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‘Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in harmony together a Great Music. And since I have kindled you with the Flame Imperishable, ye shall show forth your powers in adorning this theme, each with his own thoughts and devices, if he will. But I will sit and hearken, and be glad that through you great beauty has been wakened into song.’
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Lovely thou wert in thine own glen
Ere thou didst dwell in song or story;
Ere the moonlight of a Poet’s mind
Had arrayed thee with the glory
Whose fountains are the hearts of men—
Many a thing of vital kind
Had fed and sheltered under thee
Had nourished their thoughts near to thee
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Maglor paused before the glass. “Are you already melancholy, Maitimo? You cannot be melancholy on the first night of performance—it shall do me in before I play or sing so much as a note.”
“I am sorry,” Maedhros said, and he was. Sorry for so much… for the way in which he, not Maglor, had failed in another year’s time to become accustomed to city life. Sorry, still, to have parted from little Cousin Fingon at Fingolfin’s ice-grimed gate after the novelty of a Christmas spent so merrily together. There had been no shivering loneliness behind the snow-crowned fences of Formenos, though the white hills rolled on for untrammeled miles. It was here, in the crowded streets—
But Maedhros smiled all the same, hoping that that smile would show no trace of the lead-weight he felt dragging against every limb and heart-string. He said,
“I have been quiet today, I know.”
“I need to rest my voice,” Maglor said, reprovingly. “You do not.”
Maedhros swallowed the rest of his selfish sorrow. “Shall I tell you stories then, dear one? Last week the twins told me a very gruesome tale about three billy goats and a hideous troll who lived under a bridge.”
Maglor wrinkled his delicate nose. “Hmm. It sounds horrid.”
“Rather it was.” Maedhros finished doing up the buttons of his waistcoat. His fingers were cold and stiff; he would be glad to put on the fine new kid-gloves that Grandfather had given him as a belated Christmas gift. “It is a new story, you know—from a book of Norwegian fairy tales. Uncle Finarfin sent it.”
Maglor was diverted. “Do you ever wonder why Athair minds Uncle Finarfin so much less than Fingolfin?”
Maedhros shook his head; a carefully silent lie.
“There I go, talking again.” Maglor rubbed his throat. He was wearing a darkly winking ruby on his forefinger—it would flash and spangle when he touched the pianoforte, under the paper-shaded golden lanterns that hung above the rigged-up stage. Maedhros thought that the ruby looked like a spot of blood just now, but did not say so.
He stepped up beside Maglor at the glass, and offered, with a gesture, to tie his brother’s cravat.
“The troll was ravenous,” he said after a moment, his fingers warming in the soft fine linen. “But the goats… they were clever enough to rout him, in the end. It was all a matter of comparison. I am so much less worthy for your appetite than my brother, that sort of thing.”
“Curufin, Caranthir, Celegorm,” suggested Maglor, with some malice. “Three goats.”
“Don’t, cano. I can’t bear to think of them being devoured.”
“Then why are you telling me this story?” Maglor accused.
“Shhh,” Maedhros said, laying a finger on Maglor’s lips.
It had been the business of many evenings to escape his boorish gaolers, to steal with the velvet paws of purpose into the outside world. It was still a world, as it had ever been, of long grey-shadowed eye-sockets and inviting lamplit mouths. So many mouths… to enter as a delicious, unsuspected morsel: so many bellies of frail social power in which to reveal the fatal toxin of a greater intellect.
Melkor Bauglir was a prisoner of his house only in name. In truth, he was a probing tongue, a gnawing tooth, a jaw snapping like a trap on the unsuspecting hands that would seek to seize and bind him.
THE MARVELOUS PIANO PRODIGY WITH THE VOICE OF AN ANGEL – MAGLOR FEANORIAN – EIGHT O’CLOCK – TICKETS TO BE HAD AT THE CITY HOTEL
… City Hotel, occupying an entire block between Thames and Cedar streets, is the loftiest edifice of that kind in the city, containing more than one hundred large and small parlours and lodging-rooms, besides the City Assembly Room, chiefly used for Concerts and Balls. The rooms appropriated for private families, parlours, and dining rooms, are superbly fitted up, and constantly occupied by respectable strangers…
[Adapted from The Picture of New-York, and Stranger’s Guide to the Commercial Metropolis of the United States. New York: A. T. Goodrich, 1828.]
The Assembly Room had been divided like the stalls of a Turkish market, each makeshift “opera box” framed by hangings of baize and netting backed by swaths of smothering velvet. Elegant chairs were arranged in groupings of six or eight; enough company to make a lonely party of one shudder with apprehension. Maedhros, duly shuddering, made his way to the foremost box, conscious that his height and his hair would be very notable under the undimmed chandeliers. On the stage, placed at the forward center of the room, a beautiful pianoforte, bedecked in mother-of-pearl, stood alone.
Grander than anything we could give him in Formenos… even Athair could not afford something like this…
But Lord, how could Maglor bear it, at only fifteen? To be watched forever, by eyes friendly or unfriendly, indifferent or adoring—
“Master Feanorian?”
Maedhros started, for he knew the speaker with the French-accented voice. Hortense Duchamps, recently hired lady’s maid to Violet Tibbs. Maedhros knew he was blushing with honest shame, as well he might; the woman had let him in at the back door, and up the kitchen staircase of the Tibbs’ home several times in the autumn just past. Each time he completed this sojourn, Maedhros knew that he was brushing closer and closer against a future that would stain or even brand him.
If I am not careful…
“Mademoiselle Duchamps,” he said, with a bow.
She held a little white card in her hand. “My mistress sends you her regards. She will be seated in Number Three, and would be glad of your company there.”
“I thank—I am most grateful,” Maedhros said. The thought of Violet’s roving hands and purring voice, when Maglor was singing his heart out—it would be blasphemous. “But I must not change my seat. My brother is performing, you see, and I—”
Hortense smiled, inscrutable as usual. She was dressed all in black and had the knowing look of a jackdaw. “She expected this answer, monsieur. She bade me give you this.”
The note read: The west corridor coatroom. Half-past seven. I have the key. – V
It was twenty-five minutes after the hour.
Feanor came so rarely to the city that Melkor had been obliged to satisfy himself with a word here and there, a rumor, a chance sighting often limited to the prismed view through a coach window.
For a time, he had amused himself with the doings and whereabouts of the fine-featured eldest son, but his interest in Maedhros was dwindling. If his spies in the lad’s school were to be believed, the boy was not particularly bold or clever, much less recalcitrant. Melkor needed a fine flame of spirit, if he was to render pliant the wax of a young life.
And then—
THE WONDERFUL PIANO PRODIGY WITH THE VOICE OF AN ANGEL—
Well, what of the second son? What of Maglor, with talent (so the papers said) enough to light a dozen shapely candles? What mattered girlish features and thoroughbred limbs if Feanor’s inheritance had settled elsewhere?
Dash blood like ink, and sing with all your might. If there is a soul to cage, let song fashion the lock for me!
Covering his face with a velvet half-mask, in case he was in danger of detection by one of Manwe’s stubborner associates, Melkor sallied forth into the open maw of chorus… and perhaps, if fortune favored him, of tragic genius.
He was risking much, tonight. Even as he spurned the would-be shackles he pretended to accept by day, he was risking much.
Violet Tibbs was waiting in almost fevered impatience. After a few moments of rifling, she had seen the ivory calling-card she wanted in the tray just inside the grand hotel door, but she had not seen its owner. Then her father had insisted on introducing her to half his acquaintance in the long, ivy-garlanded foyer. This was another delay, ill-suited to her temper. Maedhros Feanorian had been absent from every card-table and dance-hall of late. No amount of explanation—which had been freely given, between short-drawn breaths—had been enough. Oh, Violet had known he would ride north in mid-December, where his farmer family lived. She heard of Formenos more than she liked, for Maedhros was always so serious and defensive about the merits of the farmer family. Over the course of their acquaintance, Violet had nearly, but not quite, given up teasing on the subject.
But Maedhros had spoken only of going away for Christmas. It was now the first full week of January, a deadly boring span of frigid days, and Violet had depended on an amusement that was, by all accounts, still skating the frozen Hudson with no word of returning south.
She craned her neck to peer over the nodding ostrich-feathers of the plump elderly lady between her and the entrance to the ballroom. Maedhros must be there, among the other early-comers. Surely he was loitering about the stage or the dressing room, assisting his insufferable brother… soothing some poet’s pique unique to the fretful Maglor.
Damn it all, Violet thought, wishing she could shout such unladylike words from the hotel’s rooftop. She refused to endure another evening without having her way.
As soon as she could, she beckoned to Hortense, and then, under the pretense of a broken shoe-buckle, she slipped away to the far side of the foyer, where several narrow corridors, velvet-curtained, led to the coatrooms and storage-chambers of the hotel. The westernmost of these did not seem to be in use tonight, and so it was an excellent place for a tête-à-tête. Violet inspected its entrance carefully. The glint of a brass key, hanging on a hook at waist-height just inside the curtain’s recess, caught her roving eye. Then she turned back to her companion. “Have you seen him, Hortense?”
Hortense lifted her thin black brows. “Who?”
Violet snapped her fan shut in exasperation. “Do not tease me. I cannot live another hour without seeing him.”
“Oh—is it love then, mademoiselle?” Hortense asked, dryly.
“No, of course not.” Violet tossed her head. “Now, I am not ashamed to ask him to sit in Papa’s box, but I imagine that he will insist on watching his brother play and sing with rapt attention, and at the most ridiculously close proximity. Therefore, tell him to meet me here—at half-past seven. That’s less than ten minutes from now.”
“Here? But mademoiselle—you wish me to say to him, come to meet Miss Tibbs in the coatroom? Aloud, and in the hearing of anybody?”
Violet hissed a sharp little sigh. “Very well. Perhaps that is too risky. Do you have a bit of paper and a pen?”
“Peut-être, mademoiselle.”
It was produced. Violet scrawled her message with what she well knew was appalling penmanship and sent Hortense on her way. Then she composed herself, trying to diminish a mischievous grin to a coquettish simper. She slipped the brass key into her beaded pocket, and stepped out from between the rustling velvet curtains. Or at least—she tried to. Her path was blocked at once by a great shadow of a man, his inky clothes smelling unpleasantly of mothballs, and his long white face half-covered in a strange velvet mask.
“Excuse me, sir!” she cried, startled and somewhat alarmed. Nobody else was loitering nearby; she had depended on that. “I—”
“Miss Tibbs, I believe,” he said, in a low voice… it was like the discordant key of an organ, flavored by a lecherous laugh barely withheld. “Your father is Erasmus Tibbs, the banker?”
“We have not been introduced,” Violet said coldly. She left off the sir this time. “I must rejoin my party.”
So far away did Papa and his emptyheaded patrons seem!
The man released his laugh now, like a bubble of air no longer trapped beneath sucking mud. “Ah,” he said. How he reeked! It was not merely the scent of a man who had taken a suit of clothes out of some forgotten wardrobe. No, this was the smell of dead things. “But you were waiting for someone here—a lover, perhaps? Tell me, I insist, of this nameless rogue... Or is he not so nameless as that, coming to hear his brother sing? A prized colt, I imagine, with a rich mane as red as the blood that runs hot for you.”
Violet was indignant—disgusted—a little more than alarmed, now. She never admitted to fear, but this… creature’s guesses, borne of eavesdropping and some other knowledge she had not given him, struck home like shot tearing through the breast of a gamebird. She could not afford to make a scene; Maedhros might appear just as her father observed her predicament, and then whatever accusations this blackguard made would have the ring of truth.
Violet’s father was fond… oblivious… indulgent. But he would not overlook an outright scandal. She must think of something else.
Carefully, she restored her coquettish smile.
“Let us not speak of such things where others can see or hear us,” she said, hiding behind a guise of overactive womanly caution. Then, stepping back so that her silk taffeta skirt whispered aside, she gestured for him to join her in the narrow corridor.
He was a man like other men, after all: prurient and grasping. He seized her by the elbow, his clammy thumb tracing circles on the exposed flesh between her sleeve and evening glove. Together they advanced until they reached the door of the coatroom itself. Only then did her captor pause, opening the door. (It opened outwards.)
In the dim remains of the light from the foyer, Violet could not see his eyes. There were only two dark holes in that wax-pale face. His hand was wax-pale too, making as if to beckon her.
Violet fluttered her lashes and inched forward. In the folds of her gown, she found her pocket.
She found the key.
The man’s hulking shoulders filled the open doorway, blacker than the darkness behind him. How vile it would be to bear his touch! Were it not for the thought of Maedhros’ soft voice and shapely hands, Violet would have dispensed with any interest in the more brutish sex altogether.
“Is there no light in there?” she asked, introducing a tremor into her voice. “I—I must have a little light.”
The man was delighted by her fear. “I shall hunt for matches in the pocket of someone’s coat,” he said, and stepped fully inside the coatroom. “If that is what you require to make a clean breast of your doings. But such lights do not last long, Miss Tibbs. Indeed, you must be brave, and mayhap we ought to treat this privacy as the sort sacred to Catholic confessionals, where penitents whisper their sins under the cover of night.”
“I am not a Catholic,” Violet said. It was her last chance at hesitance, and she knew it.
“No,” said the man, and suddenly there was no laughter in his voice at all. “You are a pitiful little whore.”
She slammed the door in his face. She heard his outraged cry, muffled by a massive thud that could only have been made by a bodily fall. He must have tripped, shocked by the sudden total darkness. She knew it was her good fortune—luck of the wildest kind. If he had not fallen, she would not have had time to slip the key in the lock and turn it.
But time was on her side.
Violet did not return to her father. Pleased that her hands did not tremble at all, she paced back and forth in the rapidly filling foyer, feeling entirely alive but for the cold, dead spot just above her elbow. He had cursed it with a leprous touch—damn him.
She visited the mouth of the narrow corridor once or twice, and heard a few stifled oaths shouted from behind the rattling door, but they were not perceptible to anybody in the crowd so many yards away. At length, she was satisfied that they had fallen silent altogether.
Although—he might break down the door, Violet supposed. He was a strong man. She intended to be at a sufficient distance away if that happened. The key, dropped down her close-fitted bodice, was warm against her skin.
It was thirty-one minutes after seven.
And now here he was, her splendid boy, with his silk hat under his arm and his waistcoat buttons gleaming beneath the swan-like curve of his cutaway coat. He was making for the west side of hall, just as she had told him to. Violet darted ahead of him with a few rather unladylike bounds. Fortunately nobody but the last billet-man in a long line of billet-men could have seen them meet, and he was concerned with selling his tickets.
“Oh—” Maedhros said, catching sight of her. He was very rosy; from wine, perhaps, but more likely from the thrill of her. Violet believed utterly in her own charms. He looked like a Christmas card of an English robin, she thought: buff and grey and scarlet.
“We must rendezvous elsewhere,” Violet explained, with a glance over her shoulder. “Somebody or other was hanging about the coatroom and I did not like his looks.”
She had decided to laugh away that hollow black stare; otherwise it might frighten her, and Violet did not like to be frightened.
“I have only a moment, you know,” Maedhros said, more serious than she liked him to be. “I must be in my seat when Maglor comes on—he always looks for me, and though I don’t know how, with all the light so bright on the stage and so dim everywhere else, I do believe he—"
“Kiss me,” Violet commanded. She had to wait with pettish impatience while Maedhros glanced from side to side, then, drawing her into the shadowy recess between an unmanned ticket-box and a sprawling false fern, he pressed his lips against hers. It was so sweet as to be almost horrid.
“You have become too tender in my absence,” she jeered, pulling away from him. “You are like a great tall baby.”
“I am not,” he mumbled, but she reached up to stroke back the lovelocks at his temples, revealing his ears to be flushed red.
“Kiss me properly,” she said. “Or I shan’t ever let you up to my little room again. Hortense and I shall bar the door to you, and leave you cold and lonely some evening—see if we don’t!”
He kissed her very warmly after that, and when she prompted him by arching her neck, he moved his mouth along a familiar path over her throat and shoulder, nosing aside her mousseline fichu in his eagerness.
“Good boy,” said Violet, very pleased indeed, and doubly pleased when she thought of the silly oaf trapped in the coat closet. Oh, he seemed a weak enough fool now, vanquished by the lady he had insulted! She pushed Maedhros gently away, and triumphantly whispered, “I shall give you something, to show my thanks.”
It was amusing, to see how his winglike brows furrowed. He did not know what she was thinking; he rarely did, but he was so very ready to learn. Violet took his right hand, which was long and graceful in its kid glove. A very fresh glove—almost too fresh. There wasn’t so much as a smudge of wear on the fingertips. With dexterous silken fingers, Violet undid the fiddly buttons, to expose a few inches of his white, blue-veined wrist. With a look she knew to be very wicked indeed, she lifted his wrist to her mouth, kissing the hollows of it long and slow.
His pulse was thunderous, a caged thing beating against the bars of flesh and bone with all its might. After a moment he tried to escape, almost begging, but Violet would not release him. She held him fast with both hands. “It isn’t time yet, Master Feanorian. Don’t be rude.”
“Violet, I—”
“Miss Tibbs,” she said, “Surely. Since you have stayed away from me so often, this past month. Yes, I am afraid it must be Miss Tibbs.”
“This isn’t right,” he said, and the sorrow in his voice—in his great silver-grey eyes—loomed suddenly so large that it was like a wave, rising in one of those dreadful, fabled storms that overtook whole ships at sea. It made Violet feel like nothing more than a mote of sand on the battered shore.
“What is—right?” she demanded bitterly. He did not know what she had schemed and suffered for him tonight. He did not know that she was closer to caring for him than she had ever dreamed possible. It was not love—she had not lied to Hortense about that—but it was nearly what she felt for her little dog, Alphonsus. Yes, very nearly that. A warmth; a willingness to touch kindly as well as cruelly.
Was that not enough?
“Please excuse me,” Maedhros Feanorian said, and Violet was no monster reeking of rot and damnation.
She let him go.
He always looked for Maedhros in a crowd. Maglor felt he could not breathe until he saw that bright head, until he could well imagine that riveted gaze.
He alone hears me. He alone knows what he listens for.
It was vastly comforting; the safely familiar, in the midst of the wildest unknown. For music was not merely a matter of notes and meter and chords and variations—it was an idea so complete that it seemed ensouled, and what mastery did one have over a soul?
Not a mastery… a dance. In his own secret soul, Maglor did not believe that even Athair understood this. Athair loved his own craft, but always he wished to be a securely crowned king of it. That wasn’t the same as a song, nor yet a singer.
Maglor smiled at the sea of faces, and one in particular. He set his hands to the keys, and opened his lips.
I am sorry. I am sorry. He rubbed at his wrist until the tender red mark left by her mouth was almost raw. I am sorry. It was a prayer, but not like Maglor’s lovely voice was a prayer. Maglor invited the attention of the heavens; Maedhros begged that the all-seeing pass him over in merciful blindness.
Just once.
Madness. Madness of lust, madness of iron cleaving yielding flesh, madness of choking fumes, madness of the battering and the battered (the door will not give. The little trollop deceived him and the door will not give)—
Madness of disease, madness of treachery (Maedhros the altar-boy is a creature of sordid wants. To what cliff-edge would Feanor be driven, if he knew that his pride was thus squandered behind a veil of secrecy? This feckless heir, with no devotion to the father's unsteady cause... instead, a half-grown man with a taste for cunning women.)
(Someday Maedhros shall answer for this)—
Madness of discord. Discord, for Feanor’s second son was a fop, a bastard, a fool, an ingrate. What talent had been given him by the nameless, clay-formed creators to whom Melkor would give no name… that talent had evidently been bored away by insect-shriveled praise. Even through the fur and velvet and wood-frame layers of this makeshift prison, Melkor could hear that his voice was imperfect, that his touch on the keys was deceptive rather than forthright. Maglor Feanorian, swelling a song unworthy of the age… it was a tune among other tunes, nothing more. It was no theme. Melkor, whose hunger for knowledge was likewise a hunger for ecstasy, a hunger for mastery, a hunger for creation—Melkor could only be glad that the sight of Maglor’s pride, as well as its tempest-fury, was not his to witness.
He will never choose Maglor again.
Yes, gentle flower in thy recess
None might a sweeter aspect wear,
Thy young bud drooped so gracefully,
Thou wert so very fair,—
Among the fairest, ere the stress
Of exile, death and injury
Thus withering and deforming thee,
Had made a mournful type of thee