Chapter 13
Margaret had not meant to pry. She’d been wandering again, her restless mind crowded with accounts she barely understood, menus for the week’s dinners she’d approved with Mrs. Fowler’s patient help.
She still had lists of linen and household stores she was meant to inspect when she found the old piano room tucked behind a faded blue door.
Dust coated the corners, but the instrument itself sat proudly beneath a linen cloth, as if waiting to be remembered.
She lifted the cloth with careful fingers.
The keys, yellowed at the edges, felt cool under her touch.
A child’s memory rose up—her mother’s small parlor, a cracked hymn book, her own awkward lessons that never went anywhere at all.
She sat anyway. Her cat curled up on the rug at her feet, flicking her tail as if to approve. Margaret pressed one key, then another. The notes fell softly, hesitant but sweet enough to make her smile.
She began to pick out an old air, a simple tune she half-recalled. Her fingers stumbled, found the shape again, stumbled once more. Still, the sound warmed the corners of the empty room.
Margaret struck the wrong chord and grimaced. “Hopeless,” she muttered under her breath.
“You’re doing tolerably well,” he said. His voice softened the shadows, threaded through the drifting notes.
When she lifted her gaze, she caught him in the reflection of the old glass cabinet. Sebastian, leaning against the doorframe, arms folded, one brow lifted in quiet surprise.
She shot him a look from the corner of her eye. “Tolerably? High praise from His Grace.”
He tilted his head, pretending solemn thought. “Well, you could benefit from a tutor. Or stronger fingers. Or perhaps less muttering when you strike the wrong note.”
She did not look at him. She pretended to study the page she had propped up, though there were no notes written there at all, only a yellowing folio of old songs.
He pushed off the frame, crossing the small space in a few strides.
Without asking, he sat down beside her. The bench was narrow, so narrow that their knees brushed, and her skirts pressed along the line of his thigh.
He smelled of open air and faint leather polish, and it took all of her to keep from inhaling with her eyes closed.
He leaned in, just enough that she felt the warmth of him along her shoulder. “Go on, then,” he murmured, voice too near her ear. “Show me your half-broken song.”
Margaret’s fingers found the keys again, stumbling through the same melody. When she muttered under her breath as she fumbled for the next line, she felt him reach past, and his hand brushed hers. It was a steady, warm, fleeting touch that made her pulse leap.
“See, like I said, less muttering.” He chuckled.
Her elbow nudged his ribs before she could stop herself. “Hush, or I’ll leave you to play alone.”
His grin flashed like a reckless boy. “And rob me of my audience? Never.”
Margaret snorted, laughter rising warm in her chest. She hit another note, firm and true this time. “You’ll scare the poor cat if you mock me again.”
Sebastian glanced down at the cat curled smugly at their feet. “She looks unbothered. Unlike her mistress.”
He said after a beat, “I thought no one came in here anymore.”
Margaret let her hands rest on the keys, her shoulders a touch stiff under his stare. “Even broken things can make music,” she said lightly.
Margaret’s mouth curved in spite of herself. She pretended to study the page, fingers hovering above the keys. “Do you even play?”
He shifted closer. The warmth of his shoulder brushed hers, a touch too steady to be accidental. “Once. Long ago. My mother made me learn. Said it might toughen my edges.”
She raised a brow, daring. “Did it?”
His mouth twitched just for her. “Briefly. Until I discovered fencing was far more satisfying.”
She laughed outright this time, the sound startling the cat awake. “A piano or a sword, not much difference for a man like you.”
His voice dipped lower, velvet and dangerous. “Careful, Margaret. I might challenge you to a duel for that insult.”
She met his eyes then. It was too close and too bright for comfort. “You’d lose. I’d strike you with a single sharp note.”
Their knees bumped again as he leaned over, and before she could think better of it, he placed his hand over hers on the keys—warm, solid, steadying her tremble.
“Try it again,” he murmured, softer now. “I’ll play the lower notes. You take the melody.”
She swallowed, her pulse fluttering at her wrist where it brushed his cuff. “Together?”
“Together.”
They did. The melody rose, awkward but sweet. She stumbled; he caught the note. He stumbled; she filled it in. Once, her pinky brushed his thumb and lingered a heartbeat too long. She felt it, and so did he. Neither of them looked away until the cat nudged against their feet, meowing loudly.
They laughed. Together. A sound like sunlight in the dusty room. The melody grew clumsy but sweet, old and half-remembered but alive.
When she turned the page, her knuckle brushed his again—warm skin on warm skin, brief but sparking enough that she forgot her next note entirely.
When they reached the end of the line, he lifted his hand but did not pull back. “Not so hopeless after all,” he said, so close she felt his breath warm against her temple.
“Liar,” she whispered, breathless. “You flatter me, Your Grace.”
He leaned back just enough to see her face, but his smile was too soft to match his teasing voice. “I never flatter, Margaret. You ought to know that by now.”
Something in her chest turned over at the sound of her name in his mouth. She found the courage to nudge his shoulder lightly with hers. “Well. Perhaps we should try the violin next. Or the harp. Would you like to play the harp with me, Your Grace?”
He huffed a laugh, low and disbelieving. “I’d sooner be up another tree.”
Margaret’s laughter cracked through the room like birdsong. The cat flicked her tail and settled again at their feet, unimpressed by humans making music of themselves instead.
Sebastian leaned back a fraction, studying her with a grin. “You know, I didn’t expect this,” he said, voice dipping softer in the room. “To be here. To be… this. Away from London. Away from all the noise and people I pretend to like. I didn’t expect to enjoy myself at all.”
She turned to him, close enough she could see the faint shadow of stubble at his jaw and the tiny nick where he must have cut himself shaving.
“Well, I didn’t expect to be here either,” she said, her mouth curling at the edge. “I expected I’d be reading household ledgers until my eyes went crossed.”
He huffed a laugh. “Ah, but instead you’re rescuing stray cats and playing the piano with a dreadful man who can’t keep time.”
Margaret laughed too, a flutter spreading in her chest from his words. “I think you keep time very well, Your Grace.”
He looked at her then. His gaze lingered on her mouth a fraction too long.
“You’re a good friend, Margaret. A very good one.”
She went still, her fingers resting on the ivory, the faint vibration of the last note buzzing beneath her skin.
Something caught in her throat, sharp and sudden.
She swallowed against it, eyes fixed on the keys as though they might shift if she looked away.
When she finally did, it was only to angle her face from his, letting the space between them fill with the soft, dying echo before she found the next chord by touch alone.
“Well,” she said lightly, though it scraped her ribs raw, “you’re not so terrible yourself, Your Grace.”
He stood, smoothing a hand over his waistcoat as if to settle whatever had shifted inside him.
He hesitated just a moment, then reached down and brushed his knuckles, almost clumsily, against the back of her hand where it rested on the keys.
“You soften this house, Margaret,” he said, so quietly she almost wondered if she imagined it. “It’s good, I think. Don’t stop.”
She looked up at him, startled into stillness. For a heartbeat, he seemed about to say more; his mouth curved, then faltered, then caught itself in that crooked half-grin that had undone her so easily.
And then, as if it cost him nothing at all, he plucked one of the small white roses from the dusty vase perched on the old piano’s edge. He set it carefully on the keys beside her hand—a single bloom, absurdly fragile on the battered wood.
“For tomorrow’s encore,” he murmured, and the warmth in it hit deeper than it should have.
He stepped back before she could find any words at all; the door cracked open, then shut softly behind him.
Margaret sat very still, staring at the tiny white rose. The keys beneath it gleamed faintly where his fingers had brushed.
The cat stirred at her feet, tail flicking against the bench leg. Outside, a wind rattled the old window latch, the only other sound in the large room he’d left her in.
Margaret’s slippers whispered over the old hallway runner as she climbed the stairs, the tiny white rose pressed carefully between her fingers. Its faint sweetness clung to her wrist.
Friend. The word should have brought relief. It did, in some practical corner of her mind, the corner that kept tally of what they were meant to be. The part that said they were just convenient, temporary, polite strangers bound by a scandal neither had truly wanted.
But the rest of her… the rest of her turned the word over like a stone that wouldn’t warm in her palm.
A friend. She should be grateful for that.