Dark Season by Joanna Lowell Read Free Book Online Page A

music. Plucked leaves from trees. Her energy was uncontainable in life. And in death … ?
    No,
he said to his whirring mind, his racing heart.
Stop. No more.
    At that moment, the woman turned again to the harpsichord and let her fingers brush the keys. He understood then what she had meant. It was the harpsichord that had enthralled her. Phillipa had been the same. The day it was first brought into the house, she’d played for hours, refusing to leave the music room to dine. Within a week, Michael, her father, had worried about the gift. Worried she might love it
too
much. Phillipa did nothing by halves.
    She had played divinely.
    He looked at the harpsichord, forcing himself. He looked at the nameboard, inlaid with ivory and mahogany. Amid the grotesque ornaments decorating the inside of the lid—beasts of the field, and serpents and capering satyrs—the massive cartouche drew his gaze. It contained the painted figures of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus frozen in the act of turning back, one arm holding his lyre, the other stretched out. He stared at Eurydice. Eurydice’s flat black eyes stared back, sightless. Her black hair flowed across her diaphanously robed shoulders. At any moment, she would vanish into the Underworld.
    Damn her.
    He didn’t know whom he meant, Phillipa or this woman who had drawn him into the music room. The last place he should have gone.
    “It’s Italian,” said the woman, curling her fingers back from the keys.
    “Venetian,” he said flatly, hating himself for falling so easily back into his old patterns. Macabre visions. Self-torment. Without the music to stir the air, the room seemed to close in upon him. Trombly House had once felt bright and open. Now he felt oppressed by it. The windows were shuttered. The room was dim. Every particle in the air had steeped in sorrow.
    He realized he was staring at the woman’s fingers, slim and white against the black fabric of her gown. He couldn’t help himself. He had to examine them more closely. He closed the distance between them with a stride and caught her wrist, as gently as he could. He turned her hand and stared at the knuckles, the tapering fingers. Her hand was thinner than Phillipa’s, the tendons and veins visible through the skin. Her fingernails were even in length, perfect ovals with pale half moons rising above the smooth cuticles.
    What had he expected? That the fingers that had freed the music latent in those keys should resemble Phillipa’s?
    The woman was making a strangled noise, tugging her hand. He raised his head, and for the first time, looked full upon her. The upper half of her face was shaded by the bonnet. Her eyes seemed impossibly deep-set, swimming in shadows. His own eyes were drawn down by the deep red of her lips. Her mouth wasn’t as wide as Phillipa’s. Her lips were full. Fuller. Under his gaze, they parted. He heard her indrawn breath.
    She was not Phillipa. She bore no resemblance to Phillipa in body, face, or spirit. But something in him thrilled with recognition. The shiver that moved across his skin was queer … a kind of fearful expectation.
    He felt another tug and opened his hand reflexively. He had no right to handle her this way. He was beyond a boor. He was a cad, unfit for human interaction. The woman was a guest of Louisa’s. She had been left to her own devices in the house, and she had been compelled to enter the music room by the sight of the harpsichord. Like Phillipa, she could not keep herself from touching those keys. She could not keep herself from playing that Bach sonata, infinitely sad, infinitely beautiful …
    That Bach sonata. How had she known? The bust of Bach near the window. Perhaps seeing it had brought Bach, and his sonatas, to her mind.
    He looked at Bach now, the blank white marble of his frozen countenance. No counsel there.
    “I apologize,” he said, looking back at her, fumbling for a way to end this unfortunate interview. The woman had dropped her head again,