"Ballast!" Charles clapped his hands together. "Exactly! See? I told you! The North and South! We are united!"
His eyes darted between them—the cynical gentleman and the stoic servant—and felt a profound sense of completeness. He had his map. He had his mentor. He had his conscience.
Now, if he could just figure out how to get a certain brown-wearing scholar into the music room to play the very large instrument he was expecting to arrive, his life would be perfect.
The Broadwood did not merely arrive at Netherfield. It colonised the drawing room.
It sat in the centre of the space—a massive, gleaming beast of rosewood and ivory that seemed to regard the rest of the furniture with the haughty disdain of an emperor forced to share a carriage with a milking stool. It reflected the morning light off its polished lid with a brilliance that made Charles blink.
It was magnificent. It was expensive. It was, currently, the most silent object in Hertfordshire.
Charles Bingley stood before it, his hands clasped behind his back, rocking slightly on his heels. He had scrubbed the clay from his person for the occasion, though his knuckles still bore the faint, greyish tint of the North Pasture.
"It is substantial, Tepper," Charles declared, his voice echoing slightly in the high-ceilinged room. "It has gravity. It anchors the room, does it not? Before, this space was merely a collection of chairs waiting for a conversation. Now it is a temple to the Muses."
Tepper, who was arranging a vase of hydrangeas on a nearby table, paused. He regarded the instrument with mildsuspicion, as if he expected it to suddenly demand a finer grade of beeswax.
"It is certainly large, sir," he observed dryly. "The delivery men were quite vocal about its gravity. I believe one of them suggested it weighed more than a guilty conscience."
Charles walked around the curve of the instrument, trailing a finger along the wood.
"Do you play, sir?" Tepper asked, though the answer was a foregone conclusion.
"Not a note," Charles admitted cheerfully. "My sisters attempted to teach me 'Hot Cross Buns' when I was seven. I was dismissed for a lack of rhythmic integrity. Caroline said I played with the grace of a falling brick."
"Then one might ask," Tepper smoothed a petal, "why the master of Netherfield requires an instrument capable of filling a concert hall, when his own musical ambitions are limited to humming in the bath?"
Charles sighed. The cheerful façade cracked, revealing the anxious romantic beneath. He saw the keys, and for a moment, he was not in Hertfordshire. He was back in the hallway of Darcy House, listening to a storm raging behind a closed door.
"I heard her play, Tepper," Charles said softly. "In London. Before I came back. I was walking past the music room, and I heard thunder. I thought it was a professional. A virtuoso. But when I saw..."
He paused, the memory still vivid—the golden light, the brown dress, the fierce, concentration on Mary Bennet's face.
"You told me so, sir. It was Miss Bennet," Tepper supplied, his tone neutral.
"It was a revelation," Charles corrected. "A solemn and quiet girl who tore the silence apart with her bare hands."
He turned to the pianoforte again. "Longbourn has an upright. A wretched thing which makes the sound of angry bees. She deserves this. She deserves a Broadwood."
Tepper finally turned from the hydrangeas. He studied his master—the flush on his cheeks, the earnest set of his jaw. This man had bought a castle because he imagined the way a specific woman would look in the tower.
"It is a very romantic gesture, sir," Tepper noted. "Or it would be, if the lady in question knew of it. Currently, it is merely a very expensive piece of wood that is gathering dust."
Charles groaned, burying his face in his hands. "That is the problem! I cannot tell her I bought it for her. That implies I was eavesdropping. It implies I am... lurking. A Man of Depth does not lurk, Tepper. He is straightforward. He is transparent."
"He is currently the owner of a silent instrument," Tepper pointed out.
"I need a strategy." Charles began to pace. "I need a reason for her to play it. A reason that does not involve me falling to my knees and confessing that I bought a hundred-guinea instrument because I adore the way her eyebrows furrow when she hits a C-minor."
"You could invite the family to dinner," Tepper suggested, returning to his flowers. "As a neighbourly gesture. The pianoforte is here. It would be rude not to ask the only accomplished musician in the room to test it."
"A test!" Charles halted. "Yes! Precisely! I shall claim ignorance. I shall say... I shall say the instrument arrived by accident? No, that is absurd. She knows we had one here lastyear, before Caroline claimed it at Thornwood. Shall I say I inherited it? No, my ancestors have no musical legacy."
"Perhaps," Tepper said, picking up the empty tray, "you might simply say that Netherfield felt too quiet. And that a house without music resembles a man without a soul—empty, echoing, and in need of a good tuning."
Charles stared at his valet. "Tepper, that is brilliant. 'A house without music.' It is deep. It is profound. It is exactly the sort of thing a man who reads travel journals would say."
"I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir."
