Scan McMullen - The Colours of the Masters

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The Colours of the Masters

by Sean McMullen

other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *

I first heard Chopin perform the night that I had just been ordered to cancel my flight back to New

York, along with the well earned vacation that was to have followed it. Paris was reminding me how

much I disliked the place by treating me to a soaking, windswept drizzle as a taxi carried me to an

address near the Parc Monceau. For the previous month I had been supervising the installation of some

computerised sound processing equipment in our company's local office, and I was tired, lonely, and

aching to be in a country where most of the people willingly spoke English.

It was still early in the evening as the cab pulled into the drive of a mansion that probably dated from

the early Nineteenth Century. There was a long, open path from the driveway to the porch of the house:

the rain intensified at that very moment. I paid the fare, took my bags and trudged down the gravel path,

by now so despondent that I did not bother to avoid the puddles. Gerry Searle, my immediate superior in

the company, met me at the door.

"I had a few nasty things to say to you until a minute ago, Gerry," I said as he took my dripping coat,

"but just having someone to talk to in English makes me forgive you for quite a lot."

"Forgive me? For what?" There was no surprise in his voice.

"For giving me the Paris installation, instead of the one in Rome. You speak French, but my second

language is Italian. My parents still live in Rome, I could have saved the company hotel bills. And did you

know about the local autonomy dispute that's going on in the Paris office? The staff have boycotted

speaking English and I spoke only twenty words of French until a month ago."

"Rico, I know how the situation is here, but I just had to get you to take over," he said, trying seem

earnest but unable to face me. "An important deal came up, a potential recording contract worth

hundreds of millions. That's also why I asked you to delay your flight back to the States."

"Ordered me to delay my flight back. And why me? I'm one of the back room boys. The only time

that I ever set eyes on the musicians we record is when they appear on television."

I sat down heavily on a teak and velvet parlour stool and wiped my face with a handkerchief. A

servant appeared from behind me, spoke to Gerry briefly, then carried my bags off. A servant. The

furnishings also confirmed that this was not only the house of someone rich, but someone whose family

had been rich for a long time. Very nice, but what would they want with a computer analyst specialising in

digital sound software?

"The recording has to be done in this house, Rico," Gerry explained as he beckoned me to follow him.

"The musicians are very famous, but..."

"But?" I asked, making no attempt to get up.

"They are dead. The people who own this house are distant relations of mine, and when I visited them

they-- "

"They probably held a seance and conjured up Mozart's ghost, and you just happened to have a

recording contract in your pocket!" I shouted, standing up and snatching my coat from the rack. "Send

my bags after me. Company business, like hell! Bunch of whackos. Try to stop me and I'll go to another

outfit-- I've had offers."

"Please, Rico, I can explain."

"Good. Phone me in New York, but try to get the time zones right or you'll get my answering

machine."

I turned to the door, only to be confronted by a pair of elderly identical twins. The women would have

been in their early seventies, and were dressed in smart grey suits and frilly white blouses.

"We have mechanical recordings of Frederic Chopin playing his own piano works," said the one on

the right in confident English.

"We are not, ah, whackos," said the other, her voice and accent identical. "I am Claudine Vaud, and

this is my sister Charlotte."

"We are very respectable. We do not even know to hold a seance," Charlotte stated indignantly.

I was taken aback. "Edison got the prototype of his phonograph working in 1877," I replied. "Chopin

died thirty years before that."

"Twenty-eight years," Charlotte smugly corrected me.

"But an ancestor of ours invented a way to record sound-- except that she could not play it back,"

continued Claudette.

"But she could play it back as colours-- we think."

"But Gerald has a way to change light back into sound, except that he is having trouble analysing his

digital signal."

"No, no, he was digitising his analog signal."

"You don't even know what an analog signal is-- "

"Ladies, please!" Gerry interrupted them. "Mr. Tosti is very tired, and has probably not had dinner.

Could you tell the maid to prepare another place at the table, and we can explain the problem to him as

we eat."

"All right, but you were not explaining it very well just now," said Charlotte as they left.

Gerry took me to the living room, where a coal fire was burning. The place was filled with Eighteenth

and Nineteenth Century furniture, all tasteful, expensive and well maintained.

"Tang Dynasty," said Gerry as I examined a vase on the mantelpiece. "Everything in this house is

genuine, Rico, including the music. The family goes back to the old aristocracy."

"So you have a bit of blue blood yourself?"

"Oh no. The family connection comes from Katherine Searle, who arrived from the U.S. in the 1820's

and later married the heir. My own branch of the family is descended from her brother, who stayed in

Boston and ran a factory."

He pointed to a row of portraits on the wall to my left.

"That one on the end is Hiram Searle. He was born in Boston in 1765, and is responsible for the basic

principle of the sound recording machine that you are about to see."

The artist had obviously taken some trouble to clean up his subject, but the dreamy, slightly scruffy

appearance of the inventor showed through nevertheless.

"He was a great inventor, but had little business sense. Fortunately his wife was as sharp as a tack

where money was concerned, and the family business did very well. When Katherine, the eldest

daughter, showed musical talent she was sent to Europe to get a better education. That's her, in the next

painting."

Katherine Searle was a stunner, with black curly hair cascading down past her shoulders, a pale, thin

face, and big dark eyes. She was seated at the keyboard of a forte-piano, and was half turned to face the

artist.

"She used to write long letters home, and sent a lot of the latest sheet music. That was probably where

the big family scandal started, because apart from being a good engineer, Hiram fancied himself as a

musician too. Our old family diaries describe how he would play the latest keyboard music that Katherine

had enclosed while his wife read the letters aloud to the rest of the family.

"In 1825 his wife died. His son was old enough to run the factory by then, but he could not control

Hiram's obsession with Beethoven. He practically worshiped the man and his music, said that he

embodied the spirit of the new century."

"In a way he did."

"Maybe, but anyway Katherine had a lot of contacts in the musical world by then, and wrote home

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