For those three days he remained an outsider, silently studying them, learning their habits and quirks, their customs and personalities. Only then would he have enough data to make informed decisions.
Evie was unaware of this arrangement. She had, quite suddenly, decided to visit a friend in the country.
“I haven’t seen Pippa since we were children,” she explained. “Besides, now that you have finally found Catherine, I imagine you’ll be quite busy with her. Something tells me it’s best if I stay out of the way.”
He set down his pen with a frown. “Pippa? The wild farm girl who convinced you to jump from the barn roof into a haystack? You broke your leg.”
Evie grinned. “I did not. I merely sprained my ankle. She wasn’t a farm girl; she was just visiting her uncle’s farm. Her father is a famous mathematician and natural philosopher.”
“And why is she in Austria now?” he asked.
“Because she lives here. She returned to Austria before the war broke out. We’ve only recently been able to write to each other again. Since I would dearly love to see her, we agreed I’d visit.”
He nodded. “Very well. You’ll need to take along a companion. I believe Mortimer has already found someone suitable.”
She pulled a face. “Very well, if you insist.”
Evie had left several days before he moved into the Arenheim home. It was better that way. Much as he loved her, he needed her out of the way to have the time and space to sort out his affairs and his feelings.
After three days of observation, he discovered that certain things remained constant in this tumultuous household, and one of them was music.
Music woke him up and music lulled him to sleep.
It was the sound of the pianoforte, masterfully played, that would wake him at dawn. Catherine—that was, Lena—practised regularly for three hours.
Then, as she rose from the pianoforte, the sound of the viola took over as Mona practised in the drawing room for the rest of the morning. Meanwhile, the boys had gone to school; the older one to university. In the afternoon, the sounds of their violin and flute scales filled the house as they practised.
The Arenheims broke their fast early, with a rather strange drink they called coffee, but which turned out to contain not a single coffee bean but dried, roasted, and ground chicory roots. Lena boiled it in a copper pot to a bitter, earthy brew, and added milk and sugar. She served it with the hard, dark bread that the peasants ate, whichwas strangely aromatic and did not taste at all bad with butter and jam.
Lunch was a simple vegetable stew with the leftover bread.
Dinner was either dumplings or pancakes, or some other sweet Bohemian dish whose pronunciation he hadn't yet mastered. It was some kind of baked doughy substance with apricot jam in it, served with vanilla sauce. It wasn’t bad, but, well, sweet. He’d never had so many sweet dinners in his entire life. He ate every crumb without complaining because Lena had made it with her own hands.
Lena was constantly in demand.
She was the heart of the house, the emotional centre. The mother.
He’d seen how Hector burst into the room, sobbing, and she’d picked him up and he’d clung to her as if he were but a toddler, and she’d carried him around the room, making soothing noises as he sobbed forth his story. He’d been feeding a stray puppy in the street that had insisted on following him unnoticed and it had got under the wheels of a carriage. Hector had held the little animal in his arms as it died. “It’s all my fault,” Hecki wept. “I killed it.”
Lena had comforted him until his sobs subsided, and he hiccuped into her lap. Then he’d gone with Les, to give it an honourable burial. A few moments later, the mournful sound of Les’s violin filled the room as he played a requiem.
Mona, too, had burst into tears, when, after many hours of practice, she couldn’t get a certain passage right,and Lena had sat beside her, rubbing her shoulder and reassuring her that she was still as talented as ever.
Even Theo had burst into the drawing room one evening, just when he was penning answers to some letters that Mortimer had brought him, stalked over to Lena who was darning everyone’s socks, dropped to his knees and burst into loud, uncontrollable sobs. He, the adult, had transformed into a child in a matter of seconds.
“I want to die.” Theo buried his head in her lap.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” Lena murmured.
After much urging, he choked out, “She doesn’t love me.”
Lena listened to him patiently as he sobbed forth the entire sorry story. Something about a blacksmith’s daughter named Rosalie whom he’d loved forever, thinking his affections were returned, only for it to turn out she was merely trifling with him. “She says I’m as poor as a church mouse and not g-g-good enough for her because she wants something better. Ultimately, she can’t l-l-love me.”
Lena sighed deeply. “Oh Theo. I am so sorry.”
She really was quite remarkable, the Duke concluded. Instead of ranting about the girl’s personality and how awful she was for rejecting Theo, she merely listened to the boy quietly, as if she understood his pain.
“I feel so stupid and ashamed,” Theo confessed.
