Chapter 5
Chapter Five
“Ipracticed the sequence last night,” James said. “In my head.”
Dominic adjusted his stride to match the boy’s pace on the pavement. “In your head?”
“I moved my fingers.” He demonstrated against his own thigh as he walked: C, D, E, G, E, each note pressed with quiet deliberation. “Miss Hartley thought I was asleep.”
“Were you not?”
“Not straight away.” He glanced down at his hand, still moving. “Moving my fingers helps first.”
Miss Hartley followed two paces behind, silent and steady. The morning was cool, the street not yet busy, and Fairmont House was already visible at the end of the short stretch of pavement, cream-fronted, its windows catching the mid-morning light.
He had walked this same distance more than a few times, at Lucien’s invitation, for dinners and late evenings and the easy commerce of a long friendship.
It had not felt like this then. The difference was the boy beside him, and he was only beginning to understand how much a small difference accumulated.
“You should hear it,” James said.
“That is what lessons are for.”
“You could come up. Just once. Before you go.”
“Not today.”
“Why?”
“The piano gives me splitting headaches. The sound of it. I have had the sensitivity since I was young. It has nothing to do with your playing.”
James walked on in silence for several steps, his coat straight, his face turned forward with the slow, unhurried patience he gave most things he was working out.
“Even when Annabelle plays?” he said.
“Even then.”
“But you can tell she plays differently.” He said it with confidence, as a point already settled and now recorded aloud. “Anyone could tell.”
They had reached the door. Dominic gestured toward it. “Come.”
James went up the steps. Miss Hartley followed.
The door opened before anyone knocked, and Lady Annabelle stood in the frame with sheet music in one hand and Newton the cat at her feet.
Newton looked at Dominic with the detached assessment of a cat with no obligations, then attached himself to James’s left ankle and purred.
“Good morning.” Her eyes moved at once to James. “You’re on time.”
“I practiced,” James said.
“Go wash your hands first.” She stepped back to let him in. “We’ll start in ten minutes.”
James went. Newton considered the corridor and followed James. Miss Hartley came through with a small nod.
Lady Annabelle looked at Dominic from the doorway.
“Good morning, Lady Annabelle,” he said.
“Good morning, Your Grace.” She held the frame with one hand and said nothing further; she had a lesson to give and a boy upstairs and no evident interest in filling the interval.
He turned for the steps.
“He talks himself through the runs at night,” she said.
“After the light’s out. Miss Hartley told me two days ago.
” She had the tone she used when reporting information she expected him to use rather than dismiss.
“He does it because he wants to know if it sounds the way he hears it in his head. He just doesn’t want to know that only from me. ”
Dominic stopped on the second step. He did not turn around. “Then tell him it does.”
“He would rather you told him.”
“I doubt that, my lady.”
He went down the remaining steps and exited the house.
As he stepped out, he heard it: five notes from the upper floor, clean and unhurried, run through once without error. After that, there was a brief pause, and then it started again, slightly faster.
He hurried away, trying to muffle out the melody.
And the bloodied memory that it provoked.
“Do you hear the difference?” James asked, looking at the keys with a pensive expression on his face, both his hands folded on his thighs.
“Between what?” Annabelle said.
He pressed E flat, held it, then pressed E natural. “Those two.”
A half-step apart; close enough that most students would not notice the distinction for months. James had only been studying notes for three weeks.
“What do you hear?” she said.
She watched him take a moment to think about it. “The second one is brighter. It sounds just like…when a window opens in a room that’s been shut all morning!”
His face was bright as he said it, the brightest she’d ever seen this reserved child, and then he looked at her to see if this was right.
She found herself nodding without even thinking about it, a smile already pulling her lips wide. “That is exactly right.”
He beamed even more before turning back to the keys.
Newton shifted in his lap, purring low in his throat, and James took a second to stroke the cat’s fur.
Then he played the five-note sequence she had assigned last session: C, D, E, G, E, steady and deliberate, the fourth note—which had caught him the week before—ringing clean.
He finished and looked at her.
“Again,” she said.
With a decisive nod, he played it again without stopping, and this time, the tempo was slightly faster.
She made a mark on his sheet with that smile still teasing at her lips. Then he ventured, tentatively, “If I learn a full song, a real one, Uncle Dominic will like it, won’t he??”
Annabelle added a second mark before daring to look into his innocent, yet serious face and said, “Of course, he will,” without batting an eye.
After the quarter hour, she introduced the left-hand bass: simple, foundational, a floor beneath the right-hand melody.
James received this with the gravity he gave to all new information.
He practiced each hand separately, satisfied himself with each, then tried them together. They fell apart on the third note.
“That always happens,” he said, with an edge of frustration in his voice.
“It always does.” She played it through for him, both hands in parallel. “Your hands argue at first. They’ll stop once they forget to think about each other.”
He watched her hands and positioned his own and tried again.
Twenty minutes later, Miss Hartley appeared in the doorway. James turned from the bench and looked at Newton with a very satisfied expression.
“Newton,” he said, and the cat opened one eye. “We have to go.”
Newton shut that eye, completely disregarding the command as his tail flicked. James gathered him with the steady care and set him beside Annabelle on the bench.
Annabelle watched him go with Miss Hartley without argument. That was a great improvement from the first week.
Downstairs, Helena was on the chaise longue with a novel held at arm’s length, which meant she had stopped reading some time ago and was simply thinking.
Lady Rosenhall sat at the writing desk with the composed authority of a woman who had already written three letters and was on her fourth.
A sealed envelope sat on the side table in Lucien’s handwriting.
“The post came while you were upstairs,” Helena said, without looking up. “One from Fairmont.”
Annabelle broke the seal. Lucien wrote the way he always had—brief, warm, the point arrived at directly.
The estate business was largely concluded.
They would remain through the end of the summer.
Charlotte, their toddler, was quite happy about that.
Elinor’s postscript occupied the bottom third: she was expecting again, please do not tell Lucien. She sent her love.
“Read it aloud,” Helena said. “I have done nothing of any interest in five days.”
“Helena,” Lady Rosenhall chastised.
“I include correspondence in that.”
Annabelle read it. Lady Rosenhall set her pen down at the news about Elinor.
“A second child,” she said. “Good.” A pause. “That is what a marriage built on the right foundations produces. A husband who is present, a household in good order, children provided for.” She picked her pen back up. “It begins with a sound match. That is how all of it is built.”
“A sound match,” Lady Rosenhall continued, writing a line, “requires a certain watchfulness on the part of those who care about a young woman. Especially when her brother is absent.” Another line. “Especially when new situations arise.”
Helena turned a page. “How are the lessons going, Annabelle? Lord James seems to be coming along well.”
“Very well. He has real instincts for it.”
“Lovely.” Helena turned another page. “And His Grace?”
Annabelle cleared her throat. “Drops James off and collects him. That is the arrangement.”
“Mm.” Helena shifted on the chaise. “He’s very tall, isn’t he? I noted it last week and I note it again.”
Lady Rosenhall looked up from her letter.
“Your remarks,” she said, with middling patience, “arrive wearing smaller clothes than they own.” She looked at Annabelle over her reading glasses.
“The Duke of Silverford has a considerable reputation, my dear. I am not questioning the arrangement. I am only saying that reputation does not cease to matter simply because the circumstances are respectable.”
“I understand,” Annabelle said.
And she did.
The Duke of Silverford was Lucien’s oldest friend, which made the entire subject rather beside the point; a lady did not think of her brother’s oldest friend in those terms; it was simply not done. Besides, the Duke’s reputation was exactly what Lady Rosenhall had named it.
And Lucien…
Lucien had strong opinions about the men Annabelle spent her time with on the best of occasions. He would have something considerably stronger than an opinion about that.
The arrangement was practical: James was a lovely boy, and the lessons were going well. That was the full extent of it, and there was truly nothing further to consider.
“I trust you do,” Lady Rosenhall replied and then returned to her letter.