Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [2]
One day, he thought, I will have my own place to live – somewhere I can retreat from the world and not be bothered. And I won’t let anyone else in.
Pigeons fluttered outside, blocking the sunlight momentarily as they roosted. Cold penetrated the attic from the street, fingers of frosty air finding their way through the spaces between the tiles.
He sighed. The violin felt heavy in his hand, and somehow clumsy, as if he had never picked one up before. The music stand in front of him held the score of a piece by Mozart – a violin transcription, according to Stone, of a famous aria called ‘The Queen of the Night’s Song’ from an opera called The Three Oranges. The black notes captured between the lines of the staves were, as far as Sherlock was concerned, like a code, but it was a code he had quickly worked out – a simple substitution cipher. A black blob on that line always meant a note that sounded like this – unless there was a small hash in front of it that raised it slightly to a ‘sharp’, or a small angular letter ‘b’ that lowered it slightly to a ‘flat’. A sharp or a flat was halfway towards the note either directly above or directly below the one he was playing. It was simple and easy to understand – so why couldn’t he turn the written music into something that Rufus Stone could listen to without wincing?
Sherlock knew he wasn’t progressing as quickly as Stone would have liked, and that irked him. He would have liked to have been able just to pick up the instrument and play it beautifully, first time and every time, but sadly life wasn’t like that. It should be, he thought rebelliously. He remembered feeling the same way about the piano that sat in his family home. He’d spent hours sitting at it, trying to work out why he couldn’t play it straight away. After all, the thing about a piano was its relentless logic: you pressed a key and a note came out. The same key led to the same note every time. All you had to do, surely, was remember which key led to which note and you should be able to play. The trouble was, no matter how hard he had thought about it, he had never been able to sit down and play the piano like his sister could – flowing and beautiful, like a rippling stream.
Four strings! The violin only had four strings! How hard could it be?
‘The problem,’ Stone said suddenly, turning round and staring at Sherlock, ‘is that you are playing the notes, not the tune.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Sherlock responded defensively.
‘It makes perfect sense.’ Stone sighed. ‘The trees are not the forest. The forest is all of the trees, taken together, plus the undergrowth, the animals, the birds and even the air. Take all that away and you just have a load of wood – no feeling, no atmosphere.’
‘Then where does the feeling come from in music?’ Sherlock asked plaintively.
‘Not from the notes.’
‘But the notes are all that’s on the paper!’ Sherlock protested.
‘Then add something of your own. Add some emotion.’
‘But how?’
Stone shook his head. ‘It’s the small gaps you put in – the hesitations, the subtle emphases, the slight speedings up and slowings down. That’s where the feeling lives.’
Sherlock gestured at the music on the stand. ‘But that’s not written on there! If the composer wanted me to speed up or slow down then he would have written it on the music.’
‘He did,’ Stone pointed out, ‘in Italian. But that’s only a guide. You need to decide how you want to play the music.’ He sighed. ‘The problem is that you’re treating this like an