Mr. Sharpe could not abide music; something in its vibrations agitated his animal spirits and contributed to his peevish disposition. When I practiced upon my violin, I did so in the top of the house, away from his apartments. In this secret music, I could tell those tales I was denied, and, there being no text, none could read whether I spake of docility or insubordination. I set myself tasks of description — thinking, I shall play this passage indicating the burning of bread, or, the collapse of a chimney, or, the stealing of evening upon the linen of a girl’s mob-cap in the alley as she whistles for her brother, or — This movement shall represent the march in triumph of a queen who sits upon a lily-throne.

Thus, when Mr. Sharpe announced his visit to the garret where I played, I was deeply troubled, foreseeing that even this species of expression might be withdrawn. I knew that he had no liking for the violin, which instrument he called “the fiddle”; and that he had no liking for any but country dances, maintaining that the music of the concert hall, the chamber, and the chapel indulged nervous sophistication and confounded natural simplicity.

He heard me play for several days in a row, interrupting sonatas by Locatelli and Leclair to request “Cup o’ Stingo” and “Cold and Raw.” On the last day, he was accompanied by a man I did not know. They traded some whispered intelligence as I played, and the music-master, seated at our dilapidated spinet, closed his eyes.

The purpose of these visits quickly became clear. Mr. Sharpe, having heard reports of my success in years previous at our evening soirées and at the opera evening for Lord Cheldthorpe, had arranged for me to play as soloist for a subscription concert; the understanding being that, were my efforts received with the plaudits of the assembled, I should continue to appear in solo turns throughout the rest of the season.

In this way, he explained, I should pay back the College of Lucidity for the kindness shown in feeding and clothing me, and they should recoup the expense of maintaining me.

The uneasiness precipitated by the mere thought of such public performance disordered my nerves to a great degree, and I felt fearful of most everything. Sleep was impossible; study, too, suffered. My silence, at this point, was total; any scene which tended toward scrutiny, demonstration, and display was deeply repugnant to my current spirits.

The violinist Signor Tartini, it is said, dreamed one night that Satan, the Father of Lies, had appeared to him in sleep, crouching on his highboy, and instructed him on the art of the violin, playing in the course of the lesson a melody of astounding seduction. Waking from the dream, Tartini attempted to recollect the fugitive motives of this diabolic sonata, but could not — and wrote instead, from those fragments, his sonata, infamous for its difficulty, called “The Devil’s Trill.” It was this which was slated on the program for my first appearance — so I was informed by Mr. Sharpe.

The difficulties of execution were not insuperable; but I feared that there should be no vigor in my rendering when my senses were clogged with terror at crowds and a crippling imagination of imminent failure. I imagined the silence of the hall when I struck the last chord; my bow wavering in silence; and me standing alone before the faces of a mob unimpressed by my exertions.

It eased me not a bit to discover I was being fit with a new suit of clothes for the concert. I stood with my arms spread wide and let the tailors measure me. They lay various stuffs against my skin to determine hue. The principal item in the outfit was a frock-coat of black silk with crimson trim. It did not help to hear my mother carp about the colors.

“He will look,” she said, “like a city parson at the racetrack. Someone who puts his money on horses named after the Patriarchs.”

“No commentary from the mother,” said Mr. Sharpe.

“It is barbaric to press the child into playing,” said my mother. “Is not his fear evident? He will run distracted. He cannot sleep.”

But Mr. Sharpe would listen to none of her importuning nor mine; and so the dreaded night approached.

From the steaming and corrosive blood of the Gorgon Medusa, most terrible to behold, she whose serpent-fringed visage incited petrifaction in all who gazed upon it, arose Pegasus, noblest of steeds, who alone could loft mortals to the heights of Mount Parnassus; in the same way, often that which most we fear births the resolve that spurs us on to altitudes we could not have achieved, had we continued walking on our customary paths.

On the evening of the concert, I was dressed with much fanfare. Bono stood behind me as I dressed. He laid his hands upon my shoulders, our two heads encompassed by the mirror; my ebon frock-coat glistening anew in the candlelight.

“Make them howl,” he said.

In the coach, my mother took my hand. Mr. Gitney and Mr. Sharpe sat across from us, clearly disordered by an excitation of nerves almost as extreme as my own.

“One word,” said Mr. Sharpe. “I have taken the liberty of informing the impresario that you acquired your astounding musical facility in one night through conversation with the Devil at a crossroads.”

I gaped at him.

“Pardon?” demanded my mother.

“Do nothing to disabuse the public of this notion.”

I said softly, “Sir, I labored for —”

“The common man likes a story,” declared Sharpe. “As much as your Puritan Boston admires labor, there are times when the price of a commodity may be increased by concealing honest hard work. Work is not seductive. We wish to give the people some magic.”

“This is outrageous,” said my mother, turning to the window.

“Hence the garb,” said Sharpe, betraying some pride. “The Devil is commonly supposed to be a black man in habilements of black, playing the fiddle.”

“Hence also,” said my mother, “the ‘Devil’s Trill’ sonata.”

“Precisely,” said Sharpe. “It is all one beautiful package.”

“This does,” said Mr. Gitney, “seem somewhat irregular, Dick.”

“It is my hope,” Mr. Sharpe said, “that it shall be weekly.”

It was a warm night, wet, and all glistened from a recent rain. The windows of the houses we passed were lit, and I could snatch glimpses of quiet lives — a mother clearing a table, or men gesticulating with their pipes. Three children, arrayed in size, stood on their stoop in the spring air, eating cakes.

“Remember beauty,” Mr. Sharpe instructed me. “Perhaps — know you what I like particularly? When notices in the newspapers describe a fiddler playing like fire coursed from his fingertips. Is that not inspiring? Your average concert enthusiast does not want to hear your melancholy perversities and pranks. Dazzle them, Octavian. Sweetness and light. Cheerful and gay. (A) Sweetness. (B) Light. See? This is the way to their hearts.”

The carriage made its way through the streets of the town.

Cheerful and gay. Sweetness and light. These words stood before me like a rebuke of everything I loved in music. I held them before me as we pulled up by Faneuil Hall. I took my teeth around them as I sat behind a column at the theater, waiting to step out and play. I meditated upon them when I made my way out before the orchestra, before the silent multitude of Boston’s finest citizens. I gazed before me, and, holding the bow aloft above the strings, envisioned Mr. Sharpe’s gray face, turned to the side, as he instructed me, “Remember beauty. Sweetness and light. Cheerful and gay”— and I began the sonata.

I played the first movement like the lolling of a suicide’s head in the tub, the corpse lukewarm, the roseate water lapping at the slackened lips. The melody was adorned in equal measure by the harshness of tone and a dismal, languorous mistuning with which I plagued all but the uneasy cadences. It is little marked upon how much skill must be exercised to produce the most piquant malformations.

The second movement, a more lively one as written by Signor Tartini, somewhat a dance, I played like the kicking of a turtle-headed spawn in a woman’s womb.

Dissatisfaction marked the few attentive faces I could discern in the gloom.

The third movement contained the much-dreaded trill, rapid and triple-stopped, which gave the piece its name. My tone was dry and hoarse, a febrile scratching; the trill itself I began as an insect rattle, almost inaudible — a single fly that sups on the hand; then the rattle grew — swarming — grotesque — the air ateem with carrion-flies, swooping, crawling, rejoicing in Beelzebub their Master.

I gave them their Devil’s Trill.

With a final, melancholic sawing, the piece was over.

The applause, perhaps, lacked something of the vigor, the generosity and celebratory ebullience it had in my previous performance. The clapping soon ended.

I felt a new bitterness in my heart; from whence, I knew not; and even as I retired to my seat, I assayed to address it through prayer to the most comfortable and equanimitous of Beings. Violinists from the orchestra shook my hand warmly, but my thoughts ran only to how I had, in anger, entertained the Serpent. I sent up hasty orisons, that the crabbed muscle within my breast be spread with balm by the hand divine, and so lose its present clogged flaccidity.

It little alleviated my disgust at the easy blasphemy I had entertained that the rest of the program consisted of excerpts from Handel’s oratorios, selected on the theme of liberty, programmed so that the assembled might reflect upon the need for action in the present confrontation with the representatives of Parliament. Succeeded by the choir’s acclamations and triumphal assurance, my grim melodic turns and bitterness showed themselves to be mere tantrums.

At the close of the program, Mr. Gitney greeted me warmly, telling me how deeply interesting had been my rendition; that it had chilled him quite pleasantly; my mother embraced me; and Mr. Sharpe took my arm, dug his fingers deeply into my flesh, and told me that I should sit back and recline in my chair while I could, for in a half an hour, my back would be too striped to admit of any respite whatsoever.

It is, however, with pleasure that I write — and at the time, with pleasure that I marked — that many in that convocation had found my rendition not without merit; though I cannot imagine that their compliments were not due in part to their pity for my obvious distress, rather than any sympathy for a performance distorted by pride and pique. Young men pressed my hand, vowing I had spoke more of the vile institution of slavery in my few moments of sonata than all the preachers in Boston in a year; I bowed my head and thanked them, though I little believed myself responsible for stirring their sympathies.

It was the memory of these compliments which I brought before my eyes and held, engraved so deep and with so metallic a sheen, when that night Mr. Sharpe whipped me with the rod: a hand extended, a smiling youth — and then a blow upon my back — a lady with her fan — and then another blow — a child peering with wonder — the visions standing out in negative intaglio as the birch-wand hit and smarted.

“Now,” said he, laying aside the rod, “prepare my hair.”

He sitting, I tucked my shirt into my breeches and, trembling, moved to assist him. I untied the silk ribbons in his hair, and released his queue from its bag. It uncoiled sluggishly upon his back, and, with a shudder, I lifted it with my fingers so it might be combed out.

“You are not so grand now,” he said. He did not face me.

My back stung; I prepared his hair for retiring.