***
He showed her the nursery, where faded wallpaper still bore the marks of toys that had been removed decades ago. "I wasn't allowed to keep my toys after I turned five. My father said they were distractions from my studies."
He showed her the schoolroom, where a single desk faced a wall covered in maps and charts. "I spent six hours a day in this room until I was eighteen. Latin, Greek, mathematics, history, and estate management. Everything a duke needs to know and nothing a person might actually want to learn."
He turned to face her, his expression raw in a way she'd never seen before.
"Promise me," he said. "Promise me that if I start disappearing again, you'll pull me back. Even if I fight you. Even if I say I don't need it. Promise me you won't let me become him."
"I promise."
"Even if it's hard? Even if I'm difficult and stubborn and all the things I've been trained to be?"
"Even then." She reached up and touched his face. "Especially then."
He closed his eyes, leaning into her touch, and for a moment, he looked younger than his thirty years. Vulnerable in a way that dukes were never supposed to be.
"Thank you," he whispered. "For seeing me. For being the first person who ever really saw me."
"You made it easy."
"I didn't. I made it almost impossible. But you did it anyway." He opened his eyes. "Come on. There's more to show you."
Chapter 16
The music room was next; smaller than the other rooms, more intimate, with tall windows that let in the afternoon light. A pianoforte sat in the corner, its lid closed, its surface covered with a layer of dust that suggested it hadn't been touched in years.
"My mother played," Frederick said, moving to stand beside the instrument. "I remember the sound of it; just fragments, really, bits of melody that surface sometimes when I'm not expecting them. She died when I was six, but the music stayed."
Lydia watched him run his fingers along the piano's edge, leaving trails in the dust.
"After she died, my father had it covered. He said the sound reminded him of her, and he couldn't bear it." Frederick’s voice was soft. "I used to think that meant he loved her. That he was so devastated by her death that even the memory of her music was too painful."
"But?"
"But now I think he just didn't want to be reminded of feeling anything at all. It wasn't that the memory was too painful; it was that feeling pain was too inconvenient." He lifted the piano's lid, revealing keys that were yellowed with age but still intact. "I've never heard anyone play this since she died. Almost twenty-five years of silence."
"Do you play?"
"No. My father didn't see the point of teaching me. Music was for women, he said. Dukes had more important things to learn." Frederick pressed a key; a single note that rang through the dusty room, clear and pure and somehow heartbreaking. "I always wondered what it would sound like if someone played itagain. Whether it would still work. Whether her music is still in there somewhere, waiting to come out."
Lydia moved to stand beside him. She wasn't musical, had never had the time or the training, but she could read the longing on his face.
"Maybe someday you'll find someone to play it," she said.
"Maybe." He let the lid fall closed again. "Or maybe some silences are meant to stay silent."
They stood there for a moment, neither quite willing to move on. The room felt heavy with memory, with all the music that had never been played and might never be.
"Show me something happy," Lydia said finally. "Something that isn't full of ghosts."
Frederick thought for a moment. Then his face lit up with an expression she'd never seen before, something almost mischievous.
"Follow me."
***
He led her through a maze of corridors and staircases, past rooms she barely had time to glimpse, until they reached a door that looked like all the others but somehow felt different.
