The serious business of fashioning the little tissue paper roses which, they decided, would be strung on thread and festooned across the backs of chairs, and stuffed into urns that would occupy either end of the refreshments table and along the walls of the room, continued in the sitting room that night. The resident gentlemen of the house—Captain Hardy, Lord Bolt, and Mr. Delacorte—were at present building said refreshments table from lumber left over from the stage. The table would be draped with a tablecloth elevated to elegance by more garlands. The duke was out tonight.
All twenty of the questionable handkerchiefs had been embroidered with TGPOTT, the initials of The Grand Palace on the Thames, and the fishnets—dyed in indigo in vats in the new Triton Group warehouse—had been fetched back home. The ladies had spent the afternoon painstakingly affixing to them their stars of various sizes at different lengths.
And then Captain Hardy and Lord Bolt and Mr. Delacorte had gallantly scaled ladders for the heavy work of suspending and draping them from the ceiling while the ladies stood below, supervising, criticizing, critiquing, bickering, pondering, and instructing.
Within two hours, the goodwill of Captain Hardy and Lord Bolt was as full of holes as the fishing nets.
“I think,” Captain Hardy said carefully, when he’d descended, “we need to make hiring footmen a priority.”
Lucien nodded slowly in agreement.
They both received copious amounts of fussing, sympathy, and gratitude from all of the ladies for their efforts. In truth, attempting to hire even one proper footman remained a trial. One prospect had stolen a spoon. Another had swiped his hand across Angelique’s bottom. Good footmen could work nearly anywhere, and Angelique and Delilah offered ordinary wages, excellent food, lots of work, and a location by the docks. The search continued, attended with passionate interest by all the maids employed there.
“Oh, look, everyone,” Delilah breathed, and pointed up.
They all stood beneath their handiwork, heads tipped back, and experienced awe at their ingenuity.
The nets had each taken a slightly different amount of dye, and layered and swagged, the effect was surprisingly beautiful. It was, indeed, like looking up at a cloud-hazed midnight sky. The stars they’d carefully constructed twisted gently, twinkling in the low light of a setting sun pouring in through the windows.
Mariana slowly paced the ballroom to where she’d stood and kissed the duke for the first time. She gazed up to find one of the largest stars dangling over her head. She wondered if it was the Star of Damocles, or the sort she ought to wish on.
Now all they needed was a moon. It seemed, suddenly, the most important part of the stage decorations, the thing that would illuminate her ethereally from behind while she sang onstage. But no one yet had any (good) ideas about how to craft one.
Because of the net raising, or as they preferred to think of it, sky raising, Dot had got hold of the newspaper late today, and was making up for lost time by reading the gossip aloud while all the ladies made folded roses in the sitting room.
“Oh, look. Here’s a little bit in the gossip columns called ‘The Disappearing Duke.’”
“Oh, wouldn’t that be an exciting story, Miss Wylde! Maybe he’s in the attic . . .” Mrs. Pariseau suggested slyly.
“Because he’s trying to get some privacy to write a book?” Mariana said.
They all giggled.
“Can you imagine? The Disappearing Duke. You could turn it into a song, Miss Wylde.”
Mariana laughed. Then she affected an ominous baritone and a sea-chanty cadence. “Oh, the duke disappeared one dark winter day—”
Dot gasped so suddenly and violently that Mariana clapped a hand over her heart.
“Sorry, Dot. I didn’t mean to frighten you! I hadn’t even gotten to the scary part of the song yet!”
“Sorry to frighten you, Miss Wylde. But oh, my goodness! They’re talking about our duke! The Duke of Valkirk. On the gossip page!”
The dread—the premonition—was so instant and leaden it gave her vertigo.
She prayed no one had said a word about her. How would anyone know? She hadn’t met anyone during her trips to his room, apart from Gordon the cat, who seemed pleased to see her.
The august and valorous Duke of Valkirk, lately a coveted presence at the best tables in the ton—notably, the ones set with the monogrammed silver and the prettiest daughters—has suddenly vanished. No one has seen him for dinner for nigh on a fortnight. Could it be that he’s decided he wants to look across at a certain pair of celebrated brown eyes forever? The on dit is that his last supper with the family of a certain Lady G will be his last supper as a single man.
Her ears rang as though she was a tea tray and had been unceremoniously dropped from a great height, by, perhaps, Dot.
She suddenly couldn’t quite feel her limbs.
“Oh, my goodness. So many new words in this one, but then, that fits, don’t it, Miss Wylde, as he’s teaching you words.”
“Doesn’t it,” Angelique, who was the person responsible for so many of Dot’s new words, corrected her absently.
“Doesn’t it,” Dot repeated, dutifully. “What is ‘valorous,’ by the way?”
“Brave,” Mariana said shortly. “Like valor.”
“And why did they call him ‘august’? He’s a bit more like December, if I had to pick a month,” Dot said.
Stop talking, Mariana thought suddenly. I cannot bear any sights or sounds or anything touching my senses right now.
“It means esteemed. And . . . wise and respected,” Delilah told her.
“Or old,” Mariana said curtly.
Delilah shot her a glance. It was the word Delilah had been diplomatically skirting.
He wasn’t, really. The gossip columns just never quite got things right.
“Ah,” Dot said happily, as if she’d just taken a long drink of something delicious, absorbing more words and more meanings.
Mariana realized she hadn’t moved. She looked at the half-made flower in her hand as if she’d never seen such a thing before.
It was almost funny how instantly and dangerously everything had stopped mattering. How instantly different reality seemed. But it was like waking up from a dream via a splash of cold water to the face.
She imagined this young Lady G, a girl likely not yet twenty. The townhouse with marble floors and ceilings twice the height of the duke from which chandeliers dripping with crystals hung. A long table set with a linen cloth and bristling with things that gleamed and glinted, candlesticks and tureens and china. She’d be pristinely lovely and lissome, her hair done up by a maid, outfitted in a virginally white gossamer gown. She’d be gazing across at the duke by candlelight with her famous eyes. He’d gaze across at her with his own beautiful eyes.
Why wouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t he?
He wasn’t “our” duke.
And he most certainly wasn’t her duke.
And here she was at twenty-five years old. Last night as she’d slowly lowered herself onto his cock, his hands sliding along her back, her nipples chafing his chest, she’d leaned in to lick a bead of sweat from his collarbone. That’s who she was. A brazen hussy who knew exactly how to use her hands and mouth to make him growl hoarse oaths of pleasure.
His hair had stood up every which way because her hands had rummaged through it while they were kissing. And his eyes had softly burned into her, and that little smile, that acknowledgment of the world they created comprised of just the two of them. She lived for that, she realized. He loved to watch her, she knew. He loved to give her pleasure, too.
And now she sat in this room full of happy chatter, wearing a dress with a spot on the hem and one on the bodice that was small but stubborn, feeling a trifle less than fresh from all the work today, though she always washed as best she could in the basin in her room. She’d already unpicked all the stitches and turned it outside in one, to keep the fabric fresh. A new dress was out of the question until she was paid to play a lobster (or a mermaid!) in Paris.
It was a madness, the lust. She’d resisted, hadn’t she? A little?
Had she?
It seemed, right now, through the haze of memory, that resisting had simply not been an option, for either of them. After all, she’d shown up at his door with a candle.
What was the word for a woman like that? The ton—the world—did need their words and labels. She was worried the right word began with a “w” and ended with an “e.” Or an “h” with a “t.” Maybe they’d gotten it right from the beginning. Maybe they saw her more clearly than she saw herself.
If the duke married this girl, who was no doubt a sheltered virgin, she’d be treated just like the crystal on that imaginary table. As a precious, breakable thing who would never have to endure the challenge of a spot on her hem. Because for a duke, there was the woman you married.
And then the woman who would do nearly anything for him in the dark.
They could never be the same woman.
She’d known that, of course.
Hadn’t she?
“Oh, Your Grace! Good evening!” Mrs. Pariseau called. “I don’t suppose you’d like to help make paper roses?”
Mariana looked up with a start.
There he stood in the doorway, coat draped over an arm, hat in his hand. Looking every inch of what he was. Even now her body felt weak at the sight of him.
For the first time, however, she felt small and tawdry.
Her pride had taken a ringing blow. Surely that was all.
She didn’t think it was fatal.
But she needed to be alone.
She turned her head away and opened her fist, amazed that she’d squeezed the little paper rose she’d been working on. It was now ragged and limp.
“I just had a meeting with my Man of Affairs about a roof repair. Paper roses would be thrilling in comparison.”
She was certain he was puzzled by why she hadn’t turned. She knew his face brightened when he saw hers. She was petty enough to deny him that much.
“Your Grace, we were just reading about you on page six of the London Times.”
His face went stony. “Surely you’re joking.”
Dot, alarmed by his expression, silently shook her head. She held the newspaper out to him.
Mariana watched his face go thunderous.
Then carefully, studiedly, coldly blank.
He lifted his head slowly and met Mariana’s eyes.
“Welcome to page six, Your Grace,” Mariana said lightly. “Now we’ve something in common.”
“Well, that, and Italian,” Mrs. Pariseau said happily.
James lay motionless on his bed. He was fully clothed, and apart from the dying fire, which he could not be bothered to get up and poke, it was dark. It was two o’clock in the morning. He’d spent the entire evening alone, waiting in an absurd agony of suspense. Starting at every sound. Every nerve on alert with hope and dread. Watching that tiny space between the door and his floor for the flash of a satin slipper.
She never came.
He was seething.
And he was in pain.
Galworthy? Galworthy’s wife? His daughter? Who had done it, sent that lying little snippet of gossip to the newspaper? It was difficult to imagine Galworthy doing it, but perhaps he was desperate to marry off his daughter. Perhaps something was amiss with his finances and he needed the settlements badly, and had thus concocted a ploy to corner the oh so honorable Duke of Valkirk into a marriage.
It was almost funny that anyone, anyone thought that was possible.
A very bad mistake, indeed.
Perhaps one of Galworthy’s servants had submitted the gossip item for money. Perhaps the daughter herself had done it, hoping to hasten an attachment along, or because she craved attention, or thought the attention would bring a better match if the duke decided she was not for him.
The risk was that it exposed Galworthy’s daughter to the scrutiny of ton gossips, and the duke to embarrassment or accusations of faithlessness when he’d made no such promise and had no such intentions, certainly not now. He did not think a few lines of printed gossip could ever embarrass him. But they could and did appall him. A little gossip about him merely wedged the way open for more of it; and more of it would collect like barnacles on the hull of his legacy. He had fought for what he had now—the influence, the wealth, the reach, the inviolable reputation—and it belonged not only to him. It belonged to his son and to his descendants.
And he, like his son said, belonged to the whole country.
He would be damned if anyone would so cheaply and willfully tarnish who he was.
He could not be embarrassed into marrying a girl. But the gossip could potentially embarrass his son and his new young wife. And while his son ought to have thicker skin, James didn’t care. He would do anything to protect him, regardless.
He understood something now, with a resignation that made him weak and wondering. He frankly wanted to call out whoever had put that expression on Mariana’s face—that pale emptiness, as though she was bleeding from the inside—and meet them on a field of combat, and mow them down.
But he supposed he’d be calling out himself, too. He was as much the culprit.
In his frustration, the pendulum of his thoughts swung violently and furiously in the opposite direction: She’s just an opera singer. I am a duke. How dare she make me suffer? How dare she make me wait? I could have any woman in my bed, if I chose. I could marry any beautiful girl in England.
He knew the truth of it: if their roles were reversed, he would not have been able to stay away from her for two days.
And this meant she, incomprehensibly, was stronger than he was.
What little alliteration would they choose to use if somehow their affair was discovered? “Hero in harlot’s bed.” “Valkirk sinks his dirk in disgraced diva.” The Rowlandson illustrations would be merciless and lurid; he could imagine them for sale at Ackermann’s, with part of the populace laughing and pointing, and others crushingly disappointed and confused. There would be broadsides. Mocking pub songs. And that would be part of his legacy, too. In fact, he imagined that every part of his legacy, every assumption about who he was as a man, would be pored over and questioned, because of a woman who thought he was amusing. Whose face went soft and lit like a lamp every time she saw him. Who, when she opened her arms to him, made him feel as though he was coming home.
A girl who’d taken other lovers, kissed other men, made love with astonishing skill and sensual abandon, enjoyed champagne a little too much, hadn’t quite hated her visit to a gaming hell, and who was trying to claim greatness of her own. She thought it would be safer at the top.
They could not be discovered. For his sake, and for hers.
So perhaps this gossip item was a mercy. A splash of water one threw over rutting dogs to get them to stop.
Mainly the little gossip item exposed another reality they both must face, however: there would come a day when he would make another match. He saw this as an inevitability.
And there would come a day, very soon, when Mariana was gone.
He wasn’t certain how to fix this for her, or if he should. He supposed the two of them would have preferred not to face anything like reality until she’d left for Paris.
Because, as she’d said before, some people preferred their dreams to their waking life.
She’d been right about something else, too. That understanding could be found in contrasts.
As he lay there in that empty room, he had a much better understanding of loneliness, because with her he had, for perhaps the first time ever, been so blessedly, blissfully not alone.
Dear Mama,
I hope this finds you well. I hope you have not been worried about me. I think you’ll be pleased to learn that I’ve decided to join a convent. It’s the best place for someone like me, and I think I can put my singing skills to good use there.
At least this was a letter her mother might not be appalled to receive. After all, her mother had always thought she was destined for great things.
She didn’t write it, of course. She still hadn’t written, let alone sent, anything after those first few words she’d written the day after she’d arrived.
Mariana had begun to believe she might make a fine nun.
Would a convent have her? They did do a lot of singing in convents, did they not?
And . . . spent a lot of time on their knees?
This was apparently who she was: a woman who made jokes to herself featuring fellatio and nuns, in order to make herself feel better about adopting that position in the duke’s bedroom after dark.
She’d adopted a lot of other positions there, too, granted.
But surely if anyone was qualified for martyrdom, she was, after occupying the sitting room with everyone else as well as the duke, who was not doing anything but quietly being a duke and making no progress on his memoirs. And sitting at the same dinner table at which the duke sat, eating. She needed to eat, after all. She could not waste away to nothing before she redeemed herself by singing in front of—ten, was it, at last count, paid attendees?—and attempted to earn her room and board, not to mention recover a little of her pride in the process.
Playing a singing lobster ought to shave her pride down to a nub. But she was going to be so spectacular that the singer playing the mermaid would expire from envy, and in her fantasies, Mariana would then send her sympathy flowers, take over the part, and become a legend.
The pleasant buzz of plans for decorating the ballroom for the Night of the Nightingale continued, and she could shelter herself within that. There was no need to even glance his way.
He certainly glanced her way. How she knew this, she couldn’t say. She merely felt it.
So she could do these things, bravely enough.
But it was more than she could ask of herself at the moment to sit across from him, alone, for Italian lessons. Or to speak to him. Or to look at him straight on. Though, like a feature of a landscape, say, a mountain, she could always feel his presence even when he was nowhere within her line of vision. She had a terrible suspicion that he would be a feature of her landscape for the rest of her life.
She didn’t know if by distancing herself she was punishing him, though she was certain that was the end result. She was neither gladdened by nor displeased by the notion. She didn’t know whether she was punishing herself, because she thought she deserved it for behaving like a harlot when she’d initially been so indignant to be called one.
Or if it was merely an act of self-preservation. A way of backing up slowly from the edge of devastation. Allowing herself space for the dust to settle after the initial shock, which should not have been a shock. She would see what feeling, what instinct, prevailed then.
She said to Dot the following day, “Would you please tell the duke that I have a headache, and that I fear I must beg off lessons?”
“Oh, dear. Do you need a tisane, Miss Wylde? Helga makes them. They could raise the dead.”
“I think I . . . I think I merely sang too loud in the ballroom, and my brain needs a rest. But don’t say that to the duke,” she added hurriedly.
Dot studied her, brow furrowed. “Too much emotion,” Dot suggested. More wisely than she realized.
“Yes, that’s it.”
When she begged off again for similar reasons the following day, Mr. Delacorte offered her a powder from his case of samples.
“Works a treat,” he confided in a low voice, “but it’s been known to cause the odd effect or two. I know a bloke who took it and had a vision of the Knights of the Round Table riding unicorns through Pall Mall,” he told her. “Cured his mal de tête, however.”
“While that sounds exciting indeed,” she told him, “I think I just need a bit of a rest.”
She could tell the sisters of the convent she was contemplating entering that she was learning about sacrifice, too.
The last two nights—after dark, that was—had seemed resoundingly empty, cold and dark. Her little room, which she quite liked, suddenly seemed strange, and—not necessarily unfriendly—but foreign. As though everything in it was merely a prop onstage. It was so odd to realize how her feelings about the duke had flowed into and colored her feelings about everything else. Had given them outsized life and dimension.
Dear Mama,
I hope this finds you well. I regret to tell you that I knew better and I should not have done, but I imagined it anyway. Laughter and seashore walks and a family around the breakfast table with him passing the fried bread around. And finally waking up next to him every day with the sun shining through the curtains on our faces. I should not have done, because I feel a little like I have just watched all those people die.
The unfinished letter to her mother remained on her desk, and it looked just the same. It had even been dusted by the maids. It was now several weeks later than she normally sent off a letter.
She could, in theory, afford to buy another sheet of foolscap or some other size of paper now if she wanted to send a letter to her mother. After all, she had those seven pounds that Giancarlo had given to her. But she would need to pay for travel to Dover, and then pay for lodging at an inn for a night, and pay for her passage to Paris from there, as well as some food to keep her alive. She’d no idea if she’d come away a slightly richer woman after the Night of the Nightingale. She would not leave without paying the ladies of The Grand Palace on the Thames at least a little something.
Perhaps they could all work out a future bargain or trade of some sort. They were women of business.
What this all meant was that she now was officially avoiding writing a letter to her mother.
In truth, she had also spent more than a little time next to her bed on her knees, hands clasped. She didn’t know what to pray for anymore, specifically. All of the things she wanted seemed inextricably entwined with the things she didn’t.
Her prayers were more after the fashion of a thanks for current blessings, a request for blessings for everyone she knew, followed by, “I’m listening, if you’ve any ideas, God.”
By the third day she knew she would have to face him again, alone.
At three o’clock, she paused in the doorway of his anteroom.
The window lit him from behind, and his face was turned toward it. He didn’t appear to be working on much of anything. His pen was in his hand, but his hand wasn’t moving.
The same stack of foolscap remained near his elbow. It didn’t look any taller.
“Buonasera, Your Grace.” She said it as politely and lightly as she could, which was no mean feat when she was dragging her spirit about like a millstone.
She could swear he’d stopped breathing when he heard her voice.
He pivoted abruptly.
For a long moment, they merely regarded each other from that distance.
“Buonasera, Miss Wylde,” he finally said just as politely. His voice was hoarse. “Won’t you please come in?”
Her heart was beating a little too quickly as she ventured forward.
Oh, what the very sight of him did to her breathing. What a sacrifice it had been to deny herself the sight of him, even if he was fully clothed.
As she came closer, she saw that he looked gorgeous, a bit hard done by, and fully his age.
There were shadows beneath his eyes. His hair was standing up a little, as if he’d just pushed it back with an impatient hand.
For that matter, she doubted she was looking as fresh and rosy as the eighteen-year-old or so daughter of an earl. She hadn’t slept much, either. All the exercise she’d been getting at night had helped her sleep, apparently.
When she wasn’t riding or being ridden by a duke, it seemed she worried about her future.
Mainly she’d lain awake with an ache so resonant it was a shock she didn’t at all times hum sorrowfully, like a woodwind.
She pulled out the chair slowly and settled in.
He had not prepared her station. There was, in fact, nothing of his usual crisp air of taking everything in hand.
He looked as though he’d fought a battle with himself and lost.
He looked the way she’d never before seen him. Almost defeated.
“I am glad to see you,” he said finally. His voice was a bit raspy. As if they might be the first words he’d said out loud to a human today.
“That is kind of you to say.”
She stubbornly refused to return the sentiment in kind.
Her soul still felt sore sitting here before him. Like an empty socket, with the wind whistling through it.
She wanted him to know that she would prevail, no matter what.
“Has your . . . health improved?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you,” she said quietly. “It was my testa,” she added. She pointed. Well, her head was partially involved. She was not going to be a diva and point to her heart. She was English, not Italian.
“Ah. Did you speak to Mr. Delacorte about remedies?”
“He gave me a powder. I hesitated to try it, as he said it both cured headaches and sometimes caused visions.”
“Ah, but you like dreams, Miss Wylde.”
She hesitated.
Her throat felt tight. “Not always,” she said.
He said nothing. He’d clearly been miserable. Which in truth gave her no pleasure.
“Would you like me to leave you to your work, Your Grace?”
“No,” he said so sharply she blinked.
He took a breath. “That is . . . please stay. We’ll have a lesson.”
He retrieved a sheet of foolscap for her and laid a quill next to it.
After that, neither one of them moved or said anything. She wished she had prepared something specific, something witty and urbane or acerbic, to say. Something a more sophisticated, jaded woman might say. Something like, How do you say, “Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials, Your Grace,” in Italian?
He cleared his throat. “I thought of an Italian phrase you might wish to know, Miss Wylde.”
Her heart lurched.
“It’s . . . Non credere ai pettegolezzi. Il pettegolezzo non è vero.”
She knew vero. Truth.
He took a breath. “Don’t believe the gossip. The gossip isn’t true.”
She stared at him. She could feel her breathing deepening and quickening.
She was not going to cry. She willed herself not to do it.
She saw the increasing light in her own face reflected in his own. But there was something she needed to know. Something she needed to hear him say aloud.
“But one day it will be,” she said. Carefully. Evenly.
The silence was long.
“It . . . seems likely,” he said finally, just as carefully. Very gently. His voice was still hoarse.
She held herself very still, to prevent the pain, which seemed to congregate at the very center of her, from touching any other part of her.
“But if it seems to the ton that I’ve disappeared, it’s because I find . . .” He paused, and turned toward the window again. He pressed his lips together, then turned back to look at her and said gingerly, as though he were picking his way through unstable, unfamiliar terrain, “. . . that I do not want to be anywhere other than here. I . . . I cannot imagine wanting to be anywhere other than here.”
She said nothing.
She just breathed.
Breathed the beautiful air in which those words had been uttered.
They were not a declaration.
She could not expect one.
But she knew, for now, they would do.
He drew what felt like his first full breath in two days when he saw the flash of her slippers at the door, which he opened immediately.
He took the candle gently from her, and closed the door behind her. He settled the candle on the table.
And then he reached for her, and she reached for him.
Arms folded around each other tightly, they merely held one another. He laid his cheek against the top of her head. He breathed in her hair.
She laid her cheek against his heart. She savored its thump against her skin.
It went on for a good long time, and seemed infinitely more dangerous and scandalous than immediate nudity.
The nudity happened soon enough.
Clothes were soon shed like shackles, and the tender ferocity and utter simplicity of what followed—a pounce, some deeply satisfying grappling, a swift and thorough drilling—left them both stunned and sated. Dumbstruck by their luck.
This need between them simply did not abate. It seemed to regenerate into something hungrier and more profound each time. The pleasure greater. The connection deeper. The terrain of each other’s bodies more familiar, yet more richly exciting.
She lay alongside him, stroking the hair from his eyes, which were closed.
“My son came to The Grand Palace on the Thames to visit,” he murmured. Her gentle hand across his forehead was bliss.
“Oh my. Did he? How lovely!”
When he didn’t say anything, she added, “Or was it?”
“Mmm . . . lovely, on the whole,” he said.
“How does he fare?”
“He would like me to spend a few days in Sussex with him and his wife. His wife’s birthday is Sunday.”
They both knew what this meant.
She was quiet. “You must go. If he came to you to ask, it means a good deal to him.”
She knew, because he’d told her, in the meandering conversations between bouts of lovemaking, how much he regretted the time he hadn’t spent with his son.
“It means . . . I shall be leaving for Sussex the day before you leave for Paris. I . . . I thought I would be here when you left.”
“I know. You’ll miss the Night of the Nightingale,” she said wistfully.
Tell me not to go, he silently willed her.
But what would he do then if she’d said it?
He could not leave his son again. He simply wanted to be yearned for, he supposed.
“At any rate, given that we’ve sold almost no tickets, the crowd will be comprised of just the people who live here, their friends, and the drunk man who leans against the building now and again. I expect he’ll enjoy it, though,” she added. Amused. Resigned. Wistful.
He was quiet. He felt that familiar, sizzling fury at the injustice of it, of people who would deprive themselves—and in so doing, likely others, through their influence—of the elevating beauty of her voice for the nasty, unifying thrill of shunning someone. It was more about a bullying wielding of power than any outraged sense of morality. And it was also cowardice. He suspected that she, in her learning of lessons the hard way and making different choices, was ultimately more moral than that privileged lot.
“I wish it were otherwise.” He meant almost literally everything.
“I’ve sung to smaller crowds before. I shan’t mind that part, really. It’s just that I wanted it to be splendid, as they’ve been so very kind to me here. I’m a little embarrassed. I hoped to earn a good deal of money for the ladies of The Grand Palace on the Thames. And I do wish I’d have a string quartet. They won’t play for me, you see. The musicians at the theater.”
Her voice had gone thick on those last words.
He couldn’t speak. The notion that she would need to brace for disappointment, or feel ashamed, or pour her glorious voice into a nearly empty room made the muscles across his stomach tense.
“I would like you to be there, but I do not need you to be there, James. I am happier knowing you will see your son. I will stun them with splendor. And then I shall go on to play better roles, and I will look back at this and perhaps . . . laugh.”
He knew she spoke truth. She’d endured before him. She would likely endure after him.
And she could, and would, leave him.
He wanted to be missed.
He turned his head to look at her. “So we’ve a few more days together,” he said softly.
His heart thudded, waiting for her to speak what to him, in that moment, amounted almost to a vow.
The seconds he waited felt like an eternity.
“We’ve a few more days together,” she whispered at last.