Chapter Four The Practice Room #2
He forgot about his carriage. He forgot about the Roman chariot. He turned from the stairs and walked down the corridor, drawn by the invisible thread of the melody like a sailor to a siren.
The music grew louder. It was not polite. It was not the sort of thing one played to entertain guests while they drank tea and gossiped about neighbours. It was a private conversation between a soul and the silence, and the soul was shouting.
Charles reached the door. It was slightly ajar. He hesitated. He knew he should leave. To listen uninvited was an intrusion. It was akin to reading a diary left open on a table. But his feet would not move. He was a man in search of depth, and he had just found the deep end of the ocean.
Darcy moved up beside him, silent as a shadow. He did not push the door open, nor did he pull Charles away. He simply stood there, the Guardian of the Moment.
Charles peered through the crack in the mahogany.
The music room was bathed in the golden light of the late afternoon. Miss Darcy was sitting on a chair near the window, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes closed, listening with an intensity that bordered on religious reverence.
But Charles did not look at her. His gaze was fixed on the figure at the pianoforte.
Mary Bennet sat on the bench. Her back was straight, rigid as a soldier on parade. She was wearing a brown dress that was the exact colour of a dried leaf. Her spectacles had slid slightly down her nose. Her hair was pulled back so tightly it seemed painful.
She looked entirely ordinary, undistinguished like the furniture.
But her hands.
Her hands were alive. They struck the keys with a ferocity that contradicted every inch of her prim appearance. She was not playing the instrument. She was fighting it. She was wrestling a confession out of the ivory and wire.
Charles watched her face. Her eyes were open, staring at the sheet music, but he did not think she was seeing the notes. Her lips were pressed together in a thin line, and her brow was furrowed with a concentration that looked like pain.
God, she is beautiful.
Not in the way Jane was striking, although her skin was smooth alabaster and her lips as rosy as her sister's.
Not in the way Elizabeth's eyes sparked with cleverness, although they had a lovely hazel colour and a deep seriousness that bordered on melancholy.
Charles stared and stared, his mouth agape.
The music swelled—a great, heaving sob of sound—and then crashed down into a whisper. A single, high note hung in the air, vibrating with a loneliness that matched the hollow space Charles had felt in his own chest for months.
I am invisible, the music seemed to say. I am here, and I am burning, and no one looks.
Charles felt a lump form in his throat. He remembered the girl at the exhibition. The one who talked about trade routes and turnips. The one who called herself 'a shield.' He had thought her funny. He had thought her sharp.
He had not realised she was a storm trapped in a teapot. A very dun teapot.
He did not weep. A bit more education might have brought him to it, but for now, he just felt a sudden, sharp ache in his chest. It was the "depth" he had been searching for, found in the last place he had thought to look.
The final chord faded. Miss Bennet lifted her hands. She held them in the air for a moment, shaking slightly, before dropping them into her lap. She slumped. The soldier vanished, replaced by a tired young woman in a brown dress.
"That was..." Miss Darcy's voice drifted from the room, small and awed. "That was deep as the ocean, Mary."
"It was acceptable." Her voice was flat, clipped, scrubbing away the emotion as if she were wiping a spill from the table. "My timing was imprecise in the third measure. I rushed the arpeggio."
"Who cares about the timing?" Miss Darcy cried. "I felt it."
"Feelings are inefficient," Miss Bennet stated, standing up and smoothing her skirts. "But thank you. We should resume the scales. Discipline is the only cure for indulgence."
Charles pulled back from the door. His heart was hammering against his ribs. He stared at Darcy.
Darcy was smiling with a knowing look.
"She is not what you expected," he said.
"She is..." Charles struggled for the word. He wanted to say magnificent. He wanted to say stunning. He wanted to say that he had just seen a woman take her own soul out of a box and show it to the world, only to stuff it back in and complain about the timing. "She is deep."
"She is a Bennet," Darcy shrugged, as if that explained everything. "They are full of surprises. Come. Before they catch us."
He allowed himself to be led away, but he cast one last look back at the door. He could hear the monotonous sound of scales beginning—up and down, mechanical, precise. The mask was back on. But he had seen what lay beneath.
He moved through the corridor, his soul vibrating with the magnitude of his discovery. He was altered. Profound. Floating on a higher plane of existence. He kept his eyes fixed on the middle distance, contemplating the nature of sorrow, and walked face-first into the doorframe.
"Beg pardon," Charles muttered to the wood, stepping back and shaking his head to clear the stars.
He adjusted his hat, took a deep breath intended to re-establish his dignity, pivoted to the left, and immediately clipped his shoulder against the other side of the frame.
He stumbled, caught himself on a footman—who looked notably alarmed—and finally managed to navigate the complex architectural challenge of an open door.
He walked out and collapsed into his carriage.
As the vehicle lurched forward, the rhythmic clip-clop of the horses' hooves rocked him gently from side to side, but in his head, the rhythm was all wrong. It was too regular. It lacked the storm.
London passed by outside the window—a blur of grey stone and busy people. Usually, Charles spent his journeys looking out, waving to acquaintances, or checking his reflection in the glass to ensure his cravat had not wilted into social unacceptability.
Today, he saw nothing. He was still in the music room.
He tapped his gloved fingers against his knee, trying to find the rhythm Miss Bennet had played. He could not. It was too complex, too wild. He enjoyed a simple country dance and Mary Bennet had just played a hurricane.
He thought of the way she had looked, surrounded by the golden light of the afternoon. She had seemed so solid. So real. She was not a "blue-eyed angel" or a "delicate flower." She was a person who felt things with a strength that frightened and moved him all at once.
Mary Bennet.
The name had always been a placeholder in his mind. Jane's sister. The plain one. The one who reads. The one who is usually obscured by a fern at assemblies.
He had been a fool. A blind, shallow fool who deserved to be hit by a doorframe. Twice.
"Turnip," he whispered to the empty carriage, a sudden laugh bubbling up in his throat.
His mind drifted back to the exhibition. I am merely being accurate. She wore her bluntness like armour. She hid behind her books and her spectacles and her brown dresses because she thought the world did not want to see her.
And maybe the world did not. The world wanted delicate debutantes. The world wanted sparkling laughter and soft smiles behind ivory fans. The world wanted women who were decorative and quiet.
But Charles was tired of sparkling. He was tired of surface.
He thought of Netherfield and of the empty halls waiting for him.
He had been worried about being lonely there.
He had been worried about the silence. But Mary Bennet was not afraid of the silence.
She filled it. She took the silence by the throat and turned it into music that made a grown man want to weep.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, leather-bound notebook. He had purchased it that very morning to record his "Deep Thoughts."
He opened it. So far, it contained only a reminder to buy new boot polish and a note that said: Does moss grow on the north side because it is cold, or because it is lonely?
He winced at his own earlier attempt at philosophy. The carriage jolted over a rut, making his hand shake, but he wrote with determination.
Netherfield needs a big pianoforte.
He stared at the words. It was a practical thought. A landlord's thought. He had shipped Caroline's instrument to Thornwood, therefore he needed one. Logical. Or was it?
He was not just going back to Hertfordshire to farm.
He was not just going back to prove he could stand on his own two feet.
He was going back to find out what other songs Mary Bennet was hiding in that fortress she built around her heart.
And perhaps, if he was very lucky, and very patient, he could convince her to play one just for him.
"To the north," Charles said to the air, assuming a pose of command that was ruined only slightly by the carriage hitting a pothole. "To the mud. And to the music."
He leaned back, closing his eyes, only to snap them open instantly. He reached to rap on the roof to stop the carriage, his hand hovering.
"Flowers," he whispered to the empty seats. "I should send flowers. A thank you. Not for the meeting at the Academy, but for the storm."
He bit his lip, his brow furrowing. Would it be too much? She did not know he had heard her. It would be an admission of eavesdropping. It would be a breach of etiquette. It would be a secret revealed.
But as the carriage turned to Portman Square, Bingley realised he did not care about the rules of a secret. He had spent his life following the rules, and he had ended up a ghost.
"Flowers," he repeated, his voice firming with a new kind of agency. "Yellow ones. Or perhaps white. A gift that says... thank you for the depth."
He leaned back again, a small, hopeful smile playing on his lips. He was going back to Netherfield. He was buying an estate. He was going to buy a very big pianoforte. And for the first time in his life, he was not just humming along to someone else's tune. He was starting to hear the music.