Chapter 10 #3
He sat at the bench and lifted the lid and played a chord quietly.
Testing the tuning. The instrument was well-maintained.
He played another, lower, and then a third.
Feeling for the keys in the way of a man reacquainting himself with the familiar.
Then without ceremony or announcement, Nick began to play properly.
Millie had not known he could play.
She had hired a private secretary. She had been given a Christ Church education and a bad leg and a sardonic habit and an unexpected patience with Papa that had moved her more than she had been prepared for.
And now apparently this. A talented musician sitting at her mother’s pianoforte in the lamplight, coaxing melody from the keys with an effortless competence that was entirely unperformed.
She lowered her notebook to her knee.
Papa put his Latin text aside.
“Anne always plays that one,” he said, in the soft, slightly removed tone of a man addressing the present and the past simultaneously.
“She has a very light touch. Very light indeed.” He returned to the Latin text, leaving the unmistakable impression that, so far as he was concerned, the matter was settled.
Millie watched Nick’s hands on the ivory keys.
The long fingers moving with a deftness that sent her thoughts sliding in a direction that was wholly improper.
She thought about scholar and secretary and sardonic and all the categories she had assembled between Grimsfell and Oxford.
None of them were wrong, and none of them were sufficient.
The whole of him was remarkably more than the sum of what she had set out to hire on a dark night in Cornwall days ago.
She put her head back against the sofa cushion.
She thought about Cirencester, which she had decided not to think about and was thinking about anyway.
She had filed it under concluded and now found that it would not stay filed.
She thought about warmth and firelight and what she had done.
About the warmth of his mouth and those few seconds that had somehow managed to be both brief and entirely sufficient for their purpose.
About how she had been thinking about it at intervals since with increasing frequency and decreasing success at not doing so.
She was rather looking forward to this evening’s treatment.
In the entirely pragmatic sense that his leg had been improving under consistent care.
She had committed to providing that care and intended to honor that commitment.
That was the complete and total extent of what she was looking forward to, and she was not entertaining any supplementary considerations on the subject whatsoever.
Certainly not, said the part of her that was not always cooperative, or truthful, about such situations.
She adjusted her spectacles and peered at the pianoforte.
Nick was playing with his head slightly bent, his dark hair disordered from the day.
The lamplight was warm on his hands and on the line of his jaw, and she thought about the Camera that afternoon.
Her hammering heart when he had pressed the bound package into her hands on Oxford Street, and the expression on his face in that moment.
Not the sardonic expression. Not the neutral expression.
Not any of the expressions she had registered in days of close observation.
She was still in the process of naming it correctly.
She thought about Lord Franklin, because she had the habit of thinking accurately and his visit was the most recent evidence available on the subject of men and their tendencies.
Lord Franklin was handsome and direct and spoke to her as an equal.
He had no intention of settling, and she had never minded any of this.
She found, sitting on her sofa in the lamplight while Nick played her mother’s pianoforte, that she still did not particularly mind it and that this was for reasons she was not quite ready to examine too closely.
Pike appeared at the door.
“Past time, Mr. Metcalfe,” he said, in the low easy tone he used with Papa. “Oi’ve got you, sir.”
Papa glanced up from his chair with the mild expression of a man being interrupted in the middle of his reading but finding the interruption not entirely unreasonable. He allowed Pike to draw him to his feet without protest.
“Is it?” Papa said.
“It is,” Pike said. “Come on, then.”
Papa took Pike’s arm with a cooperative air, having decided some time ago that Pike’s views on the subject of bedtime were generally sound and had stopped contesting them.
She heard them on the stairs. Pike’s heavy grounded tread.
Papa’s lighter shuffle. Then the house fell into the peace that it acquired when it was just the two of them.
Her and Nick. She had stopped pretending she did not notice it.
Betty was somewhere in the kitchen. Pike, once he had settled Papa, would consider his duties discharged for the evening.
Would not appear again unless called. The house had its own understanding about evenings of this kind, developed without anyone having discussed it.
Millie had decided not to examine things that were working adequately. It was an inefficient use of attention.
She watched Nick at the pianoforte.
“You are a handsome man,” she said. It was declared before she had fully decided to say it. In the direct way thoughts showed up when she was not managing the outflow of them. “One of the most handsome of my acquaintance.”
Nick’s fingers did not stop. He played to the end of the phrase. Neat and unhurried. Let his hands rest on the keys and turned to her with an expression that was not quite a smile and contained all the structural components of one.
“As handsome as Lord Franklin?” he said.
She considered this with the seriousness it deserved. She had opened the matter, and it deserved accurate treatment. “Well …” she said, “no. He is very handsome. The most handsome.”
The expression on Nick’s face twisted, not entirely a scowl and notably more satisfying than a scowl.
Involving the jaw and the brows and a brief comprehensive rearrangement of the composure.
He rose from the bench, retrieving his cane from where he had leaned it against the pianoforte leg. And turned to her.
“Are you going to attend to my treatment,” he said, his tone suggesting he had been mildly wronged and intended his position on this to be clearly understood, “or not.”
The grin spread on Millie’s face, a smugness she would not apologize for.
That, she thought, with the quiet satisfaction of a theory proved after sufficient evidence, tells me all I need to know.
She stood. Followed him out of the drawing room and up the stairs.
The house was warm and quiet around them.
The Oxford night was outside the windows, and she was, she thought, in rather a great deal of trouble, and found that she did not care, finding her fingertips brushing her lips and wondering what might come next.