Free Her Name Is Rose by Christine Breen

you’ll be famous. I know this.” And with his help, year by year, she’d come though the exams and then won a gold medal for her performance of Beethoven’s Spring sonata. She was accepted to the Royal Academy of Music in London in the summer of ’08.
    When she was sixteen Andreas had advised it was time for her to get a really good violin. He’d suggested an Irish violin maker called Conor Flynn who’d studied to be a luthier in Cremona, Italy. Andreas explained that Conor’s mother was Italian and a musician herself and now played with the Irish Chamber Orchestra. Conor had learned to play the fiddle when he was young, Andreas said, but when he visited his grandparents’ home in Verona at a young age he got it into his head that he wanted to make his own violin. Andreas laughs when he tells the story. “Imagine, mein Roslein, a five-year-old boy wanting to make a violin instead of an airplane or a tractor of some other wooden toy! And now he is one of the best young violin makers in Ireland.”
    *   *   *
    Incense burned and two ginger cats were asleep in an open violin case on the window seat of Conor Flynn’s workshop inside an old Irish farmhouse in North Clare on the day Rose and her parents walked in. It was early January. Wood shavings were scattered across the floor. Hanging on the walls were silver molds and templates, and on a blue nylon line hanging, like strange washing, were several unfinished violins. Against the wall was a long, thick table with several ceramic jars holding tools and a docking station with an iPod playing. Rose recognized the end of a Haydn concerto, but the next piece was a surprise. It was “The Lonesome Touch” by Martin Hayes, the Irish fiddler from East Clare.
    â€œIt is all about the wood. Baltic spruce and Bosnian maple. The great Cremonese violin makers got their maple from the Acer pseudoplatanus, ” the blue-eyed luthier said. He was young, not even thirty. He was wearing a wooly cap with ear flaps, and from him came the scent of the sea and his sandy-colored hair was long and tied back. Rose watched wood dust drift from his fingers when he lifted his hand to point to the samples on the plastered wall. She looked to her mother, expecting a response, her mother knowing about plants and trees and such things, but Iris only nodded, eyes down, smiling faintly.
    â€œThe higher up the trees grow, the better; generally, the air is purer,” Conor continued, a little nervous, Rose thought. “Wood is highly absorbent.”
    â€œIs it?” Rose said. She knew it was, but she’d felt Conor’s eyes on her cheek and she needed to say something to break his stare. She turned to look around the studio and then out toward the sea. A dozen white heads of snowdrops bowed in their terra-cotta pots on the windowsill outside.
    â€œYeah, it is. Things penetrate the wood. Acid rain, things, you know.… Like when it dries out, toxins may remain”—Rose turned back to him—“in the wood, I mean. But it gives it … character .” His eyes held hers. “You know?”
    â€œYes,” she said.
    For a moment it had seemed as if there was only Rose and Conor and the violins in the room until Luke smiled and said, “Character is important.”
    Iris straightened the stencils on the worktable.
    â€œUsed to be that natural materials used in violin making were unpolluted,” Conor said. “They did stuff like cutting the trees down with the waning moon to make the best tonewood. So”—he waved his hand toward the display—“if you pick the cuts here, then I’ll adjust them (and here he looked at Luke) to the character of whatever wood you choose.” He bowed theatrically to Rose. She couldn’t stop herself smiling. Something inside her stirred.
    Iris, who’d watched the exchange unfurling between them, turned to Luke.