A Certain Music

• About the Author
  
• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Epigraphs
  
• Dedication
  
• PART 1 The Man in the Woods
  
  • Chapter One
    
  • Chapter Two
    
  • Chapter Three
    
  • Chapter Four
    
  • Chapter Five
    
  • Chapter Six
    
  • Chapter Seven
    
  • Chapter Eight
    
  • Chapter Nine
    
  • Chapter Ten
    
  • Chapter Eleven
    
  • Chapter Twelve
    
  • Chapter Thirteen
    
  • Chapter Fourteen
    
  • Chapter Fifteen
    
  • Chapter Sixteen
    
  • Chapter Seventeen
    
  • Chapter Eighteen
    
  • Chapter Nineteen
    
  • Chapter Twenty
    
  • Chapter Twenty-one
    
  • Chapter Twenty-two
    
  • Chapter Twenty-three
    
  • Chapter Twenty-four
    
  • Chapter Twenty-Five
    
  • Chapter Twenty-six
    
  • Chapter Twenty-seven
    
  • Chapter Twenty-eight
    
• PART 2 The Worker on the Factory Floor
  
  • Chapter One
    
  • Chapter Two
    
  • Chapter Three
    
  • Chapter Four
    
  • Chapter Five
    
  • Chapter Six
    

C
ELESTE
W
ALTERS
is the author of playscripts for children
and adults, novels and picture story books for young readers,
texts on developmental drama and the writing of eulogies,
and three books of whimsical verse for all ages. She has also
written five highly acclaimed novels for young adults. Celeste
has been a teacher, an art gallery director, a children's theatre
producer and a university lecturer. Currently she divides her
time between Melbourne and country New South Wales where
she writes, cares for newborns and entertains groups at the
University of the Third Age.

A
NNE
S
PUDVILAS
is a multi-award-winning illustrator of
children's books and an established portrait painter who also
works as a courtroom artist for the Melbourne media. Her
first picture book,
The Race
, was awarded the Crichton Award
for Illustration and Children's Book Council of Australia
(CBCA) Honour Book. In 2000 she won CBCA Picture
Book of the Year for
Jenny Angel
, and her latest picture book,
The Peasant Prince
, has received the NSW and Queensland
Premiers' Literary Awards, the Australian Book Industry Award
and CBCA Honour Book. Anne lives and works in Melbourne.

Celeste Walters
illustrated by
Anne Spudvilas

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the
Australian Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

A Certain Music
ePub ISBN 9781864714173
Kindle ISBN 9781864716443

Original Print Edition

A Woolshed Press book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au

First published by Woolshed Press in 2009

Text copyright © Celeste Walters 2009
Artwork copyright © Anne Spudvilas 2009

The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted.

Woolshed Press is a trademark of Random House Australia Pty Ltd. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
www.randomhouse.com.au/offices
.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

Author: Walters, Celeste
Title: A certain music / Celeste Walters; illustrator, Anne Spudvilas

ISBN: 9781741663334

Target Audience: For children
Other Authors/Contributors: Spudvilas, Anne, 1951–
Dewey Number: A823.3

Cover and internal design and typesetting by Sandra Nobes, Toucan Design
Printed and bound by Griffin Press, South Australia

The child isn't like other children. Whether this is because of some intellectual or emotional difference, nobody knows. Of course, one day they will. One day they will give the condition a label, a particular code mark. But this is 1823. In consequence, after much muttering and musing and shaking of heads, she is simply pronounced odd.

Neither do they know – how can they – that this child will live for all time in every town and city of every country in the world where one might hear a certain music.

This is her story. A story that begins in the Vienna Woods.

for Rena

She was a child of nine who knew no friend. An all-watching child who viewed the play of others in the square; who read in their secret whispering descriptions of herself. She knew the reason for this. She couldn't follow the rules. She misinterpreted signals. Worse, she didn't know how to play. Everything she did was either too much or not enough. Whatever she did, it was wrong.

So she listened for other whispering and found it in the water that bubbled from the fountain, in the rustle of needles in the conifer beyond her window, in the distant call of the early morning vendors as they set up their stalls in the market place. And she would wander further from the small cottage by the granary, to where the wind roams free and where the trees grow tall and tight together. And it was there that she came upon a tree whose ladder-like branches rose up and up.

The tree stood in the Vienna Woods, together with the maples and the elms, the beeches and the oaks. Now, settled high in a fork of its branches, she could hear the whispering of early morning, see the carts trundling into the marketplace, the raggedy boys with hoops scooting behind their turning wheels, trace with a finger the distant ruins of Rauhenstein still cloaked in mist; follow the mayor bustling his way to the town hall as the clock struck the hour.

Soon sunlight would streak from the heavens, like the picture in her
Stories from the Bible
. With sunlight would come people, walking and talking and laughing, and calling each other by name. The morning would become a different colour and shape, and mask the sounds of silence.

Then on one particular day something broke the silence. The child looked left and right, and behind her. The sound was sharp, made, perhaps, by some animal. But what? And a strange looking creature had appeared out of nowhere and was striding along a path. It was a man. His head was down as though he was searching the ground for something; his hands were behind his back. The child eased into the fork of the tree. The man veered off the path and took another leading in her direction. She eased further into the fork. Now she could see him clearly. The man was small and rugged. His hair was the colour of the maple leaf in autumn and it grew wildly from his head in a tangle of curls. His clothes were shabby, his boots muddy, and around his neck he wore a rag. His unfastened frockcoat, long and blue in colour, billowed behind him as he walked. He reminded her of the stunted waterbirds with the blue-black wings that roam the lake. Suddenly he stopped and lifted his head. The man's face was red, his skin pock-marked. He stood beneath her tree and stared into the sky. Still staring, he started to move his hand up and down, then brought it to his lips and began to tap with one finger ...

In the fork of the tree the child's foot was stuck. As she tried to wrench it free, a branch cracked. The man turned. He didn't seem to register seeing a child in a tree. It was as though he was looking at her but through her to something else, something deep and far away. Now he was scrabbling in his pockets. The child watched as he took out a thick carpenter's pencil and a notebook and started filling the page with strange markings. From time to time he'd stop, move his hand backwards and forwards across his chest. And scribble on.

Now from this way and that came hurrying and scurrying and laughing and calling. As a giggling trio pounded across his path, the man let out an explosion of words, raw and terrible ...

There was only one the watcher in the tree could hear clearly as, his frockcoat ballooning behind him, he raged back in the direction from which he had come.

The word
cruel.

In narrow streets by the granary are the cottages where the poor people live. Those who work in factories, who thresh the grain, or those who, for a few Kreutzers, tinkle away on their barrel organs or perform conjuring tricks in the square.

In one such dwelling the child swished a broom over a stone floor. From time to time she'd hear the clip-clop of hooves and go to the window, and watch the cart taking grain to the granary creak up the hill. She put away the broom, pulled up the coverlet on her trundle bed, patted it straight, propped her doll against the pillow, and with a flick of her sleeve, brushed dust from the small chest of drawers that held her clothes. On the bench in the kitchen was a note. The child read, 'Collect eggs from Frau Weiss.' She stood on a box, reached to the mantel and took money from a jar. With the Kreutzers in the pocket of her pinafore, she clipped the door behind her, and set out.

Even before she reached the end of the street she could hear the rustic tumult of the market. Her pace quickened. Her wariness also. If her mother were a home mother and not a working one she would watch where her child wandered and frown and shake her finger and warn her of the charlatans and swindlers who lurked at every street corner.

She hugged the coins in her pinafore tighter. But the colours and sounds of the market were so rich and wonderful no imagining was needed to conjure them up.

She ran towards it, thinking if she were lucky a puppet show would be on in one of the caravans parked near the column.

In the square she wandered from one excitement to the next, pausing at a man in yellow with performing dogs who sat and begged and shook hands and bowed to much applause. Further along a man and a woman waltzed together to a tune played on a squeaky fiddle. And the sound joined with other sounds; with the calling of hawkers with their trays of trinkets and of vendors selling sausage and cheeses and fruit.

And as she circled, the child was aware that others were circling too, were calling her name, were jumping out from behind things to mimic her lisp.

'Yeth yeth yeth,' they crowed.

And she smiled, hoping they would smile. But they never did.

She hurried towards Frau Weiss and the eggs.

'And one extra for you,' the woman said.

'Danke, Frau Weiss,' the child replied and handed over the money.

'The child's turning into a street urchin,' remarked a woman on the next stall who sold cheese.

'What can the mother do?' hissed back the other. 'He drinks ... '

'Poor wretch.'

'Useless bum ... Eggs! Fresh eggs! Eggs laid today!'

The child's ears were sharp. She didn't wait for the next puppet show but hurried away, leaping, as she went, out of the path of a coach being driven at high speed. On past the workhouse and along the darkening network of narrow streets she ran, clutching the eggs in her pinafore with care. A man was moving along the street towards her. They both stopped in front of the small paling fence with the wooden gate.

'Eggs,' she said, opening her pinafore.

Her father smiled. He took her hand but his look didn't reach her eyes. Those who mocked her had the same look. That of a guilty thing ...