Chapter 11 #2
There was no arrangement of the facts that improved the conclusion. Annabelle had come onto the balcony, and he had put his hands on her waist before she had finished speaking, and she had leaned in by half an inch that she could not have intended to give him…
And he had kissed her.
That was the complete record.
He was thirty-two years old, with a rule he had kept for the better part of a decade for reasons that had not ceased to be valid overnight: unmarried women of good family were not for men of his sort.
She was Lucien’s sister, and her brother was at Fairmont under the complete confidence that nothing of this nature was occurring, because nothing of this nature was supposed to occur.
He was not going to sit here losing the thread over Lucien Stanton’s younger sister.
She had pulled away. She had produced the sense he had apparently mislaid, and had ended it herself, and the correct response to that was to behave as a rational man: civil, unremarkable, brief.
He had James drop off at her house at one. He would deliver the boy, keep it short, and return to work, as usual.
What had cracked it, if he was going to be honest, and he generally was, at least with himself, was not the costume or the cold or the proximity, though the proximity had not helped.
It was that she had come after him. Not to make a scene, not to demand explanations, not to show concern.
She had come out onto a cold balcony alone because his face had been wrong, and she had said so, and she had not looked away from any of it.
Men who wanted to be left alone were generally left alone. He had cultivated that expectation for years. She had not found it applicable.
And so, he called for his hat.
Annabelle was not reading.
The book was open in her lap and had been on the same page since Helena had left her after lunch, and the paragraph had been released without retention three times over. She set it aside when the footman appeared in the doorway.
“His Grace the Duke of Silverford, my lady. With Lord James.”
She smoothed her skirts and went into the hall.
Dominic was standing near the door. He had his hat in his hand and had not moved to give it to the footman, which required no interpretation. James stood at his side, holding the strap of his leather case in both fists, chin angled toward the floor.
Lady Rosenhall appeared at the top of the stairs at that moment, took in the scene below with one comprehensive look, and descended with the unhurried dignity of a woman making a point without needing to make it aloud.
She greeted the duke with a nod that was polite in the way a closed door is polite: perfectly correct and offering nothing further.
Dominic returned it with equal correctness.
“Lady Annabelle.” He inclined his head. The words were correct and entirely empty of everything beyond their surface.
“Your Grace.” She looked at him, then at James. “Good afternoon.”
James looked up from the floor. He glanced at the staircase behind her, then at her face. “Can we do the F today?”
“We can.”
He nodded once and shifted his case to the other hand, satisfied that the essential point had been settled.
“He has his things,” Dominic said. His voice was even, the sound of a man moving through his list in order. “Miss Hartley has packed a change of clothes. He has a tendency to find—”
“I know,” she said.
He looked at the wall beyond her shoulder.
“I’ll send for him at four.”
“Four is fine.”
He settled his hat. “Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon.”
He turned, and she heard the latch, and then nothing. Newton materialized from somewhere along the corridor, paused, and looked at the closed door with an air of mild inquiry. He looked at Annabelle. He looked at the door again. Then he sat down firmly, as though rendering a verdict.
James watched the door for a moment and then looked at the floor again. “He put his coat on and took it off and put it on again this morning,” he said.
“Oh?” Annabelle said.
“He does that when something’s bothering him. Mrs. Greer says.” He appeared to consider whether the account was complete, and decided it was. He looked up at her. “Can we go now?”
“Yes,” she said. “We can go.”
Newton followed them both upstairs without being asked.
She settled James at the pianoforte. He set his case down, climbed onto the bench, and looked at the keys. Then he looked at her.
“Is something wrong?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Nothing is wrong.”
He looked at her for another second, then back at the keys. He accepted this.
“Can we do the F now?”
“We can do the F now.”
They began.
He worked through the scale the way he worked through everything he had decided to do properly: left hand first, right hand second, neither combined until both were reliable on their own.
Newton had settled in the window seat behind the pianoforte, and the afternoon light came in at a low angle, and the room was quiet except for the scale and the faint sounds of the street beyond the glass.
By the fourth repetition, James’s left hand had stopped cramping on the stretch, and by the sixth, he was moving through it with an evenness she had not heard from him before.
The lesson ran close to two hours. By the end of it, he was playing in both hands, and the last time he ran it from bottom to top and back again, he went straight through without stopping, and when he finished, he sat still with his hands in his lap.
“It sounded right,” he said.
“It did,” she agreed.
He got down from the bench and picked up his case, and she walked him to the door when Dominic’s footman came at four. James went down the steps without a backward look.
She stood at the door until the gate closed.
Helena appeared behind her in the entrance hall, holding a small card between two fingers. Her expression had the quality of someone delivering information they find interesting and intend to present without embellishment.
“A gentleman called while we were at the park,” she said. “He left this.”
Annabelle took it.
The card was good stock, the engraving clean. A viscount’s name. And beneath it, in a careful hand:
Would be honored to further the acquaintance made at the Greyton masquerade, should Lady Annabelle be agreeable.
She looked at it.
Helena said nothing. She did not need to.