“You knownothingabout what James requires,” he said. “Nothing about his habits, what distresses him, what?—”
“I know that he smiled while he played. I know that when that door opened, his hands came off the keys, and his shoulders came up to his ears, and he could not look at you. I know the only way he could answer you tonight was by pressing piano keys rather than speaking.”
He said nothing.
“You saw all of that,” she continued, “and ordered him back to the ballroom regardless. You are not a cruel man. I don’t think that is the difficulty. I think the difficulty is that you don’t know what to do with him, and that is entirely understandable. But it is not something you can resolve by treating a frightened child like a junior officer who has broken rank.”
The Duke looked at her across the quiet room, and she watched the line of his jaw hold, and then, fractionally, ease.
“Lady Annabelle.”
“You,” he said, “are far from an expert.”
“Agreed entirely.” She kept her chin up. “But then, you share a similar distance.”
A movement at the corner of his eyes. There and gone. He looked at her as though he had not quite anticipated arriving here and had not decided what to do about it.
“That tongue of yours,” he said, “is going to cause you considerable difficulty one day.”
Annabelle felt her pulse race as his ocean blue eyes swept over her face. Shivers raced down her spine one after another.
What was happening to her? This was her brother’s best friend, for Heaven’s sake!
“I shall cross that bridge when I get to it, then,” she only responded, trying to hide the sensations overtaking her body around him.
The Duke held her gaze another beat. Then he stepped back, and somehow, breathing became easier.
“Good luck with your performance, Lady Annabelle,” he said, then turned and left Annabelle standing alone in the music room.
The piano keys shone brightly behind her, the distant orchestra going about its business at the far end of the house.
With his eyes lingering in the confines of her mind, Annabelle retrieved her folio, tucked it under her arm, and exited the music room.
Chapter Three
“What…?” Dominic whispered to himself.
He heard it on the third step from the landing.
Three notes, pressed one after the other. A small gap between each note while the player gathered courage for the next.
Dominic stopped.
The cold came in through his collar before any thought did. Then thought arrived, and it was not a useful one: it named the room before he willed it to.
The old music room, off the east corridor.
He had not opened that door in years.
He went down the remaining stairs and along the corridor. The notes continued, halting but persistent, a dogged repetition of something barely learned.
The door stood open.
Inside, Mrs. Greer stood at James’s elbow with both hands clasped at her waist, her mouth in a tight, unhappy line. A maid stood near the window, equally still. Miss Hartley, who had been James’s governess since his arrival at Silverford House, had her hands on the boy’s shoulders. She was saying something low and urgent that James was completely ignoring.
James sat at the piano… his mother’s piano.
The boy pressed C, then E, then G. The chord rang clean and bright in the room, brighter than anything had sounded in here in years. He considered the keys and pressed them again.
