Then one day she read something else.
You see, she sometimes went outside on her own in the morning to play. And one day she came in, while I was learning a new lute song – ‘I Saw My Lady Weepe’ by John Dowland – and she looked a little like someone had slapped her in the face.
‘What is it, sweetheart?’
She seemed out of breath. It took her a moment. She was frowning at me, with an intensity and seriousness that seemed beyond her age. ‘Are you Satan, Father?’
I laughed. ‘Only in the mornings.’
She wasn’t in joking mood, so I quickly added, ‘No, Marion. What would make you ask such a thing?’
And then she showed me.
Someone had scraped the words ‘Satan Resides Here’ on our door. It was a horrifying thing to see, but more horrifying to know Marion had seen it too.
And when Rose saw it she knew, absolutely, what needed to be done.
‘We need to leave London.’
‘But where would we go?’
That seemed, to Rose, to be a secondary question. She was resolute. ‘We need to start again.’
‘To do what?’
She pointed at the lute leaning beside the door.
‘People’s ears like music in other places.’
I stared at the lute. At the darkness of the small holes amid the twisting decoration of the wood. I imagined, ridiculously, a world inside there. Deep in the shell of the lute. Where some miniature version of ourselves could live, safe and invisible and unharmed.
London, now
I had brought my lute in for year nine. I am holding it, leaning against my desk.
‘This was hand-crafted way over four hundred years ago in France. The design is a little more intricate than English lutes of that period.’
‘So that’s what guitars used to look like in the olden days?’ wonders Danielle.
‘Lutes aren’t technically guitars. They’re obviously close cousins but a lute has a lighter kind of sound. Look at the shape of it. Like a teardrop. And look at the depth. Look at the back. It’s called a shell. The strings are made of sheep’s intestines. They give it a very precise perfect sound.’
Danielle makes a disgusted face.
‘This wastheinstrument once upon a time. This was the keyboard and electric guitar in one. Even the queen had one. But playing music in public was a bit vulgar so that was generally left to the lower orders.’
I play a few notes. The first bars of ‘Flow My Tears’. They seem unimpressed.
‘That was a big tune, back in the day.’
‘Was that from the eighties?’ wonders Marcus, the boy with the gold watch and the complicated hairstyle who sits next to Anton.
‘No, a little earlier.’
But that made me remember something.
I start to play a chord – E minor – and keep going at it in short stabs before switching to A minor.
‘I know this song,’ says Danielle. ‘My mum loves this.’
