She did, however, imagine the letter she might write to her mother, if she dared.
Dear Mama,
I hope this finds you well.
I think my life will change today.
At five minutes until three, she was moving down the hall to the anteroom, feeling much the way she did before she walked out onstage, emerging from the dark into the light.
She paused in the doorway.
She was surprised to find him standing behind the table, rather than sitting. All six feet infinity of him.
“Buonasera, Your Grace.”
“Buonasera,” he said politely. “Miss Wylde, upon reflection, I’ve decided that my time here at The Grand Palace on the Thames would be better served by working to complete my memoirs. I should think any debt to you incurred by my previous thoughtlessness has been satisfied, so I am drawing our Italian lessons to a conclusion. I wish you good luck. Good day.”
A few numbed seconds elapsed during which it felt as though her spirit had been neatly bisected from her body. As if with a spada.
She could not move, or breathe or speak.
She stared across at him from the doorway. He seemed to pulse, somehow, before her vision.
He was watching her, expression inscrutable. Posture erect.
Or, if she was not mistaken, braced.
He did not seem to be breathing, either.
You coward.
He was hardly, of course, a coward.
But she supposed some things were more terrifying even than staring down the French.
She opened her mouth to say something clever or cutting. Or perhaps gracious. A “thank you for your time, Your Grace, I understand.” Something that would impress him, and that he would not ever forget.
And then the pain set in with a shocking totality.
She said, “I hate you.”
It was appalling. Her voice was low and sincere and faintly surprised. It trembled, which she regretted. She would have liked to have sounded emotionless.
The violence of her own emotion embarrassed her. But she decided she didn’t mind. She instead felt a peculiar, dark exhilaration. She so seldom said precisely what she felt, and this was her purest truth in the moment.
She watched those words enter him like a dart. The tensing of his features, the tightening of knuckles on the quill he held. The shadow of pain about his eyes.
But he said nothing.
She supposed he was not the sort of man a woman like her could ever hope to really hurt.
She turned and departed with dignity, closing the always-open door quietly behind her.
James stared at the smooth, blank white door long after she’d departed. It suddenly bore a disorienting resemblance to the lid of a coffin.
The knob winked like a blade.
And his ears rang as though she’d slammed it.
So he closed his eyes. All of his senses, in fact, suddenly felt raw and amplified, as if he’d sampled the wrong thing from Mr. Delacorte’s case and had awakened naked alongside a sleeping tiger.
He rubbed his forehead. He pulled his hand away and stared at it. It was trembling, as if he’d just done murder.
It’s how he knew he’d done the right thing for both of them regardless of how he, and she, felt now. He had learned it was always best to make a cut brutal and swift. There was no mercy in it otherwise.
He’d lately come to know that his very spirit was always contracted like a muscle to bear all of the things expected of him. He’d understood this the instant her radiant face had lifted to his in the parlor the day of the Italian composer. Because for that brief moment, for the first time in his life, his feet had simply not felt the ground.
Firmly rooted to earth again, accustomed territory where he would always have the lay of the land, he sat down and picked up his quill pen.
He dropped his forehead in his hand.
He couldn’t make the pen move. All he saw on that foolscap was the image of Mariana’s white, stunned face.
And it was this—the need, the attempt to think of anything else—that resulted in a few words. He wrote haltingly at first.
Then ever more concertedly.
And before the hour was out, he’d filled an entire, very surprising page, word after word emerging as if something had broken open inside him.
And thusly, at last, he began to tell the story of a life.
But not, his publisher would be chagrined to learn, the one he’d already lived.
In her room, she wept.
Only a little, and as quietly as she could. Palms pressed hard against eyes and mouth. Hot tears leaking through her fingers. Ribs aching from the blows of her stifled sobs. But she could bear this. Couldn’t she? It was just emotion; for heaven’s sake, if emotion was capable of killing her, it would have done it by now. And fury and embarrassment were practically part of every day in the typical opera career, weren’t they? Onstage and off. She ought to be able to manage that much without coming apart.
But grief was so much harder.
Grief was . . . hope’s ghost.
The grief was how she knew hope had taken up residence in her like a sneaky lodger. She did not dare give this hope a name or assign it an objective. She only knew definitively that it had been there, because now she was leaden and hollow with the disbelief that accompanies a death.
Hope. That was the gleaming thing she’d sensed on the horizon. It had borne her aloft. Like a cloud. It had sneaked in, despite her ramparts.
She felt like a fool. And worse than that: uncertain. She was suddenly forced to recast everything she thought she knew about herself in this discovery. Because a lot of new questions were begged. How much of what she considered her courage was merely bravado? How much of it was really . . . just her lying to herself?
She could not afford to feel uncertain. She could not afford to miss a trick. Any emotional condition other than pragmatism was sheer luxury at this point in her life.
He was a bloody duke! What had she been thinking? He could say and do very nearly anything he liked to anyone at any time, of course. And he was better at denying himself unwise things, and perhaps that was all to the best.
Surely he was right.
Because wasn’t the bastard always right?
It was just . . .
She was going to miss him.
And he, she knew, was going to miss her.
She sighed and pulled her palms away from her face. She took another few good, long breaths.
She found a handkerchief and dampened it in her basin, where the water was still cool, and gently dabbed at her eyes.
She inspected her reflection. It wasn’t unpleasing. She tried a smile; it wasn’t unpersuasive. She did not look ravaged by disappointment. But there was still a tension about her eyes, at the corners of her mouth. That wouldn’t be going anywhere until—and if—she found a paying job.
This reminded her that she was luckier than most. Because she knew what to do with emotions. She could turn them into glory.
And one day again, hopefully, into more money.
Finally she made her way downstairs and followed the smells and laughter down one more flight of stairs to the kitchen. She found it as usual, filled with the warmth and laughter of kind and clever women. It was a balm, it truly was. A balm she was borrowing, like a balm from Delacorte’s case, a temporary remedy, but a remedy nonetheless. She did not truly belong here.
She hovered on the threshold for just one moment.
“Miss Wylde! We have decided on lemon seed cakes for the Night of the Nightingale, and punch,” Delilah told her happily.