Jane lingered on the drawing, her fingertip lightly circling it until it turned black with the phantom remnants of ink. She imagined the thing’s claws clotted with splinters and its mouth stained in blood as it snapped at the pulse in her throat—
Music flittered into the room and Jane jumped. She looked over her shoulder, half-expecting to see someone lurking in the doorway. But there was nobody, only the distant echo of thunder and the melancholy trill of a harpsichord. It began as something like a ghostly song, whispering and dull, but enough to keep her attention away from the moldy book in her hands. Had someone put a cylinder on the phonograph, to drown out the weighted sorrow in this house? The music was too clear, too organic, to be a cylinder.
Gingerly, she put the book back under the floor and replaced the loosened floorboard. She could return to the book of beasts and Clauneks later. She flipped the rug back over the spot and went to investigate the music, scrubbing her hands clean on her skirt as she went.
As she suspected, the music was someone playing the harpsichord in the sitting room, but she was surprised to see Terence seated at the instrument, his fingers caressing the reverse-colored keys with a grace she never thought him capable of having. There was no music before him, and his eyes were shut as he gently swayed to his own orchestrated rhythm.
There was a tranquility in the scene, and Jane leaned against the doorway and just took a moment to listen to him, silent. Her eyes traced the blunt aquiline lines of his profile, the way weariness grayed his features, the shadows deepening the lines around his mouth and eyes so that he appeared both troubled and content all at once. He’d the countenance of a musician, perhaps even a tortured poet. Whatever he was, Jane preferred it over the fear she saw earlier. He wore melancholy better than he did fear.
As his hymn slowed to what must have been its ending, Jane seized that moment to clap a muted applause.
Terence jumped in his seat and swiveled to stare at her. He must’ve been so entrenched in his music that he failed to notice he accumulated an audience of one.
“Oh, Jane,” he stammered a bit, brushing his palms against his trousers as he scooted back on the bench in preparation to stand. “Forgive me if I interrupted something, I just—”
“Why apologize for something so lovely?” Jane strode across the room until she leaned against the harpsichord with her chin cradled upon the heel of her palm. “I never took you to be a man of music. Seems like you’ve been full of surprises, hm?”
Thankfully, Terence remained in his seat but his shoulders were rigid, nervous. “My mother was a very musical type. She ensured all of us boys learned an instrument, my father too.”
“Is that so?”
With a timid jerk of his head, he gnawed on his lip. “I wasthe only one with passion for the skill.” And he said no more.
Jane sensed he didn’t wish to speak further on the subject, so she didn’t press on it despite the insistent eagerness to do so. She let it be. Instead, she said, “Do you perform? You’ve the skill of a man who could draw numbers to music halls across the world, I’m sure. This could take you across all the known continents if you wished. It’s a talent that should be shared.”Not kept caged in this sad house.
Terence lightly traced his fingers over the keys before folding them together in his lap, shaking. His shoulders drooped beneath the weight of a sigh—and perhaps even more. “Please know that if I could, I would. I would love to share music with others. The truth is that I… I…” His eyes were cast toward the floor as he seemed to search for said truth before wetting his lips and looking to his lap, brow furrowed. “I’ve never traveled beyond Britain before. And I wish I were able to.”
Jane leaned closer. “And why aren’t you able to?” She asked, perhaps a little too eagerly as she bit her bottom lip with a grin.
She received no response beyond him mumbling something she thought to be, “You wouldn’t understand,” which she wanted to huff about, but she knew it was not her business to know, even if she liked to think she was entitled to such knowledge.
Sighing, she let the topic fall dead to the floor.
She then sat beside him on the bench and stifled the urge to smirk at how he tensed beside her.
“Teach me,” she demanded, cool and blunt.
He cleared his throat. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’d like for you to show me how to play,” She said, looking at him expectantly. “I’m a horrid student but I’ve nothing else to do as of right now.”Except learning a little more about your strange house and stranger family…“I wouldn’t want to die of boredom,now!”
When he looked at her, it was with an intense stare which smoldered his hazel eyes into a charred brown and the corner of his mouth wavered into the ghost of a smile, as if he was studying her. Not in a way that made her feel like an object, but rather a marvel. A warm sensation trickled through her chest and she sat up a little straighter.
“Y-Yes, of course. I am not one to teach, but I shall try my best, Jane,” his mouth caressed the utterance of her name, and she wished to hear him say it again—and again, and again.
Instead, he held his hands over the keys, fingers splayed, poised, ready. He nodded to her own. “Place your hands over mine.”
And she did, his hands hot and shaking beneath her palms. She blushed at seeing their hands together, at the tickling texture of his hair and raised veins. The heat from her chest entered the tips of her ears the more her mind began to wander—
He, slowly, began to play a melody. It was a familiar one, with the cadence of what felt like a child’s lullaby, a nursery rhyme, the notes gentle staccatos. One that if someone didn’t know it then perhaps they had a marred childhood—which worried Jane for she couldn’t conjure a name for this particular tune. She couldn’t name the tune, but she couldalmostname the sensation that made her heart ache with a desire to grieve.
“Something of my own composition, of sorts,” his breath warmed the shell of her ear. “I allow whatever emotion troubling me to take hold of me and release itself across these keys until I am at ease.”
Jane pressed into him. “And what emotion puppets us now, maestro?”
He gave no answer, and instead, she saw a wry smile strainhis mouth as he continued with his refrain.
Together they played the same tune again and again, to a point where Jane was certain she could play it with her eyes closed.
