Guilty Series (54 page)

She also wanted to see the sea, so Dylan took them down the steep path through a terraced garden and down the wooded path that led to the steps they had seen earlier. As they made the climb back up the path, Isabel raced ahead, up the flagstone steps of the gardens to the house, calling for Molly to come out and see the starfish she'd found washed high on the shore down below.

“I feel as if we have walked a hundred miles,” Grace told Dylan in a breathless voice as they climbed the steepest part of the path. “Have you shown her everything you own yet?”

“Everything?” He shook his head. “Even at the speed that little girl can run, we couldn't show her seven hundred and sixty acres in a day.”

“No,” Grace said, smiling, “I suppose not. Where is your family estate?”

He pointed northwest over his shoulder. “Plumfield is up toward Honiton, about ten miles from here. There are orchards there as well. I don't know if Ian is in residence now. We do not keep each other informed.”

“When your brother was at the house in Portman Square, he did not stay even for the night. I never had the chance to meet him. You and he are not close, are you?”

“No.” Dylan paused, then said, “We were, when we were boys.”

“What happened?”

“He disapproves of me. He has no tolerance for my artistic passions and my…peccadilloes, shall we say? He feels I bring disgrace upon my family name. Nor do I have patience with him. He is very conscious of propriety and position. He talks in the language of diplomats, a dialect which is incomprehensible to me.” He shrugged. “Chalk and cheese, that is all.”

Grace stopped midway up the flagstone steps to look around her. “This is a beautiful place.”

He stopped beside her. “Thank you. I had been looking for a property for some time. The family estates are entailed, but Ian and I each received substantial inheritances. Mine included funds for the purchase of an estate of my own.” Dylan gave a laugh as he looked out over the sea. “I think it was the only way my father could think of to make me settle down and be respectable.”

“Dylan?”

He glanced at her. “Hmm?”

“I do not think it worked.”

He grinned at her. “The men of my family have always been the epitome of English gentry—upright, honorable country gentlemen. I am certain you know just what sort I mean.”

She thought of her own father. “Yes, I do.”

“The Moore men have all been like that—loved their horses and their dogs as much as they loved their women. They were the hunting and fishing sort, getting into a few scrapes at Harrow and Cambridge before marrying the right country girl with the proper dowry and settling down to life as country squires. My father messed up everything by falling inexplicably in love with a sweet, penniless Welsh girl, whose head was full of romantic ideas. She played the flute. Very different from anything the Moores had in the family tree, I assure you.”

“You are a mixture, then, of both sides of your family, musical like your mother, fond of sport like your father. Where does the wild side come in?”

He gave her a pirate smile. “That's all mine.”

Grace watched the wind carry his hair across his cheek, and as he shook it back, she wondered what it was about men who were wild and disreputable that attracted her so much. It seemed to be her lot in life. “Since your mother was musical, she must have understood your passion for it.”

“Yes. I adored my mother. She knew what music was, you see, she comprehended it in the same way I do. She wrote symphonic poems before there was a name for them. She was the only person who supported my talent. My father could never understand why we both had this passion for music. Despite the fact that he loved my mother until the day she died, he never understood her. He never understood me. Ian doesn't either. He is a great deal like our father. My mother died when I was a boy of eleven.”

“That must have been hard for you.”

“Yes.” He bent down and began to collect some of the small stones beside the path. “When she died,” he went on, “I had no one in my family, or anywhere really, who understood what I do and why it is so important to me. I began to rebel and do what I pleased, and my father could not really control me. He did not care about my music, and because of that, I did not care what he thought of me.” Dylan straightened, stretched his arm back, and threw one of the stones in his hand. It cleared the cliff and arched out to the sea. “After Cambridge, I went to Europe for four years. I toured. First, piano concerts, then conducting.” He tossed another rock over the cliff.

“I understand why you do not tour now,” she said. “You do not need the money. But why do you not conduct?”

“I just don't.” He did not elaborate, and she did not press him. After a moment, he said, “Anyway, my father and I never got along. I only came home to see him once before he died.”

Grace took another look at her surroundings. “Yet, when you were looking for an estate of your own, this is the one you chose,” she pointed out gently. “One near where you grew up, one that has orchards, one like home.”

“Yes.” Dylan looked over at her and laughed a little. “By God, I did, didn't I? I never thought about it that way. All I knew was that I loved this place from the first moment I saw it.”

“Then why do you not live here all the time?”

He was silent so long that she thought he wasn't going to answer her. “London is…easier. I haven't been here in quite some time. Two years, at least.”

“But why not?” Grace gestured to the prospect spread out before them, the trees on either side, the white rotunda that gleamed a few feet away from where they stood, and the terraces of garden and lawn that sloped down into a wild tangle of shrubs and trees before it dropped over the rocky cliff to the ocean below. “How could you stay away?”

“I had forgotten how much I used to love it here,” he murmured without answering her question. Then, with a shake of his head, he turned and started up the steps toward the house.

“Used to love it?” she echoed, following him. “Do you not love it now?”

“I don't know.” He stepped up onto the terrace and took several steps along its length, then stopped to look out at the view again. “It is so damnably quiet here, so serene. I had forgotten that.”

“You talk as if quiet and serenity are bad things. Would not those very things help you write music?”

“No.” She watched his lips tighten as he turned his back to the sea. He sat on the edge of the short wall that surrounded the terrace, his hands curling over the stone edge on either side of his hips. He closed his eyes. “I don't even know what serenity is anymore.”

Grace thought of Etienne and his erratic mood changes. “What is the turbulence all about?” she asked him, almost as if to herself. “Does everything have to be exciting all the time?”

“You do not understand.” He opened his eyes, but he did not look at her. Instead, he straightened away from the wall and started back toward the house.

Grace watched him go, and something made her call after him, “Dylan?”

He stopped, but he did not turn around. “Yes?”

“I would like to understand.”

“I doubt you ever could.” With that, he went inside the house.

 

It wasn't until Dylan was lying in bed that night that he fully appreciated why he never went to the country anymore. No diversions. No distractions. Country hours. Nothing to distract his attention at this hour of the night but the nightingale singing outside his window. Nothing to take him away from the hated, grinding sound inside himself.

I'd like to understand.

How could anyone understand what this was like, this maddening sound, day after day, night after night? Unless one heard it and lived it, one could never understand it.

He tried to shut it out, but as usual, the harder he tried, the louder the sound became. Laudanum was nearby, ready to dull his senses into an opiate-induced haze that might pass for rest. He had brought hashish with him as well, but he was strangely reluctant to take either of them. He thought of Isabel and the hashish he had smoked that night at Angeline's, and for a reason he could not quite define, he did not want to dull his wits anymore. It wasn't something a father should do.

He rolled onto his side, staring out the open French door onto his balcony, watching the cool ocean breeze play with the sheer white gauze curtain in the moonlight. If only he could spend the night like an ordinary person; how blissful to simply lay his head down, close his eyes, and drift into sleep.

He knew from experience that eventually his mind would surrender to his body's demand and sleep would claim him. Tomorrow perhaps, or the next day, but not tonight. He shoved back the sheet, got out of bed, and walked naked out onto the balcony.

Nights in early May were still a bit cool here on the coast, but he scarcely noticed the chill in the breeze. He inhaled the fragrance of the herbs in the garden below and the tangy smell of the sea beyond. The moonlight reflected off the caps of the waves in the distance like sparks in the night.

Dylan went back inside and shut the door. He walked into the dressing room. Careful not to wake Phelps, and fumbling a bit in the dark, he located a pair of black Cossack trousers, took his favorite dressing gown off the hook on the door, and left the dressing room. He slipped on the loose-fitting trousers and shrugged into the robe of heavy black silk, not bothering to tie it. He couldn't sleep, he might just as well work on the symphony, he decided and went downstairs. Since the music room at Nightingale's Gate was on the ground floor, a fair distance from the bedrooms, he probably wouldn't wake anyone.

The moonlight enabled him to see well enough to find an oil lamp and friction matches in the drawing room before he passed through one of the three wide arches that led from there into the music room. He poured himself a glass of claret, opened the French door that led into the garden to let in the cool air, and he sat down on the upholstered velvet bench of the piano, placing the lamp in the holder on the right side of the music stand. Phelps had already placed a stack of composition paper, a desk set, and his folio on the closed lid, ready for him whenever he chose to work. To dampen the volume, he left the lid down.

Given a choice, he preferred the Broadwood Grand in London to the one here in Devonshire, for the tone was just a bit richer, but one couldn't just toss a grand piano onto the rack of a traveling coach and take it along. This instrument was almost as excellent, and when he ran his hand over the keys, he found that Mrs. Hollings had followed his instructions. It was in perfect tune.

He played scales for ten minutes, then took a swallow of his wine as he scanned what he had already written.

He was in the midst of the second movement, and as his gaze ran across the notes he had scrawled on the staff lines, he remembered why that was so. He was stuck. The chords he had finally worked out for the feminine exposition didn't work here in the slow, lyrical second movement. He didn't know quite why. He tried several different variations on the theme, but none satisfied him, and that was the problem. He was never sure what worked and what didn't anymore, and as a result, he could not feel satisfied with what he had and just go on. He was constantly getting stuck.

Dylan stopped playing. He rubbed his hand over his eyes and made a grinding sound of exasperation through his teeth.

“Not going well?”

He looked up at the sound of Grace's soft voice. She was standing in her nightclothes under the middle arch that opened into the drawing room, a lamp in her hand, her hair caught back in that heavy braid across her shoulder, her feet bare beneath the unadorned hem of her nightclothes. She had very pretty feet.

He took a deep breath and looked into her face. “Did I wake you?” he asked.

She gave a yawn and nodded.

“I'm sorry. I didn't think anyone could hear in the bedrooms.”

“I had my window open a bit for the ocean air, and I heard you.” She glanced around at the slate blue walls, the creamy white columns and moldings, and the solid, unpretentious furniture. “These are nice, these two rooms.”

“How is your bedroom?”

“Pretty. Willow green paper and a soft rug. I like it. In fact, I like your house, Dylan.” She walked around the piano as if to stand behind him and have a look at the music, but then she paused and glanced at him. “May I see it, or do you not let anyone see your work?”

Dylan made an open-handed gesture toward the sheet music on the stand. “Just do not critique it,” he said with a short laugh. “I hate that.”

She did not laugh with him. “I shan't criticize,” she promised and moved behind him to peek over his shoulder. She set her lamp in the holder on the left side of the music stand and leaned forward. She put her right hand on the keyboard and awkwardly played a few bars. “Despite my lack of skill at piano, I think it's lovely.”

“Thank you.” He looked at it and frowned, thoroughly dissatisfied. “But it's all wrong.”

“Wrong? But it sounds beautiful.”

“It isn't right. I cannot explain why.” He pressed his hands to his skull with a heavy sigh and closed his eyes. “It just doesn't sound right.”

She put a hand on his shoulder. “Perhaps you should stop and relax for a bit.” She leaned down closer to his ear. “It always helped Liszt.”

She laughed and started to walk away, but he grabbed her around the waist and hauled her back. “Oh, no,” he said, “you are not getting by with that. How do you know what worked for Liszt, hmm?”

“I was teasing,” she said, laughing, grabbing his wrists at her waist and trying to push his arms away. “I was only teasing, I swear it.”

With that admission, he let her go, and she walked away. “I am going to the kitchens to make myself a dish of tea.”