scare you.” I got up and made my way through the room in the fading moonlight but by the time I had got to the piano she was gone and in the darkening room, I couldn’t see where. I stood and starred at the corner of the bay window where she had appeared to go. There didn’t seem to be any door, nor even an opening window. It just looked like a solid wall.
I wasn’t worried at the time, mind you; just puzzled. I had seen her get up and go and yet I couldn’t see anywhere she could’ve gone. The room was becoming quite dark by now, so I shrugged my shoulders and turned away. I couldn’t solve this puzzle in the dark but I made a solemn promise to return in the day and figure it out. As I left the room, I jammed a chair in the open doorway to try and make sure it stayed open.
After a quick breakfast the next morning, I went straight to the drawing room, to find where the girl had gone. I didn’t discuss my plans with Florence. I vividly remembered her hostility to the subject of the music and figured that the girl and the piano were things she really didn’t want to talk about. If I wanted to find out why, I would have to do it on my own.
My chair had kept the doors open and that morning, I easily got into the room. In the daylight, it looked as if this room had not been used for a very long time. Everything was coated in a thick layer of dust and the silverware, which had seemed brightly polished the night before, was tarnished black. I couldn’t reconcile the room as I saw it now with the room as I has seen it last night. I walked slowly over to the piano. It too was covered in dust, the ivory keys yellowed with age. There was no sign that it had been played recently. I spread my fingers to carefully play a chord. An awful, discordant clang assaulted my ears. The piano had clearly not been tuned for many, many years and i
t was now unplayable. Yet last night I had heard the girl playing it beautifully. I tried another chord and got the same result. I shook my head, unable to figure out what was going on.
I went over to the wall where the girl had apparently disappeared. There was no door, but there was a section of wooden panelling that didn’t quite match the rest of the room and when I tapped on it, it had a hollow sound that the walls elsewhere didn’t have. I pushed on it and I prodded it. I searched it carefully, trying to find some hidden catch or pressure point that would open it up. I found nothing. I stared at it in frustration until I heard Florence calling me. It would have to wait. I had lesson modules to complete and more about the care of sheep to learn. I did, however, leave the door to the room propped open.