Inspired, I turned back to the new sonata with which I was struggling. It didn’t sound awful when I played it through, but something still wasn’t quite right. Rather than try to put her out of my mind, I let myself dwell on thoughts of Kitty. It seemed only natural to lift the piece to match her vibrance, with a more joyful tone. I scribbled down the new notations, playing through each bar when I changed one of its notes.
It took me almost an hour to get to the end of the piece. Once I had changed the final note, I played it from the start. There was no doubt it was better, but I still wasn’t ready to deem it finished. The final few notes trickled from my fingers regardless, lingering in the otherwise silent room until soft applause sounded from the doorway. I turned, expecting Elizabeth to be standing there. Instead, I found Kitty.
“That’s beautiful,” she said.
I mumbled a thank-you, ducking my head to hide my red cheeks. Logically, there was no way for her to have any idea she had inspired the latest iteration of the piece, but I still felt far too transparent. Unaware exactly what she had been listening to, Kitty crossed the room and settled beside me on the piano stool. The sudden proximity of her body pressed against my side had me jumping, and my hand clattereddown onto the keys, creating a cacophony. My blush deepened. Kitty just laughed.
“An excellent approximation of my own musical abilities,” she said, pressing down a few keys in no discernible sequence.
“Did you never learn?” I asked, surprised. Most ladies of any standing could be expected to be at least moderately proficient at the piano.
“My mother tried, but with five of us and one piano, there was never really the time for us all to practise. Jane was passable and Mary was determined, and Lizzy often bored enough to try. Lydia was too impatient, and her solution to boredom was shop windows rather than pianoforte keys. I often neglected my own practise alongside her.”
“I could perhaps teach you, if you liked?” I offered, my mind certainly on helping her navigate polite society and not at all on having her sitting close beside me on a piano stool again.
“But why should I learn when I can so freely listen?” she teased.
Diligently, I played a few bars from the start of my sonata, unable to stop my smile. It was as I let them fade out that I realised exactly what was missing from the piece. A piano could not accurately capture its new essence. It was too mundane, too simple. Kitty either needed to be represented by some newfangled instrument not yet invented—which would certainly be an impossible task—or something that captured an increasingly bygone age.
Jumping to my feet, I almost knocked Kitty off the stool. I steadied her by grabbing her arm, sliding my hand down until I could link my fingers with hers. There were countless reasons why I shouldn’t, and she undoubtedly had plenty of questions, but I ignored them all, and she didn’t protest as I pulled her out of the room and down the hallway.
When I’d had my own sitting room redecorated, I had opted for a more modern design. There was elaborately patterned cream paper on the walls and duck-egg-blue panelling around the skirting, with a matching rug softening most of the floorboards. Elegance had seemed key, but the one matter on which I’d refused to compromise had been the inclusion of my mother’s old harpsichord.
Despite the fact that the instrument was rather out of fashion, I was too fond of it to hide it away. I didn’t play it often, but I did sometimes find myself sitting at it, wondering what thoughts ran through my mother’s head as she struck the keys. It was ornately decorated under the lid with scenes of the English countryside, and I heard Kitty’s subtle gasp as I propped open the top. When I sat down, she retook her seat beside me.
“How many pianos do you have?!” she asked, baffled.
“Technically, this one is a harpsichord,” I said with a laugh.
“Does your brother not realise you really don’t need to do this?” Kitty asked, sitting beside me on the bench. My heart immediately leapt to my throat at how close she chose to be once again. The room was full of alternative seating choices.“You have an impressive dowry, you have connections, you—how many other languages do you speak?”
“Four,” I admitted, ducking my head. The French and Italian were expected and had been carefully trained into me by a governess. The Spanish was not uncommon, but the Latin was less usual.
Kitty’s response came in the form of several notes of a scale, dancing her fingers across the keys. It was unpractised and clumsy, but she knew it by heart so she must have found at least a little time for practise in her childhood.
“I know you’re not including the Greek you don’t think you are practised enough in, so you really speakfiveforeign languages,” she said, playing another scale and tripping up on the final note. She tucked her hands into her lap. “And you are beautiful enough to render anyone speechless. Not to mention there isn’t a man or woman this side of London—or any side of London, for that matter—that you couldn’t best at chess. I should imagine you’ll have your choice of eligible suitors regardless of whether you can regale a party with a Scottish air or two.”
I wanted to protest Kitty’s words, but they bounced around inside me in a way I couldn’t restrain. She thought me beautiful. The notion was almost sacrilegious coming from someone with such depths of fire in her eyes and grace in the angles and curves of her features. I shook the thoughts away, forcing myself to think practically and scrambling for any words that constituted a sensible response.
“My brother does not make me do anything. I like to play.”
“Oh.” Kitty appeared to be genuinely surprised, as if the thought had not occurred to her. “Go on, then. Why did you bring me all the way here when there was a perfectly good piano in the other room?” she asked, nudging at my side as if that would do anything other than make me forget my own name.
My fingers worked independently from my mind as they fell into a familiar pattern, finding the keys for the melody I’d been working on. Other than early attempts on the harp, my practise had thus far been on a piano, and the difference in plucking the strings with each press of a key rather than striking them unlocked a door I had been unable to open. It was the perfect marriage between the two other instruments, and it captured the newfound essence of the piece with a lighthearted frivolity the piano had been lacking. For the first time, I finished the final chord of the sonata with a grin on my lips.
When I turned to Kitty, I expected her attention to be on my hands, on the harpsichord keys. Or perhaps appreciating the music with some far-off gaze into the distance, like so many did when they were pretending to listen avidly. Instead, she was watching my face.
She was so close to me that I could feel the warm rush of her breath across my skin. I could count the freckles across her cheeks. There was a smudge of brown in the blue of one of her eyes, just below the pupil. When I collected myself enough to take in the entirety of her expression rather than a series of enticements, I found her lips parted infinitesimally,her eyes wide with surprise but soft with fondness. It was an expression that lodged itself firmly in the depths of my heart.
I had been told all my life that I had to learn to sing, to draw, to play piano so that I could one day impress a suitor, but I had never much seen the point. If I practised anything, it was because I wanted to. Now, however, I understood. The burst of pride in my chest, the shaky feeling I was left with after knowing I’d impressed Kitty—perhaps that was what my governesses had meant. To have her look at me like that made me feel impossible. I could not truly have the value I did in her eyes, yet she seemed to see it anyway.
I looked away, unable to bear it much longer. Everything I had ever known—Frances’s fate, my past with Helena, a life of manoeuvring amongst polite society—had taught me I could not have the things I wanted.
“What song was that?” Kitty asked, her voice rougher than usual.
“I wrote it. I’ve never been particularly good at titling my compositions, so I’m afraid it doesn’t have one,” I admitted.
“You wrote it,” she repeated, the words more a statement than a clarifying question.
