But this was a girl who had run away from home, who had been beaten, had her ribs broken, who had just had her first night of peaceful sleep in who knows how long.
And she had just been separated from her violin.
To talk business right now just didn’t seem fair.
“Why don’t we wait until you settle in first? We can make a better deal once we know what we have to work with.”
Before Katrina could respond, Miss Satomi’s phone beeped. She looked at the text.
“It’s Astrid. Please don’t tell her that I’ve spoiled your dinner. She said she is making veal. With a side of winter melon.”
“Veal?” Katrina smiled as she thought of Skylar berating her for eating meat.
“Don’t tell me you won’t eat veal.”
“I’ve never had it. But I’ll try.”
“Good girl. Astrid is a wonderful cook. Though sometimes she uses a bit too much butter and heavy cream. Perhaps it’s because she’s Swiss. But let’s keep that between us, shall we?
“Anyway, you don’t need to finish that bing sa. If I know Astrid, she will also have made dessert.”
* * *
“NO! Listen! Can’t you hear that?” The sounds of her father were getting angrier and angrier.
“Hear what?”
“How can you be a Matía?”
“I never wanted to be a Matía!”
The door slammed open, and her brother ran out in tears.
“It’s just a fucking piece of wood!”
Each evening this happened, Lucy would pray that God might bless her brothers’ ears, grant her father health. But her brothers never learned to hear.
And now her father was gone.
Lucy sat at the workbench. Before her were the tools of the Matías. Chisels and clamps, files, planes, knives, and calipers—honest, beloved tools, passed to Franco from Catalin, and to Catalin from before that.
She picked up a mallet and a sharp, flat blade.
“Papa, I am sorry,” she said. “I know these were meant for hands other than mine. But right now, these are the only hands here.”
Her voice was weak, uncertain. But then Lucy began to work.
And her hands began to move—methodically, precisely separating seams and joinery without a trace of hesitation or doubt.
The door opened.
“Is everything okay? You didn’t come home, and I was worried, and—what?”
She nodded to her son, then went back to the violin. “Shizuka Satomi came in with a new student. They brought this.”
“That’s—”
“A violin from China,” she said without looking up. “Yes, I know.”
“No, I mean, it’s all in pieces.”
“Yes. So are we all.”
There is a reason that most luthiers never let players see what they do to their instruments. They would faint.
Violinists often think of their violins as fragile, delicate creatures.
But what do mere players know?
What makes a violin special is not its fragility, but its resilience. One can change the strings and adjust the bridge. One can slide a sound post, replace the fittings, rebore the pegbox, carve a new bass bar, even change the angle of the neck.
If one did analogous things to a painting or book, the piece would be ruined. Even pianos, for all their pomp and circumstance, are tragically temporal things. Modify the action of an Erard or Pleyel, or do what was done to that poor Cristofori at the Met, and one effectively destroys it.
But a violin’s existence, its vitality, depends only upon its capacity to sing.
With the violin disassembled, Lucy could better feel the warmth of the wood. She ran her eyes along the joints, the edges, the curve of the ribs. She examined the inside pieces—the bracings, the top and bottom blocks—for any carelessness or lack of craft. But every element of this Chinese violin was textbook.
Textbook?
Of course. Now this violin made more sense. It was not made by a dedicated luthier, but by a carpenter.
That was not necessarily a bad thing—this was a very good carpenter, someone who knew wood, who could craft strong and proper structures, who worked with the grain so the parts expanded and contracted with humidity and temperature, yet never warped out of place.
Yet strong and proper is not enough. A violin is not a footstool; it must risk breaking if it is to give everything to its song.
Lucy twirled the faceplate on her fingertip, rapped it with her knuckle, and listened. With a pencil, she freehanded a shape into the wood. Then, she began carving, first with a finger plane, then with a knife, taking a millimeter here, a half millimeter there, and listening all the while.