“I know.” He did smile now, comforting her. “That was another of my weaknesses, you see. I wanted the entire world to know how brilliant my daughter was. I wanted everyone to think as highly of you as I do. I still want that.”
Sophie’s hands clenched into fists against her thighs, an echo of the way her heart twisted and tightened in her throat. “Love is not a fault,” she said, low and fierce.
“Love may not be—but negligence is, and I let my love for you blind me to Mr. Verrinder’s true nature.” His eyes gleamed in the light of the dying day. “I swear to you, child, I will protect you better in future.”
Sophie swallowed. “I hope you do not mistrust Mr. Frampton for offering me his advice?”
Mr. Roseingrave chuckled. “Quite the opposite. Look at him and his son—they are very different, but they take such good care of one another. You can tell so much about a person by what they do, not just the flattering things they say. I should have paid more attention to what Mr. Verrinder did and less to what Mr. Verrinder promised. Because for all his lofty words, Sophie—he treated you very badly. Very badly indeed.”
Sophie’s eyes prickled with tears. The confessions clustered so close in her throat that she didn’t know which one to start with. To explain she’d been more deluded by ambition than he had? To confess she had apparently not learned her lesson, and had fallen in again with someone whose motives were far from aboveboard?
What would he say if he’d learned she’d offered to help Madeleine Crewe?
The shop bell chimed again. Her father’s customer smile came out. “Hello, sir,” he said, lowering the fallboard and rising from the piano bench. “Welcome to Roseingrave’s...”
Sophie dashed the droplets from her eyes before standing and turning to help.
The rest of the afternoon passed dreamlike: Sophie sold a violin and a harp and several copies of theHarmonicon. She talked about Beethoven and Broadwood and the newest set of ballads from Griffin and Brinkworth’s. She smiled and answered questions and pulled instruments from the wall by rote—but inside she carried around a miniature maelstrom of emotion. Pride because her father thought well of her. Anger that her father had to worry about her welfare on top of everything else. Shame because she should have hidden her pain better. Guilt because she hadn’t protected him, either. And the low, flickering flame of determination, like a torch in the darkness, lighting her way forward.
It was too many things for a single heart to contain. She had to get them out—and there was only one sure way to do it.
So she lingered by the piano while her father closed up the shop. He glanced at her hands, twisting and flexing, and a knowing gleam came into his eyes. “Make sure to lock up when you’re finished,” he said, and vanished upstairs to the floors where the family lived, and where her mother and siblings would be gathering for dinner.
But for now, she had the shop entirely to herself.
She turned the lamps down at once and pulled the openwork shutters down over the window and the door. The gaslights in the street outside provided just enough low light to see by through the wooden scrolls and cutouts.
Then she took a seat at the Dewhurst and Ffolkes.
For a moment she only sat, calming her racing heart and flexing her fingers to limber them up. But before long she was opening the fallboard like a pirate lifting the lid of a long-buried treasure chest. Sharps and naturals gleamed in welcome.
This was no time for subtlety. Sophie raised her hands and set to playing the fastest étude she remembered, the one crammed with more notes than the listener’s ears could hear at once. Some of the notes she hit weren’t the right ones but she barreled onward anyway, trying to outplay the stiffness of her wrists and that iron chill that still froze her sinews. That cold pushed against her, she pushed back, but the piece ended before the battle did.
She plucked up one of the newer concertos that had just arrived from Vienna. And tried again. But she found herself wrestling with the same problem: it was as though there was a wall between her and the music, some barrier that kept her emotions from flowing down her arms and into the song like she wanted them to. With no outlet, those wild feelings could only swirl faster and faster around her, until they trapped her as completely as if they were walls of stone, and Sophie left with only a spoon to chisel her way free.
She might never get out.
Sophie wanted to weep at the thought—so she shifted to the most lugubrious funeral march she knew. Minor chords, stately rhythm, a melody heavy as teardrops down the face of the bereaved. On more than one occasion playing it had made her sob aloud with mournful ecstasy.
But even that once-familiar agony felt muted and distant. She let the notes die away.
With the piano quiet, other sounds flowed in. Footsteps on the stones outside. Human voices from sidewalks and the street. The rush of the river. And a low, repeated thrum that Sophie had learned was the sound of the silk-throwing mill, that ran all hours. Not just a sound but a heartbeat, like the pulse of some great devouring beast. The rhythm of Carrisford. For the first two weeks here it had kept Sophie from sleeping; now she couldn’t imagine going to bed without sensing it just below the threshold of hearing. Like a lullaby.
No, not a lullaby—a waltz. The distinctiveone two three, one two threefit so neatly into the spaces between the thrums that Sophie’s fingers were on the keys before she realized she was moving. She found the bass note that harmonized with the silk mill for theone. Twoandthreewere soft, higher chords, the footsteps of a woman walking lightly down the street. A woman in gray wool (the simple melody began)—escaping into a churchyard (a brief flutter of a minor key for the gravestones)—then a powerful torrent of notes as her pursuer caught up with her and was trapped in turn by a single fiery kiss.
A second theme: languid and sensual. Caresses over linen and hands stroking skin. Building to a climax...
But now there were too many possibilities for the tune. Sophie frowned and went back two bars to refine the shape and structure. Not perfect yet, not entirely right—but she kept working at it, so focused on following the magnetic pull of that internal compass that she lost track of everything outside her hands and the keys and the shapes unfurling in the air...
A noise—one she didn’t make—broke through her trance. Someone knocking.
She whirled around to see Maddie Crewe peering through the scrollwork. Almost as if she’d been conjured by Sophie’s song.
Sophie hurried to the door and let her in, closing the shutters again behind her and hoping the haste would explain the flush that burned on her cheeks. “Miss Crewe,” she breathed, then all breath stopped as the other woman whirled off her cloak with a flourish: Miss Crewe wasn’t in her usual gray wool.
No, tonight Maddie Crewe was wearing a silk gown of bright sunshine yellow.
It was bold, utterly vibrant, and Sophie couldn’t have called up a more alluring vision of sin if she’d been a hermetic saint with nature’s full range of pharmacopoeia. The skirts were voluminous with tucks and flounces. The bodice was tight and trim against Miss Crewe’s waist; the neckline a long, wide line. Her throat—her hips—the high, generous breasts beneath the silk—Sophie had never seen anyone so beautiful in all her life.
