Chapter Seven
“Snow? It’s dust, I’m afraid,” Jenny remarked sourly, lingering on the threshold. “No one ever cleans in here.”
It was not the dust that made Emma think of snow, Maggie was certain. It was the white sheets shrouding every object, making pale drifts and mounds—crisp, gleaming, inviting as a slope after the first fall. Has she ever been sledging? Probably not.
The room was very bright; there were no curtains, and the tall windows poured in clean, steady light.
A proper morning room, Maggie thought. At home, they had had such a room, or so Papa styled it—a place, he said with pomp, where a lady wrote her letters before luncheon.
But morning rooms ought to be bright. Theirs had faced the setting sun and was gloomy from dawn to dusk.
When matters worsened and the few servants left, it was the first room shut up—not draped like this, but emptied. Every stick had been sold.
Clearing her throat, Maggie put this thought aside. “It must have been a beautiful room, once.”
Jenny offered no opinion. Emma scarcely heard her, darting about to lift the sheets and peer beneath: a large writing-desk; a long, low, empty bookcase; a padded sofa in fading green.
At the far side stood a small raised platform bearing a single shrouded shape.
Maggie needed no unveiling to guess what lay beneath.
She stepped onto the platform, smoothing her palm along the smooth, cool surface. Jenny coughed, uneasy. When Maggie glanced back she saw the nursemaid had at last entered the room but remained just within the door, all watchfulness and discomfort.
“We have seen enough,” Jenny said firmly. “We should go. Maggie, pray—”
Sensible counsel. The room was not large; there was little to explore.
Yet Maggie could not tear herself away. The wood beneath her fingers felt alive with polish and memory. She could not have said how she knew it, but this object had been the heart of the room.
Emma appeared at her side, peering at the odd shape. “What is it? Miss Winter?”
By way of answer, Maggie caught the corner of the sheet and whisked it back. Dust leapt and sparkled in the sun; she fancied she felt the motes settle in her hair and on her sleeves. Jenny sneezed.
“A pianoforte,” Maggie breathed. “And a handsome one.”
She pressed a key. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jenny flinch.
“It is in tune,” Maggie said, surprised. “After all these years.”
“His Grace has it tuned now and then,” Jenny replied, clearing her throat. “No one is permitted to play it—not that any of us could.”
“Can you play, Miss Winter?” Emma asked hopefully.
Maggie nodded, and the child’s face lit.
“Mama was very accomplished,” Emma confided, glowing with pride. “Uncle told me. She played at parties and all. He even said he would sing when she played.”
Maggie blinked. “His Grace sang?”
She could not picture it.
Emma nodded earnestly. “Uncle said Mama played every day before I was born, so I would grow up good at music. After I came, Papa held me by the pianoforte and Mama played.”
Maggie frowned. “But I heard nothing of a music-master for you.”
There was no answer to her unspoken question, which of course was an answer in itself.
So I see, Maggie thought grimly. Emma is not to learn.
She stepped forward, brushing her palm across the seat of the pianoforte stool. A cloud of dust surged away, clouding in the still air, and she sat down.
Jenny gave a low moan. “Maggie, don’t.”
“I am only sitting down, Jenny,” Maggie said mildly.
Emma stood close, eyes shining. “Can you play the pianoforte, Miss Winter?”
“Indeed, I can.”
The child considered this. “When you were at home, had you one of your own?”
Honesty was best. “Once I did,” Maggie said quietly. “No longer.”
“Why not?”
She should have foreseen the question. She felt Jenny’s gaze on her as she set her fingers upon the cool ivory and closed her eyes. “My papa sold it.”
Jenny gasped. Emma shrank a little, dismayed. “Sold it? Why?”
“We had need of the money and less need of a pianoforte,” Maggie answered briskly—and wished she had said nothing.
We had need of the money. How strange that a few simple words could encapsulate the horror of those particular weeks, with creditors banging at the door day and night, the grocer and butcher refusing credit, doors closing in their faces.
It was then that Maggie had realised that her ‘bosom friends’, all those ladies who had sworn that they adored her and would never forget her, did in fact have memories shorter than that of a fish.
She hadn’t chosen to sell the pianoforte; she had simply come home to find the instrument gone, a patch of dusty floor in the drawing room the only sign that it had ever been there. She’d wept, of course, but their creditors were silent for a while after that, and they were able to pay the grocer.
It was a sensible choice, really.
“Enough of that,” she said at last. “Shall I play something?”
“No,” hissed Jenny.
“Oh, yes—please,” Emma cried, clapping.
“What shall it be? I must warn you, I am not up in the latest fashionable songs.”
“That’s quite all right. Nor am I,” Emma said seriously. “Can you play Green Grow the Rushes?”
Maggie thought, then picked out a simple line with one hand. The tone was clear; the instrument answered sweetly.
“Like that?”
“Like that,” Emma breathed.
It felt odd, having her fingers rest on pianoforte keys again. Even so, Maggie had always known that she would never forget, and she hadn’t. She played a brief, halting scale, then another, more confidently. The notes were coming, playing out in her head.
Then she began to play. The melody was a simple one, and without a crowd of singers to back it up, sounded almost strange, a little uncertain and sad. Emma sucked in a breath, pressing against Maggie’s shoulder.
Maggie closed her eyes. She had no need to have them open, after all. There was no sheet music to follow. The music was all in her head.
For a moment, she was not Miss Winter, the governess, playing the pianoforte in a forbidden room in a house that was not hers.
While the music played, she was Margaret Camden, Thomas Camden’s much-toasted and much-admired daughter, considered likely to make a decent match and often complimented on her music.
She imagined candlelight, muffled conversation, and company, with guests gathered in a cosy, dimly lit drawing room, clustering close to the pianoforte.
There’d be applause when she was finished.
The verse and chorus were the same, of course, made different by the words, but Maggie played it again and again anyway, the words spooling out in her head.
Had she not been so lost in the tune, she might have heard the faint gasp, the floorboard’s whisper. By the time she sensed another presence behind her, it was too late.
Her eyes flew open. A discord rang.
The Duke of Burenwood stood at her back. Emma had fallen a step away, gazing up at her uncle, untroubled. Maggie’s fingers would not lift from the keys.
He looked down at her, face unreadable. Maggie opened her mouth to explain—to apologise—to say anything at all.
Nothing came but a thin, humiliating squeak.
Silence settled—heavy as a pall. Maggie realised she was holding her breath.
This is the end. He will send me off. Three days’ tenure and not a penny for the road.
“You are rusty,” the duke said—low, almost conversational. She had braced for fury, for a storm; the ordinary tone disarmed her so entirely she missed a beat.
“I have not played in a long while,” she managed. “Shocking in a governess, I know.”
He grunted and tipped his chin at the keys. “You have one verse remaining.”
Maggie was sure she’d misheard. She gulped audibly, running over in her head how much she’d played. There were twelve verses, of course, and to her surprise, he was right.
How long has he stood there? It hardly mattered. She swallowed and set her hands again to the keys, letting the final verse unspool.
I’ll sing you twelve, O
Green grow the rushes, O.
He stepped closer; she felt the warmth of him at her back, heard the faint hitch of his breath. She did not dare look up, but she knew—could feel—his gaze upon her hands.
I am not safe. He may dismiss me the instant I stop. I feel like Scheherazade, dragging out my stories to avoid being executed. Except I can’t make up my own stories to stay alive, I have to keep playing.
At first, Maggie thought that the low hum she could hear was the whirring of her own mind, panicked and darting around in her skull like moths about a flame.
Then she realised that it was him. The duke was humming under his breath, a low baritone that reverberated from his chest.
Then, to her amazement, he began to sing.
It was not loud, or indeed anything above a tuneful whisper, but Maggie heard him, his voice following the rhythm of the melody to perfection.
“Nine for the nine bright shiners,
Eight for the April Rainers,
Seven for the seven stars in the sky…”
The end approached. Terror rose at what might follow the last note. Why was he singing? Why so calm?
His voice was rich and even—the sort of voice that would grace any drawing-room.
“Three, three, the rivals,
Two, two, the lily-white boys,
Clothed all in green, O.”
Glancing sideways, Maggie saw that Emma was staring up at her uncle, entranced, clearly unaware of any danger to come. In fact, there was plain adoration in her face.
She loves him like a father, Maggie thought with a pang. And yet he locks away her mother’s memory and hides from her.
It was not fair. None of it was fair—girls left motherless; men doing their best, and yet not enough.
The song dwindled to its last lines. The duke’s voice deepened, almost breaking on the final evermore. Jenny’s head came up—Maggie saw the movement from the corner of her eye and knew the nursemaid had not heard him sing until this moment.
“One is one and all alone
And evermore shall be so.”
Maggie played the last chord and let her hands slip from the keys onto her lap. She dug her fingers into her legs, heart thumping, and waited.
At the end of such a song, in company, there would be a cheer, a laugh, a call for more. Here, there was only silence—a silence so dense she wanted to shrink beneath it.
If you are to be dismissed, she told herself fiercely, do not receive it with your head bowed like a whipped cur.
She sat tall, drew breath, and lifted her chin. She met Jenny’s frightened eyes and tried a reassuring smile. She turned to Emma—still beaming at her uncle—and at last to the duke himself.
He appeared to be staring at nothing in particular. His eyes were directed towards the keys, but they were glazed, and Maggie thought that he seemed to see nothing at all.
It was Emma, in the end, who broke the silence first.
“Mama used to sing that song all the time, didn’t she?” the little girl chirped. “You said it was her favourite, Uncle.”
He seemed to wake from a reverie. “Indeed it was. Whose idea was it to come in here?”
His words carried weight now. Before anybody else could speak up, Maggie spoke.
“Miss Emma wanted to see the room, and I thought there would be no harm in it,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt. “Jenny advised against it.”
There—confessed and done. If blame were to be laid, it would fall on her shoulders, not Jenny’s.
“You must not blame Jenny,” she added quickly.
The duke’s blue gaze—storm-water after a gale—turned upon her. “I do not blame Jenny.”
That, thought Maggie, wilting a little, does not bode well.
Emma’s smile faltered; at last, she sensed the change in the air. “Miss Winter only wanted to cheer me,” she said, small-voiced.
“Cheer you?” he echoed. “Emma, you ought to be at your lessons.”
“Ordinarily we should have taken an airing,” Maggie said, her throat tight. “But the rain—” she faltered, trailing off.
She hated still being seated. Yet rising seemed impossible. No one moved. He stood so near that the faintest stir of his breath brushed her shoulder. His scent was clean and earthy, like grass after rain—not the suffocating spices some fashionable men favoured.
He had always reeked of such perfume—the cloying sweetness that lingered long after he had gone.
The duke, however, reminded her of a forest, somehow—green and new-washed; not cloying, simply real. A real man, standing behind her, breathing—singing.
Is this truly the time to be thinking what he smells like? she scolded herself. You are on the brink of dismissal and destitution.
Swallowing hard, she forced herself to meet his eyes. His well-made features were grave; the slightest furrow marked his brow.
It would be far easier to dislike him, Maggie reflected, if he were not so handsome.
Or such a fine singer.
“This room,” he said abruptly, “is forbidden. I trust you understand me, Miss Winter.”
“I do,” she said, swallowing.
“Good.”
Turning on his heel, he marched out of the room, leaving the three of them in stunned, relieved silence.
Although, when Maggie inspected her own feelings, she was not sure that relief was exactly what she felt when she contemplated the duke’s absence. To her own horror, what she felt, quite clearly, was curiosity.
Oh, splendid, she thought wearily. This shall not end well.