Page 16 of Hold Me Fast
Look at them standing and clapping, the man who looked like Jowan among them.
Tamsyn stole another look at him, the stranger who reminded her of Jowan. His light was largely a true green, with touches of sky blue and veins of gold. Good colors.
The orchestra played the introduction to her next song and Tammie’s training took control, drawing her away from her thoughts and prompting the deep breath she needed for yet another aria, this one from a little-known opera by an English composer.
Caught up in the music, she ignored the audience, singing not for them but for Jowan. Wherever he was, and whatever he was doing.
The duet and two more songs before the break, she had been told. One more song after, and then two encores, if the audience asked for them, and they would. Tammie was in fine voice. She was untouchable, immortal, incomparable. Sure enough, they clapped, and they cheered. After her third number, they would not sit down until the duke, a handsome man despite his age, shouted to ask them to be seated.
Once he had the attention of the room, he held it. In the dream world that waited to engulf Tammie, he wore a crown, not unlike the one she often visualized on Guy, but emitting light where Guy’s crown sucked light in. A king of light, with an aura of clean pure blue rather than a king of dark, whose red-black aura hurt the eyes.
They were both tall and broad-shouldered, but the duke was slim-waisted where Guy’s indulgence of all his senses showed in his expanding paunch. The duke’s hair was iron-dark tipped with frost and Guy’s was sandy-fair and fading to white.
The duke was still talking but Tammie, since people were no longer paying her attention, let her slender grasp on reality drift. Perhaps she would not sing again tonight.
If she did, she would like to sing for Not-Jowan. The more she looked at him, the less certain she was about him being a stranger. Certainly, he smiled at her as if they were friends. He might be just a regular stage-door lecher, sure that every singer could be had for a price. But Tammie was an expert at detecting lust, and she was surely not deep enough in the opium dream to miss it if it was there.
It wasn’t. Those eyes held something else. Curiosity? Concern? Those eyes so like the eyes of the boy who had been her dearest friend. Jowan would, she supposed, be twenty-three now. Yes. Twenty-three. She was twenty-three and so was Jowan. He would have grown taller and broader. This man was taller and broader, but he had Jowan’s eyes.
People were moving, forming into queues. Was the concert over? She glanced at the duke, and he smiled back. “Would you care to have a seat, Miss Lind? We will not be long, and then they will expect their reward.”
Reward? What kind of a reward?Tammie obediently sat in the chair the duke indicated and waited to find out. Her mind kept spiraling away. Soon, she would sleep. Sleep and dream. Perhaps of Cornwall, and at the thought, Bodmin Moor rose in her mind, and the children who used to play there, escaping from their lessons to ride the half-wild moor ponies.
When the duke touched her shoulder, she found it hard to let go of the dream.
“Miss Lind? It is time for your next song.”
Guy materialized behind the man. “The duke said you would sing your encore pieces, Tammie, if enough people signed up for the raffles. You have your encores ready, do you not?”
Tammie could sing in her sleep, and perhaps she had sometimes done so. She nodded to the conductor, who had her music, and sang a lullaby that was all about the baby’s father who had, as the song lamented, “gone for a soldier”. The first encore was “Greensleeves”, which was always a crowd-pleaser. She had prepared a third aria to finish the evening, but another idea occurred to her. A song for Jowan, if it was Jowan.
Guy glowered when she crossed to speak to the conductor, but Tammie ignored him. The dreams were crowding her now, the audience turning into mystical beasts before her eyes and the ballroom fading away as ivy and other creepers pulled down the walls to show castles and forests beyond.
One of the musicians carried a chair for her to the front of the stage and gave her his harp-lute. She played a brief introduction and launched into a ballad from home—one she had never before sung on stage, but that was as much a part of her as her bones.
It was a Cornish lament, about a girl who was lost on the moor, taken by the fair folk, and the miner boy who wandered the moors day in and day out, unwilling to give up searching for his beloved. Even in Cornwall, where few now spoke the old tongue, most people would not understand the words of the song, but the music carried the sentiments.
Jowan, if it was Jowan, learned the lament when she did. Could he see, as she did, the elf king rising up from the bog to pull the girl down, then trying and failing to do the same to her sweetheart?
The man was mouthing the words of the chorus as she sang them. ItwasJowan! It must be. Her hands on the harp lute fell still and she repeated the chorus one more time, unaccompanied, the miner boy’s lament for his stolen beloved floating out across the large room.
As her voice fell still, the assembled guests paid her that highest of all compliments from an audience. A moment of complete silence. And then they were on their feet, clapping and smiling. Probably-Jowan, too. Tammie kept her eyes on him as the duke spoke a few words of thanks and encouraged them to take their seats again for the auction.
Then Guy was at her side, taking her by the elbow. “Come along. I will introduce you to the duchess and then I am sending you home,” he said.
“I would like to stay and meet the guests,” Tammie protested.
“You are too tired,” Guy declared. “I have already told the duchess as much. The song you sang last? It is not the one you prepared.”
Tammie blinked at him. Was she tired? It was increasingly hard to think.
“Come along,” Guy said again. “You may have a sip of laudanum before you meet the duchess, and then I will give instructions for another dose back at the house when you are ready for bed.”
Another dose. Sweet oblivion. Tammie put Probably-Jowan from her mind and allowed herself to be escorted out to the room that had been set aside for her and Guy’s other musicians.
“What was that last song?” Guy grumbled as he measured out the laudanum. “It was not on your list.”
“They enjoyed ‘Scarborough Fair’ and ‘Greensleeves’,” Tammie told him. “I thought they would appreciate another simple song. And I was right, Guy, was I not?”
