Something Old, Rebecca Connolly [ebook reader for laptop TXT] 📗

He lifted his chin in a faint gesture toward the other guests. “Julia must have asked for music. The pianoforte is being brought in, and they are arranging chairs… Has your wife been asked to play? She was a pleasant surprise at Trevadden.”

At once, Thomas found Lily among the guests, taking a seat beside Miss Moyle rather than moving to the front to perform. “If she has, it appears she will not be first,” he murmured, smiling for effect as he watched his wife pretend to smile for her friend and for those around her.

What was affecting her so? He needed to find out, needed to soothe whatever wounds she bore, needed to bring the smile back to her lips. The instinct to do so, the clawing within him to mend whatever had been broken, circled and swirled with an incessant edge that made his head pound.

He was so out of practice in doing such a thing, however, that he felt frozen in his place. He could only stare. Helplessly.

“Friends,” Mrs. Roskelley announced from the newly designated front of the room, “I am so pleased to be able to offer you some music this evening. My cousin, Miss Honora Berkeley, is visiting us from Bath, and she has graciously agreed to sing for us.”

She nodded in encouragement, at which point two ladies came forward, neither of whom were particularly familiar to Thomas. The elder of the two, if he could call her that, sat at the instrument, while the younger stood before it, hands clasped.

“Have you met this cousin of hers?” Thomas asked Trembath, knowing the connection between him and Mrs. Roskelley.

“Not this one,” he replied without concern. “Pretty little thing. Reminds me of Julia’s sister Kate, in a way.”

Thomas couldn’t make a response to that, given he had never met the woman, but he could see the resemblance between Mrs. Roskelley and her auburn-haired, earthy-eyed cousin.

The music from the pianoforte began, then Miss Berkeley began to sing, and all else in the room stilled when she did so. Her voice held the clarity of crystal and the purity of a songbird, and it robbed the hearer, even if briefly, of the ability to breathe.

“Once I had a sprig of thyme.

It prospered by night and by day;

Till a false young man came a-courting to me,

And he stole all my thyme away.”

The folk song was old and familiar, even to Thomas, and the melancholy tone of it would not help but stir the listener.

“The gardener was standing by.

I bade him choose for me.

He chose me the lily and the violet and the pink,

But I really did refuse them all three.”

Something tugged at Thomas’s heart the more he listened to the song, pulled his attention from Miss Berkeley’s performance, and forced him to look at his wife.

Lily was looking at him in return, her expression one of near torment. Her dark eyes were round, luminous even from this distance, though he could not tell if it was the light of the room or a sheen of tears. He had never seen her demeanor so open, so raw, so full of yearning, and he could not look anywhere else.

“Thyme it is a precious thing,

And thyme it-e-will grow on,

And thyme it’ll bring all things to an end,

And so does my thyme grow on.”

He could sense the emotions from across the room as though he felt them himself, could sense the need and the agony, could almost hear the questions she wanted to ask. Nothing could have broken his connection to her in that moment, not a disturbance in the room, not a scandal around them, not a disaster that could take the entire house down around their ears.

“It’s very well drinking ale,

And it’s very well drinking wine,

But it’s far better sitting by the young man’s side

That has won this heart of mine.”

Lily rose before the song ended, dropping her gaze from his as she turned down the makeshift aisle of chairs, moving toward the back of the room where doors led out to the garden. She slipped through them as applause rang through the room, leaving Thomas to stare after her in bewilderment, his heart pounding in what seemed to be a hollow cavern within him.

What was wrong? What had happened? What did he do?

He blinked once, then set the drink in his hand down on the table behind him and followed her as Miss Berkeley began another song for the remaining guests.

The gardens were dim, lit only by the light of the moon above and the light from the house streaming onto it. A few stands of candles lined some paths, but the majority was that of natural evening light alone.

Lily preferred to be in the garden in such light at the moment, as she could no longer contain tears. Her mind had been full of thoughts of her marriage since that afternoon, of renewed pain in its nature, in wishing for more and fearing it would never be. In frustration at her own inability to change it. In agony for feeling so much and doing so little. In still loving her husband despite having little reason to do so.

Oh, that wasn’t right, nor was it fair. He was not a villain, nor was he bad. He was kind, and he was good, and of late, he had even been sweet and playful. She had simply grown so accustomed to having nothing from him that she moved about freely without consideration of him. Had exhausted her efforts to be loved by him. Had forgotten to care that she loved him.

She turned to rest against an ivy-strewn wall among the hedges, tears streaming down her cheeks, her lungs fighting for the air to breathe.

Something had broken free within Lily in the last few days, something she had thought was long caged and silent but now fluttered about and woke much else within her.

She didn’t want to live in a tepid marriage