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He raised an eyebrow. There was a self-mocking smile lurking in the depths of his eyes. “You never told me.”

“I didn’t—” She stopped. “I should have. I didn’t think you cared.”

“Did you really like the pianissimo F’s?”

She nodded. “It was daring—but it balanced the second half of the aria perfectly.”

“I never thought of it in quite those terms. But did you read the review in the Gazette?”

“Written by Giddlesheard, and he’s a fool,” she said contemptuously.

A slow smile was growing in Rees’s eyes. “He loathed that section.”

“More fool he.” And: “My opinion matters to you?” she asked, still confused. The answer was in his eyes. And this was no time to stand by her pride, not in the darkness of the music room, with the candles making his hair look like coal touched with edges of flame, his eyes like dark pools. No time for dishonesty. “I have always known that you were the true musician of the two of us,” she said. “I never thought you’d want me to praise you.” She looked at her hands. “I just wanted you to think that I was clever.”

He still didn’t say anything. She finally looked up to find his eyes fixed on her face. He had beautiful eyes, with the thickest black lashes she’d ever seen.

“You wanted me to think you were clever,” he repeated.

Helene raised her chin: in for a penny, in for a pound. “I listen to your operas more carefully than any other piece of music,” she confessed. “Obviously, I couldn’t go more than once. It would seem odd. So I listen for something—anything—I can say to you that will demonstrate my own…” Her voice trailed off. “I have been wretchedly ill-bred and ill-mannered,” she said quietly. “I’m ashamed of myself.”

Rees reached out and pulled up her chin so his wife’s eyes met his, those astounding honest, green eyes of hers. “Did you truly like parts of the Elephant?”

“I loved it,” she said flatly. “Everyone did, Rees. You know that.”

“The hell with everyone. Did you?”

“Of course.”

He dropped his hand with a bark of laughter. “Do you know how I write these scores, Helene? Do you?”

She blinked at him. “No.”

“I sit here and I try something, and then I think, What would Helene think of that? And then I hear your voice saying that it’s underwritten, or tiresome, or—sometimes—clever. Never exquisite.”

“Oh, Rees,” Helene said aghast. “I had no idea. None!”

“I know you didn’t,” he said with that little half-smile again.

There was an odd silence between them. “I feel like such an idiot,” she said miserably. “Here I’ve spent the last nine years picking your music apart, just to make myself feel clever.” She couldn’t even bear to look at him; a sense of humiliation was growing in her chest.

“You have never been an idiot,” Rees said. He pushed open the piano lid with a snap that made the candles flicker and dance. “What if I wrote this section in B-minor, then moved into D-major from the Cantabile?”

“Why a major?” Helene said, distracted from her self-loathing for a moment. She tried it. “Moving it to G-minor would make it even darker, more interesting.”

“But I want a witty resonance there, not gloom,” Rees said, pushing her aside in his turn and demonstrating.

Helene looked down at his powerful hands, then at his black hair, gleaming in the candles, at his powerful shoulders. It’s all changed, she thought.

“You’re not paying attention,” Rees said. “Listen to this.”

“Try it slower this time,” she said. “Andante.”

Twenty-two

The Vicar Falls in Love

Tom arrived in the breakfast room to find it empty. He was not a man given to self-delusion; he knew perfectly well that his step slowed at the door because he didn’t see Lina, not because of the absence of his growling brother, nor Rees’s incomprehensible wife.