Page 101 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
James considered this. “I won’t teach you,” he said. “Annabelle will teach you.” He pressed the correct note himself, with one finger, to establish it. “That is E. You played F. They are adjacent. It is a common error.”
“Is it?” Dominic asked.
“For beginners,” James confirmed, without cruelty.
Annabelle put one hand against the doorframe.
They played the melody through twice more. James corrected Dominic twice—pointing, naming the note, waiting for the right key to be pressed before he resumed his own part. Dominic played with the patience of a man who was not in a hurry, which was not a quality she had associated with him until she saw it here, in this room, at this piano, beside a six-year-old who had no interest in softening his assessments.
By the second pass, James had come half off the bench, one knee on the seat and one foot still on the floor, his whole attention on the keys and on monitoring Dominic’s hand for deviations. She had seen him look this way at ships. At a piece of music he knew very well. She had not seen him look this way with Dominic.
She watched Dominic notice it.
The governess appeared at the far end of the hall at half past five. James heard her before she came into view—he always heard footsteps before anyone else—and looked up from the piano.
He slid off the bench. He came to Annabelle and put his arms around her waist and pressed his face briefly into her side, the way he did when something had gone right, and he was satisfied with the day. She put her hand on the back of his head.
Then he turned, but Dominic had turned on the bench to face him. James walked back to the bench and put his arms around Dominic’s middle.
She watched Dominic go absolutely still, shocked at the gesture, no doubt. His hands came up and away from James’s back for a moment, uncertain of their own permission.
Then he brought one hand down and set it on the boy’s shoulder. It was not practiced. It was the gesture of someone doing something for the first time, doing it with enough care that it didn’t look careless.
James stepped back. His expression was the one he wore after a fact had been confirmed to his satisfaction.
“Goodnight, Uncle Dominic,” he said. He followed the governess up the stairs without looking back.
The hall went quiet.
Dominic rose from the bench. He looked at her across the room.
“Could I speak with you alone?” he said, and Annabelle swallowed, taking a step back.
But she also knew she could not escape from this conversation forever. She did not want to, especially not now, when he had faced the piano…when he had come to her, all by himself.
“Fine.” She said.
They walked to her room without ceremony—he had no easy way to make the walk into something other than what it was, so he didn’t try. She opened the door, and they went in. She went to stand near the window, the late light behind her, and looked at him.
He stood in the middle of the room.
“I opened the old music room this morning,” he said.
She was very still.
“Mrs. Howell had the key. I asked her for it at half past seven.” He paused. “She gave it to me without a word.”
Annabelle looked at him and did not speak.
“I walked down the east corridor,” he said. “The plasterwork is the same as when I was a boy. I had not walked that corridor in some years.” He kept his voice even. “The door opened on the first push. The room had been shut long enough that the air inside it was cold and dry, and there was beeswax under the dust from the last time anyone had tended the floor, which was a very long time ago.”
He stopped. He had arranged this on the way over—the shape of what he wanted to say—and now, standing in front of her, the arrangement felt like a way of avoiding the thing itself.
“There is a window at the far end,” he said. “The piano stood in front of it. I could see the shape of it through the linen cover from the doorway. It was larger than I remembered, or I was larger.” He met her eyes. “My chest went tight the instant I stepped inside. Not slowly. All at once.”
She was listening with her whole attention, the way she listened when she had decided the thing being said was worth the full weight of it.
“My heartbeat went wrong,” he said. “Too fast. I could hear it. The room went bad at the edges—the light, the walls. I stood in the middle of it and the image came the way it always comes. All at once. My father’s hands on the keys. The blood in the cracks between them, dark where it had dried. My mother against the pedal board. The particular quality of his breathing as it slowed.”
