Page 42 of A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
‘Well, if he was reckless and dissolute you also said that he wasn’t a man who was unfair. And if he is lonely...?’
‘Perhaps they might find solace in one another?’
He was now laughing so much he could barely kiss her although he tried. ‘Are you by any chance lending your hand to that dubious art of matchmaking, sweetheart?’
‘If I invited them for afternoon tea, would you promise to be circumspect, Oliver? We could then test the waters, so to speak.’
‘Let’s go to bed right now and I will show you just how circumspect I can be.’
Oliver lifted her up then and their reflection caught in the window, light against dark, and he wondered anew as to how he had been lucky enough to find such contentment.
Happy chance and good fortune. The two blessings had been largely missing in his life before he had met Cecilia. He hoped with all his heart that Nick might finally find the same.
* * *
After Oliver left Nick retired to his bedchamber, the blues on the walls restful and mellow. He’d loved this room and coming in here as a young boy to curl up on the enormous bed with his parents and talk.
The same slice of regret ran over him, far more remote than it had once been, but still there none the less. Their deaths were the point where his life had begun to spin out of control, a wildness growing that became unchecked and complete.
The clock on the mantel chimed one. It was late and yet the night felt alive. With ideas and thoughts and hopes.
Cecilia was pregnant. Oliver had told Nicholas that under the threat of confidentiality. A new life. Another generation and the responsibility of guiding and teaching a child about what it was to live well.
As Eleanor had taught her daughter?
‘Lucy.’ He said the name out loud, liking the sound of it. A little girl. He wondered if she looked like her mother. He hoped she had Eleanor Huntingdon’s vivid blue eyes and brave spirit.
His glance fell on the piano in the far corner of the room and he walked over to pull out the seat. He had not played in years and he wondered why the instrument had been left here in this room when piano playing was so much outside his uncle’s endeavour or intention.
Setting his fingers above the keys, he began to beat out theMoonlight Sonataby Beethoven. He recalled so much more of his early years when he played. That’s why he had stopped in the first place, he supposed, out of pure sorrow. It was also why he could never quite abandon it.
He did not know when he’d started thinking about the music instead of hearing the notes. It was after his parents had died and he’d returned in the holidays to the cold unwelcoming Bromworth Manor. It was in loneliness that he’d gained the nuances of the pedal and had started to notice that silences, too, could be shaped by emotion.
He did this now even after all these years of awayness. He rode the edge of the beauty between easy and hard, and was absorbed in the sweet and powerful truth of the notes.
He’d never played for anyone, not even Jacob or Frederick or Oliver. He doubted they even knew he could hold down a tune. No, the music was his alone, his and his parents. A connection. Him on one side and them on the other. After his conversation with Eleanor today such a realisation was enlightening.
* * *
Lack of sleep made Nick feel wary though in those brief moments it had found him, his dreams had been strange amorphous ones full of ghosts and dead people.
It was the piano, he supposed, and the music that had wrapped around his regret and brought his parents closer. Jacob’s older brother Ralph had been there, too, with surprise on his visage at his newfound demise, blood still at his temple. The world they inhabited had been full of clouds and mist and fireworks.
That thought brought a frown because his mother had always hated the noise of them.
Eleanor was waiting for him outside Lackington, Allen & Co., a blue bonnet tied firmly under her chin and in a coat the colour of a churning winter ocean. He thought for a moment she had never looked more beautiful or more vulnerable.
‘You are early?’ He said the words as a question, stopping himself from reaching out and taking her hand again. It was a good ten minutes before the hour she had allotted as their meeting point yesterday.
‘Last time I was early, too.’
She did not look at him directly as she said this, her glance sliding away and a hitch in her voice. The façade of the Temple of the Muses was shining, whether from the recent rains or from the lightness of the clouds he could not tell.
‘You once told me that you had bought the bookRobinson Crusoefrom here and read it in a day.’ She said this as they walked up the stairs into the main room with its imposing galleried dome.
‘One of the few I ever purchased, then, according to the state of my library.’ He liked her soft laughter. ‘Actually Oliver Gregory returned the Defoe copy to me last night when he dropped in for a drink. He also said he’d seen us outside Fortnum and Mason a few days before I disappeared. What was it we were doing there?’
‘Buying wine as a celebration.’
