She came down to the second stair, and when he turned his hand palm down, she set her own hand on his and allowed him to lead her toward the drawing room. She had the bearing of a duchess, he thought with what might have been amusement under different circumstances. And in the same moment he felt as if scales had fallen from his eyes. An orphan? Raised in an orphanage? Turned out on the world to make her own way in life now that she had grown up? He did not think so. He was a fool ever to have been taken in by that story.
Which made Jane Ingleby a liar.
“‘Barbara Allen’ first,” he said. “Something that is familiar to my fingers while they limber up.”
“Yes. Very well,” she agreed. “Areallyour guests still here?”
“Hoping that forty-eight or forty-nine of them have retired to their homes for their beauty sleep, are you?” he asked her. “Not one has left, Jane.”
He felt her draw deep, steadying breaths as a liveried footman leaped forward to open the drawing room doors. She lifted her chin a little higher.
She looked like a fresh garden flower amid hothouse plants, he thought as he led her inside and between two lines of chairs, on which his guests were seating themselves again and from which they looked with curiosity at his guest.
“Oh, I say.” It was Conan Brougham’s voice. “It is Miss Ingleby.”
There was a buzz as those who knew who Miss Ingleby was explained to those who did not. They all, of course, knew about the milliner’s assistant who had distracted the Duke of Tresham’s attention during his duel with Lord Oliver and had then become his nurse.
Jocelyn led her into the open space occupied by the pianoforte at the center of the room. He released her hand.
“Ladies, gentlemen,” he said, “I have persuaded Miss Ingleby to share with you what is surely the most glorious singing voice it has ever been my privilege to hear. Unfortunately she does not have an accompanist who can do her justice, only me. I dabble along, you see, with five thumbs on each hand. But I daresay no one will notice once she begins to sing.”
He arranged the tails of his coat behind him as he seated himself on the bench, set his cane on the floor beside him, and curved his fingers over the keys. Jane was standing exactly where he had left her, but in truth he was not paying her much mind. He was terrified. He who had faced the wrong end of a pistol in four separate duels without flinching shied away from playing the pianoforte for an audience who would not even be listening to him, but to Jane. He felt exposed, almost naked.
He concentrated his mind on the task at hand and began playing the opening bars of “Barbara Allen.”
Her voice was breathless and slightly shaking for the first two lines of the first verse. But then she settled down, as did he. Indeed, he soon forgot his own task and played more from instinct than deliberate intent. She sang the song better, more feelingly, than he had yet heard it, if that were possible. She was the sort of singer, he realized, who responded instinctively to an audience. And his guests were a very attentive audience indeed. He was sure no one moved in any way at all until the last syllable of the ballad had faded away. And even then there was a pause, a moment of absolute silence.
And then applause. Not the muted applause of a gathering of thebeau mondebeing polite to one of its own, but the enthusiastic appreciation of an audience who had for a number of minutes been transported into another dimension by a truly talented artist.
Jane looked surprised and somewhat embarrassed. But quite composed. She inclined her head and waited for the applause to die away and be replaced by an expectant hush.
She sang Handel’s “Art Thou Troubled?” It was surely one of the loveliest pieces of music ever composed for a contralto voice. Jocelyn had always thought so. But this evening it seemed that it must have been written especially for her. He forgot about the difficulty he had had in improvising an authentic-sounding accompaniment for the words. He simply played and listened to her rich, disciplined, but emotionally charged voice and found his throat aching, as if with tears.
“‘Art thou troubled?’” she sang. “‘Music will calm thee. Art thou weary? Rest shall be thine; rest shall be thine.’”
He must have been troubled and weary for a long, long time, Jocelyn found himself thinking. He had always known the seductive power of music to soothe. But it had always been a forbidden balm, a denied rest. Something that was soft, effeminate, not for him, a Dudley, a Duke of Tresham.
“‘Music.’” She drew breath, and her rich voice soared. “‘Music calleth, with voice divine.’”
Ah, yes, with voice divine. But a Dudley only ever spoke with a firm, manly, very human voice and rarely ever listened at all. Not at least to anything that was outside the realm of his active daily life, in which he had established dominance and power. Certainly not to music, or to the whole realm of the spirit that music could tap into, taking its listener beyond the mere self and the finite world of the senses to something that could only be felt, not expressed in words.
The pain in his throat had not eased by the time the song came to its conclusion. He closed his eyes briefly while applause broke the silence again. When he opened them, it was to see that his guests were rising one by one to their feet, still clapping, while Jane looked deeply embarrassed.
He got up from the bench, ignoring his cane, took her right hand in his, and raised it aloft between them. She smiled at last and curtsied.
She sang the light and pretty but intricate “Robin Adair” for an encore. He would doubtless inform her tomorrow that he had told her so, Jocelyn thought, but he knew that tonight he would be unable to tease her.
She would have fled from the room after that. She took a couple of hurried steps toward the opening between the lines of chairs that led to the doors. But his guests had broken ranks and had other ideas. The entertainment was over. It was suppertime. And Ferdinand had stepped into her path.
“I say, Miss Ingleby,” he said with unaffected enthusiasm. “Jolly good show. You sing quite splendidly. Do come to the supper room for refreshments.”
He was bowing and smiling and offering his arm and using all the considerable charm of which he was capable when he turned his mind from horses and hunting and boxing mills and the latest bizarre bets at the clubs.
Jocelyn felt unaccountably murderous.
Jane tried to escape. She offered several excuses, but within seconds Ferdinand was not the only one she had to convince. She was surrounded by guests of both genders eager to speak with her. But though her position at Dudley House as his nurse and the circumstances of her hiring were doubtless intriguing to people who throve on gossip and scandal, Jocelyn did not believe it was those facts alone that drew so much attention her way. It was her voice.
How could he have listened to it two nights ago, he wondered now, without realizing that it was not just an extraordinarily lovely voice? It was also a well-trained voice. And good voice training was surely not something anyone came by at an orphanage, even a superior one.
