His eyebrows went up. He had not expected this.
His silence was not the conceding sort. He was going to be silent until words were compelled from her, like a soldier ordered into formation.
“Very well, Your Grace. I will tell you, if you will answer a question of my choosing, when I choose.”
“Are you negotiating with me, Miss Wylde?” He sounded less incredulous and displeased than she’d anticipated.
“Yes.”
He mulled this. “Very well. I am allowed three refusals.”
“You’re suggesting that you’re allowed to refuse to answer a question three times before you’ll agree to answer one?”
“Yes.”
“One refusal.”
He considered this. “Done.”
She drew in a breath. “When I was a very little girl, my family and I—my mother and father and me—traveled to the seashore. We did this only twice. We lived and breathed our little patch of London, you see, which we quite loved. We knew everybody! But we’d neighbors all on top of and next to us and cobblestones on the ground outside, and—”
“What sort of work did your father do?”
“He was a cobbler, like his father and grandfather.”
He nodded crisply for her to continue.
“He had a little shop on Tully Street near Haymarket, and we lived above it. Cor, we were busy. I still remember all the customers by name and . . . it was lively. And a great deal of work all day. We weren’t rich, but we never wanted for a thing, mind. Anyhow, I was eight years old and my father decided we ought to take a trip to the seashore in Brighton. He’d traded a pair of shoes to a friend who drove a hack, and so we had a carriage to ourselves. I tried very hard to stay awake to see all the new things, but I fell asleep straightaway . . . When I woke up, everywhere there was so much velvety green. Like blankets heaped up in piles. And the sky was so blue and empty, it was like a china plate. And on this green were sheep, and they looked like clouds in a green sky. It was like waking up in a dream. I thought I was suddenly in a fairy world. What’s more free than a cloud? To drift this way and that. To take on new shapes and colors. To see the whole world.”
He was silent. But it was clear he was listening closely.
“It was a very pretty sight. It was the first thing that came to mind—sheep and clouds. I’ve always wondered who owned those sheep.”
He was quiet a moment. And then he said:
“Mi chiedo chi sia il proprietario di queste pecore. I wonder who owns these sheep.”
She was instantly intrigued.
“Queste pecore mi appartengono. These sheep belong to me,” he continued.
“Queste pecore sembrano piccole nuvole. These sheep look like little clouds.”
“Queste pecore sembrano piccole nuvole,” she breathed slowly, each word phonetically, rhythmically flawless. Like she’d been given a magic spell. “It’s lovely when you say it that way, isn’t it? It sounds like the beginning of an aria. The curtain rises on green fields made all out of heaps of green velvet, and there are little sheep among them, perhaps fashioned out of felt and cotton wool, and the shepherdess in the most adorable frock strolls onstage—”
“—and her flock is eaten by wolves because the daft woman is busy singing about how they look like little clouds instead of watching them.”
“Operas do not need to make sense,” she said with tolerant placidity. “They only need to make the audience feel things. Like a lovely dream. For how often do dreams make sense? Dreams of the sort you have when you go to sleep at night.”
“Why on earth is that necessary? Why is any of that necessary?” His patience sounded uncommonly frayed.
He might mean dreaming. He might mean this conversation. He might mean The Grand Palace on the Thames.
She wrinkled her nose in mock sympathy and tipped her head. “Feelings are not your forte, Your Grace?”
“I should think life is operatic enough without introducing an additional element of absurd drama, let alone a drama one pays to see. I keep a box at the opera but I do not use it. My son does.”
“Fair point, Your Grace. It’s just that one person’s absurd drama, as you put it, might be another person’s matter of life or death. And not everyone prefers their waking lives to their dreams.”
“Are feelings your forte, then, Miss Wylde?”
“Good God, no. Feelings are like a stiff wind. They can blow you right off the jetty.”
He pressed his lips together for a long moment while he studied her.
“Blow you off the jetty?” he said finally.
“Another time,” she said, with an airy lift of her hand.
“I am all anticipation.”
“I will admit I enjoy knowing I’ve the power to make others feel things with my voice. To transport them to another place. To lift them up out of themselves.”
“A power, is it?”
“Oh, yes.”
They regarded each other fixedly. She noticed that his posture, which heretofore had always looked as though he had a long rifle for a spine, had relaxed a very little. She imagined that “a very little” was all this man ever relaxed.
“Very well, then, Miss Wylde. I will attempt to impart the rudiments of conversational Italian over a series of hours. I suggest three o’clock to four o’clock each afternoon for the duration of my stay. Would you like to avail yourself of lessons?”
“Yes, please. Thank you. I’ve permission to use ‘bloody’?”
“Miss Wylde, I was a soldier. Epithets are practically a second language for military men. My sensibilities cannot be violated with mere words.”
“Even when uttered by a woman?”
“Even when uttered by a woman.”
There was a little pause during which she rather loudly thought but did not mention the words she’d sung the night before, which had violated his sensibilities, which had arguably led to the two of them standing here today.
“I anticipate the hours I’ll be spending in your company will necessitate its use once or twice.”
“I should feel I have failed in my duty as a tutor if you are not so inspired.”
There was a silence.
He sighed. “I sense a ‘but,’ Miss Wylde.”
“Not so much a ‘but’ as . . . an ‘and,’ Your Grace. I’ve a list of things I’ve heard many times over the years in Italian, and I should like to know at last what they truly mean. And I should like to learn the meanings of some of the lyrics that I’ve been singing. If you would be so kind.”
“Yes. Of course. I’d be pleased to do that. Tomorrow, three o’clock in the afternoon in the antechamber of my suite. Do not be late. Now, if you would be so kind as to excuse me?”
“I would be so kind,” she said on a grave hush, and curtsied to him as he bowed, and the two so kind people parted.
Chapter Six
Her heart was beating absurdly quickly as she made her way up the stairs and down the hall the following day to the duke’s chambers. She was escorted by Dot, who was thrilled to be charged with the errand.
They paused in the hall and peered down it.
At the end of it was an anteroom attached to the duke’s room, fronted by heavy double doors, both sides open. They could see the man himself at a great table, illuminated by the sunlight from the large arched window as if he were onstage.