When violinist Sebastian Vane abandons a sold-out Royal Albert Hall performance thirty-eight bars in and walks off with a twenty-million-pound Stradivarius named Lady Aurelia, London society calls it a celebrity breakdown. Nell Ainsworth, ninth Duchess of Belward, calls it a plot hole. The only one who is not baffled is a German Shepherd named Roger, who is technically not supposed to be there.

Now Nell and Roger must follow a trail that began in Cremona in 1698, through a glittering Belgravia townhouse, a Bermondsey warehouse at midnight, an exclusive bridal salon, and a series of beautifully mannered letters arriving at Nell’s own front door—each one more polite, and less friendly, than the last—all the way to an Oxfordshire lunch party where the guest list includes armed men in the delphiniums.

Investigating alongside Nell, in his official capacity as her valet and his unofficial capacity as everything else, is Henry Templeton, lately reinstated to a certain building on the Thames. Between them stands an engagement scheduled for three years hence, an arrangement both parties agreed was sensible and neither believes for a minute. Also in residence is a stray named Claude, of no known breed and no visible courage, whose interests include doorbells, herring, and the contents of other people's handbags.

The second Nell Ainsworth mystery is a sparkling blend of golden-age puzzle and screwball romance: Agatha Christie’s plotting with Nora Ephron’s nerve, for readers who like their country-house intrigue with gunshots and Camorra bosses, their love stories conducted via surveillance log, and more dogs than anyone knows what to do with. Begin with The Roses of Ainsworth Manor, or start here—the door is almost always open.

The Vanishing Violinist is book two in the Nell Ainsworth mystery series by Nina Gates

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He held the mold. The violin was in it the way the saint is in the marble, which was a thing he said, and the men at the benches repeated, and Aurelia did not repeat, because she had seen him throw a mold in the fire once when the saint refused to come out, and she had concluded that the marble occasionally had its own opinions.

She was nineteen and had been in the workshop since she was seven, first sweeping shavings, then rubbing backs and bellies with tripoli until her arms ached, then the varnish room, because her hands were steady and her attention did not wander, and steadiness in the varnish room was worth more than genius anywhere else in the building. Nobody had decided this. It had happened the way water finds a level. Her uncle’s sons worked the benches and were named in the ledgers, and Aurelia worked wherever the work was, and was named at supper.

That year the whole shop knew the master was changing the form. He was past fifty and rich and could have made the same violin until he died, the violin the courts wanted, correct and slender and certain. Instead, he stood at the window for days with the old molds, a knife, and the face of a man doing arithmetic in church, and what came off his bench that spring was broader and bolder, an outline with its shoulders back.

It was almost right. Aurelia could see the almost from across the room, the way one hears a note lean flat before one can say why.

She was not asked. She was never asked; that was the arrangement, and the arrangement had lasted twelve years precisely because she understood it. So she waited for the white heat of the afternoon, when the men slept and the shop was empty, and she took up the tracing of the new form, and a piece of charcoal, and she moved the line.

Not much. At the waist, the master’s corners pinched inward too hard, a bite taken out of the curve on either side. She let her line turn a breath later and gave the waist back its curve. Below, a swell, two millimeters, perhaps three, where the lower bout wanted to return to itself and had been cut off. She did not think of it as correcting him. She thought of it as listening to the outline, which had been trying to say this all spring to a room of men.

Her uncle found the tracing in the morning. The shop went about its work with the industry of men near an explosion. He stood at the window with the paper for a long time. Aurelia rubbed a maple back with tripoli exactly as she had every day before.

“Who touched this?”

The shop fell silent.

“I did,” Aurelia said.

He looked at the line. He looked at her, at her hands specifically, the way the men of that trade looked at hands, reading the résumé. He looked back at the line.

“It will be weak in the waist,” he said. “The voice will spread.”

“The voice will open,” Aurelia said. “It is not the same thing.”

Somebody at a far bench put a chisel down carefully, in the way of a man securing his effects before a storm. Her uncle rolled the tracing, tucked it beneath his arm, and went up the stairs, and did not speak to her for a week.

Then he built the form to Aurelia’s line.

He never said so. The mold was made of poplar, drilled and shaped by his own hands, and if her charcoal was inside it the way the saint was inside the marble, the workshop’s official history was that the master had refined his thinking. The men said the new violins had a figure on them. One of them said, not softly enough, that the fiddle had turned out like the niece, too many curves and it argues, and her uncle, without looking up, told him to go and argue with the doorway from the far side of it, and that was the last word anyone said on the subject for three hundred years.

The varnish room was hers by then, how unclaimed territory belongs to whoever tends it. The recipes were her uncle’s, kept in his head and in a hand of abbreviations no spy could have profited from, and Aurelia ground and steeped and strained to his instruction. The instruction was the same every year because the varnish was correct and correctness does not improve.

What happened in August happened because of the heat.

She had set the resin to warm and been called down to the courtyard, a delivery, a dispute about wood that was not her dispute but required her attention. The sun moved, and the pot sat in it, and when she came back up the batch had gone past amber into something that had no name in the recipe. Deep and red, and wrong. She should have thrown it out. The instruction for a spoiled batch was the fire, and she stood with the pot in both hands over the flames but did not pour, because the light from the south window had come through the glass of it and landed on the bench. The color that landed was not the color in the pot. It moved. It went down and down, the way water goes down, and at the bottom of it there was more.

She brushed it onto a test panel of old maple, set the panel in the window, and said nothing.

Her uncle found it two days later because he found everything. He picked up the panel and turned it in the light, once, twice, and Aurelia watched him watch the color move. Flame and amber and something below the amber. His face did the arithmetic-in-church, and then he set the panel down and asked what was in it.

“The August batch,” she said. “It sat in the sun. I don’t know for how long. I don’t know the temperature it reached. I could not make it again with a year and both hands.”

He went on looking at the panel.

“It is a mistake,” she said, because someone was going to say it and she preferred her own voice.

“So is the shape of the earth,” her uncle said, “if you ask the old books.” And then, “The white violin. The one from the spring form. Bring her up.”

The one from the spring form. Her line, her waist, her argued lower bout, hanging among its brothers, and now her varnish going onto it coat by coat through the autumn, rubbed back, laid on again, the color climbing down into the spruce and maple the way the light had climbed down into the pot. He did the varnishing himself. He let no one else near her, and he wrote nothing down. When his eldest son asked after the formula for the ledger, the master said the batch was spoiled stock, used up, finished, and the ledger recorded nothing. It was true, the way the workshop’s history was true: correct in every word and empty at the center.

She was strung in December.

Aurelia was in the room. Later she would be careful with the memory, take it out seldom, the way one is careful with a thing that cannot be replaced. Her uncle tuned and settled the violin under his jaw, and drew the bow once across the open strings. The sound that came out of the wood was not the sound of the shop’s other children. Every maker’s ear in the building came up off its work. It was a voice. Grief and joy, both at once, in the same breath, and it should not have been possible from wood and gut and horsehair. The old man stood with his eyes shut in the December light, playing just the open strings, over and over, the way one says a name again to be sure of it.

Then he set her down on the bench, cut the label, and pasted it inside where the sound lives:

Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis. Faciebat Anno 1698.

Aurelia watched the label go in as it should. It was the shop, the ledger, the trade, the world. It was even, in most of the ways that could be written down, the truth. She went back to the varnish room and cleaned the brushes, which is what hands do while history is being labeled, and she did not cry, because the varnish room was dusty and she was steady.

He came up the stairs at dusk. He stood in the doorway of the varnish room with the violin in both his hands. He did not give her the violin because the violin was sold; it had been sold since spring. The violin was going to Venice to a man with a palazzo and a good ear. He stood there and held it, and looked at her over the scroll.

“They will want to call her something in Venice,” he said. “They name the good ones. The great ones.” He turned the violin in the lamplight, and the varnish changed, a flame, or liquid amber, and the movement below the amber. “They will not ask us.”

“No,” Aurelia said.

“So I have written to the buyer,” her uncle said, “regarding the care of the instrument. The humidity. The strings. And I have told him her name, so that there is no confusion in the matter, now or later.” He looked at the violin and not at her, because there are things that can only be said to the middleman. “She is called Aurelia. It is already done. It cannot be changed.”

He went down the stairs. She heard the case close, and the ordinary sounds of the shop at evening, and she stood in the varnish room among the brushes with her name going into the world without her, into the palazzos and the centuries, attached only to a private letter, explained in no ledger, a name that would outlive every record of why it was chosen. And she found it was, of all the arrangements of her life, the one she could keep.

The violin left for Venice in January, in the snow.

She lived to be old. That is not part of this story. But the men who owned the violin called Lady Aurelia, down all the years, in Venice and Paris and Vienna and London, would hold her up to the light to watch the color move, and every one of them would say the same thing, that the old man’s varnish was a miracle and its secret died with him. They were wrong in only one particular, which is a very good rate for provenance.

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