Let It Be Me

Prologue

BEFORE there were ever words, there was music. A language in and of itself, music is the background to life, where emotion dwells. Through time, words evolved, and music—while ingrained in the flesh of every living thing—became a language only for those inclined to study it. To mold it into new formations, push the limits of what was known and what evoked feeling—but ultimately, anything created, no matter how technically perfect, has to be imbued with life. And that life, its presence, could be ascertained by the king most high or the peasant most common—because music, no matter the words put upon it, belongs to everyone.

Bridget Forrester believed that. She discovered it as a child, when the staccato rhythms of horseshoes on cobblestones set the beat to which she skipped. She practiced it over and over, the pianoforte her companion as she grew and became the woman she was meant to be. And during a lifetime of study, of listening and learning and feeling, no piece of music brought more life to the world than the four movements of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Long after her voyage to Italy was complete, music and love both made and stolen, yet returned in full, Bridget Forrester would look back on her life and realize that for a brief magical moment, she had owned the qualities of each of the movements of the Ninth Symphony, when she had needed them most: The first, allegro: quick and intense. Scherzo, second: rigid structure, but able to vary. Third, adagio: stately, but hopeful . . . and the fourth movement, the culmination of all that came before.

Over the course of her life, Bridget would hear Beethoven’s Ninth played dozens of times—on every occasion that it was being performed within fifty miles of London, her husband would arrange for them to attend. They heard it at least once a year. It was their piece. It was the sound to which they fell in love.

It was the culmination of all that came before.

In 1895, at age ninety, Bridget was nearly blind, confined to a wheeled chair, and missing her darling husband every day of the six years he had been gone. But she still had her ears. She could still hear when the door to her music room creaked open. She heard as her children’s children’s children would practice their scales on her beautiful pianoforte—careful to be delicate with it, as its keys were nearly a century old. Her own hands had long since failed her—their bones freezing in pain from playing the complicated rhythms that had once flowed from her fingertips. But her memory held. And, as she was too frail to attend concerts, it was her memory that sustained her—until the day of her ninety-first birthday.

Bridget’s youngest granddaughter, who was in her first Season and very keen on what was new and the latest, woke Bridget up from her afternoon nap by having burly men haul a massive contraption into her suite of rooms.

“It’s a phonograph!” her granddaughter cried, obviously very pleased with herself. “The latest invention from America!”

Bridget had heard of such things, of course—sounds recorded, as a photographic camera would take a person’s likeness. But surely it could not compare. Daguerreotypes always looked still, frozen and cold. Not like real people, or places in time. A phonograph was certain to be as disappointing.

But her granddaughter was very enthusiastic. And in the anxieties and trials of a first Season, it was all too rare to see the girl enthusiastic.

Thus, she squinted, watching her granddaughter as she put a waxed cylinder on a horizontal spindle, and set the needle. The sound was tinny, a single violin, like an echo of music being played from another room. But Bridget—her mind still sharp, her ears still perfect—slipped into memory, fell back in time, and heard the music of a full orchestra.

She heard Beethoven’s Ninth.