Once Upon a Tower
Page 34
Edie’s eyes had grown wide. “We’re trapped!”
Gowan leaned back against the sill, happier than he had ever been. “Thank goodness Bardolph left a ham and a plate of dumplings and a chicken pie.”
He was more interested in the vision before him. Edie’s skin was covered with a pattern of little love bites—the road map. He didn’t need any maps, though he didn’t bother to tell her. He was learning by sound and touch: the catch in her breath, the sob in her throat, the way her fingers tightened on his shoulders, and the way her body shook in his arms . . .
Edie leaned out the window again, transfixed by the floodwaters, which were lapping at the tower’s lowest windows. “Don’t,” he said. “That sill is entirely too low; you might topple out.”
“You’re a fine one to say that,” Edie retorted, laughing.
Gowan didn’t argue, but wound his arms around her waist from behind, and pulled her away from the window.
“You’re going to have to stop that,” she said, giving him a naughty glance over her shoulder.
“What?”
“Oh, trying to get your own way.”
His hands were on her breasts again. “I have an idea,” he said, brushing her hair over one shoulder so he could kiss it.
“Is it about becoming a man who listens to his wife and always takes her advice and never thwarts her in any way?”
The Duke of Kinross knew better than to make promises he wouldn’t keep. “A better idea,” he said silkily, tucking her gorgeous bottom under the curve of his stomach.
“Gowan!”
It was amazing how a woman could sound scandalized, intrigued, aroused . . . all in the same moment.
Forty-two
Six years later
No. 37 Charles Street, London
The Duke of Kinross’s town house
At eleven years old, Miss Susannah was a quite accomplished violinist. In fact, she was something of a prodigy and she knew it, even though her mama always hushed her father when he said anything about that. Her mother thought it was much more important to be a nice person than to be a genius.
Personally, Susannah thought you could be both. Her tutor, Monsieur Védrines, nodded at her from his seat at the piano, and she raised her bow.
She knew the piece to the middle of her bones. And she knew everyone in the room as well. There was her dear mama and papa, and Lady Arnaut, who also played the cello, although she complained that these days she couldn’t play because her stomach was too great with child.
That was a paltry excuse, as Susannah could have told her, because Edie had played all the way through both of her confinements.
The first notes spilled from the piano and Susannah felt her heartbeat quicken. There was no reason that she should be so nervous, though perhaps it was because Jamie Arnaut was in the room, sitting by his father and mother. He was thirteen and seemed tremendously grown-up.
It was her turn, and her bow came down on just the right spot . . .
Afterward, she was flushed and smiling and terribly pleased. But there was still one piece left to play, a surprise for Edie. They’d all been keeping the secret for ages and ages, to the point where Susannah wondered whether Edie actually knew the truth and was merely pretending not to know. Grown-ups did that sort of thing.
Jamie came up with his father, Lord Arnaut, so she told herself not to blush, and dropped into a curtsy. And then she blushed anyway, because Jamie gave her a smile and said that he thought she was a wonderful violinist. He didn’t say, for a girl, and he didn’t even look as if he was thinking it.
Edie watched the color rise in Susannah’s cheeks as she accepted young Jamie’s compliments and smiled to herself. They had never been able to determine whether Gowan and Susannah’s mother had remarried, so a fearful person might worry about Susannah’s future acceptance in society. But it was obvious, even at eleven years old, when she was still all knees and elbows, that she would be a tremendous beauty some day. And her brother was one of the most powerful men in England and Scotland. Edie wasn’t worried.
Layla popped up at her side and drew her to a chair in the very front row. “The recital is not over yet!” she said, giggling madly. “There’s still a birthday surprise for you.” There was a great deal of laughter from her assembled friends and family, though Edie had no idea why.
Monsieur Védrines sat himself back down at the piano. A footman placed a straight-backed chair next to the instrument.
“Is someone going to play a duet for my birthday?” Edie asked Layla. Layla’s eyes were shining and she couldn’t stop giggling, even though she was risking waking up one of her twins, draped over her shoulder fast asleep. Edie wasn’t sure which one, since they were identical. All she could see was a cloud of golden hair against Layla’s shoulder.
“You’ll see,” Layla said now.
“I can guess,” Edie said, smiling. “I don’t see Father. He’s going to perform a new piece, isn’t he?”
“Something like that,” Layla replied.
Edie sighed happily. “What a lovely birthday present. Where has Gowan got to? I don’t want him to miss it.”
Layla looked about vaguely. “I’m sure he’s here somewhere.”
At that moment Edie’s father strode out onto the floor, carrying his precious cello. He settled himself in the chair and nodded at Védrines. The family counted it as one of their luckiest days when the young Frenchman agreed to be their castle musician.
“We shall play Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Minor, in honor of my daughter’s birthday,” Lord Gilchrist announced, giving Edie a smile before turning to place his music on the stand.
“He must have made a special arrangement,” Edie told Layla. “That piece was written for two violins, a cello, and strings.”
“I expect the piano is playing the strings,” Layla said.
Before Edie could point out that, even so, two violins were still missing, Susannah had walked to the front of the room, next to the earl, and was again picking up her violin.
And then there was a murmur as the Duke of Kinross entered. Gowan had grown only more devastatingly handsome as the years passed, his sense of command polished to a fine point, but tempered by a deep love of his wife and children that made every woman sigh.
But Edie wasn’t looking at his face. Rather, she was transfixed by the violin tucked casually under his left arm, as if he’d often carried an instrument that way.
He joined the ensemble, smiled at her, raised the violin, and began to play. Edie sat frozen in her chair. If the roof had flown off the town house to reveal a sky crowded with winged pigs, she would not have been as astonished as she was by the sight of her husband playing Vivaldi.
He wasn’t merely following the notation, either. Gowan played with as much reckless brilliance as he did everything else in his life. It was utterly clear that, had he cared to, he could have rivaled the world’s finest players.
And she understood, in the same moment, that he did not care to.
He had learned this most difficult of arts for her.
“It took three years of work,” Layla whispered, bending close. “Poor Védrines has been driven mad by the project.”
As the last notes faded, the assembled guests burst into rapturous applause. Lord Gilchrist—father to Edie, beloved husband to Layla, papa to Susannah, and father-in-law and friend to Gowan—turned to the audience and bowed. “It is with true regret that I announce that the Duke of Kinross has played, he assures me, his first and last public recital.”
More applause.
Gowan stepped forward. “The last three years have been truly happy. Learning the art of the violin from the inestimable Monsieur Védrines, with the help of my father-in-law, Lord Gilchrist, has been a pleasure.”
More applause.
Gowan bowed. Being Gowan, there was no flourish of his violin or twirl of his bow.
“Will you really never play again?” came a voice from the back of the room.
He smile
d, and his eyes returned to Edie. “Oh, I shall play,” he said. “But I shall limit myself to private duets.”
The Duchess of Kinross had not stirred. Tears slipped down her cheeks. Her husband gave his violin to his little sister and picked his wife up in his arms. “Please accept our apologies,” he said, inclining his head and smiling at the room. “My duchess is indisposed.”
And then he strode out the door.
Susannah shrugged. Since her brother had entrusted it to her, she put her bow to his Stradivarius and played a few notes. It made a sublimely beautiful sound.
“Don’t you think it was a bit odd of the duke to walk out of his own party?” Jamie asked, appearing at her elbow. A lock of hair fell over his eyes in a quite fetching way.
“My brother is like that,” Susannah explained. “He’s mad about my sister-in-law and he doesn’t care about much else. Well, besides my niece and nephew, of course. Would you like to hear me play something?” She was longing to try out the Stradivarius.
He shoved the hair off his brow. “We could play something together if you lend me your violin. I’m not as good as you, but I’m decent. Do you know Vivaldi’s Four Seasons? I’m learning the part of the first violin.”
Susannah beamed. “That’s what I’ve been working on! I can play first or second.”
They stood facing each other, those young people, with no sense of what the future would bring. But as Susannah’s melody wove under Jamie’s, and then his soared above and stole back to hers, something deep inside each of them whispered the truth. Someday, a madcap girl with bright red hair would walk down an aisle toward a young man whose hair kept falling over his brow.
It was that duet, they would tell each other, years later. Even at ages eleven and thirteen, they could hear the distant echo of the music they would create in years to come.
Upstairs in the ducal bedchamber, Edie couldn’t stop crying. “You make me so happy,” she said finally. “You have given me everything that I ever wanted.”
Gowan kissed her tears away. “You are all I’ve ever wanted,” he whispered.
Their duet that night was a silent one . . . but thereafter, their children grew used to the sounds of a cello and violin playing together. All four of these children had perfect pitch; one of them grew to be Europe’s finest violist; and only one professed that she hated music.
She was fourteen at the time, which speaks for itself.
A Note About Literature—English, German, Persian—and Cellos
This novel owes deep thanks to two quite different fables: that of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and the Brothers Grimm’s “Rapunzel.” Romeo’s passion is echoed by Gowan; the balcony scene borrows fragments of language here and there. But Gowan also owes a debt to William Butler Yeats’s early poetry: Yeats was the first to be “looped in the loops” of his beloved’s hair. Toward the end of the book, more mature and hopefully wiser, Gowan learns the poetry of John Donne. I had great fun weaving bits of Romeo’s language into the early scenes (the balcony and Rosaline among them), as well as into the tower-climbing scene.
If I had an obvious problem adopting the end of Romeo and Juliet (Edie and Gowan were young, but definitely not star-crossed nor suicidal), “Rapunzel” also offered a challenge. Her hair, for one! In a gesture toward the fable, Gowan climbs a horsehair ladder to the balcony, but in the end he ascends the tower without recourse to hair, equine or otherwise.
Yet another debt is owed to the great musician Yo-Yo Ma. I listened to his versions of Bach’s cello suites and his arrangement of the traditional canon Dona Nobis Pacem over and over while writing Tower. If you’d like a playlist of all the pieces Edie mentions, just look on my website, www.eloisajames.com. For history buffs among you, I’ll add that Vivaldi’s concerti were published in 1725, and existed beyond his original handwritten manuscript. Of course, the cello is a quite new instrument at the time, so most of the pieces Edie plays (including Vivaldi’s Four Seasons) would have been arranged for solo performance by a passionate musician such as Robert Lindley (1776–1855), who was considered one of the greatest cellists of his time.
I wanted Layla to have an exotic name for Regency England, one that connoted reckless passion, and I found just such a one in the love story Leyli o Majnun, written by the Persian poet, Abd-Allah Hatefi. It was published by Sir William James in 1788 and thereafter translated into English by Isaac D’Israeli, as The Loves of Mejnoon and Leila.
And a final literary note: Julia Quinn and I are great friends, which led to our writing, with Connie Brockway, two novels-in-three-parts, The Lady Most Likely and The Lady Most Willing. One day we were chatting on the phone and came up with the idea of embedding a couple of our characters in each other’s books, purely for the delight of our shared readership. Those of you who have not had the pleasure of reading Julia’s Just Like Heaven—and therefore have not yet met the enticing Earl of Chatteris outside the pages of this book—you have a treat in store for you!
A Sneak Peek at Eloisa’s Next Novel
Tobias Dautry grew up on the streets of London, the leader of a gang of mudlarks, homeless boys who fished the Thames for valuables. Rescued by the father he never knew he had, the Duke of Villiers, a hardscrabble rebel still lurks beneath the gleaming, civilized façade of an English gentleman. Of all the duke’s children, Tobias is the most like his father: brilliant, cold, and beautiful.
In one respect, however, he has vowed never to resemble his father: Tobias has seven siblings, five of whom are illegitimate. He has always been careful never to father a child and he intends to keep it that way. No children. Ever.
But since that’s the case . . .
Who is four-year-old Chloe?
And what is she doing on his doorstep?
We don’t have a title yet . . .
so what would you call this novel?
Eloisa would love some help!
Please visit her Facebook page and tell her your suggestion.
About the Author
A New York Times bestselling author, ELOISA JAMES is a professor of English literature who lives with her family in New York but can sometimes be found in Paris or Italy. (Her husband is an honest-to-goodness Italian knight!) Eloisa’s website offers short stories, extra chapters, and even a guide to shopping in Florence.
Please visit her at www.eloisajames.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
By Eloisa James
Once Upon a Tower
With This Kiss (a novella in three parts)
Seduced by a Pirate (a novella)
The Ugly Duchess
The Duke Is Mine
Winning the Wallflower (a novella)
A Fool Again (a novella)
When Beauty Tamed the Beast
Storming the Castle (a novella)
A Kiss at Midnight
A Duke of Her Own
This Duchess of Mine
When the Duke Returns
Duchess By Night
An Affair Before Christmas
Desperate Duchesses
Pleasure for Pleasure
The Taming of the Duke
Kiss Me, Annabel
Much Ado About You
Your Wicked Ways
A Wild Pursuit
Fool for Love
Duchess in Love
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ONCE UPON A TOWER. Copyright © 2013 by Eloisa James. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, rever
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EPub Edition JUNE 2013 ISBN: 9780062223883
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062223876
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