“Nick dropped out of sight for a few years because he did not want to be forced to marry,” Val said. “He traveled to Sussex and took a position as a groom, then as stable master on a rural estate.”
“He worked with his hands?” There was grudging curiosity in her tone.
“With a muck fork, more likely. That was the time I got to know him. He was just Wee Nick to me, an occasional companion to sport about Town with. If I omitted his title, it was an oversight, but Nick did not correct me.”
“He did not,” Ellen agreed, and some of the starch seemed to go out of her. She leaned a little more on Val’s arm, her weight welcome and even comforting. “And are you in the habit of having him check up on you?”
“He moves around a lot and checks up on most of his friends,” Val explained. He did not want to defend Nick—Nick needed no defending—but he wanted Ellen to understand why Val considered the man a friend. “This spring I moved in with him for a few weeks during the Season. I’d come down from the north and was at loose ends and was most assuredly not willing to dwell in one of my parents’ residences.”
“Hence the appeal of your new acquisition,” Ellen concluded. “You are taking more than a passing interest in it.”
“I am.” Val smiled at the observation. “Home was anywhere there was a decent piano.”
“You were that serious?”
“I was; then this happened.” He held up his left hand. “One must make a different plan sometimes, and really, spending the rest of my life on a piano bench wasn’t much of a plan.” To his surprise, he could make this honest observation without any rancor.
“But you make furniture,” Ellen protested. “That must take up some of your time.”
“I make pianos, Ellen,” Val said, feeling a curious relief to have this truth revealed. “Or my employees do. It’s very lucrative, at least for the present.”
“Pianos?” Ellen stopped in the middle of the path, cocked her head, and regarded him.
Val waited, even as he knew the female gears in her brain were whizzing about, perfectly recalling every God’s blessed word he’d ever uttered about making furniture or any other damned thing of the smallest relevance to his latest admission.
“You didn’t lie, exactly,” she said as she slowly resumed walking, “but you prevaricated. Why?”
“What sort of dashing young man makes pianos? And how does the peace of the realm require pianos? Pianos are frivolous extravagances, unlike chairs and tables. Civilized society needs chairs and tables.” To his horror, Val heard echoes of His Grace’s reasoning in his voice, though it had been years since his father had even muttered this sort of logic in Val’s hearing.
“You don’t seriously believe this, do you?” Ellen’s voice held consternation and she was again looking at him.
“Many people do, including, I suspect, my own father.” Val dropped her hand to slip an arm around her shoulders. “Many more people are willing to part with their coin to get their hands on one of my pianos, so I try not to dwell on it.”
“I am still trying to grasp that you make pianos,” Ellen said as they approached the back terrace. “It has to be terribly complicated.”
“It’s wonderful, really.” Val assisted her up the steps from the gardens to the terrace. “All that wood and wire and metal, and from it comes the most sublime sound.”
“Like brilliant, fragrant flowers from simple dirt,” Ellen replied. “There has to be something of divinity in the process. There is no other explanation, really.”
“It’s exactly that,” he said softly, “something of the divine.” In the muted moonshine, he settled for running the backs of his fingers over her cheek and taking her hand in his, but this was part of what he had in common with her. They both had the artist’s need to create beauty, to nurture it, watch it grow and develop, and see it please the senses and the soul.
As they took their places among the others, Val wanted to pull his oldest brother aside and lecture him at length. St. Just had been of the erroneous opinion Valentine lacked common ground with anyone.
Anyone at all.
“I had thought to part ways with you in Little Weldon,” St. Just said the next morning as they passed through the village, “but given there’s more storm damage here than at Candlewick, I think I’ll just see you safely home.”
“You needn’t,” Val said from atop the wagon. “I’ve Wee Nick to babysit me, Darius is guarding the fort, and the heathen are my extra eyes and ears.”
“Here, here,” Nick said from his perch on his mare. “Heathen?”
“Here,” Dayton chirped.
“And here,” Phil added.
“It’s less than three miles,” St. Just said. “By the time we’ve argued it through, we can be halfway there.”
“Suit yourself.” Val clucked his team forward. To his relief, the lane to his estate was clear except for considerable leaf litter and the occasional small limb. The house looked to be unscathed, and the outbuildings were all standing.
“Guess you were due for some good luck,” St. Just observed. “Heathen, if you’ll take the team, I will make my good-byes to my baby brother.”
While Val assisted Ellen from the wagon, St. Just grabbed each boy, rubbed his knuckles hard across their crowns, and then bear-hugged the breath right out of them. Nick offered his arm to Ellen, insisting that she have escort through the woods to the cottage, but offering St. Just a friendly wave and salute.
“At least he didn’t hug me,” St. Just muttered, smiling at Val. “My final orders to you are to marry the widow, settle down, and get some babies for your as yet unnamed estate. I imparted much the same wisdom to her.”
“She isn’t interested in marriage.” She hadn’t ever said as much, but neither had she pestered Val for his hand, so to speak.
“Change her mind,” St. Just shot back. “She’s a lady with troubles, Val. I can smell it on her the way I smelled it on Anna and on Emmie. Solve her troubles and put a ring on her finger.”
“I still don’t think she’d have me.”
“You ass.” St. Just stepped closer and fisted a hand in the hair at the nape of Val’s neck. “Do you really think without a piano bench under your backside you aren’t worth the ducal associations? Is that what this subterfuge is about? Denying you’re Moreland’s legitimate son because you are only a mere mortal, not a god of the keyboard, due to a simple sore hand?”
Val glanced at his hand. “I didn’t think you’d noticed.”
“You didn’t think I’d noticed?” St. Just growled and shook him a little, as if he were a naughty puppy. “When I came back from Waterloo, you played for hours and hours just so I could sleep. You fetched me home from certain death then played me a lifeline. When I went haring off to York, you spent the damned winter up there just to make sure I was coping adequately. You are the first friend Winnie has made, and when she can’t tell me or Emmie what’s wrong, she bangs at that piano until Scout’s ears hurt. You tucked us in each night with lullabies, you interceded for me with the biddies, you… Damn you.”
“Damn you, too.” Val stepped close, and mostly to give himself a moment to swallow back the lump in his throat, hugged his brother. “Sometimes”—he dropped his forehead to St. Just’s shoulder—“I wonder if it isn’t all just a lot of noise. It’s good to know somebody was listening.”
“I was listening. I heard every note, Val.” St. Just held him a little tighter then let him step back. “Every note.”
St. Just shot him a look then, one that allowed Val to see just a hint of the weary soldier St. Just had been, a hint of the despair and bewilderment that had followed him and so many others home from Waterloo.