The Virtuoso

Three

“Thank you for showing me the pond,” Val said as they approached the picnic blanket.

“My pleasure. It appears the fairies have been here, casting the post-picnic sleeping spell on your companions.”

“We’re not asleep.” Darius opened his eyes and sat up. “Well, Belmont might be, but he had two helpings of cobbler, so allowances must be made. It’s too quiet. Where do you think the savages have got off to?”

Belmont sat up and yawned. “They’ll be putting up their tent. It’s a sturdy business, that tent. If they use some of the lumber I brought to build a proper platform, it will keep them snug and dry and out of your hair.”

“Savages with their own accommodations,” Val remarked. “Decent of you.”

“My brother Matthew and I put a tent to good use on many a summer night,” Belmont said. “You might want to help the boys pick out a spot for a tree house, as well, but I’d set them to clearing all these damned saplings, were I you. Then Mrs. Fitz here can draft them as assistant gardeners. Pardon the language, Mrs. Fitz.”

Val arched a brow at Ellen. “Gardeners?”

“Good heavens, Windham.” Belmont got to his feet. “You can’t be thinking your work is limited to the house? If you’re to have a proper manor, you need to landscape it. The jungle will just take over again, if you don’t. The oaks need to be pruned so they don’t continue to litter your roof with acorns and leaves. You’ll want flowers near the house, an herb garden for your kitchen, a medicinal garden, a vegetable garden near your home farm.”

Val scrubbed a hand over his face. “So many gardens as all that?”

“And ornamental gardens, as well,” Belmont went on blithely. “Some scent gardens, cutting gardens for early spring through fall, color gardens. As it’s already nigh summer, you’d best get busy, or you’ll waste the entire season. You’ll take pity on him, won’t you, Mrs. Fitz? You can’t expect a city boy like Windham to comprehend the task involved.”

“I suppose,” Darius spoke up as he got to his feet, “the boys could be set to work turning beds and transplanting seedlings. One should think the offspring of a botanist might have a few skills in that regard.”

“They’ve both spent long hours with me in the conservatory and the propagation house,” Belmont assured them. “And I’ll be happy to send over seedlings, as will my wife. We’ve all manner of new varieties gleaned from her estates in Kent.” Belmont speared Val with a look. “If you’re to keep my savages here with you, I promise I’ll come back with a wagonload of seeds and sprouts for you and Mrs. FitzEngle.”

Well done, Val wanted to shout, because the look of longing that crossed Ellen’s face let him know her assistance had just been bribed right into his lap. “Such generosity will be much appreciated, Professor.”

“Well, I’m off then.” Belmont dusted off his breeches. “The leader is Nelson, and the off gelding is Wellie.”

“Gelding?” Val asked.

“I’m loaning you my wagon and team,” Belmont explained. “If all else fails, you can slaughter the horses and feed them to my sons. The boys can also ride these two, though we didn’t pack saddles for them. Their gaits are smooth enough, provided you don’t try to canter—or trot very far. My hay is in, and this is not my best pair, though they’re good fellows.”

“Most generous of you,” Darius cut in, shooting Val a to-hell-with-your-pride look. “A wagon and team will save us a great deal of time and logistical complications, and the stables, at least, are sound and in good repair.”

“Well, that’s settled,” Belmont looked around, his gaze traveling in the direction of noise most likely made by his children. “I will deliver a few paternal words of guidance, not because they will be heeded, but because Abby will expect it of me.”

“I’ll see to your horse,” Darius volunteered.

Val started after Belmont, only to find Ellen’s hand on his arm.

“Leave them some privacy,” she suggested. “Good-byes are hard enough without an audience.”

“And young men have surprising reserves of dignity.”

“I was more concerned for their father,” Ellen rejoined, smiling. “Perhaps you might suggest a visit to Candlewick in the near future?”

“I’d like to see the place. Belmont claimed it was in bad shape when he took it on.”

“And I am sure Mrs. Belmont would like to see the boys,” Ellen said. “But if we’re to keep them busy, you must tell me what exactly you’d like them to accomplish.”

They created a list, starting with the vegetable garden and including the transplanting of some young fruit trees from Ellen’s back yard to Valentine’s home farm. That property began with the meadow boasting the farm pond and ran along the lane toward more buildings and pastures in the direction of town. As he tried not to blatantly admire the curve of Ellen’s FitzEngle’s lips or the way her neck joined her shoulders, Val instead heard the melody of her voice.

It would take woodwinds—strong, supple, and light, with low strings for balance—to convey the grace of that voice. Or possibly just the piano alone, a quiet, lyrical adagio.

He pulled his thoughts back to the conversation. “Who works the home farm?” he asked as they watched Darius leading Belmont’s gelding from the stables.

“The Bragdolls. Or they work the land. The vegetable gardens, chicken coop, dairy, and so forth are not used. The manor has been unoccupied since before the previous Baron Roxbury owned the place.”

“I am not inclined to set all that to rights just yet. Your surplus is adequate for my present needs, and I won’t be hiring staff for months.” Assuming he even kept ownership of the place.

“Get in as big a plot of vegetables as you can, anyway,” Ellen said. “Children can weed it for you cheaply, and you can sell the excess, if any there is. And if you hire staff even as late as next spring, you’ll still need a cellar full of food to feed them until next summer.”

“Establishing a working manor with home farm is decidedly more complicated than I’d envisioned.”

“You thought simply to restore the house,” Ellen reminded him. “That is a substantial project in itself.”

Val shrugged self-consciously. “I liked the place when first I saw it. I still like it, and I like all the ideas I have for restoring it to health.” It reminded him in a curious way of creating… music. Part craft, part art; part discovery, part invention.

“So what will you name your acquisition?” Ellen asked, looking past Val’s shoulder.

“What?” Val followed her gaze to see Belmont shamelessly hugging his half-grown children. “He’ll miss them.”

He wondered if his father ever missed him but dismissed the thought. Victor and Bart were dead, and Val had never heard His Grace admit to missing either son. A mere youngest son off to Oxfordshire was hardly going to cause the Duke of Moreland to fret or worry or pine for the lack of him—any more than Val was going to permit himself to pine for his piano.

“It’s Monday.” Ellen leaned in to lower her voice. “Suggest you’ll bring them to visit at Candlewick on the weekend, and that way, you can dodge services in Little Weldon.” She sauntered off, pausing to bid Belmont good-bye. From where Val stood, it looked like a punctiliously polite leave-taking on both their parts. When Belmont crossed the yard to join him, Val was still watching Ellen’s retreat with a less than casual eye.

After Belmont had taken his leave and a wagonload of goods from town had been properly stored, Val sat beside Darius in the afternoon shadows and listened and calculated and listened some more. In the back of his mind, he heard the slow movement to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, a sweet, lyrical little piece of musical comfort that had nothing to do with nails, lumber, sagging porches, and broken windows.

Herr Beethoven, Val concluded, knew little of the realities of country life.

“What say we round up the heathen and finish the day at the pond,” Val suggested, alighting from their perch on the lumber. “I don’t think they’ll last much past dark, and I’m not sure I will either.”

“Swimming.” Darius affected an expression of concentration then hopped down beside Val. “That’s the business where you get wet and hope not to accommodate any leeches in the process. Wouldn’t miss it.”

With the older males following at a sedate pace and the younger pair pelting through the wood, all four were soon shucking clothes and diving off the dock into the pond. To Val, the scene was reminiscent of many summer evenings spent with his brothers. He set himself to swimming laps around the pond, searching for a sense of peace in the soothing rhythm of water and mild exertion.

“We’re heading back to start dinner,” Darius called from the dock. He was dressed only in breeches, his dark hair wet and slicked back, the boys similarly attired.

“Leave me my soap. I’ll follow shortly.”

“Soap?” Dayton hollered. “What about meat pie? What about cobbler? What about cold potato salad and biscuits with butter?” His brother lit out, leaving Dayton to give chase and Darius to smile and bring up the rear. When they’d left, Val swam over to the dock and pulled himself up onto it, content just to sit and appreciate the quiet as he dried off in the warm evening air.

Who would ever have thought the absence of music could have any redeeming quality to it at all? God above, Belmont’s offspring were loud. Val couldn’t recall himself ever being that loud, but then, he’d been the baby boy. The youngest and then the musical artist, the one most likely to be watching and worrying while his older brothers leapt bellowing from rope swings into swimming holes or tore off across frozen ponds heedless of weak ice or protruding rocks. They had yelled and carried on enough without Val adding to the din.

And now the loudest of them—Victor and Bart—were dead. Val brought his knees up, wrapped his arms around his legs, and lowered his forehead to his knees. The night was growing beautiful as the air mellowed, the shadows lengthened, and soft, summery scents floated on gentle breezes.

Grief was so tenacious a companion he wanted to scream it out into the silence. At least when he could play the piano, there had been a way to express such emotions, to air them audibly without something so ugly as a scream. He sat up, then stood, and dove off the dock into the water and washed every inch of his skin and scalp.

When he was as clean as soap, water, and effort could make him, he sat naked on the dock for a long time watching the shadows lengthen. Evenings were difficult, and he’d frequently survived them only by playing his finger exercises for hours on end. Mindless, technically demanding, aurally homely, they’d soothed him in a way nothing else did.

When darkness threatened to obscure the path home, Val rose and pulled on his breeches. It occurred to him as he gathered up shirt, socks, boots, and towel, that in his own way, he’d grown used to making every bit as much useless noise as the Belmont brothers.

Mr. Valentine Windham had troubles.

Ellen concluded this from her place in the shadowed woods and debated whether she should reveal herself or leave him to wander home in solitude. Coward that she was, she opted to guard her own privacy, lest he see from the look in her eyes she’d been spying for quite some time.

He had troubles, as evidenced by the hunch of his back muscles when he dropped his face to his knees. Troubles, as demonstrated by the long, long silence he held while evening deepened around him and he sat naked and utterly still on the dock. Troubles, as outlined by the leanness of his flanks and belly, the way his ribs and hips were too clearly delineated under his skin.

But God above, troubled or not, he was a breathtakingly beautiful man. Francis had been trim and capable of sitting a horse, but he’d never sported the kind of muscle Valentine Windham did. He’d also lacked Windham’s height and the sense of coiled, nimble power Windham’s body conveyed when it arched and dove cleanly into the water.

Those images, of Valentine Windham naked and still, naked and hoisting himself out of the water, naked and gathering his clothes at the end of the dock… They made a hot night hotter and made Ellen’s clothes feel clingy and damp next to her skin. As full darkness fell, she stripped down and slipped into the water, circling the pond many times, just as Valentine had.

And just as unable to find relief from the guilt and grief troubling her.

“The boys will be all right in their tent?” Val asked as he poured two cups of tea from the pot on the stove while a few drops of rain spattered the roof of the carriage house.

“They’re waterproof,” Darius replied, accepting his cup. “Rain or shine, this whole summer is a lark to them, as it should be.”

“They’ve gotten a lot done this week. There’s not a sapling standing in the yard, the beds are dug and planted, the vegetables are in, and the drive is looking better.”

Darius regarded Val by the flickering light of a single candle. “But you are not satisfied.”

“With them? Of course I am. They’re good boys, and they work hard. I’m lucky to have them.”

“With them, maybe, not with yourself.”

“And you are such a paragon of self-satisfaction?” The last thing Val wanted at the end of yet another grueling day was Darius Lindsey peering into his soul.

“You will take the boys and Mrs. Fitz to Candlewick tomorrow,” Darius replied. “Get some decent cooking into you, play Belmont’s grand piano for a few hours, and set yourself to rights.”

Val was silent a long time, until he expelled a hard breath and set his mug down on the bricks under the stove. “I will not be playing Belmont’s piano or any other, and I will thank you not to raise the matter before others.” He crossed the room in two strides and sat on his bunk, hauling off his boots and tossing them hard against the opposite wall.

“So that’s what all the gloves are about?” Darius asked, reclining on his cot. “Your left hand is still buggered up?”

“How did you know?”

“I have eyes, Valentine. It took me about two days to figure out you own the world’s largest collection of gloves, because you’ve bought them ready-made in two different sizes. From there, I observed your left hand is swollen, the thumb, index, and middle fingers noticeably red and painful-looking. You make every effort not to favor the hand for fine tasks but beat it to death on manual labor. One has to wonder if your actions are well advised.”

“Fairly forbid me the piano,” Val bit out. “So I don’t play the bloody piano.”

“And does your hand improve?”

“Not much.” Val tried to match his companion’s casual tone. “At first, there was some improvement, but lately, it’s no better. I might as well use it for what I can, while I can.”

“You say that like you are angry at your hand,” Darius mused, “though you do every kind of rough work there is to do with it, and you certainly make me look like I’m barely pulling my weight most days.”

“I do every kind of work the common laborers do,” Val corrected him. He rose and crossed the room to where his boots lay against the far wall and set them tidily next to the door. “I just can’t do the kind of work I was born to do.”

“And that would be?”

“Play the piano. My art is how I go on, Darius, and the only thing I know how to do well enough to matter.”

“Doing it a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” Darius crossed his arms behind his head and regarded Val where he once again sat on his cot.

“No, I don’t think. Were I going to be dramatic, I’d slit my wrists, hang myself, or jump into the Thames when the tide was leaving.”

“Valentine.” Darius sat up. “That is not funny.”

“How funny do you think it feels not to be able to play the piano when it’s all I’ve done of worth in the past twenty-some years? I did not excel at school, and I can’t point to an illustrious career like my brother, the former cavalry officer. I haven’t Westhaven’s head for business. I wasn’t a jolly good time like Bart or a charmer like Vic. But, by God, I could play the piano.”

“And you can build stone walls and referee between Day and Phil and keep an eye on Nick Haddonfield when he hares all over the Home Counties,” Darius retorted. “Do you think one activity defines you?”

“I’m like a whore, Darius, in that, yes, the one activity, in my case playing the piano, defines me.” Val heard weariness in his own voice. “When Dev was driven mad by nightmares, I played for him so he couldn’t hear the battles anymore. When his little Winnie was scared witless by all the changes in her life, I played for her and taught her a few things to play for herself. When Victor was so sick, I’d play for him, and he’d stop coughing for a little while. It’s how I let people know they matter to me, Darius, and now…”

Darius got up and crossed the room, then lowered himself to sit beside Val in the shifting candlelight. “Now all this playing for others has left you one-handed, angry, and beating yourself up.”

Not beating himself up, precisely, but feeling beaten up. “The piano is the way I have a soul, Dare. It’s always there for me, always able to say the things I can’t, always worth somebody’s notice, even if they don’t know they notice. It has never let me down, never ridiculed me before others, never taken a sudden notion not to know who I am or what I want. As mistresses go, the piano has been loyal, predictable, and lovely.”

“You talk about an instrument as if it’s animate,” Darius said, hunching forward. “I know you are grieving the inability to exercise a considerable talent, but you are too old—and far too dear a man—to be relying on an imaginary friend. You deserve more than to think of yourself as merely the slave of your muse.”

Val shot off the bed and crossed to the door, pausing only long enough to tug on his boots.

“I’m sorry.” Darius rose and might have stopped him, but Val turned his back and got his hand on the door latch first. “I don’t like seeing you suffer, but were you really happy spending your entire life on the piano bench?”

“You think I’m happy now?” Val asked without turning.

He was down the stairs and out into the night without any sense of where he was headed or why movement might help. Darius was too damned perceptive by half, but really—an imaginary friend?

It was the kind of devastating observation older brothers might make of a younger sibling and then laugh about. Maybe, Val thought as his steps took him along a bridle path in the moonlit woods, this was why the artistic temperament was so unsteady. People not afflicted with the need to create could not understand what frustration of the urge felt like.

The weekend at Belmont’s loomed like an obstacle course in Val’s mind.

No finger exercises, no visiting friendly old repertoire to limber up, no reading open score to keep abreast of the symphonic literature, no letting themes and melodies wander around in his hands just to see what became of them. No glancing up and realizing he’d spent three hours on a single musical question and still gotten no closer to a satisfactory answer.

All of that, Val thought as he emerged from the darkened woods, was apparently never to be again. His hand was not getting better, though it wasn’t getting worse, either. It merely hurt and looked ugly and managed only activities requiring brute strength of the arm and not much real grip.

He found himself at the foot of Ellen FitzEngle’s garden and wondered if he could have navigated his way there on purpose. Her cottage was dark, but her back yard was redolent with all manner of enticing floral scents in the dewy evening air. If her gardens were pretty to the eye by day, they were gorgeous to the nose at night. Silently, Val wandered the rows until his steps took him to the back porch, where a fat orange cat strolled down the moonlit steps to strop itself against Val’s legs.

“He’s shameless.” Ellen’s voice floated through the shadows. “Can’t abide having to catch mice and never saw a cream bowl he couldn’t lick spotless in a minute.”

“What’s his name?” Val asked, not even questioning why Ellen would be alone on her porch after dark.

“Marmalade. Not very original.”

“Because he’s orange?” Val bent to pick the cat up and lowered himself to the top porch step.

“And sweet,” Ellen added, shifting from her porch swing to sit beside Val. “I take it you were too hot to sleep?”

“Too bothered. You?”

“Restless. You were right; change is unsettling to me.”

“I am unsettled, as well,” Val said, humor in his voice. “I seem to have a penchant for it.”

“Sometimes we can’t help what befalls us. What has you unsettled?”

Val was silent, realizing he was sitting beside one of very few people familiar with him who had never heard him play the piano. A woman who, in fact, didn’t even know he could play, much less that he was Moreland’s musical son.

“My hand hurts. It has been plaguing me for some time, and I’m out of patience with it.”

“Which hand?” Ellen asked, her voice conveying some surprise. Whatever trouble she might have expected Valentine Windham to admit, it apparently hadn’t been a simple physical ailment.

“This very hand here.” Val waved his left hand in the night air, going still when Ellen caught it in her own.

“Have you seen a physician?” she asked, tracing the bones on the back of his hand with her fingers.

“I did.” Val closed his eyes and gave himself up to the pleasure of her touch. Her fingers were cool and her exploration careful. “He assured me of nothing, save that I should treat it as an inflammation.”

“Which meant what?” Ellen’s fingers slipped over his palm. “That you should tote roofing slates about by the dozen? Carry buckets of mortar for your masons? I can feel some heat in it, now that you draw my attention to it.” She held his hand up to her cheek and cradled it against her jaw.

“It means I am to drink willow bark tea, which is vile stuff. I am to rest the hand, which I do by avoiding fine tasks with it. I am to use cold soaks, massage, and arnica, if it helps, and I am not to use laudanum, as that only masks symptoms, regardless of how much it still allows me to function.”

“I have considerable stores of willow bark tea.” Ellen drew her fingers down each of Val’s in turn. “And it sounds to me as if you’re generally ignoring sound medical advice.”

“I rub it. I rest it, compared to what I usually do with it. I don’t think it’s getting worse.”

“Stay here.” Ellen patted his hand and rose. She floated off into the cottage, leaving Val to marvel that if he weren’t mistaken, he was sitting in the darkness, more or less holding hands with a woman clad only in a summer nightgown and wrapper. Her hair was once again down, the single braid tidy for once where it hung along her spine.

Summer, even in the surrounds of Little Weldon, even with a half-useless sore hand, had its charms.

“Give me your hand,” Ellen said when she resumed her seat beside him. He passed over the requested appendage as he might have passed along a dish of overcooked asparagus. She rested the back of his hand against her thigh, and Val heard the sound of a tin being opened.

“You are going to quack me?”

“I am going to use some comfrey salve to help you comply with doctor’s orders. There’s probably arnica in it too.”

Val felt her spread something cool and moist over his hand, and then her fingers were working it into his skin. She was patient and thorough, smoothing her salve over his knuckles and fingers, into his palms, up over his wrist, and back down each finger. As she worked, he felt tension, frustration, and anger slipping down his arm and out the ends of his fingers, almost as if he were playing—

“You aren’t swearing,” Ellen said after she’d worked for some minutes in silence. “I have to hope I’m not hurting you.”

“You’re not.” Val’s tired brain took a moment to find even simple words. “It’s helping, or I think it is. Sometimes I go to bed believing I’ve had a good day with it; then I wake up the next day, and my hand is more sore than ever.”

“You should keep a journal,” Ellen suggested, slathering more salve on his hand. “That’s how I finally realized I’m prone to certain cyclical fluctuations in mood.”

He understood her allusion and considered were she not a widow—and were it not dark—she would not have ventured even that much.

“What did you say was in that salve?”

“Comfrey,” Ellen said, sounding relieved at the shift in topic. “Likely mint, as well, rosemary, and maybe some lavender, arnica if memory serves, a few other herbs, some for scent, some for comfort.”

“I like the scent,” Val said, wondering how long she’d hold his hand. It was childish of him, but he suspected the contact was soothing him as much as the specific ingredients.

“Is it helping?” Ellen asked, her fingers slowing again.

“It helps. I think the heat of your touch is as therapeutic as your salve.”

“It might well be.” Ellen sandwiched his larger hand between her smaller ones. “I do not hold myself out as any kind of herbalist. There’s too much guesswork and room for error involved.”

“But you made this salve.”

“For my own use.” Ellen kept his hand between hers. “I will sell scents, soaps, and sachets but not any product that could be mistaken for a medicine, tincture, or tisane.”

“Suppose it’s wise to know one’s limits.” Ellen was just holding Val’s hand in hers, and he was glad for the darkness, as his gratitude for the simple contact was probably plain on his face. “Ellen…”

She waited, holding his hand, and Val had to corral the words about to spill impulsively over his lips.

“You will accompany us to Candlewick tomorrow?” he asked instead.

“I will. I’ve made the acquaintance of the present Mrs. Belmont, and Mr. Belmont assured me she would welcome some female company.”

“And you, Ellen? Are you lonely for female company?”

“I am.” Val suspected it was an admission for her. “My mother was my closest friend, but she died shortly after my marriage. There is an ease in the companionship of one’s own gender, don’t you think?”

“Up to a point. One can be direct among one’s familiars, in any case, but you’ve brought me ease tonight, Ellen FitzEngle, and you are decidedly not the same gender as I.”

“We need not state the obvious.” Her voice was just a trifle frosty even as she kept her hands around Val’s.

“Do we need to talk about my kissing you a year ago? I’ve behaved myself for two weeks, Ellen, and hope by action I have reassured you where words would not.”

Silence or the summer evening equivalent of it, with crickets chirping, the occasional squeal of a passing bat, and the breeze riffling through the woods nearby.

“Ellen?”

Val withdrew his hand, which Ellen had been holding for some minutes, and slid his arm around her waist, urging her closer. “A woman gone silent unnerves a man. Talk to me, sweetheart. I would not offend you, but neither will I fare well continuing the pretense we are strangers.”

He felt the tension in her, the stiffness against his side, and regretted it. In the past two weeks, he’d all but convinced himself he was recalling a dream of her not a real kiss, and then he’d catch her smiling at Day and Phil or joking with Darius, and the clench in his vitals would assure him that kiss had been very, very real.

At least for him. For him, that kiss had been a work of sheer art.

“My husband seldom used my name. I was my dear, or my lady, or occasionally, dear wife. I was not Ellen, and I was most assuredly not his sweetheart. And to you I am the next thing to a stranger.”

Val’s left hand, the one she’d just held for such long, lovely moments between her own, drifted up to trace slow patterns on her back. “We’re strangers who kissed. Passionately, if memory serves.”

“But on only one occasion and that nearly a year ago.”

“Should I have written? I did not think to see you again, nor you me, I’m guessing.” Now he wished he’d written, though it would hardly have been proper, even to a widow.

That hand Valentine considered so damaged continued its easy caresses on Ellen’s back, intent on stealing the starch from her spine and the resolve from her best intentions. And she must have liked his touch, because the longer he stroked his hand over her back, the more she relaxed and leaned against him.

“I did not think to see you again,” Ellen admitted. “It would have been much easier had you kept to your place in my memory and imagination. But here you are.”

“Here we are.” Haunting a woman’s imagination had to be a good thing for a man whose own dreams had turned to nightmares. “Sitting on the porch in the moonlight, trying to sort out a single kiss from months ago.”

“I shouldn’t have kissed you,” Ellen said, her head coming to rest on Val’s shoulder as if the weight of truth were a wearying thing. “But I’m lonely and sometimes a little desperate, and it seemed safe, to steal a kiss from a handsome stranger.”

“It was safe,” Val assured her, seeing the matter from her perspective. In the year since he’d seen Ellen FitzEngle, he’d hardly been celibate. He wasn’t a profligate Philistine, but neither was he a monk. There had been an older maid in Nick’s household, some professional ladies up in York, the rare trip upstairs at David’s brothel, and the frequent occasion of self-gratification.

But he surmised Ellen, despite the privileges of widowhood, had not been kissed or cuddled or swived or flirted with in all those days and weeks and months.

“And now?” Ellen pressed. “You show up on my porch after dark and think perhaps it’s still safe, and here I am, doing not one thing to dissuade you.”

“You are safe with me, Ellen.” He punctuated the sentiment with a kiss to her temple then rested his cheek where his lips had been. “I am a gentleman, if nothing else. I might try to steal a kiss, but you can stop me with a word from even that at any time. The question is, how safe do you want to be?”

“Shame on you,” Ellen whispered, turning her face to his shoulder.

“Shame on me is right, for I do not offer you anything, you see, but kisses and illicit pleasures. Those I can give you in abundance, if you want them.”

She pulled away, peering at him in the moonlight. “Are you insulting me?”

“I am not. I am commenting on my own unworthiness as a mate to a decent woman. I can bring you pleasure and take some for myself, if you offer it, but that is the extent of my utility.”

“You do not intend to stay here,” Ellen concluded, pulling her wrapper a little more snugly around her.

“I rarely stay in one place for long.” His home had been wherever there was a piano. He had no idea how to define home now. “I am not looking to marry, Ellen. I hazard you are not either, else you would have ended your widowhood some time in these past five years.”

Sitting beside her, Val felt a creeping fatalism seeping through him. This reckoning between them had sneaked up on him, but now that he was sitting in the dark, making indecent offers to a decent woman, he realized they needed to have this conversation and be done with it.

He could get her rejection of him behind them, and they could set about being cordial neighbors through their shared wood, just as if they’d never kissed. Were his hand not crippled—he hadn’t wanted to admit to that word previously—he might at some point be offering for her instead. She was gently bred, a lady to the bone, and sexually attractive to him on a level beyond the superficial easing of lust.

But he was a cripple, and the longer he went without playing the piano, the more he experienced his disability as emotional as well as physical. He’d been right to tell Darius the piano was how he’d had a soul. How he’d known himself to possess a soul.

“You are looking to dally,” Ellen said softly, bringing Val’s thoughts back to the present.

“I am looking to share pleasure,” Val replied, hoping it was true. God above, what if he couldn’t even please a woman anymore? With his arm around her and her fragrance wafting to his nose among the myriad floral scents, his strongest urge was not to lay her down and bury himself inside her.

It was to hold her close and learn the feel of her under his hands, to offer himself to her for her own stroking and petting and caressing. To take his time and learn how to pay attention to her as carefully as he’d attend a fascinating piece of new music.

“I have not your sophistication,” Ellen said, her head back on his shoulder. “Physically, I was married. I comprehend for men certain acts are more profoundly pleasurable than they are for women. Emotionally…”

“Ah.” Val’s hand stroked over her spine and rested on her shoulder so his thumb could caress her nape. “I will protect your privacy, Ellen, and your good name.” And he would show her when it came to certain acts, women could experience more pleasure than any man could endure.

“And if I conceive?”

“I will provide for you and the child.” It was the answer required of a gentleman to a lady without a reputation to protect, and it sat ill with him. “If you demanded it, I would marry you.”

“I would not demand marriage,” Ellen said on a sigh. “I was married for five years and could not give my husband a child.” There was such sadness in her voice, such surrender in the way she rested against him, Val knew in her single, quiet sentence she was hiding a story with an unhappy ending.

“You wanted children.”

“Desperately. Francis needed an heir, and I was his choice as wife. I could not produce even one son for him.”

“Francis was your husband, and you loved him.”

“I did.” Ellen seemed to grow smaller as she leaned against him. “Not well enough, not soon enough, but I did. I would have done anything to provide him the children it was my duty to give him.”

Val stroked her back, feeling his heart constrict painfully—for her. “Sometimes we are denied our fondest wish.”

“He was a good man.”

“Tell me about him,” Val urged, his hand returning to her neck. If there was etiquette involved with a prospective lover asking about a late spouse, he neither knew nor cared about it. Apparently, neither did she.

“As Baron Roxbury, Francis held one of the oldest titles short of the monarchy,” Ellen began, “but he wasn’t pompous or pretentious. I didn’t know him well when we married, but I thought him such a prig at first. He was merely shy and uncertain how to deal with a wife nearly half his age.”

Baron Roxbury? Val held still, kept up his easy caresses on Ellen’s back, and absorbed the fact that he had propositioned the Baroness Roxbury on her own back steps. What was she doing rusticating like a tenant farmer’s widow when she held such a title?

“You must have been very young,” Val managed.

“Seventeen. I was presented after my marriage, of course, but never had to compete with the other girls for a husband. Francis spared me that, and I went from being my parents’ treasured miracle to his treasured wife. I didn’t know how lucky I was.”

“We often don’t.” Val forced himself to keep listening, to keep his questions behind his teeth, as he sensed Ellen did not discuss her past often. It wasn’t just that she had secrets, it was that she grieved privately. “You miss your Francis.”

“I miss…” Ellen’s voice dipped. “I miss him bodily, of course. As we became friends, we also became affectionate, and that was a comfort when the children did not arrive. I miss him in other ways, too, though, as my spouse, the person through whom I was afforded social standing and a place in society. That’s a trite phrase until you don’t have that place anymore.”

Val said nothing but turned slightly and looped his other arm around her so she was resting not merely against him but in his embrace. He willed her to cry, but she only laid her forehead to his collarbone and sighed against his neck.

He rested his chin on her crown and gazed out across the moon shadows in her yard. There was peace to be found in holding Ellen FitzEngle like this. Not the kind of peace he’d anticipated, and maybe not a peace he deserved, but he’d take it as long as she allowed it.

“It isn’t well done of me,” Ellen murmured, trying to draw back, “pining for my husband in your arms.”

“Hush. Whose arms have been available to you, hmm? Marmalade’s, perhaps?”

“You are a generous man and far too trusting.”

From her words, Val knew she wasn’t being entirely honest, but he also knew she’d had little comfort for her grief and woes, and trust in such matters was a delicate thing. When he shifted a few minutes later and lifted her against his chest, she did not protest but looped her arms around his neck, and that was a kind of trust too. He carried her to her porch swing and sat at one end so her back was supported by the pillows banking the arm of the swing. He set the swing in motion and gathered her close until she drifted away into sleep.

Val stayed on that swing long after the woman in his arms had fallen asleep, knowing he was stealing a pleasure from her he should not. He’d never been in her cottage, though, and was reluctant to invade her privacy.

Or so he told himself.

In truth, the warm, trusting weight of Ellen FitzEngle in his arms anchored him on a night when he’d been at risk of wandering off, of putting just a little more space between his body and his soul; his intellect and his emotions. Darius had delivered a telling blow when he’d characterized music, and the piano, as an imaginary friend.

And it was enough, Val realized, to admit no creative art could meet the artist’s every need or fulfill every wish. Ellen FitzEngle wasn’t going to be able to do that either, of course; that wasn’t the point.

The point, Val mused as he carefully lifted Ellen against his chest and made his way into her cottage, was that life yet held pleasures and mysteries and interest for him. He would get through the weekend at Belmont’s on the strength of that insight. As he tucked a sleeping Ellen into her bed and left a good-night kiss on her cheek, Val silently sent up a prayer of thanks.

By trusting him with her grief, Ellen had relieved a little of his own.