Chapter 3
Chapter Three
“What…?” Dominic whispered to himself.
He heard it on the third step from the landing.
Three notes, pressed one after the other. A small gap between each note while the player gathered courage for the next.
Dominic stopped.
The cold came in through his collar before any thought did. Then thought arrived, and it was not a useful one: it named the room before he willed it to.
The old music room, off the east corridor.
He had not opened that door in years.
He went down the remaining stairs and along the corridor. The notes continued, halting but persistent, a dogged repetition of something barely learned.
The door stood open.
Inside, Mrs. Greer stood at James’s elbow with both hands clasped at her waist, her mouth in a tight, unhappy line.
A maid stood near the window, equally still.
Miss Hartley, who had been James’s governess since his arrival at Silverford House, had her hands on the boy’s shoulders.
She was saying something low and urgent that James was completely ignoring.
James sat at the piano… his mother’s piano.
The boy pressed C, then E, then G. The chord rang clean and bright in the room, brighter than anything had sounded in here in years. He considered the keys and pressed them again.
“James.” Dominic’s voice came out even.
All three women turned at once, and James looked up from the keys, his head turning like instinct to find his uncle.
“Your Grace.” Mrs. Greer moved toward him, hands still clasped. “We were only airing the room, as you requested last week. I had the maids in to dust. Lord James came past in the corridor and slipped in before—”
“Why was the door unlocked?”
“We were inside the room, Your Grace. We were working.”
“A locked room requires a key to open. Which means it was lockable while you were inside it.”
Mrs. Greer closed her mouth.
“It is of no matter now.” He walked toward the boy, keeping his eyes off the instrument. “Come away from the piano.”
“I want to play,” James said and pressed C again with one finger, as though that would settle the argument.
“This piano is not for playing,” Dominic said. “Step away from it.”
“I want to play,” James said again.
“I am aware of what you want.” He glanced at Miss Hartley, who immediately stepped forward.
James ducked sideways on the bench and put both hands flat on the keys.
The resulting sound was not musical. A full crash of discordance rang off the ceiling, and Dominic’s jaw locked.
He breathed in through his nose. “James. That is enough.”
“It’s not for playing,” James said. “You said. But why do you have it, then?”
Dominic looked at him.
The boy’s dark eyes were level and entirely serious. He genuinely wanted to know. He was six years old, and he genuinely wanted to know why a man would keep a piano in a room and declare it unplayable.
There was no answer Dominic could give him here. Not in this room. Not standing over his mother’s piano while the echo of those discordant keys was still moving through the walls.
“Step off the bench,” he said, instead.
“Why do you have it?” The boy was insistent, and now was not the time to be so hardheaded.
At least, not to Dominic, it wasn’t.
“That is not a conversation for now. Off the bench,” he gritted out.
But James shook his head, obviously not satisfied with that non-answer. “I want to play.”
Dominic stepped forward and lifted the boy from the bench in one movement, tucking him against his side.
James went rigid and immediately began to thrash. “Let me down, let me— I want to play—”
“Mrs. Greer.” He kept his voice flat. “Lock the room. Now.”
He carried the boy into the corridor, James’s heels connecting with his shin with what felt like deliberate persistence, and held him until he heard the lock click behind them. Then he set James down.
The boy turned and went directly to the door, both hands flat against the wood.
He pushed. It held. He pushed again, harder, and made a low sound in his throat.
“James.” He spoke from two paces away. “Come away from the door.”
James did not come away from the door. Mrs. Greer came out from the room, and James went immediately to her apron pocket, pulling at it with both fists. The governess stepped in and drew him back by the shoulders.
“Let me play!” James’s chest heaved twice.
Then he went very still, and his face crumpled, and the tears came fast and silent, and he stood where Miss Hartley held him and shook.
Dominic stood in the corridor and said nothing. He looked at the boy and had no idea what to do with any of it.
“James,” he said, when he could. “You are making this considerably more difficult than it needs to be.” He stopped, took in a calming breath, and started again. “The room is closed. That is the end of it.”
James raised his face then, and his cheeks were wet, his eyes dark and furious.
“I hate you,” he said, then pulled himself free of Miss Hartley’s hold and ran up the stairs.
Dominic stood in the corridor.
“See that the boy has breakfast,” he instructed Mrs. Greer.
With that, he went to his study, sat at his desk, and did not open a single letter for twenty minutes.
Three notes.
That was all Lady Annabelle Stanton had given his nephew at Lucien’s ball.
Three unremarkable notes on a pianoforte that had been considerably better left untouched, and now the boy could speak of nothing else, sleep through nothing else, and apparently be physically removed from one house only to reappear at another in pursuit of the same obsession.
Dominic picked up the first letter and set it down again.
None of this would have happened if she had simply gone on to rehearse her piece and ignored James in that room. Or better yet, alerted Dominic to his whereabouts and minded her own business.
He was aware this was not entirely fair.
What bothered him, sitting here now, was not the things she had said—those were merely correct—but the candlelight on the line of her throat when she had turned toward the boy, and the four pins keeping the left side of her hair in place.
And the fact that he had been standing close enough for these details to become entirely unavoidable.
He was thirty-two years old; he ought not to be thinking such thoughts about his friend’s sister. So, he set the thoughts aside and opened the letter.
The Linwood soiree operated on champagne and overlapping conversations, and Dominic had not intended to stay long.
He had arrived past nine and intended to be gone by eleven.
He had been in the house since morning, and the walls had been doing what walls in Silverford House occasionally did on difficult days, which was to make him aware of every room in them.
He found himself standing near the far side of the room with a glass he was not drinking from, watching Lady Annabelle Stanton be charming at a man he recognized from thirty feet.
Lord Fenwick. Thirties, well-dressed, with a genial manner that sat well at a distance.
At closer range, he was rather less appealing.
He had never been inside an establishment he had also not heard about it from a more reputable source, and Fenwick had achieved the impressive distinction of being refused entry to two of them. In the same month.
Lady Annabelle stood with Miss Helena Thrupton and Miss Thrupton’s mother, and the Dowager Lady Rosenhall, at a comfortable distance from Fenwick.
She had her head tilted at a polite angle and was saying something that made Fenwick laugh.
Her eyes stayed on his face throughout. Her hands were still at her sides.
Before he knew it, Dominic had crossed the room.
“Fenwick.” He extended his hand with every appearance of pleasure. “I thought you’d gone to Bath for the season.”
Fenwick blinked. “Your Grace! I—no. I haven’t.”
“Must have been mistaken. How is the venture in the north? I heard it didn’t go as planned.” He paused. “But perhaps I’m thinking of someone else.”
Fenwick’s genial manner developed a slight unsteadiness. “I really must—Lady Annabelle, it was a pleasure.” He took his leave at a speed that managed not to be openly undignified.
Annabelle watched him go. Then she turned to Dominic with a smile that did not reach her eyes.
“Your Grace.”
“Lady Rosenhall. Lady Annabelle. Miss Thrupton.” He nodded to Lady Rosenhall, who received it with the graciousness of a woman who had not yet decided what to make of him.
“Cousin Edith!” Helena’s head turned toward the far end of the room, where a woman in yellow was waving with considerable energy. She touched her mother’s arm. “Mama, it’s Cousin Edith…she said she might come tonight—”
Lady Rosenhall followed her daughter’s gaze, and her expression softened by a fraction. “Do excuse us,” she said, to no one in particular, and steered Helena away.
Which left Annabelle to face the Duke, and she narrowed her eyes at him.
“What exactly did you say to him?” Annabelle asked.
“I asked after his business.”
“He looked like a man caught cheating at cards.”
“Fenwick,” Dominic said, “has had the notable achievement of being refused entry to two separate establishments in the same week. It is not a commonplace distinction.”
She paused. “What sort of establishments?”
He looked at her. “Not the sort you are thinking.”
She absorbed this with a slight flush in her cheeks. “I see.” She glanced at Lady Rosenhall, who had drawn Miss Thrupton into conversation with a passing acquaintance. “Then I suppose I should thank you.”
“You should choose more carefully, my lady.”
Her chin went up a fraction. “I spoke to him for four minutes.”
“Four minutes during which he was calculating your dowry, your brother’s influence, and what an alliance with the Stanton name might offset. In that order.”
She looked at him steadily. “Do you always assume the worst of everyone, Your Grace?”