“Because I do not understand who you are. Because I knew you as a boy, and you are not that boy. Because a thief feared you, and not because you had caught him red-handed. Because Jeremy spoke of how much you have changed since school. And you give me nothing to explain any of this. Am I to trust you blindly for the rest of my life?”
His jaw clenched.
“I do not want to think about the things I did to survive when I lived on the streets. I willnotspeak of them. Men judge. Women judge. Always.”
“I would never judge you,” she said earnestly. “If you would only trust me.”
“Yetyoudo not trust me.”
Silence pressed between them. Catherine’s hands shook. The door opened, and the next course arrived. Fresh wine was poured. They waited for the servants to depart once more.
“Tell me,” he said at last, his voice harsh, “did you arrange it?”
Her brows furrowed. “Arrange what?”
“Arrangewhat? The pickpocket. Did you set him upon me? So you could watch, and see, and force my past into the open? Perhaps you are in league with Everdon. Attempting to undermine me. I cannot fathom the purpose, but that does notmean the conspiracy does not exist. Come to think of it, you were in Everdon’s company when you were introduced to me, weren’t you?”
Her breath fled.
To do such a thing would be… Machiavellian to say the least! Was that what he thought she was capable of? Manipulating people as though they were nothing but pawns? What did that say about him? Fury surged within her. She had lived in fear, been poisoned, and almost forced to marry the very devil himself. And now to be accused of such a thing!
“How dare you! That you could think me so conniving, so false…”
His eyes burned, but he said nothing. She rose, pushing back her chair.
“I will not sit here and be accused of plotting against you.” Her voice was steady, but only just. Something beneath it trembled like a fault line about to give. “And whatever you accuse me of concerning Lord Everdon, you are wrong. Entirely and thoroughly wrong.”
“Which is exactly the sort of denial I would expect,” he replied, his voice flat and cold as a winter pane.
“You may call it what you like. It will not change the truth of it.”
She left before he could answer. Not because she was afraid of what he might say, but because if she stayed one moment longer, she would either cry or throw something at his head, and she was not yet sure which would be worse.
She had nowhere to go.
The house was a warren of dark passages and unlit rooms. It was a lonely place in the evenings when the servants were in their quarters, sharing light and warmth, laughter and good fellowship. The tears came quietly, stubbornly, and she wiped at them with the back of her hand and kept moving.
She opened a door at random.
Moonlight lay across the floor in long, pale rectangles, pooling around the legs of dust-sheeted furniture. At the far end of the room, half in shadow, stood a piano. It was a beautiful instrument, dark-wooded and elegant, and it had not been touched in years. A fine layer of dust lay across the keys like a veil.
Catherine stood in the doorway, oddly nostalgic for a long moment, simply looking at it. Then she crossed the room and found a lamp on a small table beside it. A box of flint and steel sat nearby. She struck a light, and the flame caught, and warm gold bloomed outward, ushering back the dark.
She sat down on the bench.
The wood creaked beneath her, and the sound was made extra harsh in the acoustics of the quiet parlor. She lifted her hands and laid them upon the keys, and for a moment simply held them there, feeling the cool, smooth ivory beneath her fingertips.
Then, without quite deciding to, she began to play…
It was a melody she had not thought of in years.
It came back to her the way such things do, not all at once but in fragments, in snatches. A phrase here. A handful of notes there.
Her mother used to play it in the evenings, in the parlor at home, with the windows open and the summer light going gold. Catherine had been small enough to sit at her feet, and she would lean her head against her mother's knee and listen, and the world had been very simple and very safe.
She stumbled over a slower passage she could not quite remember.
Paused.
