Free Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge

sight, she found that the
tailor was studying her, a look of wry speculation in his large, serious brown eyes.
    ‘Recovering your strength after an illness, isn’t that right?’ he asked quietly.
    ‘Yes . . .’ Triss became aware that her massacre of the cake plate was not really in keeping with the picture of delicacy her father had painted. ‘I’ve lost
weight,’ she declared, defensively.
    ‘Cake is the very best medicine.’ He gave Triss a small, confidential smile. ‘I’m sure a doctor told me that once. Personally I
always
take cake for my
leg.’ He glanced ruefully at his slightly lame left leg. ‘And if one of our VIP guests decided to eat six plates’ worth or more, nobody will hear of it from me.’
    Triss stripped the newly arrived plates of their cargo in minutes, and another three plates were brought in almost immediately, loaded with muffins. Triss attacked them without hesitation. It
was such a relief not to have to hold back that she could have cried.
If I can eat enough here, without my family knowing, then perhaps I won’t need more than an ordinary dinner tonight.
I can seem normal.
    ‘Your leg – was that from the War?’ Triss did not exactly mean to ask the question, but it slipped out.
    ‘Yes,’ said Mr Grace calmly. ‘A little souvenir from France.’
    Triss thought of Sebastian. She wondered how life would have been if he had come home from the War, saddened and limping but still kind and clever. The thought gave her a surprising hollow pain
in her middle. She liked Mr Grace, she decided.
    As she was thinking this, she noticed for the first time that the tailor was wearing a black silk armband, almost camouflaged against his dark sleeve. It looked like a mourning band. Mr Grace
noticed the direction of her gaze.
    ‘Ah.’ He touched the silk with a fingertip. ‘Another old wound. Older than the War, in fact.’
    ‘That’s a long time.’ Triss had never heard of anybody wearing a mourning band for years.
    ‘Somebody I loved passed on because I put my faith in a doctor who told me not to worry,’ Mr Grace said quietly. ‘I wear it to remind myself that blind trust has
consequences.’ He stared through Triss for a second or two, then gave her a rueful smile. ‘Forgive me – and let me find an antidote to such a melancholy subject.’
    The tailor walked over to the gramophone and delicately lifted the needle so that the violins stopped mid-warble. He lifted out the record and tucked it back into its waiting sleeve, then pulled
out another disc and placed it on the turntable. When the needle was lowered on to the record it gave a short cough of static, as if clearing its throat, and then music began to play.
    But this was not proper music! All the instruments plunged in at once, as if they had been holding a party and somebody had opened a door on them. Where was the tune? It was in there somewhere,
but the instruments fought over it, tossed it between them, dropped it and trod on it, did something else, then picked it up again and flung it in the air just when you were least expecting it.
    There were trumpets and horns, but they didn’t sound solemn in the way they did when they boomed out against a background of silence to remind everyone of the dead. Instead they were noisy
and irrepressible as a farmyard – they whinnied and squawked and mooed and didn’t care what anyone thought. Sometimes they made harsh, cheeky noises like a blown raspberry, or high,
giddy squiggles of sound for the sheer joy of it.
    And nothing stopped and nobody breathed and there was no to-and-fro pat-a-cake pattern and instead it was a tangle of noise with threads winding through and over each other and it was exhausting
to listen to and it made her feel she could never be exhausted again.
    And Triss knew what it was. She had heard the wireless spit out the starting chords of such wild, blaring music, only to have her father tut and turn it off.
    This was jazz.
    ‘Do you like