Chapter Fifteen #2
The music, she meant. As it was meant to be played.
But his heart stuttered through a few frantic beats in his chest anyway at the feel of her soft, warm fingers covering his own.
Haltingly, he began the melody again, proceeding slowly through a few measures.
Familiar enough with it by now to manage it by ear rather than by reading the notes upon the page before him, instead he watched her face as they played, watched the wonder that swept over her features as the soft, sweet notes filled the room.
He ought to have taught her to play years ago.
They might have sat like this, side by side at the bench, hundreds of times already.
Perhaps the music they would have made together might have spoken to her with more clarity than his clumsy tongue had ever been able to manage.
Perhaps she might have heard him, even if she hadn’t yet seen him.
Heard the music in his heart, calling out to hers.
“I think I have it,” she said softly, into that delicate quietness that had surrounded them as his fingers paused upon the keys.
Obligingly, he lifted his hand from beneath hers and watched her position her own upon the keys his had vacated. Slowly, steadily, she picked out the same melody he’d shown her, guided by the memory of it his fingers had imparted to her.
“Perfect. Again,” he said, as she reached the end of the few measures he’d played for her.
As she plucked out the simple melody again with more confidence, Elliot caught up the accompaniment, and the gentle, soothing nocturne took shape and filled the air.
Music they had made together; a duet as much like a dance as their moonlit waltz had been.
A flight of souls, matched for the length of a few measures in the movements of their fingers across the ivory keys.
∞∞∞
Something in the very air had shifted, a strange tension so palpable within it that Kate felt she might reach out and pluck it like the strings of a harp—though probably, given her lack of expertise in musical pursuits, she would play it rather poorly.
As the last of the notes died, fading into the silence of the drawing room, Kate withdrew her fingers from the keys and murmured, “It’s probably far too late for me to learn to play.”
“It’s never too late.” Elliot uttered the words with a queer solemnity, a depth rather too grave for the sentiment he professed.
Absently he laid one hand upon the keys and a few notes trickled out from beneath his fingers.
Not the nocturne they’d been playing, but another tune that struck her with some degree of vague familiarity.
“It wasn’t too late for you to visit London. To waltz.”
That was it—the waltz they’d danced at her first ball. A melody he drew out of the instrument with the tips of his fingers on memory alone, with a talent and skill that was quite beyond her comprehension.
“No, I suppose not,” Kate said, laying her hands in her lap, over the reticule she’d set there when first she had sat beside him.
But it was years and years too late for the sort of thoughts which had plagued her just recently.
The abrupt, startling realizations which had been poking at the fringes of her mind with sharp, catlike claws.
Shredding her calm, her composure. Slicing through the very meat of everything she had once known to be true.
Tearing bits and pieces off of that solid friendship she had always treasured…
and what was left peeking through the tattered remains was more than a little terrifying.
Sometimes it was too late. She had a notebook tucked inside her reticule brimming over with names to prove it.
One of the women within it would be his wife, sooner or later.
A woman he wouldn’t have to teach to play the pianoforte, or to waltz, or any of those ladylike pursuits in which Kate lacked an education.
They would be evenly matched from the first; of the same station, the same social echelon.
“Probably,” she ventured, the nails of her right hand flexing into her gloved left, “you’d prefer it if your wife could play, yes?”
“Hm.” A touch of a smile tugged at his lips. “I don’t believe I have any particular preference, there.”
“What? But you play.”
“Yes. A musical education is common for the daughters of the aristocracy,” he said.
“It won’t be difficult to find a woman who evinces some interest or proficiency in music.
But I’ve suffered through enough musicales to know that one’s sense of one’s own abilities is often overinflated.
Truly, it doesn’t matter if my wife can play, as I’m more than happy to do it myself.
” He gave a little shrug. “It would be lovely if she enjoyed listening, for I rather enjoy entertaining.”
How could any woman not enjoy it? He played beautifully, fluidly. Music was a language he spoke with startling fluency, with a skill she imagined could easily make him a master of the art, a talent that surely rivaled even the finest of players.
“Have any—” Kate cleared her throat, swallowing through the odd dryness that clung to it and tried again. “Have any ladies in particular caught your interest? I could make inquiries as to their musical inclinations.”
Elliot ducked his head back over the pianoforte, picked up the threads of the nocturne that he’d let drop and spun the melody into a soft accompaniment to their conversation. “Your suggestions thus far have been…nice.”
“Nice,” Kate repeated blandly, stunned by the tepid response. “Nice?”
“Yes. Nice.” A little riffle of notes came to an end in a flourishing arpeggio, and an accompanying sigh. “Blast it. The truth is that I don’t know how to do any of this. I’ve never courted a woman, never even called upon one with any intent toward marriage.”
“Never?” Kate blurted out. “But—you’ve spent so many Seasons in London.”
“For a few weeks at a time,” he said glumly. “Until I grew bored of it all and came dashing back home to Longthorpe. I was never looking for a wife before. So now I find myself in this unenviable position, and I haven’t the faintest idea of how to go about it.”
He sounded so pitiful, so wretchedly pathetic that a little bubble of laughter slid up her throat. “I’m so sorry,” she said, pursing her lips. “It’s just that—well, I had always imagined you as a bit of a rake. I told Rebecca and Richard so earlier, and they laughed at me for it.”
Elliot’s brows hiked toward his hairline, disappearing beneath the fringe of his disheveled bangs. “A rake! Should I be flattered or offended?”
Kate managed an abashed smile. “Oh, flattered, certainly.”
He chuckled, and in the absent meandering of his fingers over the keys, Kate thought she could hear the echo of his amusement; a rippling merriment tripping across the notes.
“On my very worst day,” he said, striving—and failing miserably—to inflect severity into his voice, “I am at most a rapscallion.”
She knew that. She truly had, by some measure. Despite Elliot’s tendency toward mischief and the endless vexation he liked to cause, she’d witnessed nothing to suggest he was anything but welcome in society. Women still pursued him. Mamas still wanted him for their daughters.
Exasperation he might have provoked, but never true censure, never condemnation.
A reputation as a rogue, known for his cheek and irreverence—but not as a rake.
Not as a reprobate, or a philanderer. On his very worst day, Elliot was…
fun. Merry and jovial and quick-witted, with a dashing air and that damnable, dimpled smile.
His clever fingers slid over the keys, trespassing upon her section of the pianoforte as he picked out a jaunty little melody that sounded somehow inquisitive; notes rising into the upward inflection of a question. “You truly thought me a rake?”
Kate offered a little one-shouldered shrug.
“You have got that air about you, you know, Elliot. You talk excessively about the entertainments of London. The shops, the theatre, the clubs. The dinner parties and balls you’ve attended, how much you’ve won or lost at the gaming tables.
But you never speak of the ladies you’ve met, so…
so I suppose I assumed that there must be a reason for it. ”
Again that flash of a dimple in his cheek. Far from affronted, he was instead delighted that she had assumed him to be a man of so much experience. “You thought,” he accused, his voice teasing, “that I had a merry widow somewhere, or perhaps that I had a mistress tucked away in London.”
“It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption!” Sourly, Kate hit a note upon the piano, a few keys ahead of his as if to punctuate the remark. So there.
“No mistresses,” he said lightly. “No merry widows. And the reason I didn’t tell you with whom I had danced was because I hardly remembered. I was never interested in any of them.”
“Would you have told me if you had been?”
His fingers skipped over hers upon the keys of the piano forte. “Would you have wanted to know?”
Would she have? It felt like an impossible question to answer just now, with the strange, seething roil of anxiety churning in her stomach.
More worrisome still was the sense of relief swirling about her head at the revelation of how wrong her assumptions had been.
“I would have liked to know that you played,” she said evasively.
“What does it say of me that I did not know something like this of you?”
“That we’ve never been in the same room as a pianoforte together,” Elliot said dryly. “I could make the same accusation of you, you know.”
“What?” A helpless bubble of laughter escaped her. “Are you accusing me of being a rake?”