Willa’s gaze kept darting as she moved toward the violin case. Part of her wanted to bring it—but she’d already planted her lie last night, claiming not to have it with her. And she didn’t need De Wilde scoffing. And she could only assume she’d get to play his again, since he didn’t think she had hers.
“No offense, old friend. But you’ve earned a bit of a rest, don’t you think?”
Her violin remained accusingly silent as she slipped from her room and hurried down the stairs. But she’d make it up to it later. Perhaps she’d come home with a new piece to play. For that matter, Gwen said she could borrow any of her music she liked. She’d brought it with her solely because she’d known there would be musicians about, she said, and one never knew when her collection could be needed.
Bully luck for Willa. Not that she meant to be here long, but even if only for a few days, she would enjoy going through it all. Figuring out if she’d heard any of the pieces before, which would make reading the music easier. Picking her way through the unfamiliar ones until the melodies took on life in her heart.
The sun was scant when she opened the door, playing hide-and-seek as it was with a cluster of white-grey clouds. It could well rain this afternoon, given that the clouds on the horizon were mostly grey and more solid sheet than balls of fluff. She grabbed a brolly from the rack before shutting the door behind her and starting out.
She hadn’t needed the direction to the hotel. She’d spotted it yesterday on her scouting expedition—only a fifteen-minute walk from the rented Davies home. With purpose in her stride to cover up the hesitation still squeezing her insides, she set off.
A whole street had sped by before she felt it again. That tingling at the nape of her neck, that tightening of her gut. Someone was following her.
If yesterday’s pattern held true, she’d not see them if she turned. Why waste the time, then? She’d have to be cleverer than that to catch them at it, to get a glimpse of whoever wore that brown jacket. For now, she did her best to project an air of oblivious focus and kept to her path.
Once, she turned a corner quickly enough to get that glimpse, that flash of rusty brown. But only once. Then the hotel loomed, and that tightening in her stomach could no longer be attributed to someone following her. It was who waited for her that brought it on.
Just a mark. Just the job. She recited the words as she emerged onto Marine Terrace with its views of the slate-grey bay. In the height of summer, there would no doubt be crowds of seagoers rambling about the bathhouse at the end of the promenade, but with autumn’s winds blowing today, only a few bundled people dared to step onto the beach. Willa took account of them—two women with three children between them, one old man tossing bread to the gulls—and then bustled her way into the hotel and inquired at the front desk as to where Mr. De Wilde was holding his practice.
But such mundane observations couldn’t dislodge the unease. Marks weren’t supposed to study her as closely as he’d done. And praise her playing. And offer to teach her.
And they certainly weren’t supposed to propose. He’d been joking, she knew, but still. Who in the world would propose to a woman, even as a joke, within an hour of meeting her?
The desk clerk directed her toward what he called the Ocean Function Room, though she wouldn’t have needed instruction on reaching it. A few steps down the corridor and the music seeping from beneath its door was a siren song all its own.
He was playing something slow and mournful. Pausing outside the door, she stood there rather than interrupt. Just listened.
He hadn’t played this one at the concert she’d bribed her way into last winter. Nor had anyone else at the others she’d sneaked into, or whose practices she’d overheard. She couldn’t even recall hearing it on one of the old rubber records she’d found to play on her equally ancient gramophone—a device she’d rescued from a rubbish bin and which Barclay had managed to repair for her after a few months of tinkering.
And she’d remember if she’d heard it before. It was the kind of soul-searing melody she loved best, the kind she only ever played in the solitude of her flat. Certainly not the kind to share in the pub—no one could clap their hands or stomp their feet to the beat of it.
No one would want to. It was the type of melody that spoke of sorrow and pain and a longing for something always out of reach.
It sounded almost, almost familiar. As if she knew the voice but not the words. As if she’d heard another line of it before, but not this particular refrain.
The door was muffling it a bit. The low notes, and some of the richness of them all. But he was expecting her, wasn’t he? It wouldn’t be rude to simply slip in.
With all the stealth she had mastered for survival, she turned the knob, slid silently into the room, and closed the door again behind her.
His back was to her, his jacket draped over an armchair, his white shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows. His forearms, she quickly noted, were muscled and sinewy, strong. But he was still favoring that right arm, not sweeping the bow out as far as she would have expected him to do. Wincing, nearly bobbling the whole melody, when he tried. And this was a slow song—how would he play a quick one if he was in such obvious distress?
No concern of hers, really. For now she listened, her throat tight when he lingered on that D sharp. Her nostrils flaring when the melody danced upward for one glorious, major-key moment before it gave a final weeping cry of beautiful despair.
Silence underscored the last note. He held perfectly still until the echo of it had died completely away. And not until he moved did she move too, softly, just a step. “Beautiful. I’ve never heard that one before.”
He didn’t jump or start or otherwise seem surprised at her presence. Merely turned, slowly, with a smile that tried to melt her insides.
Tried. Didn’t succeed. Much.
“You would not have. A friend of mine composed it last year, for a quartet.”
She nearly grinned. An original composition—and if she couldn’t have heard it, perhaps that meant it had never been played in public. She could win Retta’s silly little challenge without any effort at all.
He lowered his right arm, too slowly. “We have only performed it once, a few months ago. In Brussels. Where I believe you said last night you have never been?”
Well, blast. But no matter. Perhaps he had another of his friend’s pieces, one that had never been performed. And if not, it hardly mattered. The real job came first. The lesson second. Retta’s challenge a far third.
“I’ve never been out of Great Britain,” she confirmed in response to his half question. Her gaze sought the music stand and the sheets of paper upon it. “Is that where you’re from though? Brussels?”
“In part.” His voice sounded odd. Strained. Pained. “We have a house there—my family. It is technically mine now that my father has died, though it still feels like my mother’s home. But most of my growing-up years . . .” He cleared his throat and held out his beautiful violin and its matching bow.
She took them, but she kept her gaze on his face. Just as beautiful, in its way, as the Stradivarius. But just as pained as his words, and not in the same way as it had been last night after he’d used his sore arm too much. Perhaps a kinder woman would let the subject drop.
She’d never claimed to be particularly kind. “Your growing-up years? Where did you spend them?”
He didn’t meet her gaze. “Louvain.”
A word that made her breath stick in her throat. Louvain had been in all the papers—Louvain, the proof of Germany’s barbarism. Of their cruelty. Louvain, all the evidence Europe needed to hold the Kaiser’s army in utter contempt. “No. Have you family there? Your mother?”
His jaw ticked once, twice; he must have been clenching his teeth. She thought he wouldn’t answer. Thought it all the more when he spun away from her and busied himself by pushing the music into a stack and flipping it so its face was to the stand.
Then his voice cut its way into the room
like a mournful D sharp. “My mother and little sister were both there when the Germans marched on the town.”
“No.” She could think of nothing else to say. No assurances to give. No bandage for what must be a slicing sorrow. “Are they all right?”
“Je ne sais pas. I do not know. I . . .” He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, cleared his throat again. “You came for a lesson, not my story.”
“I’ve enough time for both.” Not that she’d anticipated feeling this sympathy for her mark—and not that she’d let it bother her, ultimately. She couldn’t.
But she knew what it felt like to wonder whether one’s mother was living or dead. She knew that question. How it could eat a body from the inside out.
He waved it away. Her offer to listen, or the thoughts themselves? He said only, “They were not there when I went back. Not in the house, which was burned. A neighbor said they had left. I will find them.”
How, when he was here in Wales instead of there in Belgium?
He pointed at the violin. “Play for me, s’il vous plait. What I was just playing.”
She measured him a moment more. Decided that this was the kindest thing she could do for him, and that at the moment she felt like being kind. She would let it drop. “All right, but I didn’t hear the beginning. So if you would turn that music back around . . .”
“Mais non.” His smile went from forced to a grin in a blink—and as impish as any of Georgie’s ever were. “From memory.”
“I was a bit late—I only heard a few minutes.” But if he meant to confound her with the removal of the music, he was going to be disappointed. “I can only start from what I heard.”
“Naturellement.”
She shot him a halfhearted glare. “And I don’t speak French.”
His brows lifted. “Was it not taught at your school? Miss Davies—both of them—assured me they know it.”
Blast. She shrugged. “I was never very good at it and haven’t used it since. So what I once knew, I’ve forgotten.”
“Then I beg your pardon.” He produced another too-handsome smile and nodded toward the violin. “As this is not a French lesson, I will strive to speak only English.”
“I don’t mind when you speak French—I just want you to realize that I won’t understand much, so if you launch into instructions in it . . .”
He kept those brows raised. “Are you stalling, mon ange?”
Was she? Why was she? And what in the world did mon ange mean? Shaking her head, she positioned the violin under her chin, marveling yet again at how smooth was the chin rest. Raised the bow. Called to mind the first strain of the song that she had heard clearly enough to re-create. And began.
What had the other three instruments in the quartet been playing while the violin sang this melody? Mere accompaniment, or did they have melodies of their own, a counterpoint to this one? She hadn’t so much as glimpsed the title on the sheet music to see if it was a concerto or a sonata.
But she could hear it as she played. The low thrum of bass, underscoring. The trill of a woodwind, highlighting. Accenting. Playing a sweet note here, to offset the mournful one. Near dissonance there, as she held a long note.
A story of loss and longing wove its way through her as she played. Almost—almost—the tale of her beginnings. Or of the beginnings of her life as an orphan, anyway. Almost. But not quite, not with that hope woven through it here and there.
No, it was more . . . more like how she’d felt a few weeks ago when Rosemary had said she was finished. Finished with the life they’d worked so hard to be masters of. She could be glad that her sister had found something that made her happy. Glad that she wanted to share it with them.
But it couldn’t erase the missing of her. The feeling that things were changing, and that no matter how much better they might look now to someone from the outside, it was still loss. A world at war, determined to change every bit of her life.
There was still hope—she still had Rosemary, and she was glad for her. There was that major-key climb upward. But then the realization that it had taken someone else to give her sister that happiness. That Willa, and the family they had forged from necessity and sheer grit, wasn’t enough.
She was never enough.
The last note faded away. And her eyes felt damp enough that she had to blink a few times and draw in a long breath before she could bring herself to look around for her new teacher.
He stood leaning against the wall opposite her, watching her as he’d done last night, as if he expected her to sprout wings and fly about the room. For a moment, he didn’t so much as twitch. Then one corner of his mouth pulled up into a crooked smile. “My apologies.”
Well, that wasn’t any of the responses she had expected. “I beg your pardon?”
“When I awoke this morning, I found myself doubting that you had truly picked up that fantasia simply by listening, so I devised this test.” He motioned to the backward-facing music. “I knew you could not have studied it beforehand.”
Was that amusement or irritation plucking at her? She couldn’t quite make up her mind . . . but then decided she would be generous, since she was currently holding, for the second time, a Stradivarius that probably cost as much as her entire neighborhood in Poplar. She smiled. “Satisfied?”
“More than.” He pushed off from the wall and turned to a box taking up residence on a chair. “Our lesson, then. This is a fairly simple étude that you will be able to play without trouble.” Brandishing the fluttering sheets, he put them on top of the others on the stand. “Begin whenever you’re ready.”
She took a minute to look over the music first. It had taken years to be able to read music, to learn the language of what had at first struck her as strange little blobs of ink on strange little lines. She probably never would have cracked how to do it if Pauly hadn’t found her a book on the subject. Even so, learning how on her own had been a challenge she’d nearly given up on.
But after a few years of struggle, something inside her had seemed to click. And once it had . . . it was beautiful, really. That those small black circles could tell a story that could then be translated into the most beautiful part of life. Music.
She was still not all that proficient at sight-reading. But this étude did look simple. Straightforward. Satisfied that she could play it with only minor fumbles, she raised the bow again.
And got no more than ten measures in before hands landed on her back. She jumped away, a squeak of protest in her throat as she spun on him, ready to use his bow as a weapon if she must.
Lukas De Wilde held up his hands, laughter in his eyes. “I was only trying to correct your posture, Miss Forsythe. I beg your pardon if I startled you. I should perhaps have warned you.”
“Perhaps?”
He chuckled. “Forgive me. I am new to this teaching. But I promise you, this is purely professional—what my tutor did for me as a boy. I will save my flirtations for after the lesson, you have my word.”
She hesitated another moment, then turned around again to face the music stand.
“There now.” He eased closer. Too close, whether he meant it to be flirtatious or not. Put his hand on her back, which most assuredly did not make tingles dance their way up her spine. Pressed, forcing that not-tingling spine to straighten another notch. “Are you always so . . . what is the word? Skittish?”
Her shoulders edged back. “Yes.”
“Good—the shoulders, not the skittishness. That is how you should play, whether sitting or standing.”
Highly uncomfortable. And her spine would likely forget to keep itself so erect as soon as her mind was taken over by the music. But she wasn’t going to waste her breath arguing with him.
“Now. Again.”
He didn’t move his hand, as if he knew her spine would curve the moment he did. And how in the world was she to play, to get lost in the music, with him touching her the whole time?
“Or we can stand here all day, oui? Simply enjoying e
ach other’s company.”
“Has anyone ever told you you’re insufferable?”
“Oui. But they usually say it with a laugh and a flutter of their eyelashes.”
She could well imagine. Though she had no intention of fluttering her eyelashes at anyone. Certainly not someone who expected it. “Well, I say it in seriousness.”
“Noted. Now begin.”
Because it seemed preferable to debating his charm, she raised the bow and focused her gaze on the opening bar again. This time, once she’d gotten past the first two lines, his hand eased away. He still stood too close—she could feel him there, just behind her, looking over her shoulder—but the playing was easier without the touch.
And the music, though only an étude, was lovely. She felt the smile of it as she played, enjoying the way it pranced up and down, the way her fingers felt as they shifted on the strings.
Then his hand again, pressing against her spine. Her fingers stumbled.
“Continuez. Keep going.”
She did and managed to do so without the stumble after his next retreat-and-return. Though by the end of the étude, she had little choice but to release a sigh of exasperation. “It’s no use—I’ve been playing too long to suddenly learn new posture.”
“Nonsense. We can always learn something new.” He was grinning. She didn’t turn around to see it, but she could hear it in his voice. “Again, from the beginning.”
They went through it thrice more, and then again, seated. At least when she was in the hard wooden chair, he only tapped a finger to her back as a reminder. Still. If she concentrated on the music, her back wouldn’t stay straight—and if she concentrated on her back, she knew well her playing was only mediocre.
Her frustration was compounding with each touch. Frustration with herself rather than with him.
So then, she would focus on something else altogether. After completing the étude, she looked up at him. “What time is it?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold watch, flipped open the front of its case.
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