Page 117 of The Scandalous Love of a Duke
Forcing his bad memories away, he crossed the room and sat beside Katherine on the stool, his eyes following the movement of her fingers.
She had a very real skill. He hadn’t known she played so well. But even so, the pleasant sound grated on his nerves like fingernails running down a blackboard.
He looked up, searched for the notes she played on the sheet music, and then followed them across the lines. When he turned the page for her, his fingers were shaking.
He tried to force himself to like the music but it hinted at so many days he had been alone in this house with his grandparents, not understanding how he fitted into the family.
Katherine was absorbed in the music, reading it from the page and transporting it through her fingers into notes. Mary and his parents laughed at something Phillip had said. John felt his muscles contract.
He forced himself to keep breathing and turned the page again. But the tremor in his hands had increased. He was unravelling at the seams.
‘Why do you not you sing for us, John?’ Mary encouraged, as Katherine’s piece drew to its conclusion with a complex flourish she mastered easily.
His fingers fell away from the music to his thigh and he felt an inner panic swamp him. He cursed violently in his head using every swear word he knew. This was ridiculous. His rational thought knew that. But the problem was there was this other part of him that was irrational and tied up with the damned dream from his childhood. He had always thought once he knew where his mother was, the dream would pass on and these feelings of weakness, inability and unworthiness with it. But no. Life was not to be as kind to him as that.
‘Yes, John,’ Katherine said, her fingers resting on his thigh.
He gritted his teeth and stood. ‘Forgive me. There are some papers I ought to review. Excuse me.’ His gaze reached to his parents and Mary. Then he glanced at Katherine and nodded, before looking at Phillip. ‘Phillip.’
Phillip nodded and John left the room, escaping into privacy where he could nurse his madness in secret.
Katherine felt bewildered as she watched John leave. He had looked upset.
The more time she spent with John it seemed the less she understood him.
She wondered whether to go after him.
‘I should be on my way,’ Phillip said.
He stood, and Mary and John’s parents rose in response.
Katherine stood to say goodnight too.
‘John is such a killjoy,’ Mary stated. ‘He will never sing, and his voice is the best of us all.’
‘Mary,’ John’s mother admonished, pressing her fingers to her daughter’s arm to silence her. There was something wrong. His mother knew it too.
Phillip came across to Katherine and took her hands, to say goodbye.
‘I will walk downstairs with you. I am glad you came,’ she said, as they left the room.
‘Thank John for inviting me.’
She nodded. Then as they walked along the hall she asked, ‘Why does John dislike singing so much?’
‘It is not my place to say. Ask John.’
‘But you know?’
‘Not really. I only know pieces of his past that would make it likely. I doubt Mary knows the history of it at all, she is so much younger than John.’
There was a clue in his words. John’s dislike must stem from his childhood.
She accompanied Phillip downstairs but said nothing else as her mind was too focused on how to open a conversation with John.
* * *
John sat at his desk in his private sitting room, his elbows on the solid wood and his head in his hands as he fought the monster of emotion roaring in his head. His head was spinning in a dark pit of pain.
