Rhapsody for Two

by Theresa Romain

  “I can hand-letter nicely,” Simon replied. “I worked as a clerk for a time. If you’re changing out the cards often, no need to go to the expense of a printer.”

  “A clerk and a musician.” Rowena looked up at him curiously. “What else have you done with yourself?”

  His heart beat more quickly. “Many things, but never mind that. What do you think of a little tale called ‘How to Ruin a Violin’? I can imagine it now:

  “‘Loosing the strings, the Duke of Music plunged his hand into the forbidden hollow to pluck at the treasure hidden within. He thus displaced the sound peg, and he never could get his instrument back in tune. He brought it to Fairweather’s, where the proprietress fixed the old sinner’s peg.’”

  “It’s sound post, not peg,” Rowena chortled. “And your little tale sounds as if I provide a scandalous personal service. Best not quite word it like that.”

  He thought that was part of the appeal, himself, but she was in charge. “Something more classical, then? ‘If music be the food of love, play on. Come dine on passion at Fairweather’s.’”

  She breathed in deeply. “If you’re going to talk about food while the bakery is putting forth that marvelous scent of cinnamon, I’ll need cake.” Then she snapped her fingers. “Cake! Everyone loves being presented with unexpected treats. Perhaps free pastries with every purchase?”

  “And constant pastries for the proprietress?” When Rowena shrugged innocently, Simon laughed. “Let’s see what I can do with duke-ruining before you start throwing cakes at people. Not that it’s not a good idea, but I’d like to keep you from going to extra expense.”

  So, she liked sweets. He’d remember that.

  And he’d keep mentioning expense: saving her money, saving her trouble. He would wind himself into her life so that she would not want to be without him. Already, he did not want to be without her.

  The realization was startling. He stumbled, the pavement suddenly unsteady beneath his feet, and the irregularity of his step pulled Rowena close against his side. “Sorry,” he mumbled. He wasn’t sorry, for lithe and sweet-scented Rowena beside him, but he should be. He shouldn’t try to pull her close in any way. He should help her and collect his money for Howard, and then exit Rowena’s life—but oh, his heart was parched and lonely, and her blue eyes were spring water and her clever mind was a wonderland.

  He couldn’t drink from that spring; he couldn’t explore that wonderland. He could help, collect money for Howard, and move along. That was all.

  He had to keep reminding himself.

  “You might consider an apprentice someday.” His voice sounded stuffy and falsely cheerful. “You might find many eager souls in Bloomsbury, or among the ranks of my fellow musicians.”

  She waved this off, nudging at a pebble with the shiny toe of her boot. “I don’t have time to train an apprentice. Foolish though it might sound, I’m too busy to get help.”

  “Except from me,” he blurted.

  “Ah, well. You jumped into my life and started helping. I didn’t have to train you.”

  “Taking a little time now to train an apprentice would help you in the long term.” Why was he trying to help her dispense with him?

  Because it would help her. Full stop. It was for her good, and the good of Fairweather’s. What a selfless fellow he was.

  She looked interested. “You seem keen on the idea. Would you care to be an apprentice yourself?”

  I tried that once. It was a disaster. “No.” The word came out sudden and harsh. He tried to temper it, to sound merrier. “I’m not suited to that sort of work. I’m a come-and-go sort of fellow. Though I do like knowing I’m doing some good before I go.”

  “But you hardly know me,” Rowena said. “Why should you care what good you do for me?”

  He looked at her, hatless and freckled in the morning sun, and wondered how he could not care. How anyone could not.

  “I don’t know what you dream about while you’re asleep,” he said. “Or your favorite flavor of ice, or why you named your hedgehog Cotton. But I know what you dream about when you’re awake. There’s something familiar about you.”

  He permitted himself to look at her deeply, a long drink of sensation. “Besides, our fortunes are connected now.”

  “Because you connected them,” she reminded him. His face must have fallen, for she added swiftly, “Not that I mind. I am grateful for new ideas. I am very glad you came into the shop. And—and my favorite flavor of ice is pineapple.”

  This was hardly a profession of love, but it made Simon feel marvelous all the same. “I like pineapple too. And maybe I’m not as come-and-go of a fellow as I thought.”

  She smiled. “Come and go once more, if you don’t mind. Come back to the shop, and take a look at the window before you go.”

  As they retraced their short path to the luthiery, she admitted that there was a sort of security in knowing that her life had always been decided. “It’s allowed me to be more than if I’d been born into a different family. As a Fairweather, I’ve learned a trade—really, an art. I’ve become part of a tradition.” As Simon opened the front door for her, the little bell jingling a greeting, she added, “I’m not only...me.”

  “There is nothing only about you,” he said.

  She greeted the maid who had kept watch over the shop—the girl’s name was Alice, Simon recalled—then led Simon into the workshop to poke about the space.

  “Do keep the curtain drawn,” she requested. “My hands aren’t very pretty. That’s part of why I didn’t want the shop window to show me at work. I hide my hands when I can, since they’re unfeminine.”

  Simon shook his head. “They’re attached to your body, so they must be feminine.”

  She laughed, replacing a violin bow in a rack along the wall. “Please don’t think I’m not proud of what I can do. But I recognize it’s not within the scope of the ordinary.”

  “That is why you shall triumph.” Simon stepped closer to her, and before he could restrain himself, he took up her hands in his. “Your hands repair musical instruments, so they are talented. Your hands care for an old woman and a household and a hedgehog, so they are caring. And your hands belong to you, so they are beautiful.”

  She blushed. “You say exactly what people want to hear.”

  Did he? Maybe he did think about what would suit his audience. A man who sold his labor—be it metalworking, copying documents, playing a horn, or training a horse—needed to win over the people who might hire him. He needed to convince potential employers he was capable, even when he knew himself to be nothing of the sort.

  But with Rowena, he’d come to her in a state of incompetence. Twice! First with an unplayable horn, then without a job. And somehow, both times, she’d chosen to work with him.

  To accept his presence in her life.

  “I say what I mean,” he told her, because behind every heartfelt desire to persuade was simply desire. To find security. A chance. To find...hope.

  Still holding her hands, he lifted them to his lips. Brushed his lips over them both, each in turn, then released them. He didn’t mean it as a seductive gesture; it was just something he couldn’t stop himself from doing.

  Rowena was looking at him with flushed cheeks; with wide eyes and lips parted in surprise.

  He loved it. “I should say I’m sorry, but I won’t because I wouldn’t mean it.”

  “I’m not sorry.” She sounded dazed. Delighted.

  “Well.” For a moment, they only blinked at each other, two souls surrounded by exotic woods and beautiful instruments. Simon had the urge to stay here, to beg to stay. To belong here as he never had before.

  “Well,” he said again. “I should go. But,” he was unable to refrain from saying, “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “You will?”

  “With a sign for your shop window.”

  “Oh, right.” Rowena still looked misty. “I will look forward to it.”

  To seeing him? At the very l
east, to accepting his help. Which meant that he could make her life a bit better.

  It seemed a wonderful goal.

  She spread out her hands before her as if they’d changed. Could she still feel his touch on her skin? The scent of her skin had captured him. The pressure of her fingers lingered within his.

  Who was he trying to fool? The touch of her hands wasn’t enough. He wanted a place in her life, in her wonderfully certain and solid life, and he wouldn’t stop longing for more.

  Even a come-and-go fellow wanted, sometimes, a place to stay.

  Chapter Four

  “It is too late, it is presumed, to enquire whether [the public] interests are or are not injured by the description of desperate characters, depraved conduct, and daring crimes?”

  Glenarvon

  FOR THE REST OF THE day, Rowena was conscious of her hands as she worked.

  Simon Thorn had kissed her hands, had made them—made her—feel not only necessary and right, but beautiful.

  No one had appreciated her hands before, not even herself, save in the most impatient sort of way. She’d had admirers, even a lover she’d expected to wed, but her imperfect right hand was in the end too much for the man to overlook.

  Well, not only her hand. Her honest speech. Her hard-won skill. Her determination to run Fairweather’s, at the time alongside her father. So be it. She’d rather be alone than be expected to change who she was.

  But being admired exactly as she was? How heady. How lovely.

  As she coaxed the strings from the tailpiece of the battered old violin that would become the shop-window display, she looked again at her hands. The left, with the long span of the fingers, with neat nails and calluses. The right hand, with its strong thumb and truncated fingers, its slivers of nails.

  They weren’t a matched set, but they were both capable. These were hands that could build. They were, indeed, beautiful. Simon Thorn reminded her to admire her own abilities by gently, sweetly, admiring her himself.

  The whole gesture felt not like a seduction, but like an appreciation—and that was seductive indeed. There had not been enough air in the room when Rowena remembered to draw back her hands, lightheaded and buoyant.

  Maybe Simon Thorn was seducing her, after all.

  She wished he would. If he did, she’d allow it.

  Maybe she’d even hurry the process along.

  THE NEXT DAY WAS GRAY and mizzling, the sort that inspired Rowena to plunge deeply into work. The sort that brought the beetles out of their hiding places, delighting Cotton. The hedgehog was in an ecstasy of gluttony, padding around on her little clawed feet and nosing into tiny spaces to find and crunch down her favorite food.

  “Better you than me,” Rowena told her pet. “And thank you.”

  She spoke cheerfully, yet today seemed a bit lonely. Nanny’s knees hurt her, and she didn’t venture down to the workshop to keep company with Rowena. When Edith peeked into the workshop as morning drew on, Rowena could have hugged her friend in gratitude.

  “Have you finished reading How to Ruin a Duke?” Edith said by way of greeting. “No one talks of anything else, and I’ll perish of curiosity if I don’t get my hands on our library copy.”

  Rowena laughed, and now she did allow herself a quick embrace before she directed Edith to her friend’s usual perch on the end of the worktable. “I’ll get a chair in here eventually,” she promised, not for the first time.

  Edith was in truth Lady Edith Charbonneau, an earl’s daughter. Had her father not died deeply in debt and without an heir, Edith’s life would have proceeded in a far loftier realm than Rowena’s. But it hadn’t. After being orphaned as a young adult, left to care for her teenage step-brother, Edith had taken a post as a lady’s companion to the Duchess of Emory—the present duke’s mother. Edith and Rowena had been permitted to occupy the same space between gentility and those who earned their bread, and therein they made friends.

  After two years of seeming domestic tranquility, Edith had left her post abruptly some five months before. She told Rowena she was pleased to have more time to work on a manuscript of domestic advice, which once sold, would secure the financial future of both Edith and the step-brother, Foster, for whom she served as guardian.

  This wasn’t an explanation of why, or what had happened. But Edith didn’t share explanations easily. She was a Gunter’s ice in person: elegant, beautifully constructed, cool, sweet. She was also so very much that she sometimes made Rowena feel quite medium. She was very tall, very pretty, very well-mannered, very vigorous, very intelligent—and very independent. She’d been very fashionable as well, though in recent months, the threat of penury had led her to sell whatever could be sold. She now wore an unfashionable pink cloak over a gown stripped of all ornament—yet not even this could chip at her dignity.

  She was also very kind, which made her a most excellent friend, and she understood how quickly fortunes could fall and privilege could be destroyed.

  So Rowena wouldn’t pry into her friend’s reasons for leaving what seemed to be a good post. She could merely accept what Edith told her, offer a listening ear and a stack of novels, and carry on with her work.

  “Working, working,” Edith commiserated. “How busy you keep. Have you had any news from your landlord?”

  “None that’s good.” Briefly, Rowena explained her plans with Simon Thorn to increase income and better advertise the shop. “I’ll reap great rewards in a few months, maybe even a few weeks. But it might not be soon enough.” She hated to think about that, so she hadn’t been—but ignoring the problem over time had only made it more urgent.

  Edith poured out a cup from the teapot Alice had left in the workshop that morning, adding milk and sugar to her tea. When she spooned in yet more sugar, Rowena wakened to the awareness of other problems beside her own. Had her friend eaten that day? Edith was looking thin, and it would be just like her to give her own breakfast to Foster.

  So Rowena made up an excuse. “I’m hungry. Will you join me in a scone? Cook made some yesterday, and they’ll be dense as rocks if we don’t finish them today.”

  “You eat while you’re working?”

  Rowena set aside the tools she’d been using to pry apart the unfortunate violin for the shop window. “I can pause for a few minutes.” She rang for Alice and ordered a tray.

  As she spoke, she noticed that Edith drank deeply of her tea, wincing at the heat even as her eyes closed in relief. When Alice departed, Edith smiled. “Thoughtful of you, Rowena. I’ll be delighted to share your prandial pleasures.”

  “Prandial pleasures,” Rowena echoed with a laugh. “I’m hearing alliteration everywhere. This is what comes from reading How to Ruin a Duke.”

  “I wouldn’t know, since you won’t relinquish it,” Edith said crisply.

  “It’s the greatest guessing game society’s played in a long while. Every other customer in my shop is speculating about who the author might be. The butler in Emory’s household? That poor woman the duke all but jilted last year? Everybody has a theory.”

  Edith looked thoughtful, cradling her teacup in slender hands. “I begin to wonder myself, Ro. Emory always seemed dignified to me. I know men can behave quite differently when ladies aren’t around, but Emory...” She trailed off and stared into the teacup, as if fortunes might be read in the dregs.

  “I thought you didn’t care for him,” Rowena said delicately. Edith had never said so directly, but her silences could be telling.

  “I respected him, and his current situation would try the patience of a saint. I do not envy the author of this book when Emory discovers his or her identity. There’s ruin, and then there’s ruin.”

  Rowena suspected that Edith understood real ruin as well as she did. Real ruin was unforgivable disgrace, unpayable debt, unpardonable shame. How to Ruin a Duke was titillation, three hundred pages of gossip over which it was safe to giggle and whisper.

  When the world saw real ruin, it looked away. Real ruin was to be feared as
if it were contagious.

  But when someone who cared began to suspect real ruin, that person came for a visit. Or offered a scone. Or read from a coveted book.

  Or, Rowena thought, they helped a struggling business create a new plan to succeed.

  And in return, if someone cared, they offered whatever that person asked—whether it was twenty pounds or the touch of a hand. Or more, much more.

  And so Rowena turned the subject from the fraught How to Ruin a Duke to one she knew would interest and distract her friend. “Let me tell you about Simon Thorn,” she told Edith. “And all our plans for this shop.”

  SIMON ENTERED FAIRWEATHER’S with his hands full of papers and cakes, only to find Rowena entertaining a caller. This was clearly not a customer, for the visiting young woman had been permitted behind the velvet curtain, and she even sat on the worktable where Simon had perched on the first day of his acquaintance with Rowena.

  “Hullo,” he said by way of greeting. “Who’d like a cake?”

  Rowena introduced Simon to her friend, Lady Edith Charbonneau, and admitted that they’d just devoured a plate of scones. “But what kind of cakes have you brought? No one is ever sorry to receive cakes.”

  “I thought the same. These are cream cakes.” He placed the packet next to the blond woman, Lady Edith, who looked extremely interested and began to open the paper wrapping. “I’ve brought your signs for the front window too.”

  He’d had to borrow a quill and ink and buy blank cards from a print shop, but Rowena didn’t need to know any of that. Nor was she to think of the trouble he’d gone to. She was only to look impressed when she saw the result—well, the sixth result, as he was out of practice with his fine and flowing clerk’s script—of his first advertising card for the window of Fairweather’s.

  Rowena responded just as he’d hoped: with a lift of a brow, a quick flashing smile. “It’s beautiful. What an elegant hand you write.” She returned the card to him, brushing his fingers with hers as she held his gaze.