The Reason a Piano Tuner Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: A Piano That Goes Flat
Clemency arrives at Ashvane House in her father's place, finds the grand piano's pinblock cracked, and learns the work will take until midsummer.
The letter said Mr. Josiah Tallis, and my father could not hold a pen.
He had fallen off a hay cart in March and broken his left wrist in two places.
So I opened the letter at our kitchen table and read it aloud to him.
The Duke of Ashvane had a grand piano that would not stay in tune.
Three tuners had been, and each one had left it flat within a week.
His Grace would pay twelve pounds and board for the man who could fix it.
"Go," my father said.
"They asked for you," I said.
"They asked for the name on the trade card." He lifted his sling an inch.
"You've been that name for four years, Clemency."
He was right, and neither of us had ever said it out loud.
I was twenty-seven and I had a better ear than he did.
I took the coach to Hertfordshire the next morning with my tools in a roll under my arm.
Ashvane House stood at the end of a mile of limes, long and pale and much too big.
A footman took my bag and did not look at my face.
A housekeeper led me up a staircase wide enough for a cart and put me in a cold blue bedroom.
"His Grace will see the instrument with you at four," she said.
"I'd like to see it alone first," I said.
"His Grace will see the instrument with you at four," she said again, and shut the door.
I washed my hands, pinned my hair tighter, and went down to find the music room by myself.
It was at the back of the house, behind a pair of tall doors.
The room smelled of cold ashes and old wax.
The grand piano stood in the middle with its lid shut and a dust sheet half pulled off one end.
It was a Broadwood, made in the 1790s, with a case of dark walnut.
I knew the make by the shape of the leg before I touched it.
I lifted the dust sheet off, folded it, and opened the lid.
Then I pressed a key in the middle of the keyboard.
It was flat.
It was flatter than any note I had ever heard from a piano that expensive.
I pressed the next key, and the next, and each one sagged a different amount.
"You hear it," said a man behind me.
I did not jump.
I had been listening to the note, and the note was a better thing to look at than whoever had walked in.
"I hear it," I said.
"The last man said the room was damp." He came forward.
He was tall, with short sandy hair and a scar that cut through his left eyebrow.
His coat was plain dark wool and his sleeves were pushed up to the elbow.
I took him for the steward.
"The last man said a good many things," I said. "May I ask your name?"
"Ashvane."
"That's the house. I asked for yours."
His mouth moved at one corner.
"Everard Blythe," he said. "I am also the house."
I felt my face go hot.
A duke, in shirtsleeves, with horse on his boots.
"Your Grace," I said, and began to curtsy.
"Don't," he said. "You'll lose the note."
He reached past me and pressed the key I had just played.
His hand came down on the ivory beside mine, and the side of his finger touched the side of mine.
It was a small thing and it lasted no time at all.
I had tuned pianos for ten years, and I had never once lost my place in a note.
I lost it then.
"Flat," he said, close to my ear.
"Yes," I said.
"You're the tuner."
"I'm Mr. Tallis's daughter. I'm the tuner."
"Mr. Tallis was recommended to me by three people," he said. "None of them mentioned a daughter."
"They wouldn't have."
He studied my hands on the keys, and then my face.
He was a man who looked at what he was being told, and I liked it, and I did not want to.
"Can you fix it?" he said.
I did not answer him.
I took my pocket lamp, climbed up on the bench, and looked inside the case at the board where the tuning pins went in.
It is a thick block of wood, and every pin is driven through it.
The wood around the lowest pins had a crack running across the grain.
It was as long as my hand, and it was dark with old damp.
"There," I said.
He came up beside me and looked, and he was too near, and I did not move away.
"The pins can't grip," I said. "I can tune it today and it will slide flat by Sunday."
"And?"
"And the block has to be mended before anything else. Then the pins reset, then every string checked."
"How long?"
I counted it up in my head, the real number and not a number to please him.
"Until midsummer," I said.
"Two months."
"At least."
He was quiet a while.
His mother, he told me, was holding a musical evening on the nineteenth of June.
Every lady in the county was invited to hear that piano.
"Then you had better start tonight," he said.
I stepped down from the bench.
Two months under his roof, I thought, and he had not yet stopped looking at my hands.
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