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Rhys grinned. “Never fear, Hugh. She’ll never know you’re missing.”
“Grand.” And he sneaked off via the door to the library.
“Well…” Elen stood centre stage, holding her arms wide as everyone settled into their seats. “Tonight, we have the immense honour of a true singer in our midst.” Rhys groused about that under his breath. “So, please, let us all welcome, the famed French tenor…Monsieur Turenne!”
Isabelle’s heartmay possibly have dropped to her toes. Be thumping away in her slippers because it surely had departed her chest.
Monsieur Turenne?
It couldn’t be!
A diminutive gentleman swaggered through the door to rapturous applause.
A diminutive gentleman with a moustache. One who twelve years ago in London had frittered his month’s pay on three days of refined living, and so had tutored a few young ladies for some necessary coin, including a fifteen-year-old Isabelle.
A diminutive gentleman and tenor of wide renown who had proclaimed her skill upon the pianoforte, lest we forget, as akin to an angel’s flutter of wings in blessed heaven.
Quelle coincidence.
Isabelle so wished she sat anonymously and hidden amongst the audience and not at the pianoforte where Elen had commanded her to remain.
She surreptitiously lowered her head so that all he’d view was brown hair.
Beneath the welcoming applause, feet strode nearer, nearer still, and she wondered if the guests would notice if she ducked under the pianoforte and crawled to the curtains.
One might suggest she was being overly cautious but a governess should be the epitome of inconspicuousness, and Monsieur Turenne had always been rather…effusive. The last thing she wished was for her past and parentage to be discussed in front of Lady Elen and the duke, let alone all the guests.
“Welcome, Monsieur Turenne,” declared Lady Elen. “We are so lucky you are touring Wales. Thank you for agreeing to entertain us tonight.”
“The pleasure is all mine, Lady Elen,” he purred back. “For how could any man of passion deny such a beautiful woman, eh?”
“Oh…well…”
“Perhaps, later on we–”
“What will you be singing for us, Monsieur?”
“I sing…” Isabelle heard his dramatic inhale of breath. “Of triumph and of nature…” His voice lowered to a growl. “Of love. Of desire. Of seduction.”
Isabelle peeked up to view the back of Monsieur Turenne’s head, but Lady Elen’s was in profile, eye squished shut.
“I see,” the lady said. “Perchance we could just stick to the first two as we have some young ladies here of an innocent and delicate disposition.”
“Then I rouse them from it, non?”
Her eye popped to a billiard ball. “Non! I mean, no. No rousing. Just singing. If you please, Mr Turenne. That will be quite sufficient.”
“Eh, bien.” He shrugged. “You pay the bill.”
With a pained expression, Lady Elen stepped away to locate her seat, and the tenor breathed deep.
Isabelle smiled because despite his dubious character, this gentleman could certainly sing.
A spirited aria from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro filled the room,his unaccompanied voice gushing powerful and full, able to quieten to a whisper of despair and then swell to heady heights of elation.
Monsieur Turenne, she recalled, had bemoaned how the ladies of London preferred the high castrato to his masculine richness, but not here: Miss Pritchard sighed, Lady Bronwen held hand to forehead, and Miss Craddock looked to have swooned in her seat.
The duke was first to his feet, the Scandalous Mr Cadwalader’s chair empty, but it mattered not because the entire room was applauding the performance.
