“Ahh . . . Lucky for us, I do.” Nathan smiled, then tapped a treble key. “How’d you learn to play?”
“When I was ten, my dad traded my babysitting skills for piano lessons with the woman next door. He wanted me occupied and she had a three-year-old terror.” I tapped another key with one finger to create a complement to his note. “I can’t smell Lysol and Febreze without being transported back to that tiny, hot house. Those first weeks were torture . . . Then one day, none of that mattered. I got it.”
I trilled out a few more notes. “Music is math, and once you understand that . . . How can anyone not be in awe? It’s the audible expression behind the laws of the universe. It feels like the only thing, apart from God, that lives outside time. Once released, it lives on and it can make you laugh and cry, rip you apart and heal you, all within a few discrete notes strung together. And while it follows rules, expression is limitless.”
Nathan remained silent, and doubt crept in.
He turned to me, his face inches from my own. “I don’t know if it’s this place, or, as you suspect, the dress, or maybe it’s that we’re not at work, or perhaps it’s this . . .” He flickered two fingers between an A and B at the top of the scale. “I feel like I’m seeing you for the first time, this fuller version of you. The best version of you.”
“You’ve figured me out then?”
“Never, but I almost missed this. I almost missed you.” He looked across the empty room toward the arched door Isabel and Grant had exited. He stood. “Dance with me?”
He tugged my hand to pull me with him, then led me a few steps behind the piano to within the open doorway to the patio.
“There’s no music.”
“Debatable.”
Until I reached the threshold, I hadn’t realized how stuffy the ballroom had become. But here, dry inside air mixed with the outside damp. I felt warm, but as the cool air touched my skin, suddenly chilled too.
Nathan twisted his hand within my own and, palm to palm, he pulled me close and wrapped his other arm around my waist. I looked down. I couldn’t find where his blue coat ended and my dress began.
“Isabel said you never dance,” he whispered.
“She said that to me too. She wasn’t talking about me.” I felt Nathan’s head shift in an unasked question. “Anne Elliot from Persuasion. She plays the piano and doesn’t dance.”
“You’d think the role play, this getup, the stilted mannerisms, not to mention the fact that I’m saying words that should only be used in college essays, would be hard. But I’m finding it all very easy.”
We stepped a full waltz rotation in silence. The breeze rustled my dress’s hem. “Do you smell it?”
“What?” I felt his breath on my ear.
“Electricity.” I heard the word and felt my face warm. I pulled an inch away. “I mean a storm. There’s one nearby.”
I’d been right during our walk to the stables; my head reached within that tender space between shoulder and chin.
“Is that your favorite smell?”
“I found a new one recently.” I closed my eyes. I felt his head shift the minutest of degrees. The tiniest movement on my side and . . . I couldn’t move. I smelled bubble gum and something fresh, like grass and sunshine, and I didn’t want it to end. I closed my eyes and wished this moment was so significant, so weighted and so massive, that we could test Einstein’s theory—bend time and freeze it.
Chapter 21
The best version of you . . .
The words, the feeling, and the anticipation of all it might mean played within my dreams.
We had danced, and sat by the dying fire in the Day Room to talk. Then, when the ashes grew cold and the room dark, he held my hand as we walked up the stairs and along the gallery. Outside the Green Room he’d laid a soft, lingering kiss at the edge of my jaw. Just off center enough to send chills up my spine.
“Until tomorrow, Miss Morland.”
I must have leaned against the inside of our bedroom door for a half hour, savoring every memory and studying Isabel. She was tucked tight under her covers on her stomach. I could only see a mass of black curls against the white sheets. Would she wake soon? And how would everything change when she did?
I looked around the room. Isabel was gone, and once again I had not heard her wake or dress. One of the reasons I’d hesitated about this trip was my fear that our quarters would be too tight and confining. We didn’t have enough space in our friendship for our adult selves, much less if we were stuck in a room together. Yet here we were, sharing that room, and I didn’t even see her on waking. I no longer felt compressed or defined by her. We were divided by schedules, centuries, and the great distance between fact and fiction.
A brown wool dress lay across the foot of my bed with a note.
Good morning! Join us at the stables when you wake. I pulled this out for you. It’s chillier outside this morning.
I set the dress aside and opened my wardrobe. There was a dress that had caught my eye the afternoon we arrived—a deep purple, a royal purple. I’d passed it over as too bold, but now I pulled it down and fingered the fabric. It had a slight bumpiness to the texture, probably a silk and cotton blend, with matching ribbons of velvet. It was the purple on purple that gave the dress impact. It wasn’t frilly or frumpy. It had crisp pleats, right angles at the neckline, and fell in one-color splendor all the way to my toes.
I pulled my hair back in the same high bun Isabel had fashioned. This time I left no loose tendrils or curls. It felt dramatic and bold too. Soft leather boots and a black shawl, taken from the wardrobe’s lower drawers, completed the outfit. I headed to the stables.
The gravel on the drive surrounding the house shifted and scraped under my feet. Rain had pattered the windows in the night and left the gravel moist and gripping and the grass glistening with drops in the morning light. But the air was dry. All the dampness had been pulled out with the rain, and the air was also cold, crisp. Each breath made a little puff of steam, and I almost turned back for a heavier dress or a jacket. Instead I tucked the shawl tighter around my shoulders and picked up my pace along the path.
“You’re here.” Duncan stood brushing Tennyson.
“Am I late?”
“They went for a walk. Isabel was keen to go, Nathan keen to stay, but she won in the end.”
“I don’t doubt it.” I felt my buoyancy deflate with a slow leak.
Duncan pointed the brush down the path. “If you hurry you might catch them.”
“It doesn’t matter. Is anyone else around?”
“The Muellers are on a gig ride with Goliath. The Lottes are fishing on a north stretch of the stream, if you want to join them.”