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Dancing in the Desert

Two days later, Tom was fairly well convinced he might as well be John the Baptist. Lina made an excellent Salome: everywhere he turned, she seemed to be dancing, just like Salome before the King, and he had the feeling he was about to see his head on a platter. She left the room before him, and the only thing he could think about for an hour afterwards was the curve of her waist. She bent to pick up Meggin, giving him a view of the deep hollow between her breasts, and Tom could scarcely breathe for the hunger that swept over him. She smiled at him over the table, and her skin gleamed bronze in the candlelight. He wanted to lick it, all of it. And when she touched him lightly on the arm, and said cheekily that she had been practicing the dance of the seven veils, his whole body went rigid with the effort not to pull her into his arms and kiss her silliness into silence.

So he did the only thing he could think of: retreated to his bedchamber and prayed for help. At first, he prayed for guidance. Then he gave that up and started just praying for self-control. For help.

On Tom’s third evening in London, Rees announced that he would begin to train Lina in some aria or other. Tom trailed into the sitting room after them even though he was conscious that an ice water bath was a better proposition. When Lina started to sing, his heart almost stopped from the pure beauty of it. Her voice fluted higher and higher, dancing in the rafters of the room.

“Her voice is incredible,” he breathed to Rees, sitting next to him.

But Rees was frowning at his score. “Lina!” he said, cutting her off. “Try that last bar with the count as written. It’s a dotted quarter and an eighth note, not two quarter notes.”

Lina nodded, but her eyes slid to Tom’s, holding him prisoner. She took a deep breath and began to sing again. For a moment it looked as if her breasts would surely topple from her bodice. Tom found himself tensing, as if to jump forward and protect her, shield her beauty—and from whom?

There was no one in the room but himself and her protector. His own brother. Tom felt a surge of primitive hatred, one that went back more than twenty years, a gift from their father. The old earl had reveled in creating divisions between his two sons. He whipped them with his taunts from the moment they were out of the nursery. Who knew why? From the distance of the five years since the earl’s death, Tom rather thought that their father was afraid that they might present a unified front and rebel against him. Not that they ever had. Obedient as hunting dogs, they turned out exactly as he had prophesied. The earl had told Tom that he was too wet to marry, and that he would end up in a minor parish, unable to get his spineless self into a sufficiently political position to achieve a large parish. That was true enough. Tom couldn’t seem to bring himself to flatter the right people, to grease the right palm, to take those steps that would have him rising toward being a bishop. The fact that he loved his small parish and his wayward parishioners wouldn’t have mattered to their father.

“I suppose you’ll marry one of those prim do-gooders who flock in churchyards,” their father had sneered the day Tom fastened on his collar. “Thank God one of my sons has red blood in his veins.”

Something died in Tom’s heart every time Rees snapped at Lina, every time she took a deep breath and started singing again. If he was the man his father had prophesied, Rees was exactly the rakehell that their father had wanted him to be: a man of vicious habits, a man who would bring a young girl into his house and make her his mistress, a man who would force his wife to return to the same house.

Lina was singing the same bar for the tenth time. Her voice was not soaring quite as easily now. There was a little line between her brows, and she’d stopped throwing Tom teasing glances. Surely she was getting over-tired.

“Damn it all,” Rees bellowed, “don’t you listen to anything I say, Lina? Read your score. That trill begins on E-flat, not G-natural. I shouldn’t have to be your répéteteur, teaching you each aria note by note!”

She glared at him and her soft mouth trembled. Tom longed to spring to his feet and take her in his arms, but he stayed where he was. Lina was Rees’s mistress. Not his to protect.

With very little emotion, she picked up her glass of wine and tossed it in their direction, stalking out the door.

“For Christ’s sake,” Rees muttered, shaking the papers he was holding, and paying no attention to the red splotches marring his shirt.

Tom wiped the wine from his face. “You drove her too hard. Do you have to be so brutal?”

“Stay out of what you don’t understand,” Rees growled.

“I understand that Lina has the voice of an angel,” Tom said hotly. “Yet you keep shouting at her. I don’t know why she puts up with it.”

“She has to. I’m trying to prepare her to sing a lead role.” Rees tossed the papers on a stool. “Lina has a gorgeous voice but she doesn’t have the drive to be a great singer. If I don’t prod her, she won’t practice. You saw her. She pays no attention to the score, even when I’m standing before her, shouting the notes.”

“You made her sing one phrase over and over!”

“She should be doing that on her own: over and over until she could sing it correctly in her sleep. But she doesn’t want it enough.” He rubbed some drops of wine from his forehead wearily. “I know you’d like to make me out to be some sort of miscreant, Tom. But in this case, I’m actually doing my best.”

“I fail to see how shouting is doing your best.”

“I’ve promised her the lead in my next opera. She’s not ready, and she doesn’t deserve it. But if I can somehow whip her into shape before the management realizes that she’s inadequate, and perhaps even make her smooth enough so that she’s a success—and that’s doubtful—the victory might just carry her into another lead role. After that, it’s out of my hands.”

“Oh.”

“You always see things in black and white.” Rees was leaning his head back against the couch, staring up at the ceiling. “If I’m shouting at Lina, I must be evil.”

“What about you?” Tom asked boldly. “Did you always know you were a rakehell, or did you have to be instructed in your wicked ways by father?”

“I suppose I received instruction,” Rees said, sounding rather bored. He was still staring up at the ceiling.

“How well we both understood our orders.”

Rees turned his head so that his eyes flicked over Tom’s face. “Is that why you’re here, then?” he drawled. “Are you sick of being the godly vicar, and you’ve come to the house of sin for lessons in titillation?”

“No!” Tom said, horrified to find that some part of his soul leapt at the idea. Could that be the truth?