“Will you read the Trafalgar part?” he said. “Annabelle says history is best when it has people in it. This part has people in it.”
Dominic found the section and read. James sat beside him with his chin in his hand, and the questions came at the end of every passage: about the signal flags, the smoke from the guns, whata man saw from the gun deck when the broadside came from thirty yards.
Each deserved a real answer, and Dominic gave real answers, and the afternoon moved past the study window without either of them noting the hour.
At five, Mrs. Howell appeared at the door. James collected the ship book and stopped at the threshold.
“What happened after?” he said.
“After Trafalgar?”
“After England won.”
“Read the next chapter.” Dominic picked up his pen. “We can argue the consequences tomorrow.”
James took this as the arrangement it was. At the door, he stopped once more and looked back.
“You know a great deal about this,” he said.
“I read.”
“Annabelle reads too. But she says history is drier than novels.” He thought. “I think it depends on the history.”
“It does,” Dominic said.
James found this satisfactory and followed Mrs. Howell out.
Dominic sat still after the footsteps faded on the stairs. He set his pen on the ledger. He looked at the small chair James had returned to its corner, left at a slightly different angle than before, turned toward the desk rather than the wall.
He left it where it was.
Three weeks later, Annabelle walked to the music room and found the door already open.
James was at the piano, the fallboard up, his hands in his lap. What was unusual was the figure in the armchair at the far end of the room.
Dominic sat by the window. A newspaper lay open across his knee. It was not being read.
“Uncle Dominic wanted to sit here,” James said, without turning from the keys.
She looked at Dominic. He looked at the newspaper. “I had the paper,” he said, as if this were a complete explanation.
She sat beside James and said nothing about the paper or the chair or the fact that Dominic had not stayed in a room with music being played since the night he had told her what he carried.
She set James’s right hand, and they began.
James stopped himself when the third bar went wrong before she pointed it out, repeated the passage twice without being asked, and by the end of the fourth piece was measurably better than a week ago.
James turned on the bench. “Uncle Dominic. Did you hear the fourth piece?”
Dominic had set the newspaper on the arm of the chair. She had not seen him do it, but he was looking at them; at Jame’s hands on the keys, specifically. When she glanced at his face, she saw the tightness around the corners of his eyes that revealed just how much he was holding back.
He answered nonetheless and said, “I did.”
“Was the rhythm correct?”
“It steadied in the final bar. The fourth beat in the third bar wanted more time.”
James looked at Annabelle. “He heard it.”
