Chapter 24 #2
Catherine dipped her fingers into her glass and sprinkled a drop onto Aaron’s shirt. Her eyes never left his as she did so. The tension between them was immense. She felt that the air separating them crackled as though lightning had infused the air.
The moment was lost with a knock at the door. A servant entered with a further course. Aaron sat back with a sigh. After the man had left, he shared a perfectly innocent smile with her.
“Servants can always be relied upon to throw cold water on an evening,” he began, dryly.
“Speaking of the servants, I wondered at you uprooting the entire household and hiring an entire new batch of staff some years ago,” she pounced smoothly at the opportunity. “It must have been inconvenient to not have any member of staff who knew the house.”
Aaron sat back, toying with the stem of his wine glass.
“It was, but I decided I no longer wanted any part of my father’s household.”
“It does not sound fair to deprive all of those people of their livelihoods.”
“They were recompensed. Generously. And new employment was found for all those who sought it.”
“I asked Mr. McKay about one of them. He denied all knowledge.”
Aaron’s eyes narrowed, and Catherine saw the gates slamming shut. She felt a burst of resentment.
“Did you order Mr. McKay to deny the letter?” she asked boldly.
“What letter?” he parried.
“The one sent here, addressed to a former servant by someone who clearly did not know that they had been dismissed. Mr. McKay forwarded it on. Yet he told me that it never existed. Did you give him such instructions?”
His eyes darkened. “Are you a Bow Street Runner too, now? Or a magistrate? No, I did not. Why would I?”
“Then why would he lie?”
“Perhaps because you pressed him with questions. People do strange things when interrogated.”
Her fingers tightened around her napkin. “I am not interrogating. I am only trying to understand.”
“You suspect me,” he said, his voice low. “You watch me, you ask questions, you weigh every word I speak. Tell me, Catherine, why is the man I am now not good enough for you?”
Her breath caught. The words pierced her.
“That is not it,” she whispered.
“Then what is it?” He leaned forward, his eyes searching hers. “What can be so terrible that I must keep it hidden? You demand answers, but you will not say why the truth matters.”
She trembled, caught between fear and yearning.
“Because I do not understand who you are. Because I knew you as a boy, and you are not that boy. Because a thief feared you, and not because you had caught him red-handed. Because Jeremy spoke of how much you have changed since school. And you give me nothing to explain any of this. Am I to trust you blindly for the rest of my life?”
His jaw clenched.
“I do not want to think about the things I did to survive when I lived on the streets. I will not speak of them. Men judge. Women judge. Always.”
“I would never judge you,” she said earnestly. “If you would only trust me.”
“Yet you do not trust me.”
Silence pressed between them. Catherine’s hands shook. The door opened, and the next course arrived. Fresh wine was poured. They waited for the servants to depart once more.
“Tell me,” he said at last, his voice harsh, “did you arrange it?”
Her brows furrowed. “Arrange what?”
“Arrange what? The pickpocket. Did you set him upon me? So you could watch, and see, and force my past into the open? Perhaps you are in league with Everdon. Attempting to undermine me. I cannot fathom the purpose, but that does not mean the conspiracy does not exist. Come to think of it, you were in Everdon’s company when you were introduced to me, weren’t you? ”
Her breath fled.
To do such a thing would be… Machiavellian to say the least!
Was that what he thought she was capable of?
Manipulating people as though they were nothing but pawns?
What did that say about him? Fury surged within her.
She had lived in fear, been poisoned, and almost forced to marry the very devil himself. And now to be accused of such a thing!
“How dare you! That you could think me so conniving, so false…”
His eyes burned, but he said nothing. She rose, pushing back her chair.
“I will not sit here and be accused of plotting against you.” Her voice was steady, but only just. Something beneath it trembled like a fault line about to give. “And whatever you accuse me of concerning Lord Everdon, you are wrong. Entirely and thoroughly wrong.”
“Which is exactly the sort of denial I would expect,” he replied, his voice flat and cold as a winter pane.
“You may call it what you like. It will not change the truth of it.”
She left before he could answer. Not because she was afraid of what he might say, but because if she stayed one moment longer, she would either cry or throw something at his head, and she was not yet sure which would be worse.
She had nowhere to go.
The house was a warren of dark passages and unlit rooms. It was a lonely place in the evenings when the servants were in their quarters, sharing light and warmth, laughter and good fellowship. The tears came quietly, stubbornly, and she wiped at them with the back of her hand and kept moving.
She opened a door at random.
Moonlight lay across the floor in long, pale rectangles, pooling around the legs of dust-sheeted furniture.
At the far end of the room, half in shadow, stood a piano.
It was a beautiful instrument, dark-wooded and elegant, and it had not been touched in years.
A fine layer of dust lay across the keys like a veil.
Catherine stood in the doorway, oddly nostalgic for a long moment, simply looking at it. Then she crossed the room and found a lamp on a small table beside it. A box of flint and steel sat nearby. She struck a light, and the flame caught, and warm gold bloomed outward, ushering back the dark.
She sat down on the bench.
The wood creaked beneath her, and the sound was made extra harsh in the acoustics of the quiet parlor. She lifted her hands and laid them upon the keys, and for a moment simply held them there, feeling the cool, smooth ivory beneath her fingertips.
Then, without quite deciding to, she began to play…
It was a melody she had not thought of in years.
It came back to her the way such things do, not all at once but in fragments, in snatches. A phrase here. A handful of notes there.
Her mother used to play it in the evenings, in the parlor at home, with the windows open and the summer light going gold. Catherine had been small enough to sit at her feet, and she would lean her head against her mother's knee and listen, and the world had been very simple and very safe.
She stumbled over a slower passage she could not quite remember.
Paused.
Tried again.
The notes came out broken and wrong, and the wrongness of them was worse than silence, because it reminded her how much she had lost. Not just the melody. Everything. That serene parlor. The summer evenings. The woman who had played and the girl she used to be.
She lifted her hands from the keys and pressed them to her face.
The despair, when it came, was not the wild, panicked thing she had felt at Haventon. It was quieter than that. Heavier. It sat on her chest like a stone and she breathed around it, eyes closed, and let the silence of the room hold her for a while.
The creak of a hinge.
Her head lifted. The door had opened, just a crack, and Aaron stood in the gap, one shoulder against the frame, a bottle of wine dangling forgotten from one hand.
He was not looking at her. He was looking at the pianoforte, and his face was very pale.
There was something in his expression that she had never seen before. Something… helpless.
“I heard you,” he said quietly. His voice sounded scraped raw. “Playing. Just now. I—I heard from the corridor. Why did you…”
He faltered. Swallowed.
“It… it made me terribly sad. But I can’t remember why.”
She turned back to the keys, not trusting her face. “I cannot remember it properly. It keeps slipping from me. Like trying to hold water in my hands…”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he crossed the room and set the bottle on the lid of the pianoforte. He lowered himself onto the bench beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, and looked at the keys with a furrowed brow.
He lifted one hand. Touched a note. Frowned. Touched another, slightly to the left. Frowned deeper. Then a third, and this time the note that rang out was so achingly familiar that Catherine's breath caught in her throat.
He did not look at her. He was staring at his own fingers on the keys with an expression of genuine bewilderment, as though they were acting without his permission.
He pressed another note. Wrong. Corrected it.
Then another, and another, and the melody began to unfurl beneath his halting, unpracticed hand, note by note, like a flower blooming in languid motion.
It was rough. Graceless. He had no skill at the instrument, and it showed in every hesitation, every correction.
But the notes were right.
Every single one of them was right, and together they filled the space with something so tender and so bittersweet that Catherine felt the tears start again, silently, without warning.
She turned to stare at him.
“You know it,” she whispered. “How… how do you know it?”
Only Aaron and I know this melody. After our mothers passed, we swore an oath to never play it again…
His hand stilled on the keys. He looked at her then, and his eyes were glossy in the lamplight. There was something fragile in them, something that looked almost frightened.
“I think…” he began slowly, as though the words were being drawn out of him against his will, “it reminds me of something. A missing part of my childhood. Homey… but just out of reach.”
Catherine looked at him. At the bewildered, wondering expression on his face. Her heart twisted. “My mother played it for me.”
He faltered, as though afraid to voice his thoughts.
She reached for him, gently taking the bottle he made to hold and setting it aside. He looked at the empty space where the wine had been, then back at her, one eyebrow raised.
“No more tonight.”
“You presume to tell me when I may drink?”
“Yes, I am your wife.”
He stared at her for a beat. Then he laughed, short and genuine, and Catherine found herself smiling back at him before she could help it.
Their eyes met.
The melody lingered in the air, binding them.
Catherine felt it like a thread pulled taut. She did not decide to lean toward him. She simply did, drawn by something older than thought.
His breath caught. Then his mouth was on hers, and the kiss was nothing like the frenzied ones they had shared before.
It was heartfelt. It tasted of salt and wine and something close to despair, as his hands came up to frame her face as though she were something precious and breakable.
She pressed closer, fingers curling into his shirt at the collar. His arms locked around her waist and drew her flush against him, and the kiss deepened until it ached, until it carried the weight of every sharp word from the evening and every unspoken thing beneath them.
She pressed her lips to his jaw. His throat. Felt his pulse stutter beneath her mouth.
“No more lies,” she whispered. “Not tonight. Only this.”
He pulled back to look at her, and his face was raw in the lamplight, something close to pain behind his eyes.
“I cannot lose you,” he said, raspingly. “Even if I cannot give you everything you deserve.”
Catherine held his gaze. She thought of the painting. The fever. The way he had said her name in his sleep, broken and afraid. Whatever he was hiding, it was not this.
“You will not lose me,” she said quietly.