Page 24 of Lady Mary's May Day Mischief
He extended a hand to have her take the bench and sat down beside her.
She rubbed her palms together. “All through the night in my mind, I played all our duets. We’ll be superb.”
She danced her fingers over the keys in a trill and tossed him a happy grin. “I chose this piece.” She offered up a few more chords. “Last night, I sneaked down here to look for the score, but the Courtlands don’t have it. I remember it, although not very well since I haven’t played it without you.”
Beside her, he stilled.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You must recall this.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t played it by yourself.”
“It was ours,” she blurted, her confession burning her cheeks bright pink. “I couldn’t bear to play it alone.”
He caught his breath on a dawn of remembrance. “This piece is the one we practiced for my mother.”
“A birthday present for her.”
“She was shocked.”
“Really? Why?”
“She wondered what would become of me. Her gangly, awkward, bookish third son. The one who was irrelevant, no use to the family. The one who could do maths in his head and was suited best to become some aristo’s estate manager.”
“She loved you!” Mary recoiled.
“That I never doubted. Yet to her and to my father, I was the odd duck. The son they did not need. The one who was not interested in breeding Arabians, sitting in Lords or learning cards. The one who preferred to grow plants, till the soil with the tenants or repair old tack.” He stared at her but saw the past. “After you and I performed this, she suddenly had hopes I might acquire culture. Become a gentleman, if indeed I would be one who never owned a thing but what I earned.”
She took both his hands in hers. His fingers twined with hers in rough urgency. “If they could see you now, they’d know how wrong they were.”
He tried to brush that off with a shake of his head and a dose of humility.
“It’s true, Blake. If they thought you gangly, you were taller than either of your brothers. If they thought you awkward, most youths are, boys and girls. If they declared you bookish, well, they did the right thing and sent you off to the engineers. And look what you did for them, the military, Wellington. For us all.”
“You give me more credit than I deserve.”
“I doubt it. How often did you calculate precisely where a fortress wall should be breached? How well did you plot the shortest and best path for a road meant to carry hundreds of caissons and thousands of tramping men?”
“Others did, too.”
“That does not diminish your service or your excellence.”
“I failed, too.”
She shrugged. “One must often fail to learn how to perfect a task.”
He noted that with a twitch of a brow. But it did not sway him either.
She mashed her lips together. “How often did you fail? Tell me. Where?”
He lifted a shoulder and gazed off to consider a hideous hole in Spain. “I did not do well at Badajoz.”
As if he’d punched her, she sat taller. “You must not take all blame for that battle.”
“We numbered twenty-one engineers leading infantry. Teaching them as we fought hand-to-hand down into the trenches. A nightmare to climb out. My god.” He raked a hand through his tousled hair. “Over our own wounded and dead. The French rained down artillery upon us like a million devils.”
“But in the end, you won that city.”
“I cannot claim success.”
