“—and her flock is eaten by wolves because the daft woman is busy singing about how they look like little clouds instead of watching them.”
“Operas do not need to make sense,” she saidwith tolerant placidity. “They only need to make the audience feel things. Like a lovely dream. For how often do dreams make sense? Dreams of the sort you have when you go to sleep at night.”
“Why on earth is that necessary? Why is any of that necessary?” His patience sounded uncommonly frayed.
He might mean dreaming. He might mean this conversation. He might mean The Grand Palace on the Thames.
She wrinkled her nose in mock sympathy and tipped her head. “Feelings are not your forte, Your Grace?”
“I should think life is operatic enough without introducing an additional element of absurd drama, let alone a drama one pays to see. I keep a box at the opera but I do not use it. My son does.”
“Fair point, Your Grace. It’s just that one person’s absurd drama, as you put it, might be another person’s matter of life or death. And not everyone prefers their waking lives to their dreams.”
“Are feelings your forte, then, Miss Wylde?”
“Good God, no. Feelings are like a stiff wind. They can blow you right off the jetty.”
He pressed his lips together for a long moment while he studied her.
“Blow you off the jetty?” he said finally.
“Another time,” she said, with an airy lift of her hand.
“I am all anticipation.”
“I will admit I enjoy knowing I’ve the power to make others feel things with my voice. To transport them to another place. To lift them up out of themselves.”
“A power, is it?”
“Oh, yes.”
They regarded each other fixedly. She noticed that his posture, which heretofore had always looked as though he had a long rifle for a spine, had relaxed a very little. She imagined that “a very little” was all this man ever relaxed.
“Very well, then, Miss Wylde. I will attempt to impart the rudiments of conversational Italian over a series of hours. I suggest three o’clock to four o’clock each afternoon for the duration of my stay. Would you like to avail yourself of lessons?”
“Yes, please. Thank you. I’ve permission to use ‘bloody’?”
“Miss Wylde, I was a soldier. Epithets are practically a second language for military men. My sensibilities cannot be violated with mere words.”
“Even when uttered by a woman?”
“Even when uttered by a woman.”
There was a little pause during which she rather loudly thought but did not mention the words she’d sung the night before, which had violated his sensibilities, which had arguably led to the two of them standing here today.
“I anticipate the hours I’ll be spending in your company will necessitate its use once or twice.”
“I should feel I have failed in my duty as a tutor if you are not so inspired.”
There was a silence.
He sighed. “I sense a ‘but,’ Miss Wylde.”
“Not so much a ‘but’ as . . . an ‘and,’ Your Grace. I’ve a list of things I’ve heard many times over the years in Italian, and I should like to know at last what they truly mean. And I should like to learn the meanings of some of the lyrics that I’ve been singing. If you would be so kind.”
“Yes. Of course. I’d be pleased to do that. Tomorrow, three o’clock in the afternoon in the antechamber of my suite. Do not be late. Now, if you would be so kind as to excuse me?”
“I would be so kind,” she said on a grave hush, and curtsied to him as he bowed, and the two so kind people parted.
