The Cremona Variations

Free sample: the opening of Chapter 1, North Light. The complete book (216 pages, 28 chapters) comes as DRM-free PDF + EPUB with purchase.

Chapter 1: North Light

The knife wanted to wander, the way it always did in the last centimeter before the corner, and Francesca held her breath the way Giacomo had taught her, not because the breath mattered to the wood but because it steadied the hand that did. She was cutting the purfling channel on the lower bout of her Triennale violin, spruce shavings curling off the point of the blade in pale commas, and the north window above the bench threw the kind of light that told no lies: not gold, not flattering, just the truth of the grain laid bare at seven in the morning.

Forty days. She had chalked the number on the underside of the bench that morning, the way she’d chalked every number since April, then wiped her palm across it so it wouldn’t stare at her while she worked. Forty days until she carried this violin, this exact instrument with its unfinished channel and its unvarnished ribs, into a room of five men who had known her father and would spend two hours deciding whether she deserved to sign her own name to an instrument the way he had signed his.

She set the knife down and flexed her hand. On the wall above the bench hung Giacomo’s tools in the order he’d left them: thumb planes graduated by width, the bent gouge he’d used for scroll work, a scraper worn concave from forty years of the same three strokes. She had not moved anything. Some mornings the workshop was less a place she worked than a place she visited him.

The drawer beneath the bench held the letters. She knew without opening it how many there were, because she counted them the way other people counted sheep: eleven from the bank, three from the supplier in Mirecourt who wanted the wood paid for before he’d cut another log, one from the comune about the workshop’s façade, which needed repointing she could not afford and would not, this year, be fined for neglecting, because the inspector had been a friend of her father’s and pretended not to notice. She had opened the first four. The rest she had not, on the theory, childish and kept anyway, that an unopened letter had not yet demanded anything of her.

She was still holding the knife when Elena came in without knocking, the way she always did, dropping her bag on the spare bench and pulling the cover off her own half-strung viola with the brisk indifference of someone who paid by the hour and intended to use every minute of it.

“You’ve been here since dawn,” Elena said. Not a question. Sawdust had settled into the crease of Francesca’s sleeve, which told its own story.

“The channel doesn’t cut itself.”

“Neither does mine, and yet I sleep.” Elena set her tools out in a row, chisel, then gouge, then the little agate burnisher she’d bought secondhand from a dealer in Brescia who swore it had belonged to someone famous, though no one, including Elena, believed him. “How many days now?”

“Forty.”

“Forty.” Elena said it the way she said most things, half question, half provocation. “You know what I keep thinking. There will be two candidates in that room next month, and only one of them has a dead man standing behind her chair. They won’t look at your violin, Francesca. They’ll look at his ghost holding it up.”

“That’s not fair.”

“It’s not supposed to be fair. It’s supposed to be true.” Elena did not look up from her pegbox, which was how she delivered her worst lines, sideways, so you couldn’t tell if she meant to wound or only to test whether the wound was already there. “I trained on a factory floor outside Cremona, putting varnish on necks that came off a jig. You inlaid your first purfling at fourteen with a man who could not walk into a shop in this city without someone standing up. When Bernabò looks at your work he will not be able to help himself. He’ll hear the name Rovelli, and his hand will move toward the pen before his eyes finish the wood.”

“Is that an accusation?”

“It’s an observation. I make them so you don’t have to make them about yourself.” Elena glanced over at last, and something in her face gave way, the tease folding back into the older, plainer affection underneath it. “I’d take the ghost, if it were on offer. I’m only saying it isn’t nothing, what you’re carrying into that room. It’s not only a violin.”

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