“How did you do it?” he asks, setting me down. A million tiny bubbles fizz in my stomach.
“It was George,” Dr. Cliffton says, spinning Mrs. Cliffton out and drawing her back into him again with the crescendo of the music. The pleats of her skirt unfold like an accordion. “What makes the most well-known music, the songs that have inspired poets and artists since the dawn of time?” Dr. Cliffton looks years younger than he did at dinner last night.
The music begins to sputter and fade. But even in the silent spaces between it, the air around us feels changed. “I’ll give you a hint,” Dr. Cliffton says. “‘Fled is that music: Do I wake or sleep?’”
I don’t even have to think. “That’s Keats. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’?”
Keats, I think with a sharp pang of disappointment. Not Shakespeare.
But it’s hard to feel anything but joy when George opens his grasp to reveal a single nightingale feather, silky and russet brown, the promise of music now resting in the palm of his hand.
We celebrate for the better part of an hour. Genevieve dances into the room with glasses of punch and egg salad sandwiches. Then we all sit together in the library, drinking in the sparkling punch and the music as if it were nectar.
Dr. Cliffton makes several phone calls to inquire about ordering large quantities of nightingale feathers. “Yes, nightingale,” he repeats, enunciating and pressing the telephone closer to his mouth. He hesitates. “Larkin? I’d prefer to work with someone else. Nothing underground. Keep everything aboveboard, please.”
Mrs. Cliffton turns to Genevieve and me. “We should host a party,” she says, her hands clasping. “We could surprise everyone. Align it with the Sisters Tournament so no one will suspect anything.”
Dr. Cliffton blocks the telephone receiver with his palm. “That would give us time to make enough Variants so that people could have them that very night instead of having to wait.”
Mrs. Cliffton finds a notepad and starts making a list.
Dr. Cliffton and George spend the rest of the afternoon grinding the remaining feathers, and at the end George is rewarded with two small midnight-blue pouches shot through with silver threads.
“You know where we have to go, don’t you?” he asks me. We put on our coats and slip out the door together. “Be back soon,” I say to Mrs. Cliffton.
“Home before dark, please,” she says. Will doesn’t look up.
George and I walk the mile to Beas’s house. Knock on the door, which is wreathed with boxwood and ribbon.
“You two look like the cats that swallowed the canary,” Beas says, narrowing her eyes when she opens the door.
George holds out his hand. The pouch sits in his palm like a robin’s egg in a nest.
Her mouth falls open. Eyebrows twitch with the first spark of hope.
“Shh.” He brings his fingers to his lips. “You can’t speak a word yet. But . . . Do you happen to have a violin lying around?”
Her eyes turn to stars. She fetches her violin and leads us outside. We walk deep into the cushioning silence of the woods and sit on moss-covered rocks next to a brook. Beas closes her eyes when George dusts the freshly crushed Variants over her violin.
And then, from memory, she sets her bow to the strings and plays us the most beautiful song my ears might ever hear.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Date: December 16, 1942
Bird: Jay
Upon discovering a deceased one of their own, jays group together and sound alarm calls. They do not leave the carcass for two days, even to eat. Instead they sit and attend their dead.
Just before dawn I tuck the broken mouse under the collar of my coat and use the Tempests to run on the train tracks until I hit the edge of Sheffield. When the sun begins to rise, I jump on a train and ride two hours home.
“I could market Peace as a fresh start for an anxious or drug-addicted mind,” I explain to Phineas later that morning. “Joy to combat a broken heart. Courage to inject like a shot in the arm.”
We sit together on the porch, eating eggs. I drape a blanket over Phineas’s legs and feed my broken mouse a piece of cheese.
“And you think you can do this in humans?”
I swallow. “I do.” The mouse’s teeth catch my finger, enough to prick the smallest drop of blood. I press my fingers together to staunch it at the same time that Phineas presses his gray lips together.
