Ernestine looked up expectantly, then started to pack up her embroidery. “I expect that’ll be him, don’t you think?”
Stacie glanced at the clock and numbly nodded. He was right on time.
She heard their parlormaid Hettie’s light footsteps patter across the tiles of the front hall, then the rumble of Frederick’s voice reached her, and she rose as Hettie opened the drawing room door and announced, “Lord Albury to see you, my lady.”
“Thank you, Hettie.” Stacie thrust aside her troubling thoughts and plastered on a smile. “Lord Albury.” She went forward to meet him. “Welcome to my home.”
Frederick took the hand she offered and bowed over it. “Lady Eustacia.” His gaze went past her to Ernestine, who had risen and now hovered expectantly.
Retrieving her hand, Stacie turned to her cousin. “Lord Albury, allow me to present my cousin, Mrs. Ernestine Thwaites. Ernestine resides here, keeping me company.”
Ernestine smiled in obvious delight and curtsied. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, my lord.”
Frederick nodded, polite yet aloof. “Mrs. Thwaites.”
“I’ve heard so much about you and your wonderful gift, my lord,” Ernestine all but gushed. “I was utterly thrilled to hear that you will be playing for us again.”
Frederick’s expression grew even more distant. “Indeed.” With a curt, clearly-intended-to-be-dismissive nod for Ernestine, he turned to Stacie. “Your piano?”
Shy? Or merely made uncomfortable by praise?
Whichever it was, Stacie smiled and waved toward the double doors in the middle of the drawing room’s interior side wall. “It’s in the music room—through here.”
She walked to the doors, opened them wide, then led the way into the large music room. She glanced back and saw Frederick looking around, taking note of the room’s arching ceiling and the overall dimensions.
Stacie glimpsed Ernestine, back in the drawing room, shifting to sit in a chair close by the open doors; thankfully, her cousin would be screened from anyone on the piano stool.
Frederick’s and her footsteps echoed as they crossed the polished wooden floor.
“The acoustics are good,” he murmured, a tinge of surprise in his voice.
“Indeed, they are.” She smiled and admitted, “I bought the house for this room.”
A brief smile chased the cool reserve from his face. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
They reached the grand piano, angled in one corner of the room, with the light from the long bow windows falling over the keyboard and music stand.
As he moved to claim the piano stool, Frederick resurveyed the room. He sat and announced, “This is placed almost perfectly—let’s see how it sounds.”
He raised the lid and swept aside the felt strip covering the keys, then spread his fingers over the ivory and played a rapid succession of scales.
Stacie held her breath, hoping for any piece of music, however short. She’d heard him play at the school, and that had only whetted her appetite. To hear him play here, in a room and on an instrument she knew, suddenly escalated to a burning desire.
He frowned, then embarked on another, longer set of scales, one that used every section of the keyboard.
Even that, somehow, sounded special; there was something in his touch, in his mastery of the keys, that invested each note with strength and clarity… She couldn’t explain it, but she knew what she heard.
On reaching the end of the exercise, he lifted his hands from the keys, and to Stacie’s disappointment—and she was sure Ernestine’s as well—he picked up the discarded felt and spread it back over the keys. “If it had been just one or two strings, I would have tuned them myself, but most of the notes are just a fraction out. We’ll need an expert tuner to restore it to perfection.”
He rose, lowered the piano’s lid, and met her eyes. “Unless you have someone else you prefer, I’ll arrange for my tuner to call.”
“By all means.” Of course, he had a preferred expert. “It would be best, I suspect, were it tuned to your specifications.”
“Indeed.” He looked up the room toward the door to the hall. “If at all possible, I’ll bring him around tomorrow—most likely in the early afternoon.”
“That will suit admirably.” She waved toward the second set of double doors, opposite the still-open pair that joined the music room to the drawing room. “While you’re here, perhaps I should show you how I believe we’ll accommodate our guests at our…we haven’t yet decided what to call them. Musical events? Musical soirées? They aren’t quite recitals, are they?”
She saw his lips twitch. He rounded the piano and joined her as she walked to the second set of doors. “No—it would be misleading to call such a function a recital. I’ve always wondered why hostesses don’t simply call such events a musical evening.”