Page 31 of The Baron Takes a Wife

“More Mozart? The opera is The Magic Flute.”

As if she hadn’t reminded him every other day. “Won’t you be sick of Mozart by the end of the week?”

“Never,” she said definitively and began a Mozart sonata.

He took a moment to remember the bottom part and then joined her in the music. It was only partway through that he remembered his promised lessons to his wife and resolved to convince her to join him in the music room sometime soon.

Chapter Nine

Several days later, Elena once again found herself at the piano, sitting next to her husband. She had agreed to a music lesson, as he had asked her several times, but she had an ulterior motive to question him about his desires.

“My lord.”

“David.”

“Husband.” He weighed this response and nodded in concession. She decided to forge ahead. She had thought continuously about this subject since they left the hospital and decided to tackle it head-on.

“I must ask a blunt and uncomfortable question, but I think it will make our way forward easier.” She paused, trying to get the wording right. “Do you desire to accelerate ‘maybe someday’ out of a need for an heir? Or do you perhaps desire me?”

She looked up, not realizing how nervous she was until that moment, as her heart fluttered like a moth seeking the light. She was not sure what she wanted his answer to be.

He again appeared to be weighing his words as he glanced at the keys. “There is the answer that is more truthful and the answer that would frighten you less.”

“I think the truth is preferable, however difficult,” she said solemnly. “Mai bine puțin cu dreptate decât mult cu strâmbǎtate.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Telling the truth is always the wisest course of action.”

“Then you would be correct in your deduction of the latter case. I always cared for you, you must know, but it was without desire, as I was unable to feel that for the longest time. But one day, I smelled amber on your letter—"

“The amber? My grandmother mixed scents.”

He nodded, then smiled fondly. “I wondered where that came from. It seemed…sensual for such a sterile medical space.”

She blushed. It had been her vanity in those days, one of the few things she had on her person when she had to make the journey to Üsküdar. She had tried to sell it for food, but it had been half gone, and no one wanted it when they needed money for food and safe passage themselves.

“I smelled that amber on the letter,” he said, then paused. She saw a flush climb up his neck, as he had left off a cravat, being at home. “And then I felt something again. And then I saw you, and it came back tenfold.”

She couldn’t help but gasp, delighted but also anxious in equal measure. She looked at his eyes, gazing at her full of heat. But not necessarily predatory, like she had known in the past. The heat had a warmth to it as well, like the glow of a fire rather than the flame that would burn. She inhaled a deep breath and tried to remember her conversation from the hospital. She must have appeared pained because David looked at her sympathetically.

“Do you want to talk about it? You told me about what happened before we met but did not…go into great detail.”

Everything within her resisted speaking out loud about her greatest shame. She had only told David as much as she had because she thought he might purposefully take too much laudanum, and her emotions had been heightened. David must have noticed her tense.

“You do not have to. It’s just ever since I started talking about my own…pain, for lack of a better word, some of the grief and stress has lessened. It hasn’t completely gone away, but it’s less heavy. It’s as if my grief was a satchel full of stones. The stones are still there, but I gave some away, and now it’s easier to walk forward.”

Elena swallowed. She made a great show of taking her hands off the piano keys, flexing them, and resting them in her lap.

“But it is more than grief for me. It is also shame.” David covered her knee with his hand in a gesture of comfort. She took another deep breath and continued. “But mayhap you are right. I found some release in speaking with a woman at the hospital. It may help in bearing the burden, I suppose.”

She sighed and began. “When the Russians first began to invade Dobruja, I did not understand what the fighting was for. I later read in the English papers that the tsar believed that the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire would rise up and fight for them when the army invaded. But they did not. I think that maybe, it is possible that Anatole, the man I ran away with, was…not a spy, but a scout maybe, someone to report back to the Russian army on the Orthodox in the empire. While there were many people in our village from different backgrounds, we rarely had new parishioners. I should have noticed it was strange that a young Russian man began to attend our church services. But I was so infatuated, I could not see.”

She began to play stray keys on the piano, as she had seen David and Irene do before.

“I left a note for my family, but it was purposefully vague. Looking back, I do not know what I was thinking. I imagined he would take me to Russia with him. How silly that seems now.” She hit a sour note and stopped pressing the keys. “I see now how he knew the timing of everything. When I changed my mind and ran away from him, I think that was part of why he was so angry, because that messed up his plan. But I just wanted to see my family again, to beg their forgiveness. I didn’t know the army would come through our village that day. I did not know much of anything, I suppose.”

She began to shake, thinking of the carnage and utter chaos of leaving her beloved home to find everything completely upside down in a matter of hours. She had always longed for adventure and romance but quickly found that all she wanted was the home she could never have again. David put his arm around her shoulders, and some of the shaking subsided.