Epilogue
FOUR MONTHS LATER
“There are forty chairs,” Miles said, stepping inside the old music room. He looked around with the inventory-taking expression he deployed at parties before deciding whether they were worth his attention. “Thirty-seven confirmed. Three chairs of architectural optimism.”
Dominic was at the far window. Below, the first carriages had begun to turn into the square, lanterns lit against the November dark.
He had been standing here for twenty minutes.
Annabelle had sent him out of their chambers at half past seven with the information that she could not finish dressing with him hovering, and the music room had been where his feet brought him.
“You arrived early,” Dominic said.
“I arrived at the right time,” Miles said. “Which is the better claim.” He came up beside him. They stood at the window together, watching the lanterns below. After a moment, Miles looked at him sideways. “You have been in here a while.”
“I have an interest in the room’s condition.”
“You have an interest in your wife’s evening going well. Different thing.” Miles said nothing more about it, which was one of the qualities that made him tolerable.
Dominic turned from the window and looked at the piano.
The room was fully lit. Three candelabra, the mantel lamp, the long curtains drawn.
The piano stood uncovered at the far end with its lid raised, the keys catching the candlelight along their length.
He had been in this room almost every week since September, and it still did the same thing to him—not the total dissolution it had been in the beginning, the edges coming apart, the ground going unreliable—but a version of it.
A tightening at the sternum. One hard beat of the heart.
The image came.
He let it come. He had learned that fighting it made it slower to pass.
His father’s hands on the keys. The dark dried into the cracks between them. The quality of the breathing in the silence after.
He breathed in.
Annabelle’s voice in the dark, the night of the nightmare: you’re here.
I’m here. Her hand flat on his chest, the warmth of it through the fabric, the weight of it.
The way she had simply matched his breathing—not counting aloud, not making a performance of it—slow in, hold, slow out, until his body had found the same rhythm.
He breathed out. Held it. Let it go.
His heartbeat settled. The room came back fully: the chairs in their curved rows, the candlelight steady, Miles beside him saying nothing.
“She will play beautifully,” Miles said, after a moment.
“I know she will,” Dominic said.
Miles looked at him once, then looked back at the window.
The hall had acquired the sound of an evening assembling itself by the time they came downstairs. Coats being taken, voices moving through the corridor in the unhurried way voices moved when a gathering was finding its feet.
Lucien and Elinor arrived first. Lucien had left Charlotte at Fairmont House with the nurse; he came through the door, crossed the entrance hall directly, and put out his hand. Dominic took it, and the grip held one beat longer than a handshake required.
“Well then,” Lucien said.
“Well then,” Dominic said, and they were done with it.
Elinor kissed his cheek and looked at him squarely in the way she had of looking at people she had decided she liked. “She was anxious this morning,” she said. “Is she well?”
“She is well.”
“Good.” Elinor moved past him into the corridor, taking Lucien with her.
Helena arrived in primrose yellow, which she wore the way she wore everything: with the absolute conviction that it was correct.
She stopped in front of Dominic, took both his arms, and said, “Is she ready?” When he confirmed it, she said, “Lady Rosenhall told Mrs. Aldgate this week that the Duchess of Silverford is the most accomplished pianist in her acquaintance. Mrs. Aldgate’s acquaintance numbers approximately four hundred people. I want you to have that figure.”
He thanked her. She moved on.
Lady Rosenhall herself arrived half a step behind Helena, already surveying the chair arrangement.
“Silverford.” She inclined her head. “The acoustics will be excellent with the curtains drawn.”
“The curtains are drawn.”
“I know.” A pause. “That is why I said it will be excellent.”
She went in without waiting for an answer.
Miles materialized at Dominic’s elbow. “Lady Rosenhall has just given you the highest compliment she gives anything,” he said, “and you accepted it without flinching. Four months ago, you would have asked Mrs. Howell what a curtain had to do with acoustics.”
“Four months ago, I was wrong about most things,” Dominic said.
Miles looked at him. “Yes,” he said, “you were,” and went to find wine.
Theodore and Cressida, the Ashmeres, arrived together. Theodore greeted Dominic with a handshake and a brief look at the room; Cressida found Helena at once, and the two of them fell into conversation within thirty seconds.
Other guests filtered through: Lucien’s parliamentary neighbors, an elder countess Annabelle had befriended in September, two ladies from their autumn calls who arrived together and positioned themselves with long practice near the refreshments.
By eight o’clock, the room was full.
Dominic went to the front and waited until the conversation had arranged itself into quiet. Forty faces turned.
“You are here,” he said, “because my wife wished to open this room properly, and because she wished to play for you in it. Her skill requires no introduction from me.” He paused. “You are about to hear it directly.”
He sat down. The guests applauded, the expectant kind, gathering itself in. The door at the back of the room opened, and Annabelle came in.
She was in deep blue, the gown she had declared her favorite and worn three times this season. Her hair was up, with the loose strand at her right temple that was always there by the second hour of an evening.
She walked to the piano without looking at any of the guests. Except, for a moment, him. Her eyes went to him across the room and stayed there, and then she sat at the bench, settled her hands in her lap, and looked at the keys.
The room went quiet.
She began.
He did not know the full title of the Beethoven sonata—she had told him twice, and he had not retained it—but he knew the music.
He had heard it through the floor of his study for weeks.
He had stood at the doorway of the corridor at night and heard it come under the door and not gone in, and had sat at the top of the stairs in the dark and let it come through the ceiling, and had understood in those weeks before he had done anything about understanding it—what the music was doing to him.
He had the words for it now.
The room held still around it. Not the polite stillness of an audience performing attention, but the involuntary kind: heads slightly forward, breathing slowed.
Lady Rosenhall’s hands were folded in her lap, and her expression had stripped itself of its methodical quality and gone simpler.
Miles was very still. Lucien, two chairs down, was watching Annabelle with an expression Dominic had not seen on him before—open in a way that the drawing room did not usually warrant from him.
She played the movement through. When she lifted her hands from the keys, a full beat passed before anyone moved. Then the applause began, and it was not the polite kind.
Dominic put his hands together. He watched her turn on the bench with a high color in her face that was not the effort—she had played as though breathing—but the other thing: the color that came when she had been genuinely heard.
Miles reached him first. “She is extraordinary.”
“I know,” Dominic said.
“She told me last week that she began playing at eight years old,” Miles said. “Her father said she ought to improve her posture. She improved her posture and played again. He said nothing. She decided on the spot to become the finest pianist in England.”
Dominic was quiet with that.
“Because if he was not going to praise it,” Miles said, “she might as well be very good at it.” He picked up his glass. “You are fortunate.”
“I know I am.”
Helena appeared on his other side. “She played the second movement differently tonight than she did in September,” she announced. “More settled.”
“She is more settled,” Dominic said.
“You are responsible for that.” She said it without irony or condition. “I say things directly when I mean them. I meant that entirely.” She moved away before he had to answer.
Theodore came to his elbow. He arrived without announcement, as was his custom. He looked at the room—the piano, the walls with their old plasterwork, the candelabra—and said, “This room was closed for some years.”
“Twenty-three,” Dominic said.
Theodore looked at him once, factored it in, and said, “Good that it’s open now,” and went back to Cressida.
Lady Rosenhall appeared next. “Lord Keldwick tells me the boy is to play.”
“He is.”
“How old is he?”
“Seven.”
She considered it. “My nephew gave his first public performance at eight. He was competent. If the boy is competent at seven, that is early.”
“He is not competent,” Dominic said. “He is remarkable. Annabelle said so. She does not say things she does not mean.”
Lady Rosenhall looked at him for a moment. “No,” she agreed, “she does not.” She went to her chair.
A few minutes later, Dominic went to the front of the room again. The talking settled.
“There is a second performance this evening,” he said. He paused. “My ward, Lord James Barrow, will play for you.”
He crossed to the door at the back. James was in the corridor with his governess, a step behind—good coat, hands pressed light against his thighs. That was how James stood when he was bracing himself against something: the hands, lightly fisted, pressed against the seams.
Dominic crouched. He had learned, over the past months, the importance of level.
“You know this piece,” he said.
“I know this piece,” James said, with the care of someone confirming a recorded fact.