“Good morning, Lady Annabelle,” he said.
“Good morning, Your Grace.” She held the frame with one hand and said nothing further; she had a lesson to give and a boy upstairs and no evident interest in filling the interval.
He turned for the steps.
“He talks himself through the runs at night,” she said. “After the light’s out. Miss Hartley told me two days ago.” She had the tone she used when reporting information she expected him to use rather than dismiss. “He does it because he wants to know if it sounds the way he hears it in his head. He just doesn’t want to know that only from me.”
Dominic stopped on the second step. He did not turn around. “Then tell him it does.”
“He would rather you told him.”
“I doubt that, my lady.”
He went down the remaining steps and exited the house.
As he stepped out, he heard it: five notes from the upper floor, clean and unhurried, run through once without error. After that, there was a brief pause, and then it started again, slightly faster.
He hurried away, trying to muffle out the melody.
And the bloodied memory that it provoked.
“Do you hear the difference?” James asked, looking at the keys with a pensive expression on his face, both his hands folded on his thighs.
“Between what?” Annabelle said.
He pressed E flat, held it, then pressed E natural. “Those two.”
A half-step apart; close enough that most students would not notice the distinction for months. James had only been studying notes for three weeks.
“What do you hear?” she said.
She watched him take a moment to think about it. “The second one is brighter. It sounds just like…when a window opens in a room that’s been shut all morning!”
His face was bright as he said it, the brightest she’d ever seen this reserved child, and then he looked at her to see if this was right.
She found herself nodding without even thinking about it, a smile already pulling her lips wide. “That is exactly right.”
He beamed even more before turning back to the keys. Newton shifted in his lap, purring low in his throat, and James tooka second to stroke the cat’s fur. Then he played the five-note sequence she had assigned last session: C, D, E, G, E, steady and deliberate, the fourth note—which had caught him the week before—ringing clean.
He finished and looked at her.
“Again,” she said.
With a decisive nod, he played it again without stopping, and this time, the tempo was slightly faster.
She made a mark on his sheet with that smile still teasing at her lips. Then he ventured, tentatively, “If I learn a full song, a real one, Uncle Dominic will like it, won’t he??”
Annabelle added a second mark before daring to look into his innocent, yet serious face and said, “Of course, he will,” without batting an eye.
After the quarter hour, she introduced the left-hand bass: simple, foundational, a floor beneath the right-hand melody. James received this with the gravity he gave to all new information. He practiced each hand separately, satisfied himself with each, then tried them together. They fell apart on the third note.
“That always happens,” he said, with an edge of frustration in his voice.
“It always does.” She played it through for him, both hands in parallel. “Your hands argue at first. They’ll stop once they forget to think about each other.”
He watched her hands and positioned his own and tried again.
Twenty minutes later, Miss Hartley appeared in the doorway. James turned from the bench and looked at Newton with a very satisfied expression.
