He pulled the door shut and stood in the corridor.
The house was entirely quiet. No lamp burned at this hour except the one at the foot of the stairs behind him. The corridor ran ahead in the dark, and Annabelle’s door was at the far end of it, and the line under it was dark.
He had come back from half of London on foot, his boots damp through, and he stood in the corridor and thought about a six-year-old boy who had gone to sleep on the strength of having stated a true thing, and felt, with a thoroughness he could nothave prepared for, exactly how much he had managed to get wrong.
He stood there for a long time, and then he could do nothing else but go to his room.
He slept three hours and woke before the house and lay on his back and looked at the ceiling.
He heard her door at half past seven. He heard her voice at the foot of the stairs a little while later, light and even, talking to James about coats and the weather—she thought it looked like rain; James was not convinced—and then the front door, and the sounds of the street, and the house going quiet.
He lay still.
James’s words from the night before were still with him in the way certain things stay—not as a thought that repeated itself, but as a weight that had not shifted position since the moment of settling.
When Annabelle is happy, the whole house is happy.
James had said it plainly, as a true thing, in the same register he used for naval formations and the behavior of yellow dogs. There had been no expectation of drama in it. No bid for sympathy. He had simply noted an accurate fact and gone to sleep.
Dominic got up, got dressed, and went downstairs.
Mrs. Howell was in the passage near the kitchen stairs, two menus in her hand, her reading spectacles pushed up on her forehead. She looked at him and waited.
“The old music room,” he said. He stopped.
Mrs. Howell stood very still.
“I should like the key.”
She looked at him over the menus for the count of three. Then she set both menus on the hall table and reached into her chatelaine and produced a small iron key and held it out.
He took it.
She said nothing, which was, in its own way, quite a great deal; her own way of showing her respect for him.
“Thank you,” he said, and went.
The east wing corridor was cool even now. The plasterwork above the dado rail was the same as always; it was his grandfather’s renovation, the original work. He had walked this corridor as a child on his way to no place in particular. He had not walked it in some years.
The door was plain oak, no different from the others along this passage. He stood in front of it.
He put the key in the lock and turned it.
The door opened on the first push. The air that came out was cold and dry, the air of a room that had been shut for a very long time.
He stood in the doorway.
The room was covered. Two armchairs, the side table, and the writing desk that his mother had used. And at the far end, where the two long windows faced the garden, the piano under its linen—the shape of it still unmistakable, the curve of the cabinet visible through the cloth. It was larger than he had remembered. Or he was larger. It amounted to the same thing.
He took a step inside.
His chest tightened. Not slowly—at once, in the way a hand closes on something without intending to. He stopped, one foot still at the threshold, and breathed through his nose. The air tasted of dust and cold and a scent beneath the dust, older, faintly sweet. Beeswax. The floor had been waxed once. Perhaps the last time anyone had tended this room.
He took another step.
His heart was going faster than a man walking a short corridor warranted. He was aware of it in a way he was not usually aware of it—the beat of it prominent and disordered, his ears filling with the sound of his own pulse. His hands were at his sides, and he held them still. At the far end of the room, the windows let in the grey morning light, and the piano stood in the middle of it. He kept his eyes level and walked toward it.
He breathed in.
