Page 98
She smiled at that. “I’m a fool, I suppose.”
“You are,” he agreed bluntly. And then, “Even when—even when I brought Lina into your chamber?”
“Oh, I didn’t think I was. I kept telling myself that I was indifferent to you. But it hurt.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Were you—were you in love with her?”
He shook his head. “Never. She knew it too. I wanted her voice, you see. We stopped all sort of bedroom things a year ago, from pure lack of interest.”
“I wish I hadn’t said such cruel things to you,” Helene said, dismissing Lina and the Russian dancers forever. “I do love your chest and every hair on it.”
“I think I feel more than love for your chest,” he said rather dreamily. “It’s like an obsession. I shall have to compose a canzonette, To My Wife’s Breasts.”
“Silly,” she said. And then, “I shouldn’t have been cruel about your music, either.”
“Nor I so dismissive of yours,” he said.
She hesitated, and then, “I think…I think we may both write better with the other’s help.”
His arm tightened around her. “I know that is true for me, but I doubt there is anything I can add to your gift, Helene. Of the two of us, you are the brilliant musician.”
“Not so!” she protested.
His lips traced a quarter note on her cheek. “I write at the peak of my ability when you are near; what more could a man want?”
“We have gifts of different kinds,” Helene said slowly. “You are a genius at expressing emotion and creating a character, Rees. All I’m good for is doing a piece of music itself, with no story. You saw what my waltz was about, after all. I hadn’t even noticed, though I wrote it.”
Rees chuckled. “That was when I really started to wonder whether there was the faintest chance that I might be able to keep you in the house forever. When I saw that waltz.”
“Scandalous, isn’t it?” Helene actually felt proud of it.
“Worse than Russians on the table,” he said. Then he sang: Let me, dearest wife, embrace you, As would a lover his lovable bride…” But he stopped singing to kiss her.
“Face to face with burning cheeks,” Helene whispered sometime later.
But her husband was kissing his way down her body, and she couldn’t see his cheeks anyway, so she threw away the thought.
Much later, Helene lay against her husband’s heart and listened to the steady beat of her life and her future.
She felt sleepy. Rees was already asleep. So the earl and his countess fell asleep, in a bed of opera scores, of discarded musical notes and florid lyrics, while the candles guttered on the piano.
It was morning when Leke opened the door and surveyed the room. By then, its occupants had vanished. Anyone less accustomed to Earl Godwin’s organization methods might have noticed nothing amiss.
But Leke stood in thought for a moment or two, staring at the crushed papers piled high around the sofa, and then, even more intently, at a thick white dressing gown tossed to the floor next to the piano.
He left with his regular measured step, a garment neatly folded over his arm, and a smile curling the edges of his mouth.
Forty-two
In Strictest Confidence…
18 January 1816
The Countess Pandross to Lady Patricia Hamilton
…I assure you, my dearest, that I am as startled as anyone. But it is quite true. Earl Godwin is positively lavish in his attentions, and you know that for a man like that to show any courtesy at all, particularly to his wife, is quite out of the way. The opera singer is definitely a thing of the past, and it’s rumored that Countess Godwin is carrying a child, so perhaps all this attention he pays her has to do with the question of an heir. Men are so absurdly attached to the idea of reproducing themselves. Of course, it may also have to do with her part in that opera he’s just put up, The Quaker Girl. The newspapers have all called it a triumph, although shamefully I haven’t found time to see it yet. I told Pandross that if we don’t attend this week I shan’t be able to go anywhere in public, because darling, it is all that anyone is talking about. Almost, I envy you for your snug country life. You’ll have to see it the moment you return for the season. The waltz scene is apparently scandalous, and yet I was told in the strictest confidence that Countess Godwin wrote the waltz herself, if you can believe it.
