Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Dominic went out at ten that night and walked.
Not toward any club, not toward Miles or White’s or any of the usual coordinates—just out, coat buttoned, hat on, the city opening around him in the way London opens after dark: lamplit passages and the smell of the river, the sounds of coaches on the larger streets thinning to nothing as he moved into the quieter passages south of the park.
He walked east along the river, the tide going out, the mud-smell low and cold.
He walked until his legs were tired and the sky had gone from black to the grey that belongs to no hour cleanly.
He arrived back at Silverford House at half past four.
The footman at the door nodded without surprise, as footmen did, and Dominic took the stairs without a candle—he knew the house well enough not to need one—and on the first landing, he stopped.
James’s door was ajar. A thin line of light showed at the gap.
Dominic stood in the corridor. Then he stepped forward and pushed the door open slightly.
James was sitting up in his bed with the ship book open across his knees. The candle on his nightstand had burned to its lower third. He was not reading. He was looking at the door.
“You were out,” James said.
He nodded, “Yes, I went walking.”
“It is very early.” He looked at the candle, then back up. “Or very late.”
At that, Dominic smiled, very slightly. “Both.”
James turned the book over in his lap. He looked at the plate inside—the Trafalgar formation, the wind arrows—and said, without looking up, “You made Annabelle sad.”
Dominic stood in the doorway.
“She is not sad at meals,” James continued, still on the plate. “She is sad at other times. I heard her.” He paused. “She doesn’t think anyone can hear her.”
“James—”
“Do you want Annabelle to be sad?” He looked up now. His gaze was direct, as it always was when he needed a plain answer to a plain question.
“No,” Dominic said. “I do not.”
“Then you should fix it.” He set the book on the nightstand and lay down. He pulled the blanket up. “When Annabelle is happy, the whole house is happy.” He settled his head against the pillow and closed his eyes.
Dominic stood in the doorway.
“Goodnight, Uncle Dominic,” James said, from under the blanket.
“Goodnight,” Dominic said.
He pulled the door shut and stood in the corridor.
The house was entirely quiet. No lamp burned at this hour except the one at the foot of the stairs behind him. The corridor ran ahead in the dark, and Annabelle’s door was at the far end of it, and the line under it was dark.
He had come back from half of London on foot, his boots damp through, and he stood in the corridor and thought about a six-year-old boy who had gone to sleep on the strength of having stated a true thing, and felt, with a thoroughness he could not have prepared for, exactly how much he had managed to get wrong.
He stood there for a long time, and then he could do nothing else but go to his room.
He slept three hours and woke before the house and lay on his back and looked at the ceiling.
He heard her door at half past seven. He heard her voice at the foot of the stairs a little while later, light and even, talking to James about coats and the weather—she thought it looked like rain; James was not convinced—and then the front door, and the sounds of the street, and the house going quiet.
He lay still.
James’s words from the night before were still with him in the way certain things stay—not as a thought that repeated itself, but as a weight that had not shifted position since the moment of settling.
When Annabelle is happy, the whole house is happy.
James had said it plainly, as a true thing, in the same register he used for naval formations and the behavior of yellow dogs. There had been no expectation of drama in it. No bid for sympathy. He had simply noted an accurate fact and gone to sleep.
Dominic got up, got dressed, and went downstairs.
Mrs. Howell was in the passage near the kitchen stairs, two menus in her hand, her reading spectacles pushed up on her forehead. She looked at him and waited.
“The old music room,” he said. He stopped.
Mrs. Howell stood very still.
“I should like the key.”
She looked at him over the menus for the count of three. Then she set both menus on the hall table and reached into her chatelaine and produced a small iron key and held it out.
He took it.
She said nothing, which was, in its own way, quite a great deal; her own way of showing her respect for him.
“Thank you,” he said, and went.
The east wing corridor was cool even now. The plasterwork above the dado rail was the same as always; it was his grandfather’s renovation, the original work. He had walked this corridor as a child on his way to no place in particular. He had not walked it in some years.
The door was plain oak, no different from the others along this passage. He stood in front of it.
He put the key in the lock and turned it.
The door opened on the first push. The air that came out was cold and dry, the air of a room that had been shut for a very long time.
He stood in the doorway.
The room was covered. Two armchairs, the side table, and the writing desk that his mother had used.
And at the far end, where the two long windows faced the garden, the piano under its linen—the shape of it still unmistakable, the curve of the cabinet visible through the cloth.
It was larger than he had remembered. Or he was larger. It amounted to the same thing.
He took a step inside.
His chest tightened. Not slowly—at once, in the way a hand closes on something without intending to.
He stopped, one foot still at the threshold, and breathed through his nose.
The air tasted of dust and cold and a scent beneath the dust, older, faintly sweet.
Beeswax. The floor had been waxed once. Perhaps the last time anyone had tended this room.
He took another step.
His heart was going faster than a man walking a short corridor warranted.
He was aware of it in a way he was not usually aware of it—the beat of it prominent and disordered, his ears filling with the sound of his own pulse.
His hands were at his sides, and he held them still.
At the far end of the room, the windows let in the grey morning light, and the piano stood in the middle of it.
He kept his eyes level and walked toward it.
He breathed in.
Annabelle’s hand on his chest, in the dark. He let himself remember the weight of it…the warmth. Her voice saying: You’re here. I’m here.
He held it.
She had not moved her hand. She had stayed, which was the thing that undid him, not the words—she had stayed with her hand on his chest in the dark and felt his heartbeat and counted his breathing and not made anything of it at all, as though staying were the simplest thing in the world.
He breathed out and took another step. The floor was cold through his boots, and before he knew it, he was in the middle of the room. He breathed in again.
Then, he reached the piano. He was standing two feet from it, with unsteady hands, and the image was working at the edge of his vision—the dark line along the keys, the shape against the pedal board—but he managed to keep breathing as he gripped the edge of the linen and pulled.
It came off in a long sweep, dust rising, and the keys appeared, ivory and ebony, old now, the ivory gone slightly yellow at the edges. The fallboard was closed, but… it was still the same piano.
The image came then.
It did not come slowly or by degrees. It came all at once, the way it always came: his father’s hands, and the blood, dark in the cracks between the keys, and the sound of it still in the air of the room though there was no sound.
The shape of her against the pedal board.
The quality of his father’s breathing—ragged and very slow.
Dominic gripped the edge of the cabinet with both hands.
The room had gone wrong at the edges. His breathing was too fast and too shallow, and he could hear it from the outside of himself, could hear how it had gone wrong.
His legs were not going to hold this steady.
The light in the room was too much and too little at the same time, and the piano was in front of him, and the image was all around it, and his throat had closed down to nearly nothing.
Breathe.
He closed his eyes.
Her voice in the dark, steady and unhurried: You’re here.
I’m here. Breathe. Her thumb moving across the back of his hand in slow passes, not calling attention to itself, simply there.
The way she had counted his breathing without counting out loud—he had known she was doing it, had known she was matching her own breathing to his, had felt the evidence of it in the rise and fall of her chest against his arm.
She had not made it a performance. She had simply done it, and he had followed without meaning to, the way a body follows a rhythm it recognizes.
He breathed in. Held it, and then. Out.
The floor was still cold through his boots. The cabinet was cold under his palms. The room was where it had always been—the windows at the far end, the walls on either side. His heartbeat was still too fast, but it was in his chest, where it belonged.
In again. Hold. Out.
He breathed until his legs held properly.
He breathed until the edges of the room came back.
He breathed until the image had not gone—it would not go; it had lived in him for twenty-three years, and it was not going anywhere now—but it had moved back to where he could see it without it being the only thing he could see.
He opened his eyes and fixed them on the keys before sitting down on the bench.
He had not sat here since the night before she died.
He had been nine years old, and she had arranged his hands over hers and said: Listen for the middle note—do you hear it?
He had been trying to hear it when she sent him to bed.
He had gone up the stairs and lingered at the top, wanting to hear more of her playing through the floor.
He raised the fallboard. The keys were ivory and ebony, old and slightly yellowed. They were clean. He looked at them for a time, the fallboard up, the room quiet around him.
He set his hands on the keys; the cold of them going through his fingers at once. He did not press anything yet, taking it as slowly as he could, sitting there with his hands on the cool ivory and looking at the garden wall through the window, at the grey London sky above it.
Then he pressed a single note.
Middle C.
It rang out into the room and died slowly, the way old instruments do, the resonance going and then gone. The room did not close around it.
He played three more notes—a chord low in the bass, the opening his mother used for a piece she had played often. He had not known, until this moment, that he still carried it: the shape of it in the muscles of his hand, waiting there since he was nine years old.
They rang out and went quiet.
And instead of his father’s hands, he saw hers.
Her long fingers…the way she sat at the bench—always straight, which she had explained to him was mechanics rather than manners: you breathe better upright, the air goes all the way down.
The way she tilted her head when a piece went right, listening for something just past the room.
He remembered Annabelle’s hands on the keys at the Fairmont soiree. The way the room had gone quiet around her without her seeming to notice it, and the music had moved through everyone standing in it, and he had stood at the back and not been able to look away.
He remembered James’s face when the new piano arrived. Both hands pressed flat to the cabinet, stock-still, his eyes wide and full of what he was holding—the way he looked when a thing mattered, and he needed it to stay exactly as it was.
Dominic played the chord again.
He held it until it faded. And he sat for a time with his hands in his lap, just letting the sound echo inside his mind. Then he stood, walked to the door, and walked through it.
But he did not close it behind him. In fact, the key was still in the lock. He left it there too, and walked back down the corridor, and did not look back at the open door.
He did not need to.