The tiny classroom was bitterly cold and overlooked a cloister that saw the midday sun for only an hour a day. Once part of the neighbouring church it had long been given over to secular projects for the benefit of the local community. On Mondays and Wednesdays an English girl occupied the room for a couple of hours in the vain hope of imparting a few words of her mother tongue to reluctant Italian teenagers, but today was Tuesday, martedì, and the turn of the music school. The maestro paced the corridor, wincing at the do-re-mi’s of elementary school children that escaped through the thin partition walls of the classrooms. He caught sight of himself in the glass door of the office and paused a second before knocking; he pouted a little and raised an eyebrow, seeing an uncanny resemblance to Clark Gable. Others were wont to see him – dressed in black and with a Spanish accent – as an ageing Zorro.

"Buona sera, maestro!" said the secretary. He was irritated and perplexed by the perpetual smirk she wore whenever she greeted him. "Nicoletta phoned…"

He raised the eyebrow again.

"…she’ll be here in about ten minutes."

"Grazie!" he snapped and left the office, closing the door just hard enough to make the secretary think he might have slammed it.

The maestro strode back to the music room to nurse a curious anxiety that he had been jilted. He had just closed the door behind him when there was a sudden sound from the corridor - erratic at first, like the first clicks of castanets, before the full heat of the flamenco, then more regular, more insistently rhythmic.

The maestro stayed fixed, with his fingers on the handle, listening. There were footsteps coming towards the door. And the steps were getting faster and nearer and louder and louder. Only the nervous anticipation of a cymbal crash after a rolling crescendo of kettledrums had ever made his heart beat like this!

Surely someone was dancing up the corridor!

The steps hesitated, faltered – it was her, he was certain.

"Nicoletta," he announced, opening the door wide.

A young woman with dark eyes and an unusually pale complexion stood before him.

She nodded, "Maestro…" and looked beyond him to the pianoforte in the corner of the room.

"I’ve kept you waiting," she said. She was stating a fact; there was no offer of explanation. She started unwinding a long, crimson scarf from around her neck and unbuttoning her ankle length coat. He moved to help her off with it, but she shooed him away.

"It’s freezing in here."

"I fear we are to suffer a little for our art, yes."

As he spoke, she looked at him directly, and quite unexpectedly, in the eyes in a way that made him painfully regret his last words. He raised the eyebrow involuntarily and she, to his alarm, mirrored his expression.

"Well?" she said, "where do we begin?"

She glanced again at the piano.

"Not there!" he said, rather too quickly and quite emphatically.

He coughed and began, "First we need to look a little at musical notation, the history of music, scales and…" he swallowed hard, "…and…" until his words had trickled away from him. She was pulling off her gloves; ordinary woollen gloves that revealed quite the most perfect hands he’d ever seen. He had been about to give her his introductory speech about how she would never, of course, reach the status of a true maestro, would never thrill packed theatres or transport audiences from their miserable, everyday existences into the realm of the sublime through music, as he, the maestro, had once done. Instead, he found himself with neither voice nor words. He knew that those were magical hands that needed no guidance from him – they would find for themselves the music hidden in the keys and coax out even the most complex of melodies. He walked to the piano and closed the lid. The sound of it thudding shut reverberated around the room.

"Wonderful acoustics," she said after a few seconds.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a tiny key and carefully locked the keyboard.