Page 88 of The Virtuoso
“At least you’re doing something about him,” Nick pointed out charitably, “though as to that, you’ve gotten a great deal done here in a short time.”
“Good crews,” Val said, glancing around. “Though I have to confess, it makes me nervous, the quiet. I can hear them banging away over at Ellen’s, but not to see scaffolding all over my north wing, not to hear the constant ring of curses and shouts and hammers, it’s unnerving.”
“You never heard much of anything before,” Nick said, “except all the notes in your head. You hear things now.”
“Possibly.” Val considered the notion. It was one thing not to listen, but Nick was accusing him of nothearing. His Grace was the one who never even heard others.
“You don’t get that gone-away look in your eyes as often as you did a couple months ago,” Darius added, “and you don’t make a fat, unhappy fist of your left hand a hundred times an hour.”
“I fisted my hand?” Val asked, staring at the hand in question as he spoke.
“I noticed it, because at first I thought it meant you were angry and ready to plant somebody a facer, perhaps even my charming self. Then I realized you didn’t even know you were doing it.”
Val’s gaze moved from one friend to the other. “It has begun to amaze me that I managed to walk upright and speak English on occasion, such a stranger have I apparently been to myself.”
“Not a stranger to yourself,” Nick corrected him, frowning down the drive, “more a visiting dignitary to those who care about you.”
Val fell silent, wondering what else his friends might have wanted to tell him, but for this tendency he’d displayed to become absorbed in his own artistic world, even while in the company of others. He realized abruptly he was doing it, again, while his friends exchanged a rueful smile.
“Bugger the both of you.” Val shoved them each on the arm. “I’m going to go through the house one more time. If you’d take the outbuildings, Dare, and you the stables, Nick, I’ll feel better.”
“Of course.” Nick strode off, leaving Darius to eye his friend.
“You’ve put the house in order this week,” Darius said. “The place looks good, and I assume you’ll be moving into it when Ellen’s cottage is done.”
“That would make sense,” Val replied, unwilling to voice his reluctance to do just that. Ellen back at her cottage seemed another step closer to him out of her life. If she ended their association, he could not bear to take up residence in the house alone, not with her toiling away in her gardens, one home wood and three universes of stubbornness away.
“So when,” Darius asked gently, “will you set up the piano?”
Val slewed around to stare at his friend. “Whatpiano?”
“The one your papa sent along with the team,” Darius said. “The one that’s been sitting in its crate in the carriage bays for the past week and more.”
Val cringed. “We left a pianointhecarriagehouse?”
“Freddy will expect you to have a piano,” Darius said, his tone merely bored. “And we’ve half the morning to kill before he gets here.”
“And Nick’s considerable brawn to assist us.” He shouldnoteven set the damned thing up. What was His Grace thinking, now of all times, to send Val a piano? It was so typical of their dealings, that his father would finally mean well and get the timing so exactly, ironicallywrong. Val stared down at his left hand, which looked no different from the right of late. He could always crate up this gift later and send it back from whence it came.
“Let’s get this over with,” he muttered, telling himself no piano should be housed in a damned carriage house, and certainly not inhiscarriage house.
“If you insist.”
“You going to tune the thing?” Nick asked, draping an arm over Val’s shoulder when they’d gotten the instrument set up in a first-floor parlor. “I know you have your kit with you.”
Val’s lips compressed into a thin line, but Nick was right. He did have his tools with him—he always did.
“Ellen might enjoy playing it,” Darius suggested with devilish innocence.
“Bugger you both,” Val said on a sigh. Except a piano should be kept in tune.
His craftsmen had packed the instrument very carefully—for it was one of his, damned if it wasn’t—and the piano was in fine shape, not even needing much tuning. Val closed the lid and looked around the room for the bench that had been delivered with the piano. He positioned it before the piano and noticed a corner of white paper sticking out from under the seat.
A note in his father’s slashing, confident hand.
Valentine,
You play these things better than I have ever done anything, save perhaps love Her Grace. She picked this one out after trying all that were ready for sale at both of your shops. She said it was particularly lovely in the middle and lower registers, whatever that means. Her Grace will be sending along some of your music, though I told her it would be better for you to come choose what you wanted from Morelands, as an old fellow might get to see his youngest (and only bachelor) son that way, but there is no reasoning with Her Grace on certain points.
