With delight, our orchestra played our first concert after the restitution of meat.

There is no sensation so sweet as the gratification of applause when one has hazarded embarrassment and humiliation before a crowd; no thrill so physical in its application nor so keen in its extension of the senses. Rare is it that the intellect and the dexterity, the activities of the mind and the strategies of the nerves — the body and the soul — are put to so supreme a challenge all at once; and having triumphed in that arena, with response immediate to one’s exertions, one feels almost like a machine elevated to the status of a god. And how much more superior still the transports, when one is surrounded by a community of brethren who share in the success, whose efforts and collaboration brought about this triumph of mechanism and spirit, this apotheosis of the animal.

For the concert, we played symphonies by Monsieur Gossec, Herr Beck, and Dr. Boyce, as well as airs by Mr. Arne sung by an officer’s mistress, all calculated to gratify the hearers with an impression of the rationality and graciousness of the human animal all too lacking in the months since the flight from Concord and the savagery of Bunker Hill.

The seats were full of officers in full dress and citizens of the city so stirred by the circumstances of the performance and the vivacity of execution that they often hooted and clapped to demand we play movements a second time through; some twenty of these loud gallants being friends of the musical sapper who had composed the harpsichord concerto, which giddy claque whistled and stomped vigorously, not ceasing until Mr. Turner stood and shouted that he begged of the fine gentlemen that they would, as a demonstration of their benevolence, cork their bungs so we might have some Stamitz. He promised that we would soon have a satire acted upon the rebels, writ by the notorious wit Major-General Burgoyne, with curtain-tunes and airs by this same excellent sapper to please the crowd. At this, there was an outburst of gaiety from all the assembled; and I was sensible that the delight of the evening enlivened my spirits as well as all of those seated around me. I could find no cause for anything but rejoicing.

The concert was soon concluded; alert and with the whole frame illuminated in success, I replaced my violin in its case and assisted in the removal of chairs against the wall; when a voice called my name — not Augustus, but Octavian.

I turned, startled, fearful of whom I might see.

There stood no stern academician — but my former music-master — Mr. 13-04, as I had most familiarly known him — who rushed forward and seized my hands, throwing my perceptions into confusion; so I scarce was sensible of what he meant when he said, “Octavian — I am so sorry . . .”

I stammered and could not speak, and it was some moments before he established that he had heard of my mother’s passing from one of the Gitneys’ servants, who had returned to the city in one of the periods of laxity in the siege to claim some furniture and clothing. Mr. 13-04 condoled with me on the death, so he said, of that blessed being, so accomplished in her conversation, so graceful in her carriage, and so charming in her person — once again, it taking me moments to recognize that he spake still of my mother — whom I saw before me as last she appeared, her skin brittle with sores, her tongue inanimate, her animal spirits in constant irritation from the depredations of the pox. I did not know whether I could bear to speak to one who would advert to her.

Mr. 13-04 had a thousand questions upon my well-being and the well-being of those of the College of Lucidity. I did not fully disclose my situation, but did say that Dr. Trefusis was in the city, too, and recovering from a long fever. This intelligence of Dr. Trefusis’s presence and health filled Mr. 13-04 with delight, he harboring the warmest of regards for my tutor.

“Octavian —”

“Augustus, sir,” said I.

He looked at me askance; then continued, “You must come to my apartments. I have in my possession something which, I trust, you will find interesting.”

I inquired politely as to what it might be.

“Music,” said he, “which I transcribed from the songs of your mother’s country.”

I was startled at this revelation. Though of course, I had known since childhood, as I have said, that in my infancy, she had assented to perform songs for his transcription —

But that they still existed — that I might play, myself, the music she recalled from her childhood —

The thought made me run almost frantic with suspense.

I heard her saying to me, in the candlelit darkness of my bedchamber, “‘By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept. . . . On the willows there, we hung up our harps. . . . How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land?’”

She laid her hand upon me.

“Mr. 13-04,” I said, “I cannot disguise my anxiousness to see these melodies. It is in the highest degree —”

“Come with me,” said he, plucking me by the coat. “Since I heard of her death, I have spent weeks staring at them.”

I finished my work for Mr. Turner with all the speed I could, aiding in the extinguishing of candles and the stowing of chairs. When I had completed my tasks, Mr. 13-04 and I set out for his rooms.

He lived some ways away, in the shambles of Mount Whoredom on the northwestern side of the city, an address somewhat inauspicious, it being a quarter of the city where one did not lightly walk alone at night; but I would have faced footpads and banditti with alacrity, armed only with my fists, to see the proffered documents; and so I repaired with him, though the dusk had long since fallen.

We went by way of Cambridge Street, and passed even the Novanglian College of Lucidity; pausing, both, for a moment to regard it, where we had spent so many hours of my childhood together. Now ’twas lit with torches, and sentries stood outside the front doors, jealously protecting the officers who slept within.

As we walked onwards, Mr. 13-04 interrogated me about the denizens of the College and how they had fared in the few years since last he had been a visitor. His hostility to Mr. Sharpe, whose hatred of music still stung him, could not but put me more at my ease; though we should attempt generosity to all, even those who wrong us, recalling the Creator’s hand in their construction, I could not bring myself to do other than despise this man who had so soured the headwaters of all that sweetened our household.

As we walked up the steep streets of Mount Whoredom, the crabbed houses hanging over the street, their walls uneven, the dirt of the road thick with rubbish, I recounted in as few words as I could my mother’s final days and my escape.

His rooms were at the top of a boarding-house near an expansive puddle, which we skirted without entire success. We ascended the stairs, my pulse quickening with anticipation, and he unlocked his door.

He entered almost on tiptoe, suggesting to me that someone else was in the set of chambers, and, within, lit a tallow candle which shed but a very feeble light. It appeared that he had two rooms, a sitting-room and another, the door to which was closed; he slept on a pallet, clearly, in the sitting-room, next to his spinet.

He lifted the candle to the wall, and there I saw that he had tacked sheets of music all over the plaster, high and low, affixing other pages with paste. They were written in his hand — the which I recognized from our lessons — and, without close examination, I saw that they were the songs in question, notes scribbled hastily as my mother had sung, words written in some language unknown both to him and to me.

“Octavian,” he whispered, clutching my shoulder, his eyes heavy with impendant tears, “I have wished for so long to show these to you.” I could barely see the papers’ brown scrawl, so precious as it was, in the faint light.

“She was perhaps fourteen when she sang them for me,” he said, his voice unsteady. “Her voice was like a child’s. In her eyes . . . I saw reflections . . .”

He held the candle close to the music again. “Hum it,” he said. “I have been waiting so long. Hum the tunes.”

I did not stop to think why he did not hum the music himself; I merely leaned close and picked out a few notes, murmuring them.

“Quietly,” cautioned Mr. 13-04.

I had only murmured a few more when the inner door opened, and a Redcoat in his shirt, with his jacket hung about his shoulders, demanded, “We’re sleeping.”

The music-master explained to me, “My landlord has let out my room to soldiers.”

“Who rise at dawn,” said the soldier. “With the first light.”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” said the music-master. “We did not wish to disturb your tranquility.”

“He’s humming,” said the soldier.

“He is singing me the songs his mother sang.”

“He the one, then?” said the soldier. “With the mother?”

“Indeed,” said the music-master.

The soldier did not return to his bed, but swore lazily and sat down with his back against the doorframe, observing us.

I turned back to the music. While the soldier and Mr. 13-04 conversed quietly of small things — cheese eaten which had to be replaced — I surveyed the pieces. Most were songs for one voice — though perhaps in their native land, they would have been sung by many. In a few, she had indicated some harmony, and in one, counterpoint. I could not thank Providence sufficiently for the trove here bestowed upon me. I sang a few more notes, giddy with anticipation, until I came upon a smudged symbol which I did not recognize.

I turned to the music-master. “What is this, sir?” I asked him.

He looked at me with expectation. “Yes?” said he.

“I cannot descry all of your marks,” I explained.

He looked at me with some confusion; he examined the wall. “That,” he said, “yes, that symbol. She made, do you recall, a scratched noise — a noise in her throat?”

I regarded him with bewilderment.

“It brought the note . . .” He did not finish.

I awaited explanation.

“You recall,” he urged.

Ignorant of his meaning, I hesitated.

“This is why my desire has been so great for you to see these sheets,” he said. “You shall be able to interpret for me all of these marks . . . recalling the songs.” He smiled at me; and it was a smile of slowly growing desperation. “I could not record what she sang; there was no notation for it, all the peculiar . . .” He moved his hand fishily in the air, unable to describe what he imagined. “It was not . . . there were not symbols enough to depict what she sang. The tuning was too alien in its accents . . . so deliciously strange . . . and there was no key as I could understand it to many of the songs. So I made marks . . . but later . . . I could not recall what they signified. There were so many marks . . . ambiguously drawn. . . . And later, when I asked her, she would deny all knowledge of the music. . . . So you, knowing the songs, may tell me . . . what . . .”

He ceased speaking.

“She never,” I said, and hesitated. “Sir, she never sang these songs to me, in my memory. I was an infant. You are the only one who heard them.”

Stricken, he took in the pages on the wall, their cryptic lines drawn to depict oscillations in the voice, cries and dips lost to both of us. “You must recall,” he demanded. “Perhaps by your bedside? She . . . ?”

“Sirs,” came a cry from the other room, “we are sleeping.”

“They’re sleeping,” said the soldier crouched by the door.

Ardently, I believed that could I but read these tunes, I would hear her again. Her voice should speak, and I have proof of lullaby and tenderness.

With fervent desperation, I scanned them, seeking one firm melody; only too sensible that my mother’s voice inhered in these pieces, strung between these notes, frayed to the point of snapping — could I only find the line of it, and grasp it — her mouth, her throat, her lungs, her teeth, her tongue — all of these frozen in concert in the crude lines before me —

Vainly, I cast my eye over the sheets; but like the first, I saw that they were rife with equivocations and parentheses, notes that Mr. 13-04 had made in ignorance, attempting to capture turns of melody and vocal tricks that could not be rendered. One song was written clearly in harmony, runs of thirds; but she had also beat a rhythm which he had assayed to reproduce, and this was nothing but scratchings and clumsy scribblings, revisions he had not ever returned to review and apply methodically. Many were scarcely legible. The words of none had been set down with care.

One of the soldiers called, “Did you tell the fiddler, ’twas us nimmed his cheese?”

“Aye,” said the soldier leaning against the door, and to Mr. 13-04: “We’ll buy one for you new.”

From the dark, a voice explained, “We et rarebit.”

With frantic eye, I sought my cradle-songs, the songs of comfort she might sing for me again, dandling me in her arms. My gaze leaped from bleary note to blotted slur, none yielding music, none quitting me of clamor.

“Does any of you have a powder tester?” asked one of the soldiers. “I’ll need one tomorrow in the forenoon.”

“Hughes has one. The handle’s off, though. Almost. So wear a mitt.”

I could not apply myself fully with their speaking; I lifted my hands to my ears and pressed my fingers in.

“Does any of you have a mitt?” the soldier asked.

I could not block their chatter; all awake, now, as they were (“Robbins burnt his thumb purple on Hughes’s gadget”); and sobbing once, I pressed my hands to the paper — seeking in these scraps, some memory that might have snagged — as strung therein were all the secrets of my childhood erased, that life I might have lived: ceremonies and dances, what women wailed for in the marketplace, the sweep of ancient grasses; and I fancied that if they would simply let me sing, I would hear the voices of my forebears; I would hear their tales, which they wished still to tell me; I would smell the hides of beasts of burden, twitching from the flies; taste the savors of my family’s confections; and I might see the lips of those who had sung these songs to my mother in her infancy: a grandfather, his hair an unimagined white; a grandmother, sitting in a grove and laughing. I considered, scarcely daring to entertain the prospect, a father might hold me swaddled in his arms, and raise me to his sister’s lips.

“‘If I forget thee,’” she had hissed to her invisible homeland, “‘if I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not my nation to my chief joy. . . .’”

But when I looked upon the music, it did not sing for me; my tongue did not move; for it was not my past. It signified nothing. These tunes were silent. I knew only the graces and mordents of Europe.

“It is all lost,” said Mr. 13-04. “Is it not?”

I turned to him. “Most,” I said. And added, at long last, “Sir.”

“I shall make you copies.”

I nodded; knowing that the copies would be even further from these scribbled originals which hung upon the wall.

The soldiers, sensible, perhaps, of my anguish, did not speak.

“I shall walk you to your dwelling,” said Mr. 13-04.

“You needn’t, sir,” said I, desiring no conversation. “I do not wish to trouble you.”

“It is after the curfew. A Negro will be detained by the watch,” he said.

He spake the truth. I thanked him and bowed my assent. We took our leave of the soldiers, who with some warmth indicated the pleasure they had in making my acquaintance, so much having been recounted about myself and my mother in previous months.

Mr. 13-04 and I made our way through the darksome streets. At one moment he could not restrain himself from declaring, “I loved her”; which news could not but inspire weariness and indifference.

He never wrote out fair copies of these jottings for me, fugitive as were the marks and impossible of interpretation. I never returned to the rooms on Mount Whoredom — or did walk by the door, one afternoon, but could not bring myself to knock and be once again confronted by the vaguaries of those imperfect staves, those ballads without text.

I was sensible even that night of the folly of my expectations — that notes on a page might restore her voice to me. What is the voice, I meditated, but an expulsion of air, a few vapors scented with the curdled decoctions of the stomach, vegetables mulching and pulverized beef? What is a song, but an instant evaporation?

It is as futile to seek the past there as in a refuse of dishes encircling a table, each with its own crust of gravy, its own tale of bone and crackling. One might as well weep over Mrs. Platt’s dry orts, thinking they might restore what was lost, what had been swallowed, all that had, in times of feasting, been cut away and devoured.