“Even?” Martha murmured.
“It is something in his doleful countenance; it makes one long to confide in him.” She continued, gaze on me: “A hasty person would say the brother and the sister are not at all alike, Martha, but we are not such dull elves. I begin to discern it, though he is so tall, and she so little, and his eyes so blue, and hers so”—her own eyes bored into mine for an unsettling instant—“dark, and as for their features in general, barely a point of similarity can be traced—”
“Where do you begin to see the resemblance, in such a case?” Martha asked, amused. My heart was pounding and I did not know where to look.
Jane said: “Both have an air of having fallen to earth. One can tell at a glance they are not truly English. They are so correctly, so perfectly English.”
Too horrified for speech, I bowed. I felt the eyes of both women on me and could not meet them; instead I looked across the room to where Mrs. Austen had stopped coughing and Liam was leaning in, questioning her. I longed for some way to warn him that she was on to us, but there was none.
“Jane, you are merciless.” Martha touched my forearm gently. “You know, Miss Ravenswood, do you not, that she quizzes only people she likes? She regards it as a mark of distinction.” I looked up, surprised by her words and her expression, kind without a hint of irony.
Before I could think of a response, Cassandra said: “I am sorry. My mother sometimes claims the privilege of age overmuch. Let me see what is become of the tea.”
WHEN THE TEAPOT WAS EMPTY AND THE SEEDCAKE SEVERAL SLICES smaller, conversation slowed, and I began to think of leaving. But then Martha asked Jane about a new piece of music Fanny Knight had copied and sent from Kent, and Liam encouraged her to play it. Soon we were all around the piano, Liam appointed to turn pages. Though the tune was simple and too sweet for me, her fingering was good and she played with a precise intensity that fit her character.
I said: “You are a true proficient. Will you play us another?”
“You are kind. There is nothing else fit to hear.” But she made no move to get up; the room seemed to echo with her song.
“Perhaps you would play us something,” Cassandra said to me. “Jane mentioned there was a pianoforte in your house in town—are you not a musician?”
“I would not give myself that distinction.” I wanted to avoid being observed; I was still smarting from so correctly, so perfectly English. Teasing or not, it pointed to a flaw in our presentation, one I wanted to go away and think about. At the piano, Liam had picked up a piece of music from the neat pile and shown it to Jane, asking her something. She nodded and played a phrase; they conferred, and she played another.
“Give us that one!” he said. “’Tis a favorite of mine.”
“Is it, sir? I am sorry then, for I barely remember it.” She played a few more notes, and as Liam followed them with his voice, unexpectedly resonant and tuneful, she looked up in surprise, which I shared. The long hours I had spent on music during Preparation, he had been off shooting or learning to drive a carriage; these were hard to master and essential to impersonating a gentleman in a way that music was not.
“I will play it only if you will sing.” She lifted her hands off the keyboard and looked around the room for support. “You see, the words are all here, if you need them.”
“I am sadly out of practice.”
“Oh, please do,” Cassandra said. “Since Charles went back to sea, we have not heard any singing worth the listening. Henry claims never to be in voice, and as for the younger Digweeds—” She left this thought unfinished.
Liam hesitated and glanced at me. I gave a tiny nod, thinking he had gone too far to politely back down. He turned back to Jane, saying, “I can deny no wish of yours,” studied the sheet a few moments, humming quietly and following the notes with a finger, then put the music back on the piano, nodded at her, and took a step back, rolled his shoulders, and took a breath. They began.
HE HAD BEEN AN ACTOR; IT MADE SENSE THAT HE HAD VOCAL training. He had good range, excellent breath management, and a surprising ease, an absence of affectation, as if singing were as natural as talking—but it wasn’t just that. The rough texture of his voice gave the song, a sad one about love gone wrong, a melancholy ferocity; it was like someone had opened a window and let in the Bront?s. Cassandra, Martha, and Mrs. Austen were staring at him with the surprise that I was trying to conceal, while Jane lost her way and stopped playing after a certain point, so that he had to finish unaccompanied, intensifying the effect.
O, the rain falls on my heavy locks
And the dew wets my skin,
My babe lies cold
Within my arms
O Gregory, let me in.
When the song was done, no one said anything. Then Jane stood up and shook his hand vigorously, as a man might. “You astonish me, sir, you astonish me,” she said, and her eyes were shining. “Thank you.”
She hurried out, limping slightly; there was the creak of quick footsteps headed upstairs, a sob, the slam of a door. We remaining five looked at each other, stricken. As they will when she’s dead, I thought. Soon.
“I am sorry to distress your sister,” Liam said to Cassandra, and the familiar sound of his speaking voice brought me partway back to reality. “Were there some painful associations with that song? I could not have known.”
Cassandra just shook her head.
“Perhaps I should go to her,” I said. They all looked at me. “Make sure of her,” I added, and turned and hurried upstairs. I had to get out of that room. I thought I understood why she had fled, because I had felt it, too, what I saw in her face.
I paused at the top of the stairs, confronted by a dark, narrow hallway with a window at the end, several closed doors, and a lump in my throat. Then I realized I had been here; we had toured the house museum in my own time, as part of Preparation. If historians got it right, her bedroom, which she shared with Cassandra, would be the first one, just ahead of me. I stepped toward it and knocked. “It’s me, Mary. May I come in?”
I did not wait for permission. Opening the door, I stepped into the deeper darkness of the room to see a pale shape lying on one of the beds. The curtains were open, offering a square of night sky as I felt my way to a chair near her bed and sat down. When my eyes had adjusted to the dimness, I saw she was facedown in a pillow, hands clasped at the back of her head. After a time, she turned to look at me, but said nothing. It was too dark to see her expression.
“I wanted to be sure you had not been taken ill.”
“I had not,” she said, adding after a pause, “I only felt an irrepressible desire to be alone.”
“I needed to also, but I would not disturb you. Shall I go out in the hall?”
I heard amusement in her voice as she said: “Perhaps we can be alone together. If we do not talk.”