20. Chapter 20
‘Selfish, self-obsessed, petulant woman,’ Cassius puffed as he reached the bottom of the stairs. ‘Never happy, never satisfied, never…’
I am losing my hearing…
‘Never enough,’ he muttered to himself, his words losing their bitterness as he landed on the path. ‘Never…’
Losing my hearing…
Cassius steadied himself against the wall as the true force of her words hit him. Theirs was a world of noise, of notes, cues, and directions, of whispers and booming percussion.
My hearing…
On a cold night about fifteen years ago, Cassius had wallowed in memories of who he might have been, with nothing but a piano and some raw, home-stilled vodka for warmth.
And like a flip of fairy dust, a woman had skulked into the damp basement, sat beside him on the bench, and, together, they had played a song.
She’d been more beautiful than marble, with a voice as pure and clear as wind chimes, and the only reason he’d known she wasn’t a hallucination was that she’d bumped against his side and let her glass clank onto the wood.
Like the thousands of people who would follow, he’d fallen in love with her, although he’d wager not one of them loved her the way he did.
They loved the Odette Delaney of the stage.
But what had sunk his heart was the way her eyes glinted at the music.
At the names of the great composers they sparred with and the tunes they took turns tinkering with, at the way she laughed at anything that pleased her.
Odette loved music, and that night had been the first in forever where he’d forgotten his sour grumbling and his stolen childhood and had recalled the magic of song.
That night, Cassius remembered what it was to love music. The notes spun from her as she gave life to intervals, pitch, and beats. She became the music. And she could not be contained any more than sunshine could be bottled. While a man could cage a nightingale, he could never trap its song.
Cassius paced the length of the stairs that led up to her villa. Then he rested a foot on the bottom step as he tried to pull together some form of an apology to offer her.
‘You! You’ve been warned! Out of here!’
Cassius tracked the voice to across the main thoroughfare, to the park.
A man, dressed in a day suit and swinging his cane like he did not need it for walking and carried it for other reasons, crossed the road at a jog.
He was barely five foot tall, but he faced Cassius down like he was as solid as the oaks in the park.
‘I don’t know why you’re still hanging around,’ he continued. ‘Nothing ever happens on this street. We’re just a quiet bunch of Londoners. You want a story, go loiter somewhere in Park Lane or Grosvenor Square. That’s where the true miscreants of this city live.’
‘I’m not a journalist!’ Raising his hands, Cassius moved away from the house and into the yellow circle of a street lamp. ‘I’m a friend of Odette’s. Zadora, Cassius Zadora. Conductor.’
The man’s eyes narrowed as he studied Cassius’s face.
‘I know you. You play the piano for Odette.’ He thrust out his hand.
‘Lawrence Hempel. Number 3,’ he said, pointing his cane in the direction of the townhouses over the road.
‘Apologies,’ he added, although there was no regret in his tone.
‘We look out for one another around here. Odette has had some trouble before. Being who she is, and all.’ He tucked the cane under his arm and took a step closer.
‘How has she been, since the funeral? My wife was going to call on her today, but she said Odette was at the theatre all day.’
‘Dress rehearsal. Opening night is the day after tomorrow. The show must go on.’ Cassius shrugged. ‘She hasn’t missed a beat.’
‘But how is she?’ Lawrence pressed.
‘She won’t talk. Not to me.’
Lawrence offered him a wan smile. ‘You know Odette. She’s not so good at asking for help. Mina is worried about her. Odette and Albert were good friends.’ He stepped closer, and his voice dropped into a low and conspiratorial tone. ‘And her hearing. Is it a problem?’
‘How did you—’
‘Phineas had his suspicions. He’s my son-in-law.
’ Lawrence nodded back at the townhouses.
‘Nothing gets by him. He possibly spotted it before she knew herself. We haven’t known what to do.
Whether we should ask or leave her be. She’s headstrong, like my daughters.
And my wife. And Iris, come to think of it.
’ He looked back over his shoulder, gazing at the street as if, for the first time, he was seeing a common thread.
‘He hasn’t told anyone outside of the family.
Seems a hard blow for someone like her, to lose so much at once.
We just want her to know… I don’t know. That we are here, perhaps?
That we care? My maintenance man, Harry, he lost his hearing from working in a factory, then promptly lost his position.
Barely spoke for three years after. And Odette loves…
’ He waved his cane in a vague circle at the street, the park, the world beyond.
‘Everything,’ Cassius finished. ‘She loves everything. She likes living here, doesn’t she?’
‘We all do,’ Lawrence said. ‘For all its quirks, it’s quite the place to call home.’
Home.
The word caught him like a fist to the chin.
Cassius peered up the stairs, past the opulence, traced the white gable of the villa against the inky blue of the evening sky, and tried to take in the magnificence of the house she had bought because her friend lived next door and a cat had invited her to stay. Not just her house. Her home.
He’d been adrift for all his life. He’d slept in houses, so many houses, even manors and castles while he played to ever-changing crowds of nobles—bored, enthused, intrigued, complacent, eyeing other women, eyeing other men. So many houses.
But a home?
What was home to him? A broken memory of music and hard words, a place that had faded to a memory long before Agnieszka had died. And Odette’s was not much more than his. Yet, she had made a new one.
And all he had wanted to do was take her from it.
‘I am about to leave London,’ Cassius said. ‘I have a position conducting in Vienna. Will you and your wife and the others look out for her? I don’t know if she’ll keep singing after this show. Can you make sure she doesn’t cut herself off from the world?’
‘Aren’t you and her courting? And you’re leaving? What’s wrong with you?’
‘She deserves better than me,’ Cassius confessed. ‘She deserves everything. I’ll get her through opening night. But after that, she’ll need her friends. Can you…’
‘Of course,’ Lawrence said. ‘We always do.’
Cassius threw one last look up at the house. No, not house. Her home.
He had no right to try and take it from her. To keep her for himself.
The best thing he could do for her was to walk away.