Page 39 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
“Four is fine.”
He settled his hat. “Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon.”
He turned, and she heard the latch, and then nothing. Newton materialized from somewhere along the corridor, paused, and looked at the closed door with an air of mild inquiry. He looked at Annabelle. He looked at the door again. Then he sat down firmly, as though rendering a verdict.
James watched the door for a moment and then looked at the floor again. “He put his coat on and took it off and put it on again this morning,” he said.
“Oh?” Annabelle said.
“He does that when something’s bothering him. Mrs. Greer says.” He appeared to consider whether the account was complete, and decided it was. He looked up at her. “Can we go now?”
“Yes,” she said. “We can go.”
Newton followed them both upstairs without being asked.
She settled James at the pianoforte. He set his case down, climbed onto the bench, and looked at the keys. Then he looked at her.
“Is something wrong?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Nothing is wrong.”
He looked at her for another second, then back at the keys. He accepted this.
“Can we do the F now?”
“We can do the F now.”
They began.
He worked through the scale the way he worked through everything he had decided to do properly: left hand first, right hand second, neither combined until both were reliable on their own.
Newton had settled in the window seat behind the pianoforte, and the afternoon light came in at a low angle, and the room was quiet except for the scale and the faint sounds of the street beyond the glass.
By the fourth repetition, James’s left hand had stopped cramping on the stretch, and by the sixth, he was moving through it with an evenness she had not heard from him before.
The lesson ran close to two hours. By the end of it, he was playing in both hands, and the last time he ran it from bottom to top and back again, he went straight through without stopping, and when he finished, he sat still with his hands in his lap.
“It sounded right,” he said.
“It did,” she agreed.
He got down from the bench and picked up his case, and she walked him to the door when Dominic’s footman came at four. James went down the steps without a backward look.
She stood at the door until the gate closed.
Helena appeared behind her in the entrance hall, holding a small card between two fingers. Her expression had the quality of someone delivering information they find interesting and intend to present without embellishment.
“A gentleman called while we were at the park,” she said. “He left this.”
Annabelle took it.
The card was good stock, the engraving clean. A viscount’s name. And beneath it, in a careful hand:
Would be honored to further the acquaintance made at the Greyton masquerade, should Lady Annabelle be agreeable.
She looked at it.
