Chapter Two

G eorge had just got comfortable. Warm and dry, in quiet, pleasant surroundings, with warm tea and food in his belly and the company of a gentle, beautiful young woman. She seemed so interested in his stories that he had almost forgotten they were strangers. He liked to make her smile, to watch the array of expressions cross her face and know she understood. He liked her voice too, low and musical and intriguingly accented.

And then the boy seized his hand. "Come and meet my papa!"

George kept his gaze on the boy, holding on to her words, He's playing , that he did not quite believe. They had all said "Papa" was dead. The men at the inn who had called her a widow, Mark, Mrs. Hazel herself. Was he being fooled in some way again?

It did not happen often, and he had taught himself to recognize the flim-flam men and women, the liars and the cheats. There weren't many of them, and he had felt no such alarm bells with her.

The boy was smiling, but his eyes were serious. He really wanted George to meet someone. Without looking at Mrs. Hazel, he rose and let Mark lead him to the sofa.

"This is my papa," the boy said proudly. "Papa, this is George, who was caught in the storm. We're letting him stay because he is kind."

George looked where the boy was looking—at the back of the sofa—and felt a little frisson of memory, one deeply buried in his own childhood. Showing a very different adult someone no one else in the room could see. And just for a moment, he imagined he did see a man sitting on the sofa—a misty, insubstantial figure with wild, merry eyes and a sensitive mouth. He shivered, and the illusion vanished.

Mark laughed. "Papa says you had better be, but he is only joking. I can tell he likes you."

"Enough, Marco," his mother interrupted, as though she were trying not to speak too sharply. "It is past time for bed, and the storm is quieter. Say goodnight to Sir George."

For some reason, the name surprised him. People either called him Sir Arthur, or just George, depending on when and how they knew him. He wasn't quite sure why he had told the boy he was called George, except that there was an honesty in such young children, and George was more closely related to who he was. Sir Arthur was who he had become, the miracle that enabled him to travel where he willed, meet interesting people, learn from more than just books, make decisions. But at heart, he was still George.

"Good night, Sir George!" Mark said enthusiastically.

George smiled. "I feel I should be slaying dragons when you call me that. Good night."

"Can I help slay the dragons?" Mark asked over his shoulder as his mother led him from the room.

"Of course. You shall be my apprentice."

Mark grinned at him, in clear expectation of an exciting new game. But it was Francesca's smile that stunned him. Part amused, part grateful, it softened her watchful, anxious eyes and made them sparkle. Her whole being lit up with a beauty that deprived him of breath.

Fortunately, she turned away from him, so she couldn't have begun to suspect the effect of her mere smile upon him.

Mere? There was nothing mere about it.

George liked to look at beauty. Beautiful women were no exception, but they did not usually tongue-tie him. Some of his closest friends were beautiful women—Lady Hera, for example, his first true friend who had shown him the way to freedom and truth.

But this girl, this mother, was nothing like Hera. Nor any of the women who had moved him since. She was a widow, the wife of a great musician, yet someone the villagers had felt free to play unkind tricks on. He should not be here, threatening her already precarious reputation, and yet the many layers and facets of her character fascinated him.

Of course, he was given to obsessions. Once he had solved the puzzle or revealed everything to his own satisfaction, he was usually prepared to move on to the next. For this woman's safety, he should move on now .

He was pacing between the shuttered window and a large, beautiful pianoforte that he had barely noticed before. He used it now as a quite deliberate distraction, running his hand over the smooth, polished curves, depressing the occasional key to appreciate the tone and timbre of a single note, perfectly in tune.

"Do you play, Sir Arthur?"

Her voice from the doorway took him by surprise. He realized he was sorry not to be Sir George to her still.

"No." He straightened. "I never learned. The pianoforte was always in the drawing room. But I like to listen."

She looked slightly confused by that but did not ask anything, for which he was grateful. He did not want to say to her, I was an odd child who embarrassed my parents in front of guests, so they kept me hidden, pretending I was ill and then dead. "Do you play?" he asked hastily.

"Sometimes." Another flash of lightning penetrated the room, and her breath caught. Her shoulders tensed as she waited for the crash of thunder. "I used to be quite good."

"Used to be?" He frowned. The rumble of thunder was quite distant, and she relaxed visibly.

"Yes. I used to play all the time. Now, I need to be in a certain mood. One has to practice constantly to keep the skill honed."

Something slotted into place in his mind. "You were a player, like your husband."

She tilted her head with a hint of defiance, daring him to criticize. "It was how I met him. We performed at the same theatre in Naples, and then played together many times."

"But his death changed everything for you," he guessed.

"Of course. But playing was already difficult by then."

"Why?" he asked.

Her body jerked, very slightly, as though she would turn away from him, and he knew he had been too blunt. But before he could apologize, she said in a rush, "War. Guns and panic that cleared the concert hall. Soldiers on the rampage, shooting everywhere. Now I need peace in order to play." She stared at him, clearly appalled by her own words. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that, and you didn't wish to hear it. Your honesty is catching."

She snatched her hand off the piano, as though afraid it would shake, and from impulse he caught it, holding it lightly but firmly, wishing only to comfort, because he too had been lonely and frightened in his life. Her fingers were soft and slender. They jumped in his, and then, before he could release her and apologize, they gripped his hand hard while thunder rumbled off into the distance.

"I have met soldiers who can longer bear the sound of guns," he said. "Or thunder. What happened to you?"

"Nothing. I hid beneath a harpsicord in a store cupboard until they were gone. Percival found me there. But I never forgot the fear, or the grief, because I thought I would never see him again. And now I never will."

"Does Mark see him? Or is he really just playing?"

Her eyes widened. She seemed to have forgotten her hand resting in his. Her mouth, curiously vulnerable, opened to speak and then closed again.

Slowly, she drew her hand free. "He imagines he does. As though wishing would make it true." She moved toward the sofa and sat down, almost exactly where Mark had been staring.

"Can he still remember what he looks like?" George asked.

"He seems to. He knew you were not Percival as soon as he saw you clearly, but he hopes. He is lonely."

He was not, George thought sadly, the only one. "Because the villagers are cruel?"

She nodded once.

"What is their problem with you? Just because you are different to them?"

"That and…the vicar's wife cut me when she realized I had played in public for money. On the stage like a common actress, I believe were her precise words." She shrugged. "Often, the ordinary people take their cues from those they imagine are their betters. While Percival was alive, it was not so bad, but after his death, their hostility grew more open. Now I hear words like foreign whore spoken quite openly when I walk into the village. For myself, I don't really care, but what if Mark hears and understands?"

George was appalled. "Intolerable!" He threw himself down on the sofa beside her. "Who is the magistrate?"

"I will not involve the law and allow such accusations to be official."

He closed his mouth, swallowing down his objections. He saw her dilemma, whatever the injustice. "So what will you do?"

"Pretend I do not hear or care. Show that they will never frighten me."

He met her gaze. "Do they?"

"Not when I do not care. I do not want to care."

"Not to care is not to be alive."

A frown flickered across her face and vanished, but he thought he had irritated her. "What or who do you care about, Sir Arthur, called George?"

He could not help smiling. "Many things now—many people that I once did not even know about."

She studied him until his eyes slid away. He liked her too much already to be comfortable with her displeasure.

But she did not sound displeased, just curious. "You are a little unworldly, are you not?"

"Yes," he admitted. "I am only just discovering it. In reality, I mean. I feel like a very well-educated child."

"Why? What is your story, Sir George? What dragons have you slain?"

"Internal ones, largely."

"You don't want to tell me," she said shrewdly. "Even though I have told you my secrets."

"Not all of them. But you are right. I am wary of contempt."

She looked gratifyingly startled. "Do you deserve it?"

"My friends would say not." From the corner of his eye, some movement distracted him, but when he glanced around, there was nothing there but the flickering candles. He felt again the shiver of memory, of an old, long-buried sensitivity.

"Someone walked over your grave," she observed. "A peculiar English saying."

"It is," he agreed, and began a humorous debate on the derivation of the phrase. It made her laugh, as he intended, and for a little they happily compared English, Latin, and modern Italian oddities.

Inevitably, the conversation broadened and led down unexpected paths that were both intriguing and fun. Until he realized there had been no thunder for an hour and the rain had receded. He rose with strange reluctance and bowed.

"Once again, my thanks for your kindness and for your company this evening. I will bid you goodnight."

"Goodnight," she responded, standing with him. "But if there was any kindness on my part, I believe you have repaid it."

"I wish I could." He wanted to take her hand and kiss it, but in the circumstances, it would have been highly inappropriate. Even less appropriate than imposing on her hospitality unchaperoned.

Since there was nothing else to do, he walked away and crossed the hall to the stairs, where he lit one of the small candles and found his way back to the bedchamber in which he had changed.

A fire had been lit there, taking the chill off the wet autumn evening, an additional thoughtfulness he had not expected from the ancient manservant. Wondering about her life here, about her son and her talented late husband, he prepared for bed.

Only as he was about to blow out the final candle and lay his head on the pillow did he become aware of the tension within the room.

George was sensitive to what he thought of as "atmosphere," stemming from his childhood, when he had so often failed to understand people or the expressions behind their words. Instead, he had relied on undercurrents that he could not name, until he had found his way back to the safety of his own comfortable space.

Only much later had he come to understand that the safety lay not in the physical room but in himself. Curiosity had outweighed fear and false duty, enabling him to consider many more thoughts and actions and begin to live as he always should have. However, some atmospheres were still best avoided—like the raucous inn—because they jangled his nerves in acute discomfort.

There was no noise in the bedchamber except his own breathing, the rustling of the bedclothes, the occasional gentle movement of the glowing coal in the guarded fireplace. And yet there was hostility here. Like his father's when he was disappointed. Like Nurse when she could not get her gin, or his brother Hugh when the numbers did not go as he wanted them to. And yet there was no one but George in the room.

So who was angry with him?

His skin prickled. Was someone else in the room? One of the two servants? Mark?

No. No one had come in—the door creaked, and he would have heard. He was alone.

But he did sense something : a presence, an emotion, perhaps? Strong emotion.

A breeze blew over his skin, raising the hair on his arms and his head. He almost leapt out of bed, except that he could see from the glow of the coal there was no one else in the room.

Old houses were drafty.

He closed his eyes and tried to relax. He could hear music. A violin, playing something wild yet elegant. Vivaldi? He smiled because it must have been Francesca, even though her favored instrument was not the violin but the pianoforte.

His eyes flew open. Francesca had gone to her own chamber. He had heard her footsteps on the stairs and the passage, the closing of her bedroom door. The music was not loud, but it did not come from the room below, or from a room along the passage. It sounded too close, too intimate, in this very room…

Or perhaps just in his head. Was he as mad as his father had claimed?

The music was beautiful, the playing exquisite, and yet it came with some kind of threat. Anger. A warning. He stared toward the glow in the fireplace.

"Percival," he murmured.

The fire flared into a single flame that quickly died. And just for an instant, a man's figure seemed to form in the darkness, wispy and insubstantial.

"I won't hurt her," George said. "I won't hurt either of them."

Abruptly, the atmosphere eased, and the imagined figure vanished as though it had never been—which it probably hadn't. George was alone in a warm, comfortable room. Even the wind no longer howled outside, and the rain was gentle, intermittent against the windowpanes.

He felt foolish, talking to an imaginary ghost. And yet in some ways it made sense that something of Percival lingered in this house, watching over his wife and child. It was as if Percival had identified himself to George with the music—however that was even possible—and made his warning plain. If George had intended any action against anyone in the house, he would undoubtedly have dropped it.

As it was, he felt a touch of guilt, because his attraction to Francesca was strong, and shame, because he was in danger of believing in the impossible.