Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
“Lady Annabelle,” Dominic greeted as Annabelle stood for him and James at the entrance hall a few days later.
Annabelle had told herself, during the walk from her bedchamber to the front door, that there was nothing unusual about any of this. She had the lesson to prepare, she had her morning, and everything was the same as it had always been.
Now, the Duke released James’s shoulder.
“Your Grace.” She stepped back to let James through. “Good morning.”
“Good morning.” He was already turning. He put his hat on as he went back down the steps, without looking back, and the footman closed the door before he reached the pavement.
James stood in the entrance hall with his case in both hands and watched the door close.
Then he looked at Annabelle, his expression serious but curious in a manner she did not want to encourage.
So, she smiled at him and volunteered a light-hearted question: “Shall we begin?”
He didn’t answer, merely turning and going toward the music room. Annabelle followed silently behind him, resolving to take her mind off thinking about the man who brought him here in the first instance.
She had made the decision two days ago, and she intended to hold to it. She would find her own husband this season, without Dominic Barrow’s help, without his interference.
And without the compounded confusion that seemed to follow wherever he went.
The lesson went poorly from the first quarter-hour, and not in any way that Annabelle could easily name.
James sat, opened his case, set out his music, and placed his hands on the keys.
He played the opening scales. He played them again.
He played the passage from the Haydn she had given him the previous session.
But he was watching her, at intervals. He would look at the keys, play, then look at her. She would glance up from the music and find his eyes already there, tracking.
“James. Third measure, F sharp.”
He looked at the keys. He hit the F sharp.
“Good.”
She turned the page. He played the next passage. Two bars in, she looked up, and he was watching her again, hands moving on the keys, but his attention was not on them.
“What is it?” she said.
“Uncle is upset,” he said, then looked down at the score.
Annabelle paused, looking from the boy’s face to his fingers on the keys. The boy’s three simple words made her heart clench a fraction.
She shook her head. She would not think of him; she had better things to worry about, so she let it go and kept the lesson moving.
At least, James had gotten it off his chest and ceased watching her.
That was encouraging. At least, for a while.
Because at the end of the Haydn passage, he stopped, placing his hands flat on his thighs and looking at the piano.
Annabelle waited.
“When Uncle left,” James said, “I saw that he didn’t look at you.”
Annabelle’s heart stuttered in her chest, and she cleared her throat subtly, even as she kept her hands steady on the music stand. “He left you here for your lesson. That was the purpose.”
James’s brow folded briefly. “He looks at you,” he said. “When he brings me. He always looks at you when he says good morning.”
On the settee behind them, Helena’s needle stopped moving through the embroidery frame.
“Today he didn’t.” James turned and looked at her directly. “And you didn’t look at him either. You looked at me instead.”
Annabelle could only stare at the child, this young boy who saw far more than she was wont to give him credit for. She had not thought that the child would notice the coldness between them, but she could not quite tell him why she and his uncle were at an impasse at the moment.
What would a six-year-old know of marriage marts and trying to find a husband? What would he understand in the fact that his uncle is the one who offered to help her, yet is the same one hindering her every attempt, confusing her every step of the way as he did?
“And you smiled,” James said, “but it was after. Did he…? He made you sad, didn’t he?”
She opened her mouth, and the words just poured out. “We… had a disagreement, that’s all,” she offered softly. “Grown people have those sometimes, even when they respect each other. It has nothing to do with these lessons, or with you, dear.”
James looked at his hands on his thighs, and moments passed.
“Will our lessons continue?” he said. “Even now?”
“Next week, and every week after that.”
He weighed this for the length of three slow breaths. Then he put his right hand back on the keys and played the Haydn opening, slowly, both hands finding their places.
Annabelle folded her hands in her lap and listened, heart breaking in her chest.
Dominic found James in the library, face down on the carpet with a book propped open and his chin resting on both hands. This was how he read when he did not want to be asked questions.
“Miss Hartley told me the lesson was difficult today,” Dominic said.
James turned a page without looking up. “I didn’t want to play.”
“Why not?”
A short pause. “Annabelle was sad.”
“Did she say that?”
“She said she wasn’t.” Another page turned. “But she had the sad face.”
Dominic looked at the ceiling. He had not been thinking about the terrace at Lord Arbuthnot’s for two days, with moderate success. He had not been examining why he had said what he’d said, or why he could not seem to let it alone now that he had.
The arrangement, James’s lessons, the boy’s steadier eating and sleeping and speaking, was the point of all of it.
The arrangement was now operating badly because Dominic had pressed a score the length of two terraces when he had no standing to press it at all, and the consequence was a six-year-old lying on the carpet refusing to play Haydn.
He looked at the book James was reading. It was about steam-driven mechanical engines.
“There is a fair near Bloomsbury on Saturday,” he said.
James set the book flat on the carpet and looked up at him. He looked at him for four full seconds.
“With mechanical toys,” Dominic added.
He had heard this mentioned three times in the past ten days, at the breakfast table and once during an altogether unrelated conversation about carriage axles.
James looked at his book, then back at Dominic, and then said, with the directness of someone delivering a considered verdict: “You were mean to her.”
Dominic was simply frozen solid. What…?
“You should tell her you’re sorry,” James said, and picked his book back up.
And Dominic let out a soft scoff, unable to believe his ears, but also unable to deny the truth that had come out of his nephew’s mouth.
Lady Rosenhall stepped down from the carriage and paused.
“I have made a miscalculation,” she said.
“It is charming,” Helena said.
“A man is blowing a trumpet the size of a sardine tin.”
“He is committed to his art.”
She straightened her gloves and walked toward the gate.
James was already there. He stood without moving, both arms at his sides, taking the scene in: the crowd at the entrance, the juggler to his left, the stalls visible through the gate, and all the noise coming from all of it at once.
The expression on his face had no agitation in it yet, only the focused blankness of a boy receiving more information than he had planned for.
Annabelle crossed to him without hurrying.
She stood close enough that her skirt brushed his boot and looked where he was looking. “That man to the right has a cage of mechanical birds,” she said, bending slightly and pointing. “The blue one lifts its wings when he winds the key. Do you see it?”
James looked at the bluebird going through its small, jerky arc. “It moves wrong,” he said. “Birds don’t hold their wings that way.”
“I think he made it from memory.”
“Then his memory is wrong.”
“Possibly.” She straightened. “But it still moves.”
James watched the bird complete its rotation. His shoulders came down by a degree. “Can we go in?” he said, already walking through the gate.
Dominic was two steps behind them, but Annabelle did not look at him, even though her skin prickled with the acute awareness of him.
Dominic watched Annabelle point at the mechanical bird, and watched James’s shoulders drop.
Miss Hartley had been with the boy for four months, and she was patient and reliable, and she had learned the specific distances and tones that kept James from shutting down entirely.
But…she did not do what Annabelle did. None of them did.
She looked at what James was looking at and described it, and that was apparently sufficient, and Dominic had watched this happen enough times that it had stopped seeming remarkable and simply seemed like a fact about her.
He turned his attention toward the east stalls. Helena appeared at his left. Dominic didn’t quite know what to do about her attention, but he knew he was going to have to entertain it regardless, especially knowing that she was Lady Annabelle’s closest confidante.
“Your Grace.” She fell into step beside him and immediately matched his pace. “You look extremely formidable for a fairground.”
“This is my standard expression.”
“I know. I said as much.” She watched the stalls ahead for a moment. Then: “She got through the whole lesson before she said a word about it. That is how she is. She will let you take the entire thing apart before she shows you it mattered.”
Dominic said nothing.
“She has also decided,” Helena added, in the same even tone, “that she no longer requires your assistance finding a husband. She intends to manage that herself from here.”
Dominic looked toward Annabelle, who was ahead of them with James at a tin monkey stall, her head bent toward the boy’s height.
She said something; James’s chin dropped in the small, closed way that meant he was pleased and did not intend to show it.
The two of them entirely occupied with each other, entirely self-contained.
“She said that,” Dominic said.
“This morning. To me.” Helena’s voice carried no weight in either direction. “I am not asking you to explain yourself. I only thought you should know both things.”