The dusty room above the music shop had begun to feel less like a cage and more like a sanctuary. The scent of old paper, lemon oil, and the faint, lingering smell of rain on Finnian’s coat had become the fragrance of creation.
In the weeks that followed their first tentative session, Beatrice found the rigid rules they had set for themselves softening at the edges, worn down by the constant friction of their collaborative energy.
The initial mistrust had receded, replaced by a grudging respect that was, to her alarm, blossoming into a genuine camaraderie.
They had developed a rhythm, a language all their own. Finnian would pace the worn floorboards, his voice a low, impassioned rumble as he recited new lines, his hands carving the air as if shaping the very words.
Beatrice, at the pianoforte, would listen, her fingers hovering over the keys, capturing the essence of his emotion and translating it into chord and melody. He was fire and earth; she was air and water.
Together, they were creating a storm.
“No, that’s not it,” he muttered one afternoon, running a frustrated hand through his dark hair.
They were working on a transitional scene, a moment of quiet melancholy for the heroine before she resolves to fight for her love.
“It’s too… declarative. She’s not angry yet. She’s hollow. A bell that’s been struck one too many times.”
Beatrice’s hands fell silent on the keys. “Show me,” she said softly.
He stopped pacing and looked at her, his gaze intense.
“She’s lost something she can never reclaim. Not a person, not yet. She’s lost the idea of herself. The girl she was supposed to be is gone, and she’s mourning for her.”
To capture the feeling, Beatrice let her fingers drift into a simple, searching melody in a minor key. It was a somber, questioning phrase, full of unresolved chords that hung in the air like dust motes in the afternoon light.
It was a lament she had composed in her own moments of quiet desperation, a melody for a future she felt slipping through her fingers.
She played it through once, then again, adding a deeper, resonant harmony in the bass. The music filled the small room, a sound of profound and aching loss.
When she finished, the silence that followed was heavy. She looked up to see Finnian standing utterly still by the window, his back to her.
His usual restless energy was gone, replaced by a stillness that was more unsettling than any outburst.
“Mr. Shaw?” she ventured, her voice quiet.
He didn’t turn. “Play it again.” His voice was thick, strained.
She obeyed, her touch more gentle this time. The melody wept from the pianoforte.
As the final, mournful note faded, he finally turned to face her. The cynical, combative mask he wore like armour was gone.
In its place was a raw, unguarded grief that struck her to the core.
“That sound…” he began, his voice barely a whisper.
“It is the sound of a promise broken by God.”
Beatrice felt a protective instinct rise within her, a strange and powerful urge to soothe the pain she had unintentionally unearthed.
“The music is for the character, a reflection of her loss.”
He gave a short, humourless laugh, the sound like breaking glass.
“Characters, Lady Beatrice, are born from truth. Their losses are ours.” He walked over to the pianoforte but did not look at the keys.
He looked at her, and for the first time, she felt he was seeing not a lady of the ton, not his anonymous collaborator, but simply… her.
“I had a sister,” he said, the words falling into the quiet room like stones into a deep well.
“Her name was Elara. She was younger than me by five years. A tiny thing, all sharp elbows and bright eyes. She loved music more than bread. She would hum tunes she heard from the street musicians, tapping out rhythms on the tabletop until our mother would scold her for the noise.”
Beatrice remained perfectly still, her hands resting on the cool ivory. This was a place she had not expected to be, in the heart of his private history.
“We had no money for lessons, of course. Not for a pianoforte. But she found a battered old tin whistle at a market stall. She played it day and night. The sound was dreadful,” he said, a faint, sad smile touching his lips.
“But the soul in it… it was pure. She dreamt of Covent Garden. Not of singing on the stage, but of sitting in the orchestra, making the sort of beautiful noise you just made.”
He paused, swallowing hard.
“When she was eight, the fever came through the rookeries. It took so many. It took her. The last thing I remember is her trying to lift that whistle to her lips, but she hadn’t the strength. The silence in our tenement after she was gone… it was a living thing. It was the sound you just played.”
The story settled over Beatrice, heavy as a shroud. She saw it all: the grimy tenement, the determined little girl with her tin whistle, the devastating emptiness of her absence.
The chasm between their worlds had never felt so vast, and yet, in that moment, she had never felt closer to him. His contempt for her class, his fierce ambition—it was all cast in a new, tragic light.
He fought for a voice because his sister never had the chance to find her own.
Words were useless. Condolences from a lady who had never wanted for anything would be an insult.
Instead, she turned back to the pianoforte. Her duty, her art, her very soul compelled her to respond in the only language that felt true.
She began to play. Not the simple lament from before, but something new, something being born from his grief and her empathy.
It started with a single, hesitant note, like a child’s question. Then a simple, folk-like melody emerged, reminiscent of a tin whistle, sweet and achingly innocent.
The theme grew, swelling with harmony, becoming richer, more complex. The pain entered the music then, a dark, churning undercurrent in the bass, the sound of a world that was cruel and unfair.
But the melody of the whistle refused to be silenced. It soared above the pain, a testament to a spirit that could not be extinguished, a heartbreaking aria of what was and what could have been.
She played until her fingers ached and her vision blurred, pouring every ounce of her compassion, every drop of her own caged-in sorrow, into the music. When she finally let the last chord fade into the dusty air, she was trembling.
Finnian was standing over her, his eyes shining with unshed tears. He didn’t speak.
He simply reached out, his calloused fingers hesitating for a moment before gently, reverently, touching her hand where it rested on the keys.
It was not a spark of awareness this time, but a current of profound, shared understanding that flowed between them, more intimate than any touch they had yet shared.
***
Miles away, in a Mayfair study panelled in dark mahogany, Lord Ashworth swirled the amber liquid in his glass and scowled at a copy of The Theatrical Inquisitor.
His own play, The Indolent Heart, had been savaged by this very paper three months prior.
The critic’s words were seared into his memory: “A tedious confection of predictable rhymes and pedestrian sentiment, utterly devoid of a single, authentic emotion. Lord Ashworth proves that while breeding may confer status, it does not, alas, confer talent.”
The humiliation still burned. He had fancied himself a poet, a man of letters.
Instead, he had been dismissed as a foppish amateur. And now, to add insult to injury, the talk of the town was of another playwright. A gutter-born upstart. Finnian Shaw.
He picked up another gazette, his eyes narrowing on a small column of society gossip. It spoke of a new English opera being developed at Covent Garden, a work of such rumoured power and passion that it was set to redefine the London stage.
The libretto was by Shaw, but the music, the column breathlessly reported, was from a mysterious, anonymous composer of breathtaking genius.
Ashworth snorted into his brandy. Genius? From where?
How did a man like Shaw, a man who likely learned his letters in a back alley, suddenly procure a composer of such calibre? The truly great composers were known.
They were attached to patrons, they taught the daughters of the aristocracy, they performed in the great houses. A talent of this magnitude did not simply appear out of thin air to collaborate with a penniless playwright.
A bitter seed of suspicion took root in the fertile soil of his jealousy. It was unnatural.
Shaw was a wordsmith, known for his raw, violent prose. Music of the sort being described—complex, soulful, masterful—required refinement, education, a lifetime of study.
It required a background Shaw and his ilk simply did not possess.
The man was a fraud. He had to be.
A slow, cruel smile spread across Ashworth’s face. He set his glass down with a decisive click.
The theatre world was a nest of gossips, starving musicians, and disgruntled stagehands, all of whom could be persuaded to talk for the right price. He would start there.
He would visit Covent Garden, not as a patron, but as an investigator. He would ask a few casual questions, grease a few palms, and listen to the whispers in the wings.
He would unearth Finnian Shaw’s secret. And when he did, he would use it to crush him.
The thought of exposing the celebrated playwright as a cheat was a far more satisfying balm to his wounded pride than any good review could ever have been. He would see Shaw ruined, and perhaps, in the process, discover the identity of this so-called “Ghost” for himself.