“Important? Yes. They were important documents, Mr. Rennison. They were vitally important.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. There has been a screw-up. The package wouldn’t fit into the safe at the bank — as I’m sure you must have known — so I brought it home with me. Must have got mixed up with my guests’ luggage.”
“Mixed up?”
“The taxi driver must have loaded it in the van. I presume they took the package with them.”
Silence. As in all the out islands, it was a citizen’s band system. Anyone could listen in, and people often did. Finally he said, “Perhaps they will remember at the airport.” A pause. “They may be searched.”
“Perhaps. But she was traveling in her own plane. An artist on tour you know.”
“How convenient.”
“Yes. You should make a list of those documents — for the authorities. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
I did hear something, two days later: a package in the mail with a letter attached.
Dear Mr. Rennison: A note to thank you for your hospitality. I’m sorry we weren’t able to say goodbye in person, but we thought it best to leave at once — you understand. Enclosed, tapes of the concert. Also Lloyd’s other tapes. Our flight was uneventful, except that the cargo door unexpectedly flew open mid-ocean dispensing my cello case into the sea. A freak accident. Luckily, the cello was not in the case at the time. Call if you are ever in Great Barrington. Sincerely, A. Arbuthnot.
Schindler wasn’t the only one to take a loss. Drover came to see me, wanted payment for an account of about two hundred dollars. “She said it was all right, you’d look after it.” There were similar stories from Vero at the hotel; the Inn, where Mrs. Arbuthnot had taken Burnett and others for elaborate dinners; from the lady who ran the hat and dress shop; from shops throughout the village. The total came to over a thousand dollars. And then there was a call from the airport: three hundred dollars for airplane fuel. I paid the bills out of my own pocket. I owed her that.
The Dancing Master
by James S. Dorr
So she had been caught dancing. Was that such a crime? She argued with Gant, the temple priest’s deacon. “My husband is a dancing master. We married because of my love for the dance.” But the deacon slapped her.
“Silence, woman,” he said. “Here, your husband is a musician. He plays for God only — do you understand?”
She risked a glance at Pietro, her husband, and saw the warning in his eyes. Be careful, Melantha.
And so she just nodded.
The deacon, however, was not yet finished. “Here, those who dance, as they do in the south, are considered suspect. You and your husband are from the south, are you not? As you may know, the south is considered a haven for witches.”
Gant spoke the last word as if he would spit it, and so she just nodded a second time. But I am a healer, she thought as he turned away. And God made music. As well as people’s feet. But she kept silent until he had left through the temple doors and only then rushed to Pietro’s arms.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered. “About dancing. Why do they hate it?”
Her husband kissed her, then looked around quickly. “Shhh,” he said. “They may not like this either. But as for the dancing, I understand from the deacon’s men that they are waging a war against heresy. It makes them nervous. That is, anything that gives people pleasure they think must be sinful.”
She nodded. “We should not have come here,” she muttered.
“I know,” he said. “But here we are anyway, captured when these people’s soldiers attacked our caravan. And it’s our good luck I am a—” his voice caught “—I am a musician.”
He turned, and Melantha’s eyes followed his as they swept through the temple’s vast, ancient interior, finally coming to rest on the huge organ across from the altar. Pipes were dismounted, lying at full length along the floor, while the keyboard, where he had been trying it out, was still half disassembled.
“Suppose you can’t fix it?” Melantha whispered, and yet she knew that her husband could. When they had been taken into the temple six days before, the keys had been frozen, the pipes filled with cobwebs, the windchest cracked and holed. Yet as soon as he had seen it, even in its ruined condition, Pietro’s eyes had lit with a glow.
The priest had noticed that, as had his deacon. Surrounded by soldiers, they had been going through Melantha’s pack, spilling out vials of dried leaves and herbs. She should have been warned when one soldier muttered under his breath and made a hand sign. But then the priest’s deacon had opened Pietro’s.
“Look here,” he said. He pulled out a small flute, then another, a mid-sized recorder. Then tabors and books — music notation, meant simply as exercises for dancers but most impressive for those who might be unskilled in its reading. He turned toward Pietro.
“You are a musician?”
Pietro had nodded, saying nothing. The deacon had turned to the chief priest then and whispered something into his ear. The priest had smiled, and the deacon turned back.
“We have a festival three weeks from this day. Everyone from the city will be here. Can you play this organ?”
Once again, Pietro had nodded. “I’ll need my wife’s assistance,” he had said, and as the interview came to an end, he had gone to inspect it. And now he’d already restored it sufficiently to key a tune on the upper register, using a forge bellows borrowed from one of the city’s blacksmiths to fill the fixed windchest, along with the blacksmith’s apprentice to pump it. The tune he had played was one from their own country. One meant for dancing.
And so she had danced, paying no mind to the boy forcing air through the metal reed pipes. But now she had been warned — the boy had been watching and had told the deacon. And she and her husband had been warned before, when Gant had taken them to the rooms in the back of the temple where they would stay — rooms next to the vestry, where she had first noticed the trace of an almost familiar smell — that if the instrument could not be made ready for the high feast day, both their lives would be taken in forfeit.
The smell pervaded her thoughts. Her dreams. She knew it from someplace — one of her herbs, but one used rarely, an unpleasant odor yet not quite this odor. And why should such odors — odors associated with healers, whom apparently these people feared — be found in the temple?
But she had little time for such thoughts now. With just two weeks left before the feast day, the main work of fixing the organ had begun.
“Gant,” Pietro shouted the first thing that morning, “we have two things missing. The first is a wind source. It’s all very well to use blacksmith’s bellows for playing the smaller pipes, but for music to fill this whole church, we’ll need more than just reed sounds. Do you understand me?”
Gant, squat and muscular, turned toward Pietro. “No, dancing master—” Melantha winced as the deacon contemptuously spoke the name she had used for her husband the evening before “—my business is with people’s souls, not with their hearing. But under the organ there is machinery...”
“Show us, then,” Pietro said. “There must be bellows of some sort down there. Beneath the windchest—” he pointed to the long boxlike frame of the organ proper, studded with tubes that led to the pipe banks. “How do we get there?”
“This way,” the deacon said, gesturing for them to follow him behind the pipes themselves. While they watched, he bent to a ring that was set in the stone floor and, heaving upward, opened the trapdoor.