Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The walk back from the park had taken longer than expected.
James had found a snail on the south path and determined that it required full scientific inquiry—he had read something about locomotion that he wanted to test against direct observation, and he tested it thoroughly, and Annabelle had stood in the thin afternoon light and given him the time.
He was still talking about it on the way back through the gate.
He had moved from locomotion to the comparative weight of shells, and then to a question about whether snails dreamed, which he had raised not as whimsy but as a genuine inquiry deserving a serious answer.
She had given him one. She was listening to herself do it from a slight remove—the voice that moved through the day undisturbed, while the part of her that did not perform ordinary things stayed where it had been all morning, behind her sternum.
They came in through the front hall. James was two steps ahead, still mid-theory, and she was working out the afternoon—his reading hour, her correspondence, the long evening she had learned to fill rather than feel—when James stopped.
She nearly stepped into him.
He had gone wooden in the doorway, and so she followed the direction of his head.
The new music room door was open. The sound coming from it was slow and uncertain—a single note, a pause, another note, the halting shape of a melody worked out one key at a time by someone reading it off the space between presses.
James turned to look at her, but she had nothing for him. She simply looked back, just as perplexed. He turned and walked toward the door, and she followed behind him to find…
Dominic was sitting at the piano.
His back was straight, and his hands were in his lap, and the fallboard was raised, and he had been, from the evidence, pressing keys individually in the manner of someone mapping terrain. He looked up when James came into the doorway.
He saw Annabelle behind him.
He stayed on the bench. He did not arrange his expression into anything, which meant she got the unmanaged version: the careful stillness he used when he was uncertain, which she had learned to read as its own kind of speech.
James stood in the doorway. “You are playing the piano,” he said, confusion in his tone.
“I-I am…attempting it,” Dominic said, his tone gruff.
James looked at the keys, then at Dominic, then at the keys again, making the inventory.
“Would…Would you like to play with me?” Dominic asked.
It came out plainly. He had stripped the question of the hedging that most adults attached to invitations directed at children—it arrived as a direct question, which James received in the way he received all direct questions: as something to be answered.
He stared at Dominic for three full seconds. Then he crossed the room and climbed onto the bench.
He set his hands over the keys with the authority of someone who had been here many times and knew where everything was. His posture at the piano was already better than Dominic’s.
Annabelle stayed in the doorway.
Dominic placed his right hand on the keys and picked out a simple figure—four notes in a low pattern, the shape of a melody James would know.
It took her a moment. Then she had it: a nursery song, the kind that moves from hand to hand until no one can say who originated it.
James’s face changed when the first phrase came through.
He found his place at the treble end and joined in.
They played together, and then Dominic pressed the wrong note. A half-step off, the wrong tone arriving in the room in a way that admitted no ambiguity.
“No.” James leaned across at once and pointed at a key two positions over. “That one. Not that one.”
Dominic looked at where he was pointing. He looked at the key he had pressed.
He let out a sound—small and brief, almost nothing, quickly gone. Annabelle heard it as what it was: a real laugh, surprised out of him, not deliberate.
“You’re a strict teacher,” Dominic said.
James considered this. “I won’t teach you,” he said. “Annabelle will teach you.” He pressed the correct note himself, with one finger, to establish it. “That is E. You played F. They are adjacent. It is a common error.”
“Is it?” Dominic asked.
“For beginners,” James confirmed, without cruelty.
Annabelle put one hand against the doorframe.
They played the melody through twice more.
James corrected Dominic twice—pointing, naming the note, waiting for the right key to be pressed before he resumed his own part.
Dominic played with the patience of a man who was not in a hurry, which was not a quality she had associated with him until she saw it here, in this room, at this piano, beside a six-year-old who had no interest in softening his assessments.
By the second pass, James had come half off the bench, one knee on the seat and one foot still on the floor, his whole attention on the keys and on monitoring Dominic’s hand for deviations.
She had seen him look this way at ships.
At a piece of music he knew very well. She had not seen him look this way with Dominic.
She watched Dominic notice it.
The governess appeared at the far end of the hall at half past five. James heard her before she came into view—he always heard footsteps before anyone else—and looked up from the piano.
He slid off the bench. He came to Annabelle and put his arms around her waist and pressed his face briefly into her side, the way he did when something had gone right, and he was satisfied with the day. She put her hand on the back of his head.
Then he turned, but Dominic had turned on the bench to face him. James walked back to the bench and put his arms around Dominic’s middle.
She watched Dominic go absolutely still, shocked at the gesture, no doubt. His hands came up and away from James’s back for a moment, uncertain of their own permission.
Then he brought one hand down and set it on the boy’s shoulder. It was not practiced. It was the gesture of someone doing something for the first time, doing it with enough care that it didn’t look careless.
James stepped back. His expression was the one he wore after a fact had been confirmed to his satisfaction.
“Goodnight, Uncle Dominic,” he said. He followed the governess up the stairs without looking back.
The hall went quiet.
Dominic rose from the bench. He looked at her across the room.
“Could I speak with you alone?” he said, and Annabelle swallowed, taking a step back.
But she also knew she could not escape from this conversation forever. She did not want to, especially not now, when he had faced the piano…when he had come to her, all by himself.
“Fine.” She said.
They walked to her room without ceremony—he had no easy way to make the walk into something other than what it was, so he didn’t try. She opened the door, and they went in. She went to stand near the window, the late light behind her, and looked at him.
He stood in the middle of the room.
“I opened the old music room this morning,” he said.
She was very still.
“Mrs. Howell had the key. I asked her for it at half past seven.” He paused. “She gave it to me without a word.”
Annabelle looked at him and did not speak.
“I walked down the east corridor,” he said.
“The plasterwork is the same as when I was a boy. I had not walked that corridor in some years.” He kept his voice even.
“The door opened on the first push. The room had been shut long enough that the air inside it was cold and dry, and there was beeswax under the dust from the last time anyone had tended the floor, which was a very long time ago.”
He stopped. He had arranged this on the way over—the shape of what he wanted to say—and now, standing in front of her, the arrangement felt like a way of avoiding the thing itself.
“There is a window at the far end,” he said. “The piano stood in front of it. I could see the shape of it through the linen cover from the doorway. It was larger than I remembered, or I was larger.” He met her eyes. “My chest went tight the instant I stepped inside. Not slowly. All at once.”
She was listening with her whole attention, the way she listened when she had decided the thing being said was worth the full weight of it.
“My heartbeat went wrong,” he said. “Too fast. I could hear it. The room went bad at the edges—the light, the walls. I stood in the middle of it and the image came the way it always comes. All at once. My father’s hands on the keys.
The blood in the cracks between them, dark where it had dried.
My mother against the pedal board. The particular quality of his breathing as it slowed. ”
Annabelle’s eyes had gone bright.
“I have carried that image for twenty-three years,” he said.
“I have never once walked back into that room to find out whether I could survive it. I arranged my life in every available direction to ensure I would not have to.” He looked at her.
“And then I stepped inside this morning, and my legs were not going to hold steadily. I could not get enough air.”
He paused. “I thought…I thought of you,” he said.
“The night in the library—your hand on my chest, the way you counted my breathing without counting aloud. How you stayed. You did not make anything of it. You simply stayed and felt my heartbeat and matched your own breathing to mine, and I followed without meaning to.” He looked at his hands.
“I followed it again this morning, from memory. Your breathing. The weight of your hand.”
He saw the way she pressed her lips together, and the desperation started pulsing like lifeblood through him.
“I stayed until my legs held properly,” he said. “Until the image had moved back to where I could see it without it being the only thing I could see. Then I sat on the bench and I raised the fallboard.”