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“I don’t mind. I genuinely enjoyed teaching the Delamar sisters.” She’d justified staying on without remuneration because she truly cared for those young ladies. What would they say when they learned she was gone? At least they would mourn her absence.
“How is Father today?”
“You’ll see,” the manservant replied, his gray eyebrows furrowing.
“A bad day?”
“I tried to stop him, I did. But will he heed me? Oh no, heavens, no. Heed loyal old Withers, who’s been with him since the beginning and seen him through thick and thin? Never.”
What now? Viola followed him into the small parlor that had been converted into a music room. Her father was on his knees, sawing off the final remaining leg of their gorgeous Austrian pianoforte.
“Papa! What are you doing?”
He kept sawing, the sharp teeth gouging the expensive maple wood.
She ran across the room, knelt next to him, and threw her arms around his shoulders, stopping his forward motion.
She turned him to face her so that he could read her lips. “What are you doing?”
He maneuvered the leg off and the pianofortecrashed to the floor. “There,” he said triumphantly. He flattened onto his belly beside the butchered pianoforte, laying his ear against the wooden floor, and played the keys with his fingers.
A look of delight danced across his face.
She put her ear to the floor and heard the vibrations. Her father was using the floor as a sounding board. He was desperate to hold on to his slender connection with sound, his fierce inner music not enough to sustain him.
The pianoforte had been their most valuable possession, a gift from Lord Sprague, her father’s last remaining patron and financier.
The tears she’d wanted to shed earlier, at the duke’s house, sprang to her eyes as she listened to her father play. He’d been composing his Symphony no. 10 in D minor for more than five years. The four-movement symphony would be surpassingly beautiful... if her father ever finished it.
It had been commissioned by the Philharmonic Society for fifty pounds. She’d written to them several years ago, explaining their straitened circumstances, and they’d sent another fifty pounds. She couldn’t ask for more.
Her father had been relying on Lord Sprague’s patronage which made Viola very uncomfortable. The baron had been trying to make her his mistress and she was afraid that his patience was wearing thin.
The baron was the last patron left of the dozens who used to lavish money and gifts on the composer. Her father had fallen out of favor withthe nobility six years ago. The money had flowed freely then, and her father had been much in demand as a composer and conductor. Until he’d pursued the wrong nobleman’s wife. He’d been sued for adultery and the sordid trial had transfixed all of London. As the salacious details were written about in newspapers and scandal sheets, her father had been pilloried. Suddenly, no one would perform his works. Britain turned its back on its favorite composer.
Now the audiences clamored for soft, romantic music, not her father’s darkly dynamic and sometimes sorrowful works.
He was lost inside his music today, happier than she’d seen him in months. She wiped her tears away and left him to his work.
She must find a way to pay the rent, and the servants, and settle the household accounts without troubling her father with tidings of destitution.
Now that the heat of her anger and hurt had evaporated, Viola knew she’d have to swallow her pride and ask for her back wages from the duke. She needn’t speak to the man himself. Dukes were cushioned sorts of creatures, cocooned from the reality of life’s pesky domestic matters.
What would her intrepid archaeologist friend India, the Duchess of Ravenwood, do? She’d corner the duke in a back alley outside of a gaming hell and threaten him with a judiciously placed knife until he paid her the back wages.
Not exactly Viola’s way of doing things. Her friends were all powerful women and they’d helped her so much in the past. She didn’t wantto accept outright charity, but she would ask her friends if they knew of anyone who required a music instructor.
Oh, how she would miss Lady Blanche, Bernadette, the twins, and, especially, young Birdie, who showed such promise as a musician and a composer.
She’d miss the Delamar sisters, but she was absolutely determined not to miss their brother.
It was only a matter of time. One year from now she’d open a newspaper and read something about the Duke and Duchess of Westbury, and she’d feel nothing. She’d be very dispassionate about it. She’d think,Ahyes, I used to make a fool of myself over that arrogant duke.
Everything her friends had said about Westbury was true. He’d never had to work at anything. And what did he do with his wealth and position? He squandered it. And was rewarded for his bad behavior.
Her heart was an enigmatic organ. It beat to its own music, and try as she might to conduct a sprightlier, more suitable melody, it wanted to wallow in the minor chords of a hopeless infatuation. Hopeless not only because she could never marry him, and because he would never want, or be able, to marry her.
Hopeless because he wasn’t worthy of hope.
