Heartsong

by Melinda Cross

  Madeline watched the landscape unroll outside her window, absently noticing the countryside embracing spring after a long, hard winter. Normally dignified Black Angus cattle cavorted like calves in newly opened pastures; creeks swollen with snowmelt tumbled in every gulley; and the green flutter of furled leaves made it look as though every tree was quivering in anticipation of its rebirth.

  It should have been a magical, fairytale tapestry to someone whose world had always been limited to the concrete boundaries of the city, but to Madeline music had been the definition of beauty for so long that she'd almost forgotten how to appreciate anything else.

  Over an hour later, Elias spoke the first words that had passed between them since they left the city. 'We're almost there,' he said as the car slowed on an exit ramp.

  'Already?' Madeline blinked her way out of what seemed like a dream. She'd been staring at a spot on the dashboard for miles, playing one of his compositions in her mind.

  She peered out of the side window at the narrow tar road they travelled along now, squinting at the bright splash of yellow daisies crowding right up to the asphalt on either side.

  Elias glanced at her as the car topped a rise and coasted down into a village that looked more like a postcard than reality. 'Brighton Square,' he explained as the car slowed, its tyres thumping softly when the tar beneath them changed abruptly to old brick. 'My place is just a mile or so on the other side of town.'

  Madeline nodded silently, her eyes busy. Quaint shop-fronts with colourful awnings lined the main street, wrought-iron lamp-posts called to mind another century, and a wildly gay tulip bed sprawled over the village green.

  They probably invented the word 'charming' for places like this, Madeline thought, turning to watch through the back window as the tiny town receded into the distance. 'It's a lovely place,' she said. 'I can understand why you live here.'

  'I live here because it's convenient,' he said, and there was a definite chill in his tone that made Madeline wonder what she had said wrong.

  At last he turned the wheel sharply and entered a narrow drive banked with thick shrubs just beginning to leaf. 'This is it. Rosewood. You'll see the house in a minute.'

  'I've never been in a house with a name before,' she said.

  His jaw tightened momentarily, then relaxed. 'Don't get the wrong idea. It's no mansion. My mother just had a passion for names, that's all. She named almost everything she ever owned, including this place, and the name stuck, even after she died.'

  'The house belonged to your parents?'

  'Parent,' he corrected her, emphasising the singular. 'They divorced shortly after I was born and Mother never remarried.'

  When the car rounded a turn in the drive that brought them right up to the house, Madeline's features went immediately slack, and without realising it she leaned so close to the window that her nose nearly pressed against the glass. She would remember this moment later and be grateful that her face had been turned away from him, because she had felt the defensive mask slipping; felt it being replaced by the naked longing of the child she had once been, and the pathetic wonder of that same child, to see that sometimes fantasies came to life.

  Home. Her lips formed that alien word in a silent exhalation, fogging the glass as she gazed out at the gingerbread jumble of red brick and faded green shutters—it was the visualisation of a dream she thought she'd forgotten; a dream from those early, early years before life had taught her not to dream at all.

  Except for the ticking of the engine as it cooled, there was complete silence in the car. Elias studied Madeline as she stared out of the window at the house, her profile softened and somehow open, as if she was showing the house a side of herself she never allowed people to see. His black brows twitched in curiosity.

  'I grew up in this house,' he said quietly.

  Before she could stop herself, Madeline whispered, 'It's perfect.' The sound of her own voice startled her, because she had never heard that much emotion in it.

  'It was once,' he said, staring out at the tangle of unkempt shrubbery crowding the small front porch. 'But that was a long time ago.' He sighed and lifted his door-handle. 'Come on. I'll give you the grand tour.'

  Madeline thought that entering this particular house as an adult was a little like getting up to the ticket window right after the last seat had been sold. You made it, all right; but it was just too late. Maybe if she'd had a home like this as a child, her life would have been different; maybe the world wouldn't have been such a cold, unforgiving school where all the lessons were hard—but all the May bees died in June, as one of her foster mothers had said.

  Too late, too late, her thoughts repeated sadly as she followed him through the house, her expression frozen in a distant, polite smile. Occasionally, unintentionally, her hand reached out to trail across a papered wall; to touch a porcelain doorknob a hundred years older than she was; and in those brief seconds of physical contact she thought of how perfect it all might have been once, and how sad it was that it had never been.

  Most of the downstairs rooms were small, cosy, cluttered with comfortable old-fashioned furnishings and a lifetime of loving needlework—his mother's, obviously—and suddenly she was intensely jealous of his boyhood; of the warmth and love any child would have felt growing up in a place like this, even without a father. It was the touch of a mother that Madeline felt in every room, almost like a living presence, welcoming her…

  In an abrupt, angry gesture she shrugged away the fanciful notion, irritated with herself for even entertaining such a childishly mystical thought. She shut down her mind and concentrated on following Elias down a hallway that cut the house in half, running from the front entrance, past the staircase to the second floor, all the way back to an old-fashioned swinging door.

  'The kitchen,' he announced unnecessarily as he stood aside to let her enter, first, but Madeline came to a sudden halt a few steps into the room. 'Anything wrong?' he asked from behind her.

  Anything wrong? his words echoed in her mind. No. Of course not. Not unless there's something wrong with suddenly, inexplicably wanting to weep; wanting to sink to the floor and bury your face in your hands and sob until someone who loves you comes and puts a hand on your shoulder and makes it all better. There would have been someone like that in a kitchen like this, someone who would have made sure that little girls never cried alone.

  To her left was a galley area crammed with old oak cupboards, sink on one side under a window, a cast-iron stove squatting on the opposite wall. Its fat oven door looked like a mouth, smugly closed over the memories of all the bread and pies and cookies it had once held inside. Straight ahead was a round wooden table with matching ladder-back chairs, all tucked neatly in an alcove cradled by a bay window. And everywhere there were reminders of the woman who had made this house a home—in the empty clay pots on the window-sill that might once have held aromatic herbs; in the tiny stitchwork of a wall-hanging that said 'Cooking is Love'.

  'Madeline?' There was concern in his voice as he repeated, 'Is anything wrong?'

  She turned her head slowly to look at him, mask back in place, her expression cool and detached. 'No. Of course not.'

  When she turned back, she noticed a thin layer of dust on everything; a musty odour that advertised an empty house. No one had lived here for a very long time, she realised, and if the kitchen seemed to tremble with sleeping life it was just an illusion.

  'No one's actually lived in this house for years,' Elias said, almost as if he'd read her thoughts. He passed her and walked over to stand at the sink, his eyes fixed on a distant point outside the dull glass of the kitchen window.

  'I thought you lived here.'

  His head jerked towards her in a snap that sent his hair flying across his brow in a black comma. 'No. Not here. I'll show you where.'

  She followed him through the galley to a tiny mud-room, then out through a back door. They were met by a brick path that led them on a meandering voyage through the back yard, pass
ing the eerie skeletal remains of hundreds of roses.

  'Are they dead?' Madeline asked, feeling a strange sympathy for the stiff black sticks that poked up through the dead mess of compacted leaves and dried grass.

  'I don't know,' he said brusquely over his shoulder, walking even faster. 'Some are, and some aren't.'

  Suddenly the path made an abrupt turn to the right, passed through a narrow opening in a stand of white pine, and disappeared under the wild grass of an open meadow. Less than twenty yards ahead a white-framed building much larger than the house seemed to pop from the ground.

  'This is where I live,' Elias said, pulling a key from his pocket and opening the front door. 'I had it built a few years ago.'

  Madeline felt the firmness of short-napped carpet under her heels as she walked a few steps into the huge open space and turned in a slow circle. The building had no interior walls, no furnishings, no windows—nothing to distract the mind or distort the sound.

  Of course this was where he lived. If she'd thought about it at all, she would have realised that he no longer belonged in the house of his youth. But this—this was just the kind of uninterrupted starkness that fostered genius, and let it flow unimpeded.

  There was an enormous Steinway concert grand on a raised platform in the centre of the building's open interior. Her eyes touched the piano with something like reverence, then shifted to the grey acoustic tile climbing the walls and the rafters to the peak of the roof, creating a perfect chamber for the sound that would rise from below. Her fingers twitched with an almost uncontrollable need to run to the piano and play; to make music in a place designed for that and nothing else. Behind her, Elias watched her hands at her sides and smiled coldly.

  'Your studio,' Madeline whispered, hearing the sound of her voice absorbed instantly.

  'And my home.' He led her to the far wall and pushed on a portion of the thick tile that had covered a door. Madeline walked through into a long narrow room that ran the entire length of the building. It had a desk with a work-light, a bed, a dresser, and little else.

  'There's a small kitchenette back there,' he nodded towards a door at the far end, 'and a bath, of course. Everything I need.' There was something decidedly unpleasant about his smile, as if he was forcing it.

  Madeline backed out of the small room, finding it suddenly disturbing. 'You don't use the house at all?'

  Elias closed the door with a faint smile. 'No. The house will be yours, for as long as you work for me.' He walked away towards the piano, never noticing that Madeline had frozen in place, her lips parted slightly.

  The house would be hers, she thought, shivering. Not forever, but for a time, the house would be hers.

  'Madeline?'

  She blinked, focused on where he was leaning back against the piano, his elbows propped behind him, his eyes fixed on hers across the space between them. 'Come play for me,' he said quietly, and, without any warning at all, Madeline's heart turned over.

  She looked at him from across the room, and something about the distance between them, or perhaps the added height of the platform, made him look taller, broader, almost god-like, and suddenly she was afraid. He pulled at her, just as the house pulled at her, waking old emotional responses from the grave of her childhood; and those responses terrified her.

  She walked woodenly towards the platform, reeled in on the line between his eyes and hers, and, when she finally sat down at the piano, her hands were trembling.

  The trembling stopped the moment she touched the keys.

  Nearly fifteen minutes later her hands fell from the keyboard and she closed her eyes, feeling drained and empty.

  'Thank you,' he whispered from behind and to her right, and she turned slowly on the bench to look up at green eyes as beautifully serene as the undisturbed surface of a woodland pond. There was a shadow of a smile on his lips.

  'It sounded like that in my head, when I wrote it,' he said quietly, and Madeline realised that she had just played the overture from an Elias Shepherd musical that no one would produce. Too ponderous, the critics had said; too mechanical; and, with that, the down-slide of his popularity had begun. She couldn't recall deciding to play it; only that the notes had flowed from her fingers to the keyboard, as if that was the piece she had been destined to play on this particular occasion.

  'Anything you want, Madeline,' he was saying earnestly, moving closer to her now, bringing all the heat of the room with him, passing that heat through his hands to her shoulders when they finally rested there. 'I'll give anything to have the world hear my music the way you play it.'

  She stared straight ahead, her thoughts racing. All of her life she had wanted things from other people, but had had nothing to give in return. At last, someone wanted her; at last, she had something someone thought was valuable, and for the first time she experienced that tremulous wonder of being a participant in the human race, instead of simply an onlooker.

  Let me live in that wonderful old house, let me play your music, let me be close to you while you work—let me have that forever, she was thinking; but she knew better than to ask for forever.

  'You and I aren't going to win any prizes for tough negotiating,' she said, pretending to be amused. 'I'll do anything to play your music, and you'll do anything to see that I do.'

  He chuckled softly and moved his hands on her shoulders, turning her to face him, dropping to his heels next to the bench and looking directly up into her eyes. 'We're a perfect match, you know—two people who don't give a damn for anything but music; but for the music we'll sacrifice anything. We should make a hell of a team.'

  Her smile felt a little weak. 'Yes. We should.' But it won't last, a little voice taunted her, because you want it too much, and when you want things, or need them, or, God forbid, learn to love them, they disappear.

  She tensed when his hands slid down her arms to her wrists, brushing against the soft swell of her breasts on the way. He turned her hands palm up in her lap, cradling them in his, gazing at them with such an expression of awe that she felt strangely detached from them, as if they were a separate entity he worshipped, one that had nothing to do with her as a person. Something about that troubled her, but, before she had time to analyse it, his hair was brushing against the soft flesh of her inner arm, his lips were grazing the inside of her wrist, and all reasonable thoughts fled in the face of intense physical sensation.

  She stared down at where his head was bent over her, marvelling that the pressure of his mouth on her wrist should have such a startling effect on the rest of her body. A dark, sleeping coil of heat began to unwind in the pit of her stomach, its fiery warmth spreading down to her legs, up to her chest and face in a visible flush, and she felt her breath come faster.

  This is it, she thought, mesmerised. This is the poetry and the music and the meaning of life, and you're feeling it for the very first time. Hold still. Hold your breath, and maybe it will never end.

  Suddenly he rose and pulled her to her feet, drawing her slowly against him, and for the first time in her life Madeline felt the full length of a man's body pressed against hers.

  'Look at me, Madeline,' he whispered, pulling back slightly, his voice hoarse and dark and somehow frightening; drawn as tight as the muscles in the arms that held her.

  She raised her eyes obediently, caught her breath when she saw that his had darkened; that by some peculiar trick of the light they looked black rather than green, and very, very hot.

  'Elias.' The word was merely a quick expulsion of breath as their eyes met, and, though she had never said the name before, it felt familiar passing over her lips.

  Later she would wonder if saying his name aloud had shattered some strange, magical spell, because in the next instant he stiffened abruptly and stared at her in shock, as if he'd just realised who he was holding in his arms. The skin around his eyes tightened and he held her at arm's length, as afraid to hold on as he was to let go. 'I'm sorry,' he said, his voice strained. 'I don't know what made me do th
at. Maybe David's right. Maybe I've been alone for too long.'

  The words were like cold, dark fingers tightening around her heart. Was that all it had been? No poetry, no music, no profound connection decreed by destiny? Just the impulsive act of a man too long alone?

  She searched his eyes long enough to see a plain, colourless creature reflected there, and didn't wonder that he had pulled away.

  Her expression blank, arms hanging limply at her sides, she watched him take a few quick steps away, then turn back.

  He stared at her for a moment, his gaze steady now, his expression unreadable. 'It's late,' he said finally, turning for the door. 'We'd better get back to the city.'

  Madeline sat in numbed silence during the ride home. In broken, hesitant spurts of awkward conversation, Elias offered her an outrageous salary, even the promise of future royalties, and Madeline simply nodded in wordless agreement. None of it mattered; none of it had anything to do with why she would go to Rosewood.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  For the next three days Madeline occupied every waking moment with a flurry of activity. She washed and ironed and packed her meagre wardrobe, rescheduled all her students with other piano teachers, cleaned her apartment in preparation for a long absence—anything to keep her mind busy and the memory of that moment in the studio safely buried. But occasionally a sharp, unexpected flash of memory would catch her by surprise, interrupting her work, and at those moments she would stop and grit her teeth, fighting to forget the heart-stopping sensation of being caught in Elias's embrace.

  Again and again, especially at night when she lay exhausted yet unable to sleep, she replayed those few precious moments in her mind. Elias had touched her, and with that touch he had shattered her defences, made her hope for things she'd always known would never be hers. And then he'd simply pulled away, unaffected by the act that had moved her world. To him it had been merely a momentary lapse—a simple physical reaction that had no more meaning than the drawing of a breath. In a way, she hated him for that; hated him because she was tormented by the memory of his touch, while all that tormented him was how long it was taking her to pack.