Chapter 7 #2
“No. It was what I heard beneath it.” He did not look at her when he said it.
He looked at his own plate, which was the kindest thing he could have done, because it let her keep her face.
“Eat your pears, Miss Carrow. They are better than the fricassee, and I have it on excellent authority that you agree.”
She ate the pears, which were exactly as good as she remembered, and that was its own small cruelty, and somewhere underneath the careful management of her face a thing she had buried very deep turned over in its sleep.
It had not always been like this. That was the unbearable part, the thing the bright airless room would not let her forget.
There had been a dinner at this very table, before the war, a small ordinary family dinner with Henry alive at the foot of it and the Dowager not yet a widow and Lord Cole beside her with no title to weigh him down.
A tedious neighbour had been holding forth at insufferable length about the management of his hounds, and Cole had leaned in and murmured something so dry and so exact about the man that Melody had laughed straight into her wine, helplessly, in the middle of the hound monologue.
The whole table had turned. And Cole had said, smooth as cream, that he begged everyone’s pardon, for he had made an unforgivable remark about the soup.
He had taken the entire blame onto himself and let her recover, and the neighbour had resumed his hounds, and under the table his foot had found hers for one second and pressed, we got away with it.
She had been two-and-twenty and so happy she had not known to be frightened of it.
Now they sat eight feet apart under the eyes of his mother and could not so much as laugh, and the distance between that table and this one was the whole of what had been done to her, and she had spent so long being angry at him for it that she had never once let herself grieve it.
The ladies withdrew, and the gentlemen did not linger long over their wine, the marquess being no use for conversation and Sir Marcus too anxious to enjoy it.
The company reassembled in the larger drawing room where a pianoforte stood gleaming and unplayed, the kind of instrument bought for the look of a room rather than the use of it.
Melody found a window and stood at it, which was her instinct in any room too full of people arranging her, and she was counting the panes when Cole came to her, not too close, careful as a man crossing ground he knows to be mined.
“Are you comfortable?” he asked.
“I am never comfortable when everyone in a room is arranging my life inside their heads. It is a particular sensation. Like being tried for a crime in a language you are not permitted to speak.”
“Then I shall give them something else to arrange.” He said it quietly, and there was an unmistakable intensity within the depths of his piercing, steel-blue eyes.
“Will you play? Or if you would rather not play, will you tell me what is wrong with that instrument, because I am certain something is, and I would rather hear it from you than from the man who sold it to my mother.”
“You wish me to perform. So that the room may judge whether I perform well.”
“No. I wish you to hold the room. There is a difference, and you of all people know it. Sit down at that pianoforte and the whole company has to attend to what you choose to give them instead of what they have decided to make of you. You stop being the thing in the corner they are discussing. You become the reason they are quiet.” He let that settle before he went on.
“You used to play. You played the thing about the falling water that I could never remember the name of. I should like to hear it again, if you would. But it is yours to refuse, and I will take you back to your mother this instant if you say the word, and no one will think anything of it but that the duke is dull.”
She looked at the pianoforte, and at the room, and at Cassandra arranging herself decoratively against the mantel as though she had been hung there.
She looked at her mother twisting the new ribbon on her sleeve, and at the long cold portraits, and something in her that had spent the whole evening being acted upon decided, all at once, that it would rather act.
“It is the Field nocturne,” she said. “The one about the falling water. And there is nothing wrong with the instrument except that it has never once been asked to do anything but sit there and be expensive. Which I find I have a great deal of sympathy for.”
She sat down and played, and the room went quiet around her the way he had said it would.
For the length of the nocturne she was not a baronet’s daughter being measured against a marquess’s.
She was the only person in the room who could do the thing being done, and Cassandra by the mantel had to stand and be silent and listen like everybody else, and that, Melody thought, with her hands moving over the keys of the falling water, was very nearly worth the nutmeg.
It was the Dowager who found her afterward, while the company was breaking up and the carriages being called, who drew her a little apart on the pretext of admiring her playing, and who said, in a voice pitched for the two of them and edged like good scissors, “You play charmingly, Miss Carrow. My son was always susceptible to a charming accomplishment. He has a great store of kindness in him, my son. I would not have a sensible young woman mistake a duke’s kindness for a duke’s intention.
The two are very different things, and only one of them is binding. ”
“Your Grace need not trouble herself,” Melody said. She kept her voice perfectly level, because the level voice was the one weapon the Dowager could not take from her. “I learned long ago not to mistake anything that comes out of Greenstone House for certainty.”
She had meant it only as armour. She had no notion, watching the small satisfied composure settle back over the Dowager’s face, how exactly true the thing she had said would turn out to be.