“I can play the piano now?” he asked.
She smiled. “Oh yes, you most certainly can.” She said, and herded him up the stairs.
The music room occupied the first floor: small and south-facing, its walnut-cased piano set against the wall, a chair by the window where Miss Hartley settled with her needlework, and the manner of a woman fully prepared to be both present and unobtrusive. James came in behind Annabelle and stopped just inside the doorway.
He looked at the piano. Then at the window. Then at the piano again.
His shoulders settled.
He went to the bench without being asked and placed his right hand on the keys.
“Do you remember where we stopped?” Annabelle asked, sitting beside him.
He nodded and pressed C. Let it ring. Then E.
“And G,” she said.
The chord came out clean, the three notes fitting together with a neatness that had not been there at Lucien’s ball. He turned to look at her.
“That’s considerably better than the first time,” she said.
“I practiced.” He pressed C again. “Silverford House has a piano.”
“So I’ve heard.” She kept her expression level. “I suspect your uncle would rather you hadn’t mentioned that.”
James considered this with no particular evidence of remorse. “He says it isn’t for playing.”
“He did say that.”
“But it’s a piano.” He pressed E, measuring the note. “That doesn’t make sense.”
It didn’t, Annabelle agreed privately. But she said only, “Are you ready for a new note?”
He returned his attention to the keys.
She introduced D. Then a five-note run: C, D, E, G, E. She played it through once and lifted her hand. He placed his own fingersin position and worked through it slowly, one note at a time, the gap between each one long enough to tell her he was listening before he committed to the next.
He pressed G and reached the final E. It came out flat. He stopped. Tried again. Flat again.
“A little higher,” she said.
He adjusted. The note rang out right, and the small breath he let out through his nose told her more than he would have said with words.
He ran through the sequence three more times. By the third pass, the gaps had narrowed, and his hand had eased from something braced and watchful into something more trusting of itself.
“Is it a real song?” he asked.
“The beginning of one,” she said. “Each lesson, we build on it.”
He pressed C, then D. “Like a story.”
“Rather like a story.”
He was quiet for a moment, his fingers moving through the run again, unhurried. “Stories have problems in the middle,” he said.
“The best ones do.”
“And then they get better at the end.”
