“Valentine.” Darius sat up. “That is not funny.”
“How funny do you think it feels not to be able to play the piano when it’s all I’ve done of worth in the past twenty-some years? I did not excel at school, and I can’t point to an illustrious career like my brother, the former cavalry officer. I haven’t Westhaven’s head for business. I wasn’t a jolly good time like Bart or a charmer like Vic. But, by God, I could play the piano.”
“And you can build stone walls and referee between Day and Phil and keep an eye on Nick Haddonfield when he hares all over the Home Counties,” Darius retorted. “Do you think one activity defines you?”
“I’m like a whore, Darius, in that, yes, the one activity, in my case playing the piano, defines me.” Val heard weariness in his own voice. “When Dev was driven mad by nightmares, I played for him so he couldn’t hear the battles anymore. When his little Winnie was scared witless by all the changes in her life, I played for her and taught her a few things to play for herself. When Victor was so sick, I’d play for him, and he’d stop coughing for a little while. It’s how I let people know they matter to me, Darius, and now…”
Darius got up and crossed the room, then lowered himself to sit beside Val in the shifting candlelight. “Now all this playing for others has left you one-handed, angry, and beating yourself up.”
Not beating himself up, precisely, but feeling beaten up. “The piano is the way I have a soul, Dare. It’s always there for me, always able to say the things I can’t, always worth somebody’s notice, even if they don’t know they notice. It has never let me down, never ridiculed me before others, never taken a sudden notion not to know who I am or what I want. As mistresses go, the piano has been loyal, predictable, and lovely.”
“You talk about an instrument as if it’s animate,” Darius said, hunching forward. “I know you are grieving the inability to exercise a considerable talent, but you are too old—and far too dear a man—to be relying on an imaginary friend. You deserve more than to think of yourself as merely the slave of your muse.”
Val shot off the bed and crossed to the door, pausing only long enough to tug on his boots.
“I’m sorry.” Darius rose and might have stopped him, but Val turned his back and got his hand on the door latch first. “I don’t like seeing you suffer, but were you really happy spending your entire life on the piano bench?”
“You think I’m happy now?” Val asked without turning.
He was down the stairs and out into the night without any sense of where he was headed or why movement might help. Darius was too damned perceptive by half, but really—an imaginary friend?
It was the kind of devastating observation older brothers might make of a younger sibling and then laugh about. Maybe, Val thought as his steps took him along a bridle path in the moonlit woods, this was why the artistic temperament was so unsteady. People not afflicted with the need to create could not understand what frustration of the urge felt like.
The weekend at Belmont’s loomed like an obstacle course in Val’s mind.
No finger exercises, no visiting friendly old repertoire to limber up, no reading open score to keep abreast of the symphonic literature, no letting themes and melodies wander around in his hands just to see what became of them. No glancing up and realizing he’d spent three hours on a single musical question and still gotten no closer to a satisfactory answer.
All of that, Val thought as he emerged from the darkened woods, was apparently never to be again. His hand was not getting better, though it wasn’t getting worse, either. It merely hurt and looked ugly and managed only activities requiring brute strength of the arm and not much real grip.
He found himself at the foot of Ellen FitzEngle’s garden and wondered if he could have navigated his way there on purpose. Her cottage was dark, but her back yard was redolent with all manner of enticing floral scents in the dewy evening air. If her gardens were pretty to the eye by day, they were gorgeous to the nose at night. Silently, Val wandered the rows until his steps took him to the back porch, where a fat orange cat strolled down the moonlit steps to strop itself against Val’s legs.
“He’s shameless.” Ellen’s voice floated through the shadows. “Can’t abide having to catch mice and never saw a cream bowl he couldn’t lick spotless in a minute.”
“What’s his name?” Val asked, not even questioning why Ellen would be alone on her porch after dark.
“Marmalade. Not very original.”
“Because he’s orange?” Val bent to pick the cat up and lowered himself to the top porch step.
“And sweet,” Ellen added, shifting from her porch swing to sit beside Val. “I take it you were too hot to sleep?”
“Too bothered. You?”
“Restless. You were right; change is unsettling to me.”
“I am unsettled, as well,” Val said, humor in his voice. “I seem to have a penchant for it.”
“Sometimes we can’t help what befalls us. What has you unsettled?”
Val was silent, realizing he was sitting beside one of very few people familiar with him who had never heard him play the piano. A woman who, in fact, didn’t even know he could play, much less that he was Moreland’s musical son.
“My hand hurts. It has been plaguing me for some time, and I’m out of patience with it.”
“Which hand?” Ellen asked, her voice conveying some surprise. Whatever trouble she might have expected Valentine Windham to admit, it apparently hadn’t been a simple physical ailment.
“This very hand here.” Val waved his left hand in the night air, going still when Ellen caught it in her own.
“Have you seen a physician?” she asked, tracing the bones on the back of his hand with her fingers.
“I did.” Val closed his eyes and gave himself up to the pleasure of her touch. Her fingers were cool and her exploration careful. “He assured me of nothing, save that I should treat it as an inflammation.”
“Which meant what?” Ellen’s fingers slipped over his palm. “That you should tote roofing slates about by the dozen? Carry buckets of mortar for your masons? I can feel some heat in it, now that you draw my attention to it.” She held his hand up to her cheek and cradled it against her jaw.
“It means I am to drink willow bark tea, which is vile stuff. I am to rest the hand, which I do by avoiding fine tasks with it. I am to use cold soaks, massage, and arnica, if it helps, and I am not to use laudanum, as that only masks symptoms, regardless of how much it still allows me to function.”
“I have considerable stores of willow bark tea.” Ellen drew her fingers down each of Val’s in turn. “And it sounds to me as if you’re generally ignoring sound medical advice.”
“I rub it. I rest it, compared to what I usually do with it. I don’t think it’s getting worse.”
“Stay here.” Ellen patted his hand and rose. She floated off into the cottage, leaving Val to marvel that if he weren’t mistaken, he was sitting in the darkness, more or less holding hands with a woman clad only in a summer nightgown and wrapper. Her hair was once again down, the single braid tidy for once where it hung along her spine.
Summer, even in the surrounds of Little Weldon, even with a half-useless sore hand, had its charms.
“Give me your hand,” Ellen said when she resumed her seat beside him. He passed over the requested appendage as he might have passed along a dish of overcooked asparagus. She rested the back of his hand against her thigh, and Val heard the sound of a tin being opened.
“You are going to quack me?”
“I am going to use some comfrey salve to help you comply with doctor’s orders. There’s probably arnica in it too.”
Val felt her spread something cool and moist over his hand, and then her fingers were working it into his skin. She was patient and thorough, smoothing her salve over his knuckles and fingers, into his palms, up over his wrist, and back down each finger. As she worked, he felt tension, frustration, and anger slipping down his arm and out the
ends of his fingers, almost as if he were playing—
“You aren’t swearing,” Ellen said after she’d worked for some minutes in silence. “I have to hope I’m not hurting you.”
“You’re not.” Val’s tired brain took a moment to find even simple words. “It’s helping, or I think it is. Sometimes I go to bed believing I’ve had a good day with it; then I wake up the next day, and my hand is more sore than ever.”
“You should keep a journal,” Ellen suggested, slathering more salve on his hand. “That’s how I finally realized I’m prone to certain cyclical fluctuations in mood.”
He understood her allusion and considered were she not a widow—and were it not dark—she would not have ventured even that much.
“What did you say was in that salve?”
“Comfrey,” Ellen said, sounding relieved at the shift in topic. “Likely mint, as well, rosemary, and maybe some lavender, arnica if memory serves, a few other herbs, some for scent, some for comfort.”
“I like the scent,” Val said, wondering how long she’d hold his hand. It was childish of him, but he suspected the contact was soothing him as much as the specific ingredients.
“Is it helping?” Ellen asked, her fingers slowing again.
“It helps. I think the heat of your touch is as therapeutic as your salve.”
“It might well be.” Ellen sandwiched his larger hand between her smaller ones. “I do not hold myself out as any kind of herbalist. There’s too much guesswork and room for error involved.”
“But you made this salve.”
“For my own use.” Ellen kept his hand between hers. “I will sell scents, soaps, and sachets but not any product that could be mistaken for a medicine, tincture, or tisane.”
“Suppose it’s wise to know one’s limits.” Ellen was just holding Val’s hand in hers, and he was glad for the darkness, as his gratitude for the simple contact was probably plain on his face. “Ellen…”
She waited, holding his hand, and Val had to corral the words about to spill impulsively over his lips.
“You will accompany us to Candlewick tomorrow?” he asked instead.
“I will. I’ve made the acquaintance of the present Mrs. Belmont, and Mr. Belmont assured me she would welcome some female company.”
“And you, Ellen? Are you lonely for female company?”
“I am.” Val suspected it was an admission for her. “My mother was my closest friend, but she died shortly after my marriage. There is an ease in the companionship of one’s own gender, don’t you think?”
“Up to a point. One can be direct among one’s familiars, in any case, but you’ve brought me ease tonight, Ellen FitzEngle, and you are decidedly not the same gender as I.”
“We need not state the obvious.” Her voice was just a trifle frosty even as she kept her hands around Val’s.
“Do we need to talk about my kissing you a year ago? I’ve behaved myself for two weeks, Ellen, and hope by action I have reassured you where words would not.”
Silence or the summer evening equivalent of it, with crickets chirping, the occasional squeal of a passing bat, and the breeze riffling through the woods nearby.
“Ellen?”
Val withdrew his hand, which Ellen had been holding for some minutes, and slid his arm around her waist, urging her closer. “A woman gone silent unnerves a man. Talk to me, sweetheart. I would not offend you, but neither will I fare well continuing the pretense we are strangers.”
He felt the tension in her, the stiffness against his side, and regretted it. In the past two weeks, he’d all but convinced himself he was recalling a dream of her not a real kiss, and then he’d catch her smiling at Day and Phil or joking with Darius, and the clench in his vitals would assure him that kiss had been very, very real.
At least for him. For him, that kiss had been a work of sheer art.
“My husband seldom used my name. I was my dear, or my lady, or occasionally, dear wife. I was not Ellen, and I was most assuredly not his sweetheart. And to you I am the next thing to a stranger.”
Val’s left hand, the one she’d just held for such long, lovely moments between her own, drifted up to trace slow patterns on her back. “We’re strangers who kissed. Passionately, if memory serves.”
“But on only one occasion and that nearly a year ago.”
“Should I have written? I did not think to see you again, nor you me, I’m guessing.” Now he wished he’d written, though it would hardly have been proper, even to a widow.
That hand Valentine considered so damaged continued its easy caresses on Ellen’s back, intent on stealing the starch from her spine and the resolve from her best intentions. And she must have liked his touch, because the longer he stroked his hand over her back, the more she relaxed and leaned against him.
“I did not think to see you again,” Ellen admitted. “It would have been much easier had you kept to your place in my memory and imagination. But here you are.”
“Here we are.” Haunting a woman’s imagination had to be a good thing for a man whose own dreams had turned to nightmares. “Sitting on the porch in the moonlight, trying to sort out a single kiss from months ago.”
“I shouldn’t have kissed you,” Ellen said, her head coming to rest on Val’s shoulder as if the weight of truth were a wearying thing. “But I’m lonely and sometimes a little desperate, and it seemed safe, to steal a kiss from a handsome stranger.”
“It was safe,” Val assured her, seeing the matter from her perspective. In the year since he’d seen Ellen FitzEngle, he’d hardly been celibate. He wasn’t a profligate Philistine, but neither was he a monk. There had been an older maid in Nick’s household, some professional ladies up in York, the rare trip upstairs at David’s brothel, and the frequent occasion of self-gratification.
But he surmised Ellen, despite the privileges of widowhood, had not been kissed or cuddled or swived or flirted with in all those days and weeks and months.
“And now?” Ellen pressed. “You show up on my porch after dark and think perhaps it’s still safe, and here I am, doing not one thing to dissuade you.”
“You are safe with me, Ellen.” He punctuated the sentiment with a kiss to her temple then rested his cheek where his lips had been. “I am a gentleman, if nothing else. I might try to steal a kiss, but you can stop me with a word from even that at any time. The question is, how safe do you want to be?”
“Shame on you,” Ellen whispered, turning her face to his shoulder.
“Shame on me is right, for I do not offer you anything, you see, but kisses and illicit pleasures. Those I can give you in abundance, if you want them.”
She pulled away, peering at him in the moonlight. “Are you insulting me?”
“I am not. I am commenting on my own unworthiness as a mate to a decent woman. I can bring you pleasure and take some for myself, if you offer it, but that is the extent of my utility.”
“You do not intend to stay here,” Ellen concluded, pulling her wrapper a little more snugly around her.
“I rarely stay in one place for long.” His home had been wherever there was a piano. He had no idea how to define home now. “I am not looking to marry, Ellen. I hazard you are not either, else you would have ended your widowhood some time in these past five years.”
Sitting beside her, Val felt a creeping fatalism seeping through him. This reckoning between them had sneaked up on him, but now that he was sitting in the dark, making indecent offers to a decent woman, he realized they needed to have this conversation and be done with it.
He could get her rejection of him behind them, and they could set about being cordial neighbors through their shared wood, just as if they’d never kissed. Were his hand not crippled—he hadn’t wanted to admit to that word previously—he might at some point be offering for her instead. She was gently bred, a lady to the bone, and sexually attractive to him on a level beyond the superficial easing of lust.
But he was a cripple, and the longer he went withou
t playing the piano, the more he experienced his disability as emotional as well as physical. He’d been right to tell Darius the piano was how he’d had a soul. How he’d known himself to possess a soul.
“You are looking to dally,” Ellen said softly, bringing Val’s thoughts back to the present.
“I am looking to share pleasure,” Val replied, hoping it was true. God above, what if he couldn’t even please a woman anymore? With his arm around her and her fragrance wafting to his nose among the myriad floral scents, his strongest urge was not to lay her down and bury himself inside her.
It was to hold her close and learn the feel of her under his hands, to offer himself to her for her own stroking and petting and caressing. To take his time and learn how to pay attention to her as carefully as he’d attend a fascinating piece of new music.
“I have not your sophistication,” Ellen said, her head back on his shoulder. “Physically, I was married. I comprehend for men certain acts are more profoundly pleasurable than they are for women. Emotionally…”
“Ah.” Val’s hand stroked over her spine and rested on her shoulder so his thumb could caress her nape. “I will protect your privacy, Ellen, and your good name.” And he would show her when it came to certain acts, women could experience more pleasure than any man could endure.
“And if I conceive?”
“I will provide for you and the child.” It was the answer required of a gentleman to a lady without a reputation to protect, and it sat ill with him. “If you demanded it, I would marry you.”
“I would not demand marriage,” Ellen said on a sigh. “I was married for five years and could not give my husband a child.” There was such sadness in her voice, such surrender in the way she rested against him, Val knew in her single, quiet sentence she was hiding a story with an unhappy ending.
“You wanted children.”
“Desperately. Francis needed an heir, and I was his choice as wife. I could not produce even one son for him.”
“Francis was your husband, and you loved him.”
“I did.” Ellen seemed to grow smaller as she leaned against him. “Not well enough, not soon enough, but I did. I would have done anything to provide him the children it was my duty to give him.”
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