“It would help me to hear you,” Jem said softly. “And it might ease him as well.”
Lucasta nodded, unable for the moment to speak. His anger with her had not lessened, nor had she forgiven him for the May game he had set out to play with her. But around and within the exasperation she felt a deeper pull, the connection that had been building between them for months. This was not the moment to examine it.
“Arendale is in the north, I understand?” she asked.
“In Northumberland, above Newcastle. In fact near the Borders of Scotland,” Jem answered.
“This is not the time to distress him your warbling,” Lady Payne snapped.
Lucasta bent over the bed. “Would you wish a song or two, milord? I do not want to disturb any business.”
A cold eye glared at her, slitted like a snake. “You,” he rasped. “Jeremiah’s ladybird.”
“A friend,” she said. “I’ll sing a northern ballad I know, and if it distresses you, turn me out.”
She folded her hands before her, squared her shoulders and filled her lungs, and imagined she was in the music parlor at Miss Gregoire’s. A gracious if elegantly shabby room, filled with her favorite people. She sang to soothe Jem; she sang to calm Lady Payne; but mostly, she sang for the still, wracked man on the bed, to gentle his path into that bourn from which no traveler returns.
She sang of weary travelers, of Mary McCree, of the green mossy banks of the Lea. She sang a few Scottish tunes she knew, “The Flowers of the Forest” and “The Birks of Abergeldy.” The Marquess breathed slowly, listening, his hand occasionally twitching, but the twist of pain in his face eased. The solicitors rustled quietly in their corner, the nib of the clerk’s pen scratching steadily across the parchment, and the doctor wiped atear from his eye at the end of a slow, sad air in Scots Gaelic that a friend at Miss Gregoire’s had taught her.
Lady Payne sat with her head bowed, still as marble. Jem nodded when Lucasta drew a small wooden flute from her pocket.
“You always have a musical instrument about you, do you not?” His smile, though it brought out the lines about his mouth and the shadows of strain beneath his eyes, was unbearably fond. Lucasta’s heart clenched again.
“Most times,” she agreed, and took a sip of his tea to wet her lips.
The air in the room changed as Lucasta sang and played. Lady Payne dropped her head to her folded hands, her lips moving in prayer, and a few tears slid down her cheeks. She was a woman who had lost the protection of her husband and was now losing her father-in-law’s protection as well, to be thrown on the mercy of a nephew she had never been able to like. It was a precariousness that faced all women who had no secure income of their own, and Lucasta understood it.
The doctor collected his leeches and sat beside his patient, monitoring his pulse. The secretary blotted dry his ink and passed his documents to the men of business, who reviewed them at length and nodded. They passed the copy to Jem, whose face tightened as he read, but he made no comment.
Lucasta played the lovely, haunting “The Rowan Tree,” singing the lyrics written by the Baroness Nairne, as the doctor roused the marquess to sign his last testament. And she played the gentle, sad melody of “Hasten and Come With Me” when the doctor picked up the thin, white wrist for the last time and shook his head gravely, indicating that the Marquess had stepped through that thin veil between worlds, and the man on the bed was a man no more.
A brief flurry of activity from the men of business attended the doctor’s verdict, a last ordering of documents and signing of signatures. Lady Payne, a grim set to her mouth, went to the clock on the mantel, opened its back, and stopped the hands. Then she opened a lower drawer in the bureau and withdrew a white sheet which the secretary helped her drape over the mirror. Lucasta felt the ancient thrill of superstition shiver over her skin, remembering how she had done the same when her father died.
As the woman of the house, it would fall to Lady Payne to prepare the body for burial and attend to all the other funeral and mourning preparations. Lucasta wondered who would sit with the Marquess tonight.
She had sat with her father’s body that first night, before the rest of his family could arrive. While the candles burned down to nothing, she sat watch in those solemn, sacred hours. She knew the vigil for the dead came from an ancient superstition of not letting a demon enter a fresh body, but she herself had huddled in that liminal darkness like a shelter, knowing that when she emerged, she stepped into a world where her father no longer lived. In that threshold she had felt him, lingering, as reluctant to leave as she was to let him go.
Jem slipped out the door and Lucasta, returning her flute to her pocket, followed. She suspected he would, like a wounded animal, seek to be alone, and alone was the last thing he needed.
She found him before the tall window at the end of the hall that overlooked the street. The day’s clouds had rolled away, leaving a last blush of golden afternoon light before evening fell. When she neared, her skirts swishing across the thick rug, he turned sharply, as if he might attack. But she held her hands out to him, offering, and he swept her into his arms, pressing his face into her shoulder.
His body was warm and hard, as it had been during their embrace in his shop, and as she slipped her arms around his shoulders, she felt again that deep sense of completion, as if she had arrived at some place she had longed for without ever knowing what it was she sought.
She must not give in to that dangerous softness. She offered the warmth of one human creature to another, no more. She did not forget that he had laid some plot against her and she had stepped into it like a trusting fool. She did not forget that he had brought her in friendship into his second home, acquainting her with his sister and the rest of the family he kept hidden from the world, then had slammed that door shut when he deemed her unworthy.
She did not forget that when he kissed her, the rest of her surroundings melted to nothing, and she kissed him back as if nothing in the world mattered save for him. That way lay a sure path into madness.
“It’s all mine now,” he muttered into her hair.
She paused in the act of stroking his shoulder. He had such fine, firm shoulders, taut with fabric but not padding. He was not a man who deceived others about who he was.
“Your father?” she said tentatively.
He rubbed his forehead against her shoulder as if trying to erase a memory. “He will have the control but leave the running of it to me. I will have to carry out his decisions, distasteful as I might find them.”
“Your grandfather has men of business. I saw them in the chamber.”
“And they must be overseen as well,” Jem said bitterly. “The marquess didn’t trust them, and I do not either.” He sighed, his shoulders heaving. “My shop—my business—there will be no time for any of it. And my family…”
