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Susan hadn’t been the first of the family to cross the pond and make it to America. That had been Lucy, and she hadn’t been willing to settle for Liverpool, New York. She’d gone to the big city itself, eager for something new and fresh and exciting. America, she was sure, would be that.
And something had told her, whispering as though in a dream, that it was where she was meant to be. She recognized that certainty as the same one that had brought her to Narnia three times – four, counting her very first trip, which so often blended into the great second adventure – and knew to listen to it. It had never led her wrong before.
So off she went, trusting that her siblings would trust her to know what she was about, and she settled in easily. New York City was a place made for valiant people, and she hadn’t been known as Queen Lucy the Valiant for nothing. Maybe she wouldn’t be a queen here, but she could still take the city by storm.
At least, that was her plan. It didn’t work out as well as she had hoped. Lucy was pretty and bright-eyed, but it turned out New York City was full of girls just like that, even some who could pull off an English accent. (Sometimes she was told their accents were better than hers.) It was the sort of city she could blend into, disappear in. If she had wanted to lose herself, there was no better way.
It probably seemed like she wanted to lose herself. Lucy Pevensie, picking up shifts at an automat, renting a cheap apartment that she strode through like a queen because if she skulked she knew someone would think she was weak and try to take advantage of that. She could drop her name, vanish into the shadows, be anyone else but the odd girl who had left this world for Narnia for a while.
Instead, she befriended the Norwegian family who lived the floor below her, the Omdahls, and picked up a few words in their language. She accompanied fellow waitresses to auditions and commiserated with them when it inevitably fell through. (And, on those few times when they got a juicy role, she celebrated.)
And, on her days off, she rented out a studio with a couple painters and worked on silly little projects. She was just tinkering, she told everyone. Just playing around, not so much inventing something as trying to make modern art. They were silly little sculptures, pretty things that could show up in a museum exhibit, if it were a particularly enterprising museum.
That was how Mr. Stark found her.
It was more accurate, really, to say that she found him. She went out to one of the exhibitions of his technology – Susan would probably scoff and say he was just showing off, but Lucy found his boyish excitement when he gave his presentations charming, and she hoped Peter and Edmund enjoyed her long, rambling descriptions of what she saw when she wrote them – and lingered longer than most people did. What he was making – what he was trying to make – was fascinating, even beautiful, but it never seemed to work out quite the way he hoped.
As far as she was concerned, that made them even more beautiful. No matter how often he failed, he kept trying.
Lucy was enchanted.
Most of the rest of the crowd had gathered around an automobile, his latest attempt at making a flying car. Lucy had to admit that it was flashy, but it didn’t interest her as much as another project tucked to the side of the hall. While everyone else was oohed and aahed over the car, Lucy made her way to what she could only describe as a player piano, though from the wires and instruments coming out of the back, she knew it wouldn’t be as simple as the one she had seen displayed back in England. The last time she had seen Mr. Stark, he was busily chatting to a young woman in a revealing dress, and he didn’t seem likely to appear at her elbow to answer her questions.
He wasn’t likely to take much notice of her, anyway. She was pretty, sure, but she didn’t know how to dress herself up the way Susan did. Gina Omdahl had done her makeup and lent her a gold dress, but both of those had been suited to the fairer girl. Lucy’s hair was a few shades darker, her skin a little ruddier. She looked like she was trying to play dress-up.
Luckily, that meant hardly anyone paid attention to her. No one even saw her duck past the velvet rope separating the piano from the rest of the room.
Lucy drifted around it, admiring the shine of the electric lights on the dark wood that made up the piano, and the brighter reflections on the brass and steel jutting out from it. It wasn’t traditionally beautiful, but there was wonder and fascination in the way they twisted together and reached outward. The more she looked, the more she realized that her first idea was wrong. It wasn’t a player piano at all. It was almost like a piano trying to grow a garden out of itself.
That probably wasn’t what Mr. Stark had intended. It was, however, what Lucy saw, and she was determined to find out more about it.
She didn’t touch the piano, not at first. She circled it, stepping lightly even in her borrowed shoes, until she had made a full circuit. The pipes put her in mind of an organ now, though without the organization of the one she had seen in St. Paul’s Cathedral years ago. They were twisted and tangled together, and there had to be some reason. She tilted her head to the side, pondering, trying to piece together the puzzle before her.
She was just beginning to think that she understood when a voice called, “Like what you see, Miss?”
Lucy’s head snapped up, and she stared, amazed, at Howard Stark. He was grinning at her as though she was exactly who he had wanted to see just then. For just a moment, her heart leapt, though she could not have said why. She wasn’t the sort of girl to fall over her feet for any man, especially not one at least fifteen years older than her.
She decided it must be alarm. That was the only rational explanation.
Howard Stark easily stepped over the rope and walked toward her. Lucy stood frozen for a few seconds, a mouse before a snake, before shaking that thought off. She was no mouse, and she doubted Mr. Stark had the subtlety to be a snake.
“I didn’t think I’d bother anyone if I were over here,” she said. “Everyone else seems to be interested in the car.”
“And you’re not,” Mr. Stark said. “That’s what interests me.” He walked forward casually, though there was a curious glint in his eyes, one that betrayed his excitement. “English?”
Lucy nodded.
“London?”
She nodded again. “But I was sent out to the country during the Blitz.”
“Of course.” Mr. Stark’s voice softened then, and he suddenly seemed to age. Lucy amended her guess of his age to twenty years older than her. He could be old enough to be her father, though it was hard to imagine him being anyone’s father. “You must have been just a kid then.”
Lucy never knew what to say to that. She wasn’t even sure why she had brought it up now. “It felt like a great adventure then,” she said. It had been, though she could hardly tell anyone else that. (Though if anyone would understand, she couldn’t help thinking it might be Mr. Stark.)
“And America’s your next big adventure.”
It was supposed to be. Maybe it would be. Answering that would make her feel like a child, though, and she couldn’t help feeling a little sensitive to that. None of the Pevensies had liked being treated like children after their return. Lucy, the youngest, had faced it the most often.
“So what’s this?” she asked, gesturing at the piano.
Mr. Stark’s grin was back, brilliant and self-assured and a little mocking, though Lucy felt sorely tempted to live up to its challenge. “What do you think?” he asked.
Lucy fought the urge to cross her arms. “It’s a piano,” she said.
Mr. Stark rolled his eyes. It was all Lucy could do not to grin. “What else? You’re an English gal. Don’t you know how they work?”
“We aren’t all brought up like Lizzie Bennet,” Lucy countered. “Some of us have to find other ways to show we’re accomplished ladies.” But she’d had some amount of musical training, both in England and in Narnia. The Narnian lessons had been more successful, because she’d felt the need to prove herself more than others had needed to see her prove her abilities. She had already saved the land; they would love her for that even if she were the least musical person in the world. In London, her teacher had made it seem like no one would care about her at all unless she could play Chopin flawlessly.
Lucy circled the piano cautiously, looking it over. It wasn’t set up to clearly show the inside, which was a shame, but she had seen the innards of a piano before. She’d taken one apart out of curiosity, and Edmund had bought her time to set everything aright before anyone could walk in on her.
What she could tell was that the tubes coming out of the piano were meant to augment the sound, and not in the ordinary way a pipe organ’s pipes would. They weren’t meant to amplify, but to outright change, to make them into something strange and otherworldly.
That word shouldn’t have popped into her mind so readily. It shouldn’t have made her fingers tingle the way they did.
Or perhaps it should have. Perhaps it was a sign.
Lucy extended her hands over the keys, then paused and looked up at Mr. Stark. “May I?”
He bowed his head and swept his arm through the air. “By all means.”
Lucy knew that her playing wouldn’t be anything special. It would be, at best, passable. Susan ought to be here, she thought. Susan had always been more willing to perform for others. If anything, she seemed to enjoy it, something Lucy still struggled with. It was hard enough to convince the people around her that she enjoyed wearing long dresses and tight shoes.
But she could play a little. Lucy took a breath, released it, and began to play some scales.
They emerged from the piano like a miracle.
The sound was enough to take Lucy’s breath away. She hadn’t heard music like this since Narnia. Even the scales sounded like something that belonged to another world, like something that could summon up another world. She almost expected to see a dryad poke her head out from behind a column, or to feel the breath of Aslan himself drifting over her. She thought that she might close her eyes and open them once more in Caer Paravel, her subjects all around her.
Lucy looked up at Mr. Stark. They were still in New York City, still in the exhibition hall. A few people had drifted over, drawn by the music, but most were still hobnobbing or clustered around the fancier inventions.
None of those interested Lucy any more, though. She knew what she had heard. She knew what she had done.
Did Mr. Stark?
She turned to him and was glad to see he looked as impressed as she felt. “Mr. Stark,” she said, “do you know what you have here?”
“I know what I could have,” he said, “if only I can find someone who has a sense for the fantastic to help me out with it.” He took a small step closer to her. “I think there’s a lot more to you than meets the eye, Miss…”
“Pevensie.” She stuck out her hand, just like an American. “I’m no concert pianist, but I think you’ve made magic, Mr. Stark. I want to make sure it stays magical.”
With a grin, Howard Stark took her hand and shook it. That was how Lucy wound up with her new – and far better – job.
Later on, he would introduce her to his English friend as well.