Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
“Was that right?” James asked.
He was turned toward her on the bench, hands folded in his lap now, with the careful stillness of someone who has finished something and is waiting to be told whether the thing was real.
Annabelle had not moved. She had been watching his hands and listening, and she was quiet for a moment longer than he expected, because she had learned early that he always noticed a false response and weighed it accordingly.
“Yes,” she said. “All the way through. Both hands.”
He looked back at the keys with the expression he wore when he was verifying a conclusion he had already arrived at privately. He pressed C once, softly, not practicing, only checking that the note was still where it had been.
“There was a gap,” he said. “After the third phrase.”
“There was. You closed it.”
“I pushed through it.”
“That is how you close it,” she said. “You’ll push less each time.”
He pressed D, then let it fade. Newton had been asleep in the armchair since the start of the hour, and the sound did not stir him. James watched the cat’s sides rise and fall with the comfortable indifference of someone who had already made his peace with Newton’s sleeping habits.
“Miss Hartley says I’m different,” he said.
Annabelle kept her voice level. “Different how?”
He thought about it. “She says less crowded in here.” He tapped the side of his head, once, without ceremony. “She usually means the loud parts.”
“And are you? Less crowded?”
“When I’m playing.” He pressed E, held it until the note dissolved. “The loud parts go somewhere else.”
She did not say what she thought of that.
Outside, a cart came through the square, and James’s shoulders tightened by a fraction, then released.
Three weeks ago, the same sound would have brought his hands off the keys entirely, and he would not have found his way back to them for the remainder of the lesson.
“The melody,” he said. “It has a middle part now. Where the left hand does the different thing.”
“The bass line, yes.”
“I didn’t like it at first.”
“I know. Your hands argued.”
“They stopped.” He looked at her with the flat directness he used when stating something he considered settled. “They forgot to think about each other, like you said.”
“Exactly like I said.”
He glanced toward the window. The clock on the mantel read five minutes to twelve. He turned back, and his face had shifted from the satisfaction of a task completed; he seemed to be calculating what to do with the time remaining.
“Uncle Dominic is coming at noon,” he said.
“He is.”
“He’ll be early,” he added with complete certainty. “He always comes early.”
Annabelle agreed, because it was true. In three weeks of the arrangement, Dominic had arrived at noon exactly once.
Every other time, he had come up the front steps at between eight and twelve minutes before the hour, looked at the door, waited for it to open, and said as little as possible before leaving.
“I want him to hear it,” James said. “The whole thing.”
She waited.
“He hasn’t,” James said. “He always leaves before I play.” He turned back to the keys, but did not press them. “I want him to stay for one minute and hear it. That’s all.”
“You could ask him.”
“He’ll say no.”
“You can ask anyway.”
James pressed his fingers flat on the keys without depressing them, thinking. “He said the sound hurts his head… but sometimes, I walk past his study, when he leaves the door open, and I hum the melody. When I do that, he doesn’t put his hands over his ears.”
He looked at her, his brow furrowing in confusion.
Annabelle said nothing because she did not know what to say to comfort a child who was wrestling with emotions and circumstances far too complicated.
“I’ve thought about it,” James said, his brow creasing further. “I don’t think his head hurts. I think he’s lying.”
Annabelle bit her lip. The clock on the mantel ticked through several seconds. What was she supposed to tell this innocent child? That she suspected the same? That his uncle had deeper reasons for not wanting to hear music?
“You could tell him what you told me,” Annabelle said.
“He’ll still say no.”
“He might.” She paused. “But it would be an honest no. Which is better than a reason that doesn’t quite fit.”
James held her gaze for a long moment. He had brown eyes, dark and very steady, and when he looked at her directly, it was with the full, unguarded attention he gave the piano keys.
It was the most honest face she had ever seen on anyone.
He nodded once and turned back to the keys.
He was playing through the second phrase when Annabelle heard the front door below and footsteps on the stairs a moment later. Quick, unhurried, the gait of a man who was not rushing, but was also not interested in taking his time.
James heard it, too. His hands stayed on the keys.
Dominic came through the door with his hat in hand and his eyes on James first, the same as always. He took in the bench, the keys, the cat in the chair, and James’s expression, which was readable to anyone who bothered to look.
“Ready?” he said.
“I want to play it for you first,” James said. “The melody. I learned the whole thing.”
“James—”
“It’s one minute.” He kept his voice flat and even. “You could stand at the door.”
Dominic held his hat. “The sound—”
“You said it hurts your head,” James,” he paused. “But when you’re in the study, and the door is open, and I’m humming, you don’t put your hands over your ears.”
Dominic looked at the boy.
After a moment, he said, “It is not that I do not want to hear you play.”
James looked up from the keys. “Then why?”
“It is not a simple answer.”
“Why not?”
Dominic turned the hat once in his hands. “James—”
“Is it the migraine or not?” James said it flat, both hands resting on the keys, looking at his uncle with the direct, unblinking attention he gave things he was working out.
Dominic had gone very still. He let out a breath, slow and even, and said nothing.
Annabelle said, quietly, “Your Grace… James has been working on this diligently. He learned the whole melody because he wanted you to hear it. Not because I asked him to.” She paused. “That is all he wants.”
Dominic looked at James, then at Annabelle. He knew that his face gave her nothing, but he was much more grateful for the fact that she did not press it.
He turned back to his nephew again. “One day,” he said, the words releasing with great difficulty, “I will hear it.”
James held his gaze in that guileless yet accountable way he did that reminded Dominic that he could not escape his words. “Promise?”
Dominic’s hand stilled on the hat. “Yes,” he said.
James nodded, as though this, too, was information he was filing away.
“Your coat,” Dominic reminded quietly.
James climbed off the bench and set Newton gently aside on the bench cushion.
Newton opened one eye, registered the change in arrangement, and settled back into sleep without visible objection.
James retrieved his coat from Miss Hartley, who had materialized in the corridor, and went through the door without looking back.
Dominic turned to follow.
“Your Grace,” Annabelle called out at the last moment.
He stopped. “Yes, Lady Annabelle?”
She approached him and kept her voice low as Miss Hartley and James disappeared down the corridor.
“James asked me, on Tuesday, whether you would stay on Thursday. He asked me again on Thursday morning. And this morning, before you arrived, he said he wanted to play it for you specifically.” She kept her voice even, without pressure in it. “He wanted you to hear it.”
Dominic was quiet with his back to her for a moment. His shoulders sagged for a moment, and Annabelle stilled as she noticed the emotion in the movement.
Then, he quickly straightened and whispered, “I know.”
He left, and the door settled behind him, and Annabelle stood alone in the music room, with the piano at her back, and Newton rubbing against her legs, purring.
What is this man hiding so deeply? Why can’t he push it aside for his nephew’s sake? For one minute, at the very least?
She scratched the cat behind the ears and did not say any of the things she was thinking.
James was explaining the mechanics of the sustain pedal with an enthusiasm Dominic hadn’t seen in the boy in months.
“You press it with your foot,” he said. “The notes last longer.” He looked at his bread. “Annabelle says I’m not old enough for it yet. You have to know the notes first, or the extra sound makes everything confused.”
“That seems reasonable,” Dominic said.
“She showed me how it works, though. So I understand what it does.” He took a bite. “It sounds like water. When you drop a pebble in a pond and the rings keep going even after it has sunk.”
Dominic cut his meat. He had no response for his nephew.
“Newton sat on my foot today,” James offered. “During the scales.”
“How… did the scales fare?” Although he did not think he could keep up with James’s same burst of enthusiasm, Dominic still wanted to encourage it any way he could.
Because this was the first time he’d seen James truly alive after his parents died.
“They were slower.” He shrugged. “He always keeps us company during the lesson. Annabelle says it’s because he likes me. I like him, too. He’s a very nice cat.”‘
He turned back to his supper without inflection, without sentiment, and said nothing further.
Dominic put his wine glass down.
He looked at the boy bent over his plate, eating with appetite.
He thought about what Annabelle had said.
He picked up his glass and said, “Mrs. Greer tells me you’ve been sleeping through the night.”
James looked up. “Yes… I have.” He admitted in a small voice, as though he were not sure it was something to be reprimanded for.
Dominic tried softening his mouth into a small smile, then said, “That’s better than before.”
That attempt allowed the boy to sit up straighter, his expression even more open now.
“The melody helps,” James said. “If I move my fingers through it first. The loud parts go somewhere else.” He ate the last piece of his supper.
“Annabelle says music does that. She says that’s one of its main purposes. ”
Dominic had nothing useful to add to that, and they finished their meal in relative silence.
Later that night, at half past eleven, he passed James’s room.
He had been in the study until then; the work had occupied him well enough that his mind had been, mostly, on the right things.
The door was ajar, and it was dark inside, but that did not stop him from hearing it: a very soft sound; soft enough that it would not have reached him if the door had been fully closed.
Five notes, the first phrase of the melody, hummed without the keys. Up and around, down and back.
Somehow, it sounded far more than a six-year-old humming a melody. It sounded like a lullaby. Like a soothing balm spread over the hollow void of grief.
How could a small boy express so much with such little effort?
Dominic tensed, his mind yanking him back to the old music room, to his mother’s soft smile, to her fingers over the keys.
Then the blood—
His heart sped. “No,” he muttered to himself.
He swiftly turned on his heel and walked on, trying to muffle James’s tune and the melody of grief that was seared into the back of his soul.