“He is not competent,” Dominic said. “He is remarkable. Annabelle said so. She does not say things she does not mean.”
Lady Rosenhall looked at him for a moment. “No,” she agreed, “she does not.” She went to her chair.
A few minutes later, Dominic went to the front of the room again. The talking settled.
“There is a second performance this evening,” he said. He paused. “My ward, Lord James Barrow, will play for you.”
He crossed to the door at the back. James was in the corridor with his governess, a step behind—good coat, hands pressed light against his thighs. That was how James stood when he was bracing himself against something: the hands, lightly fisted, pressed against the seams.
Dominic crouched. He had learned, over the past months, the importance of level.
“You know this piece,” he said.
“I know this piece,” James said, with the care of someone confirming a recorded fact.
“You have played it twenty times this month.”
“Twenty-three. I counted.”
Dominic looked at him. At the brown eyes steady behind the effort. At the jaw set and the hands pressing at his seams. He had not known, a year ago, how to meet those eyes without fumbling the meeting. He knew now. The fumbling had cost him a great deal, and the knowing cost nothing.
“You may come out when you are ready,” Dominic said. “Not before.”
James looked past him at the doorway into the room. His jaw moved once.
Then he stepped forward.
He walked down the center aisle with the focus of someone who had rehearsed the distance. Forty faces watching, and he did not look at any of them. His eyes went to the piano and stayed there. He reached the bench and sat. He arranged himself as Annabelle had taught him—upright, feet flat, hands in his lap—and looked at the keys for the count of several seconds.
The room did not move.
His hands came up from his lap and settled over the keys. He pressed the first note.
It came out clear and clean, and the tension in his posture shifted—not gone at once, but in the way a body releases when the thing it feared turns out to be survivable. He went inside the music. The room ceased to exist for him, and he began.
A Mozart minuet. Annabelle had chosen it for him in October: simple, she had told James, but not simple-minded. His hands knew the distances now. The piece moved in its deliberate way across the keys, and he played it with the stillness of someone who had gone inside it rather than sitting on top of it.
In the second phase, he came to the difficult bar—the one he always got wrong—paused for a fraction of a beat, found the note, and continued. The correction was so clean that half the room would not have caught it.
Annabelle caught it. From where Dominic sat, he saw her hands, folded in her lap, press together once.
James reached the final bar. He lifted his hands from the keys, placed them in his lap, and sat.
The applause was immediate.
Dominic was on his feet before he was aware of standing. Miles had risen beside him. Lady Rosenhall’s hands were going together with real force. Helena had both hands at her mouth. Annabelle was clapping with her color high and her eyes bright in the way they went when she was keeping something back.
James turned on the bench. He looked at forty standing faces. His eyes found Dominic’s across the room.
He held there for a moment.
Then he came down from the bench and walked back up the aisle, and Dominic met him at the front.
“I made one error,” James said.
“You played beautifully,” Dominic said.
“I made one error,” James said again, in the tone he used for things that were going on the permanent record.
