The double doors to the drawing room stood ajar, and pure, sweet Chopin floated out through the crack. Beth pushed the doors open and paused on the threshold. Ian Mackenzie sat at Isabella’s polished piano, staring at the empty music stand in front of him. His wide shoulders moved as his hands found and played notes, and his booted foot flexed as he worked the damper pedal. Sunlight caught on his dark hair, burning it red.
I can play this piece note for note, he’d said at the opera house. But I cannot capture its soul. He might not think he could capture the soul of this piece either, but the music wove around Beth and drew her to him. She walked across the room to the piano as the notes floated around her, loud and sweet. She could bathe in them. The music made a little run high on the keyboard, then ended with a low chord that used all of Ian’s fingers. He let his hands stay in place, sinews stretching, as the last undulations died away.
Beth pressed her hands together. “That was splendid.”
Ian snatched his fingers from the keys. He looked quickly up at Beth and away, then placed his hands back on the keyboard, as though he drew comfort from the feel of the ivory.
“I learned it when I was. eleven,” he said.
“Quite a prodigy. I don’t think I’d even seen a piano when I was eleven.”
Ian didn’t do all the things a gentleman ought to do: rise when she entered the room, shake hands with her, make sure she sat somewhere comfortable. He should ask after her family, seat himself, and chat about the weather or something equally banal until a quiet and efficient servant brought in a tray of tea. But he remained on the bench, frowning as though trying to remember something.
Beth leaned on the piano and smiled at him. “I’m certain your teachers were impressed.”
“No. I was beaten for it.”
Beth’s smile died. “You were punished for learning a piece perfectly? Rather a strange reaction, isn’t it?” “My father called me a liar because I said I’d only heard it once. I told him I didn’t know how to lie, so he said, ‘Better be thought a liar, because what you’ve done is unnatural. I’ll teach you never to do it again.’”
A gruff note entered Ian’s voice as he echoed the man’s timbre as well as his words.
Beth’s throat tightened. “That’s horrible.”
“I was often beaten. I was disrespectful, evasive, difficult to control.”
Beth imagined Ian as a boy, his frightened gold eyes looking everywhere but straight at his father while the man shouted at him. Then closing his eyes in pain and fear as the cane came down.
Ian began another piece, this one slow and sonorous. He kept his head half bent, his strong face still as he focused on the keys. His thigh moved as he worked the pedal, his entire body playing the music.
Beth recognized the piece as a piano concerto by Beethoven, one the tutor Mrs. Barrington had hired for Beth had liked. Beth had been a mediocre player, her hands too work-worn and stiff to learn the skill. The tutor had been haughty and mocking of her, but at least he’d never beaten her.
Ian’s large fingers skimmed the keyboard, and slow notes filled the room, the sound rich and round. Ian might claim he couldn’t find the music’s soul, but the strains of it called too vividly to mind the dark days Beth had suffered after her mother’s death.
She remembered sitting in a corner in the hospital ward, her arms around her knees, watching as her mother’s consumption stole her last breaths. Her beautiful mother, always so frail and frightened, who’d clung to Beth for strength, was now ripped from the life that had terrified her.. The hospital had turned Beth out after they laid her mother in a pauper’s grave. Beth had not wanted to return to the parish workhouse, but her feet had taken her there. She’d known she had nowhere else to go. They at least had given her a job, since she could speak well and had a modicum of manners. She’d taught younger children and tried to comfort herself by comforting them, but all too often they fled the workhouse to return to the more lucrative life of crime.
It was only the in-between people like Beth who were trapped. She didn’t want to resort to selling her body to survive, feeling nothing but disgust for men who could lust after fifteen-year-old girls. Nor could she find respectable employment as, a governess or nanny. She had little education, and middle-class women didn’t want someone from a Bethnal Green workhouse taking care of their precious tots. She’d finally persuaded one of the parish women to find her a typing machine. The woman had eventually produced a third-hand one whose B and Y keys stuck, and Beth had practiced and practiced on it.
When she got a little older, she reasoned, she could hire herself out as a typist. Perhaps people wouldn’t mind her background as long as she worked quickly and efficiently. Or she might write little stories or articles and try to persuade newspapers to buy them. She had no idea how this was done, but it was worth a try.
And then one day, while she was pounding away at the machine, the new vicar of the parish came to call. Beth had been soundly cursing the B key, and Thomas Ackerley had looked at her and laughed.
A tear rolled swiftly down her cheek. She put a quick hand on Ian’s, and the piece stumbled to a halt. “You don’t like it,” he said, his voice flat.
“I do—only, could you play something a little happier?” Ian’s gaze skimmed past her like a beam of sunlight. “I don’t know whether a piece is happy or sad. I just know the notes.”
Beth’s throat squeezed. If she wasn’t careful, she’d start blubbering all over him. She whirled to the music cabinet and dug through sheets until she found something that made her smile.