She let her finger come to rest on Middle C.And pressed.
The sound was rich and mellow, and it flowed right through her, reverberating against her tautly stretched nerves. Her stomach tightened, but her hunger was forgotten. Suddenly all that mattered was this instrument and the need to lose herself in its exquisite familiarity. Heedless of the biting cold, she sat down, placing her bare feet on the chill metal pedals, letting her fingers rest deliciously on the keys for a second and closing her eyes in relief.
After a day of confusion, this, at last, was something she could understand and control. This was her way of interpreting the world, expressing emotion—the only way she had ever been shown and the only way she knew.
The moonlight turned her hands a bloodless blue as they began very quietly, very tentatively, to play. Without thinking she found the piece that was flowing from her fingers was Chopin’s Nocturne in E Minor, its haunting notes flooding the night and filling her head with memories.
Memories she hadn’t allowed to surface before, but suddenly wouldn’t be suppressed any longer.
Closing her eyes, she gave in to them. Gradually she became aware that the keys were slippery with wetness and she realised she was crying, her tears dripping down onto her hands. She played on, not feeling the cold.
Compared to the ice inside her, it was nothing.
* * *
Sitting at his desk in the library, Orlando rubbed a hand over his tired eyes and leaned back in his chair. Apart from the soft red glow of the dying fire, the computer screen in front of him was the only source of light in the massive room, and he had been looking at it for too long. His eyes stung.
Thankfully, much of his business was conducted internationally, so the long hours of the night when sleep would often evade him could be usefully spent working. His computer was state-of-the-art, fitted with the very latest in screen-reading software, which he had always refused to use, preferring instead to type by touch and magnify the words to a size that made it possible for him to read them.
Technically.
Tonight they seemed to slide across the edges of his vision and dissolve without penetrating his mind.
The Middle Eastern border situation he was dealing with was balanced on a knife-edge. Hired as a consultant on aerial tactics and weapons deployment by the government, he was monitoring the situation on an hour-by-hour basis, grimly holding out against sending planes into an area where they had about as much chance of surviving as a pheasant over the Easton beech woods in shooting season.
As he knew all too well. It had been on a similar raid that Felix had been shot down. Or that was the supposition: they’d never even recovered his plane.
Sighing, Orlando got up and went to stand at one of the long windows, feeling a gust of cold air as he pulled back the curtain and looked out. Around the relentless blackness in the centre of his vision he could see the courtyard was bathed in moonlight.
With something that felt almost like a physical blow he recalled Felix’s kindness that last time when he’d come home on leave, at the time when Andrew Parkes had given Orlando his diagnosis. Felix had accepted it with resignation, and for the remainder of his leave had treated Orlando with a horrible gentleness bordering on respect. When he had said goodbye it had almost as if he knew it would be the last time.
He’d had no intention of their relationship carrying on as before, Orlando realised now. As far as Felix had been concerned, if Orlando wasn’t the big brother he could compete with and look up to, he was no brother at all. Nothing.
Orlando leaned back against the wooden shutter, tipping his head back and banging it softly, rhythmically, against the paneling. The pain reminded him that he was still alive. Sometimes he felt that he was disappearing, that just as the world was fading before his eyes, so he was fading from the eyes of the world.
Somewhere in the distance he could hear music. Maybe he’d finally lost it? he thought with savage desolation, striding to the door and pulling it open.
But he hadn’t imagined it. Music was rippling through the dark rooms of the sleeping house, filling the empty spaces with sweet, sad resonance. With emotion. With life.
In the doorway of the grand salon he stopped, his breath catching in his throat. The effect of the music in the moonlit stillness was profound—it vibrated through him, smashing down defences he had spent the last year building. The room was ink-black washed with silver, and he turned his head, so that at the edge of his vision he could see her.
She had her back to him, her head tilted up so that her glowing red hair cascaded down over the thin slip of pale silk she was wearing. He could see with startling clarity the gleam of her bare shoulder in the moonlight, the shadowed drape of silk at the narrow part of her waist, just before it swelled out into sumptuous fullness. Hungrily, helplessly, his eyes sought her, desperate for more; but, as always, the instant he looked directly at her she disappeared into the black vortex in the centre of his vision. He felt his hands ball into fists of frustration as the music tugged invisible chords inside him, reawakening the feelings and needs he strove so hard to annihilate.
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