“No, I don’t think. Were I going to be dramatic, I’d slit my wrists, hang myself, or jump into the Thames when the tide was leaving.”
“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.