CHAPTER SEVEN
CéCILE
The ivory card rested beneath my left wrist as I played.
I had hidden it in my sleeve when we left the dining room, though I could not have explained why.
It was only a narrow scrap with three questions written upon it, but it felt more intimate than a letter.
Adrian had given me something no one else at the table had thought to offer: a way to answer without first proving that I deserved to be heard.
The capon is excellent. I am not hungry.
Did Nathaniel ask you to come?
Remember what?
My final answer—No—had been written for everyone to see.
I should have felt ashamed of contradicting my father. Instead, as my fingers moved across the ivory keys, I felt as though some tight and painful fastening inside me had come undone.
The drawing room had never seemed so alive. Candlelight shivered across the mirrors. The open windows admitted the heavy fragrance of gardenias that could not possibly be blooming. Behind me, conversation rose and fell beneath Nicholas Fairhaven's warm laughter, but it seemed very far away.
I played Schubert without sheet music. The notes lived inside me, whole and obedient, untroubled by the barrier that waited whenever I opened my mouth. At the pianoforte, I did not have to seize each sound before it escaped. My hands spoke, and no one hurried them.
Adrian listened.
He stood beside the tall velvet curtains, still dressed in white, untouched by the heat that had left every other gentleman flushed and damp.
He did not drink his brandy. He did not glance toward whoever happened to be speaking.
His attention remained upon me with such completeness that the crowded room seemed to narrow around us.
Commander Vale had listened when I played. He had once turned pages for me through an entire Mozart sonata and apologized when he moved too early. I had admired him for that gentleness. I had believed marriage to him would be calm, respectful, and safe.
But I had never wondered where Nathaniel stood when I entered a room.
I had never felt his presence before I saw him.
I had never played a wrong note because he looked at me.
My hand slipped upon the keys.
Adrian's mouth curved slightly.
Heat rose into my face. I returned my attention to the music, but the mistake had awakened something I could no longer pretend not to feel.
It was not love. I knew too little of love to give the sensation so grand a name.
It was a sharpened awareness, a restless wish to be noticed by one particular person and the alarming pleasure of discovering that I already was.
Across the room, Octavia reclined upon the striped settee with Augusta Dewey and Lavinia George arranged near her like petitioners before a queen. My mother occupied the chair closest to her, laughing too brightly at something Octavia had said.
Octavia caught my eye and smiled.
There was power in the smile, but no warmth I could trust. I remembered how effortlessly she had unsettled the women at dinner, opening their jealousies with compliments too graceful to challenge.
For one foolish instant I had wanted to become like her.
Now I wondered whether Octavia's beauty was another sort of language—one she used as deliberately as Nicholas used laughter.
Near the sideboard, my father stood with Judge Dewey and Reuben George.
They had gathered into a tight, defensive knot, drinking port and speaking without looking at one another.
The confidence they had worn before dinner was gone.
They looked older beneath the candlelight, their faces damp and their shoulders bowed.
A ship arriving after midnight. Cargo omitted from its manifest. Records altered after they had received the proper signatures.
What did you do? I thought as Father's trembling hand lifted his glass. What did all of you do to Nathaniel?
I wished Elin were behind me. I wanted the steady comfort of her presence and the small warning pressure of her hand upon my shoulder. But Dinah had sent her upstairs with hot water for Adrian's room.
The thought made me pause.
Adrian stood before me.
I had not seen him cross the room.
“Why did you stop?” he asked.
The question held no impatience. He might have been willing to wait through the night for my reply.
I glanced toward my mother. She was occupied with Octavia, but habit tightened my throat all the same.
Adrian drew the silver pencil from his waistcoat and laid it beside the card.
The gesture loosened something in me.
I wrote, Elin has gone to your room.
“Has she?”
His eyes moved briefly toward the ceiling.
The answer unsettled me. Surely he had requested the water. Surely he knew a servant would be sent.
Before I could write another question, the mantel clock began to chime ten.
Each note sounded clean and ordinary. Around the room, no one appeared to remember the false strokes that had disturbed dinner. Only my father looked toward the clock, his face whitening as he counted.
Adrian touched one finger to the ivory card.
“Some questions are more easily answered in music.”
I looked up at him.
“You hear what others overlook,” he continued. “You hear the space beneath a melody and the breath between one note and the next. But you have not yet heard everything your own music contains.”
I wanted to ask what he meant. The words gathered behind my teeth and struck their familiar glass.
He indicated the final passage of the piece. “Play it again, Cécile. More slowly.”
No gentleman had ever addressed me by my given name with such ease. The intimacy of it warmed my face, though I knew I should have objected.
I began the passage again.
This time I drew each note out until the melody seemed to breathe beneath my fingers. Adrian hummed beside me, so quietly that I felt the vibration before I understood what I heard. His note entered the music without disturbing it.
“Listen,” he said.
He hummed the note again.
“Now find it.”
My hands faltered. I thought he meant for me to speak, and the glass rose inside my throat.
“Not speech,” he said, as though he had seen the fear. “No first consonant to catch you. No sentence waiting to go wrong. Only the note.”
He played it softly with one finger.
I drew breath.
A sound left me.
It was no more than an open vowel, quiet enough to disappear beneath the pianoforte, yet it was clear. It did not break. It did not repeat itself or close painfully around my throat.
I stopped playing.
Adrian's gaze remained steady upon mine.
“Again,” he said.
I found the note a second time. It emerged stronger, round and startlingly pure. The vibration moved through my chest and into my face. I pressed one hand to my throat, certain I had discovered some hidden instrument beneath my skin.
Behind us, Nicholas's laughter ceased.
Adrian lowered his voice. “Let the melody carry a word.”
He touched the final line of music and gave me one softly.
“Gardenia.”
The word should have been impossible. Its hard beginning should have trapped me. Its four syllables should have broken apart before I reached the second.
But the melody was already moving.
I placed my fingers upon the keys and followed it.
“Gardenia,” I sang.
The word flowed whole and clear through the room.
My hands fell still.
Every conversation behind me had stopped. My mother stood beside Octavia's chair with one hand pressed to her breast. Lucien stared at me openly. Warren's face had gone slack with disbelief.
I touched my throat again.
The voice had been mine. I had felt it leave me, yet it belonged to a self I had never met.
“Cécile,” Mother whispered.
Adrian did not look surprised.
“Again,” he said.
I played the passage once more. The first word came more easily. A second phrase followed it, then a third, each one rising without struggle. My shoulders loosened. My chin lifted. The cruel pauses that governed my speech found no purchase in the melody.
For those few measures, I did not have to force my way into the world.
The world opened and received me.
When the final note faded, no one moved.
Then Mother hurried toward me.
“Do it again,” she demanded. Wonder and calculation had already begun struggling across her face. “Cécile, sing the entire passage.”
The old fear returned at the command. My throat tightened.
Adrian stepped between us—not enough to cause offense, only enough to interrupt her path.
“She has given us what she wished to give,” he said.
Mother stared at him.
No one had ever told her that something belonging to me could be withheld from her.
I should have been embarrassed by the attention. Instead, exhilaration moved through me so fiercely that I could scarcely remain seated. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to run into the garden. I wanted to seize Elin's hands and show her what had been waiting inside me all these years.
Adrian turned back to me.
His expression had softened, though the stillness in his eyes remained unfathomable.
“There you are,” he said.
The words entered me more deeply than praise.
The doorway behind him darkened.
Elin stood there, one hand gripping the frame.
Her face was colorless. Damp strands of pale hair clung to her temples, but she was trembling as though she had walked in from a Swedish winter. A dark wet mark spread across the front of her dress where the copper pitcher must have spilled.
I rose so quickly that the bench scraped the floor.
“E-Elin?”
She crossed the room without looking at anyone except Adrian. When she reached me, her fingers closed around my wrist.
They were painfully cold.
“Come with me,” she whispered.
I glanced at Adrian.
He was watching Elin now.
The tender expression he had worn for me had vanished. Something ancient and knowing looked out through his beautiful face.
Elin tightened her grip.
“Do not be alone with him,” she said