Excerpt:  The Secret Daughter

​

Chapter Two 

​

I am frozen in time against my will, enduring being moved and cared for like the relic I am since my master died. For over two hundred years I have been in this lifeless, whitewashed corner of a square room I detest. I am placed by a large window which pleases me and disgusts me on any given day. The putrid color of the synthetic fabric curtains, they part just enough to let the light warm my wood, the rosewood and oak polished to an unnatural sheen on my sides. I am not placed with purpose, I am wedged between a plain wall, and Franz Liszt’s memorabilia, how dare they! 

 

I am the great 1817 Broadwood fortepiano made expressly for Beethoven, the greatest maestro of all time, yet I sit cloistered here in a dead museum. Breathing the manufactured air, biding my time, I remain untouched like the town’s wretched spinster. The room is soulless in its box-like shape, the carpet cheap and rough as sandpaper under my purposeful feet and pedals. My lid cannot soar upward, instead it retreats in fear from the low ceiling, which is unnaturally flat and dull, not made to carry sound, but to thwart it! 

 

I tolerate the glint from Liszt’s swords in that glass box permanently locked in place too close to me. His portrait stares down at me yet betrays the light he carried in his soul, layer upon layer of oil paint the smell still sickens me as it wafts over my frame. The blue in his eyes is not his. Even I know Liszt had the piercing dark eyes of an artist, one who sees beyond the ordinary. The muted thud of the machine which pumps frigid air into the room, laughs and curses me with its incessant off-pitch whistling and whining. 

 

In the evening, I feel the museum exhale when all the lumbering people have gone. The room glows from the impossibly small lights along the floorboards of every wall. Even Liszt’s artifacts sleep and leave me in peace. In these hours, I can still smell her lilac perfume and hear the lyrical rise and fall of her voice. She loved me as she loved Beethoven, she knew my worth, she knew I would serve Beethoven and her until they chopped me into firewood. 

 

Soon, they will move me again; my own room where I can be alone with this young Marie. Beethoven and I will not rest until our story is told, until his letters are safe again in the arms of his love. It’s time to tell our story, a story I cannot keep locked inside my wooden heart any longer. 

 

This young woman, our Marie, she must hear me!