The Gambler and the Castle by Greg Blyth

The stiffness in the joints of his hands and fingers was beginning to ease, as was the pain. The movement helped. Instinct and muscle-memory had taken over now and his hands started to flow over the discoloured piano keys like roving waves in an organised storm.

With his eyes closed and his mind transfixed on the music, forcefully tangible, Ian rocked to the peaking crescendo of his latest work-in-progress. He breathed in deeply through his nose, taking in the dank smell of the master bedroom ? rising mostly from the thinning Persian rugs, the thick curtains that had probably never been washed, and the heavy wooden furniture. Ian didn?t mind the smell of the room. He thought of it less as a smell of age and more as a smell of history ? lives and stories of its previous residents since the great house was built in 1860 by Lord Rodney Illingworth of Horsham.

Ian wasn?t sure how the lineage wound its way down through the generations, but somehow this mansion and its lavish estate had recently been left to his wife Philippa. She insisted that until Ian?s composition was complete he should stay out in the country where he could be free of distractions. She would stay in their house in Chiswick Park until he was done. But what he was beginning to discover more and more, was that it was Philippa who inspired him. And her distracting company was what he missed most. Even now, as his fingers gambolled across their ebony and ivory playground, he wondered what Pipsie was doing, and what she would think of this composition so far.

Just as the music swelled into what was to be the climax of the piece, his hands came to a stop and the room fell silent. Now, for the first time today, he could hear the patter of rain against the large multi-paned window. He opened his eyes to the sheet music on the stand above the keys, pushed his spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose and flipped through the dog-eared pages. Months of reworking the music had resulted in the pages being filled with pencil markings and finger smudges. He turned to the seventh page.

It was blank. Formidably so. The climax had yet to be completed, and his stomach tightened as he considered the looming deadline that had been set by Edmond Cole, the director of the Sussex Symphony Orchestra. Ian Hawes had earned quite the reputation over the last thirty odd years within the ranks of the SSO, but in recent months he deemed his reputation to be far more fragile than he had once believed; the cynics seemed to outnumber his supporters and heavy-handed criticism laced the whispers at the black-tie dinners and soir