“Are you going to listen or talk?”
“I can hardly wait to hear more about your illustrious father.”
“You should be honored. Now, where was I?”
“With your father, a settler, being annoyed with more settlers coming in.”
“Oh, sorry,” she said, tweaking one of the thorns very slightly, “did I hurt you? I’ll try to be more careful, but if you don’t stop interrupting me, I may not remember to be gentle. Now, let’s see, I was talking about Mrs. Benson. My father thought my mother might like to have some company, so he brought the woman home, planning to take her back east in the spring. She ended up staying with us for four years, then she fell in love with some passing easterner and married him, but by then I had Madame Branchini.”
“And she taught you opera?”
“I’m getting ahead of myself. Mrs. Benson had taught piano and singing in the East and my mother thought it would be nice if she tried to do something with me, because I was awfully jealous of my older sister, Gemma. You see, my mother is an artist and my sister had inherited every bit of my mother’s talent. Even at five years old Gemma could paint and draw rather well, while I could draw not at all. I was jealous that my mother spent so much time with Gemma.”
“So, your mother turned you over to the music teacher and immediately you started singing arias.”
“No, I sang funny little popular songs and things my father’s friends taught me and—”
“Songs about hailing the queen, that sort of thing? Are your father’s friends also dukes?”
She ignored him. “No one thought much about my singing for years, then, one day, Mrs. Benson was looking through a trunk my father had found. It had been thrown from a settler’s wagon—the idiots take everything they own with them and then at the first rough place they have to start lightening their wagons.”
’Ring had seen some of the “rough” places. Ravines a hundred and fifty feet deep. “What was in the trunk?”
“Sheet music. My father hauled it home because he thought maybe Mrs. Benson and I could use it.” Maddie pulled another thorn from his back and smiled. “In the bottom was a piece of music such as I’d never seen before. It was ‘Air des bijoux,’ you know, from Faust.”
“Jewel Song,” he said softly, translating.
“Yes, exactly.”
&nbs
p; “I don’t know the song, but maybe you could sing it for me and I’d recognize the tune.”
“You should have so much luck. Anyway, Mrs. Benson helped me with the words, and since my father’s birthday was approaching, I thought I’d learn the song and sing it for him.”
“And so you did.”
“No, not quite that easily. Mrs. Benson is an American.”
“A curse on a person if I ever heard it.”
“You don’t understand. Americans have a horror of opera. They think opera is for rich people, for snobs. If an American says he has even seen an opera, he will probably be ridiculed. When I asked Mrs. Benson about the piece of music in the trunk, she dismissed it, said it was opera and it wasn’t for a little girl like me. I guess I was about ten then.”
“And that was like waving a red flag in front of you, wasn’t it? Nobody anywhere can tell you not to do anything, can they?”
“Would you like me to send Edith up here to do this? I’m sure she would love to get you with your clothes off.”
He didn’t say anything, but he turned his head and gave her an odd look that she didn’t understand, and she continued.
“I did feel rather challenged by her warning, and I was quite curious, so I took the music to Thomas.” Before he could ask, she told him who Thomas was. “There were several men who lived with us, friends of my father’s. Thomas is one of them, and he could play a little and sing a little. Not as well as my father, of course, but—”
“Of course not as well as Daddy,” ’Ring said under his breath.
“Thomas could play and sing a little,” she repeated pointedly, “so I went to him with the music. By then I could read music rather well and I’ve always had perfect pitch.”
“The best people do.”
She smiled. “Thomas and I together pieced the song out and I rehearsed it. At my father’s birthday, after everyone had eaten and my father had been given gifts from everyone else, Thomas played his flute and I sang the song.”