'No Woman Can Judge a Violin,' He Laughed — She Held the Duke's Violin to the Candle and Saw a Copy

Two hundred candles in an assembly room built for dancing, eighty of the county in silk on gilt chairs, and a woman in plain red wool with glue in the creases of her fingers standing up in the front row before the music can begin. On the platform the most respected man in the county, the organist who has taught every lady of quality her scales, lowers his violin and laughs the warm easy laugh he keeps for a dog that has wandered in. Miss Harker mends fiddles for carters, he tells the room. Let us be patient with her. Leah Harker does not answer him. She bends to the black case at her feet, lifts out the violin that has lain eight years in the Duke's locked music gallery, takes a candle from the nearest branch, tips the instrument until its sound hole sits an inch from the flame, and puts her eye to the opening. The room watches her look. Then she lowers it and says four words that no luthier's daughter who owes four quarters' rent should be able to say to anyone. This is a copy. Two weeks earlier the Doctor had carried that violin down the lane to her leaking shop, paid her rent to varnish it, and told her, striking his silver tuning fork against his knuckle, not to open it. Her father opened one once. It cost him his name, his customers and, three years ago, his life. Now the Duke of Selwood is home from Naples with a letter he should never have sent, a blind dancing master upstairs has never been wrong about a note, a maid in the second row cannot meet anyone's eye, and the Doctor has gone to the magistrate first and sworn that the fraud is hers. There is a crack mended from the wrong side, a workbook with seven words in a dead woman's hand, a low note on the G string that only one violin in England can play, and a tall man standing at the wall by the second window who has promised to see that nobody turns her from the door. This is a dramatized fictional story. Names, places and events are fictional. #dukestories #regencyromance #audiostory