Page 109 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
By eight o’clock, the room was full.
Dominic went to the front and waited until the conversation had arranged itself into quiet. Forty faces turned.
“You are here,” he said, “because my wife wished to open this room properly, and because she wished to play for you in it. Her skill requires no introduction from me.” He paused. “You are about to hear it directly.”
He sat down. The guests applauded, the expectant kind, gathering itself in. The door at the back of the room opened, and Annabelle came in.
She was in deep blue, the gown she had declared her favorite and worn three times this season. Her hair was up, with the loose strand at her right temple that was always there by the second hour of an evening.
She walked to the piano without looking at any of the guests. Except, for a moment, him. Her eyes went to him across the room and stayed there, and then she sat at the bench, settled her hands in her lap, and looked at the keys.
The room went quiet.
She began.
He did not know the full title of the Beethoven sonata—she had told him twice, and he had not retained it—but he knew the music. He had heard it through the floor of his study for weeks. He had stood at the doorway of the corridor at night and heardit come under the door and not gone in, and had sat at the top of the stairs in the dark and let it come through the ceiling, and had understood in those weeks before he had done anything about understanding it—what the music was doing to him.
He had the words for it now.
The room held still around it. Not the polite stillness of an audience performing attention, but the involuntary kind: heads slightly forward, breathing slowed. Lady Rosenhall’s hands were folded in her lap, and her expression had stripped itself of its methodical quality and gone simpler. Miles was very still. Lucien, two chairs down, was watching Annabelle with an expression Dominic had not seen on him before—open in a way that the drawing room did not usually warrant from him.
She played the movement through. When she lifted her hands from the keys, a full beat passed before anyone moved. Then the applause began, and it was not the polite kind.
Dominic put his hands together. He watched her turn on the bench with a high color in her face that was not the effort—she had played as though breathing—but the other thing: the color that came when she had been genuinely heard.
Miles reached him first. “She is extraordinary.”
“I know,” Dominic said.
“She told me last week that she began playing at eight years old,” Miles said. “Her father said she ought to improve her posture. She improved her posture and played again. He said nothing. She decided on the spot to become the finest pianist in England.”
Dominic was quiet with that.
“Because if he was not going to praise it,” Miles said, “she might as well be very good at it.” He picked up his glass. “You are fortunate.”
“I know I am.”
Helena appeared on his other side. “She played the second movement differently tonight than she did in September,” she announced. “More settled.”
“She is more settled,” Dominic said.
“You are responsible for that.” She said it without irony or condition. “I say things directly when I mean them. I meant that entirely.” She moved away before he had to answer.
Theodore came to his elbow. He arrived without announcement, as was his custom. He looked at the room—the piano, the walls with their old plasterwork, the candelabra—and said, “This room was closed for some years.”
“Twenty-three,” Dominic said.
Theodore looked at him once, factored it in, and said, “Good that it’s open now,” and went back to Cressida.
Lady Rosenhall appeared next. “Lord Keldwick tells me the boy is to play.”
“He is.”
“How old is he?”
“Seven.”
She considered it. “My nephew gave his first public performance at eight. He was competent. If the boy is competent at seven, that is early.”
