Page 26 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
Dominic turned to follow.
“Your Grace,” Annabelle called out at the last moment.
He stopped. “Yes, Lady Annabelle?”
She approached him and kept her voice low as Miss Hartley and James disappeared down the corridor. “James asked me,on Tuesday, whether you would stay on Thursday. He asked me again on Thursday morning. And this morning, before you arrived, he said he wanted to play it for you specifically.” She kept her voice even, without pressure in it. “He wanted you to hear it.”
Dominic was quiet with his back to her for a moment. His shoulders sagged for a moment, and Annabelle stilled as she noticed the emotion in the movement.
Then, he quickly straightened and whispered, “I know.”
He left, and the door settled behind him, and Annabelle stood alone in the music room, with the piano at her back, and Newton rubbing against her legs, purring.
What is this man hiding so deeply? Why can’t he push it aside for his nephew’s sake? For one minute, at the very least?
She scratched the cat behind the ears and did not say any of the things she was thinking.
James was explaining the mechanics of the sustain pedal with an enthusiasm Dominic hadn’t seen in the boy in months.
“You press it with your foot,” he said. “The notes last longer.” He looked at his bread. “Annabelle says I’m not old enough for ityet. You have to know the notes first, or the extra sound makes everything confused.”
“That seems reasonable,” Dominic said.
“She showed me how it works, though. So I understand what it does.” He took a bite. “It sounds like water. When you drop a pebble in a pond and the rings keep going even after it has sunk.”
Dominic cut his meat. He had no response for his nephew.
“Newton sat on my foot today,” James offered. “During the scales.”
“How… did the scales fare?” Although he did not think he could keep up with James’s same burst of enthusiasm, Dominic still wanted to encourage it any way he could.
Because this was the first time he’d seen James truly alive after his parents died.
“They were slower.” He shrugged. “He always keeps us company during the lesson. Annabelle says it’s because he likes me. I like him, too. He’s a very nice cat.”‘
He turned back to his supper without inflection, without sentiment, and said nothing further.
Dominic put his wine glass down.
He looked at the boy bent over his plate, eating with appetite.
He thought about what Annabelle had said.
He picked up his glass and said, “Mrs. Greer tells me you’ve been sleeping through the night.”
James looked up. “Yes… I have.” He admitted in a small voice, as though he were not sure it was something to be reprimanded for.
Dominic tried softening his mouth into a small smile, then said, “That’s better than before.”
That attempt allowed the boy to sit up straighter, his expression even more open now. “The melody helps,” James said. “If I move my fingers through it first. The loud parts go somewhere else.” He ate the last piece of his supper. “Annabelle says music does that. She says that’s one of its main purposes.”
Dominic had nothing useful to add to that, and they finished their meal in relative silence.
Later that night, at half past eleven, he passed James’s room.
He had been in the study until then; the work had occupied him well enough that his mind had been, mostly, on the right things.
The door was ajar, and it was dark inside, but that did not stop him from hearing it: a very soft sound; soft enough that it would not have reached him if the door had been fully closed.
