Page 101 of Dukes All Night Long

“Y ou best get up afore the master finds you sleeping and the sky coming light.” Peg, Vicar Howard’s maid of all work, yanked the curtains open with a flourish.

Annie opened one eye. If it was coming light, it was coming slowly.

But Peg was right. Uncle Virgil would lash out at her for laziness if his breakfast wasn’t ready when he rose.

If he decided some demon of sloth had taken her, it would be the strap, not just words.

Peg would see to the hearths and set up the table, but cooking fell to Annie.

So did laundry. Rug cleaning. Wood chopping.

She rose with a groan, regretting the compulsion that drove her to the music room at Woodglen when she should be sleeping.

Weariness, hard to disguise, always weighed her down the next day.

When Gideon Kendrick, the duke’s brother, first told her she was welcome to use the pianoforte at Woodglen, she had asked Uncle Virgil for a few hours a week to practice.

She’d received a grim lecture on the evils of a woman who got above herself, and, inevitably, her mother’s sins, for which he had no doubt Mama currently burned in hell.

And so, when she could no longer stay away, she escaped in the night to play.

She suspected the Woodglen steward, Marshall, left the window unlocked for her.

An hour later, she stirred the porridge, which her uncle insisted be served without butter, much less sugar or spice every day of the year. He preferred it gray and tasteless. Aunt Ella never said what she preferred, but, meek as an ailing ewe, she never spoke up to her husband.

Annie brought the porridge to their table.

The vicar eyed her sharply, looking for some fault he could correct.

She stood back and waited for his wave of dismissal before retreating to the kitchen and her own bowl.

Glancing back at the closed door, she added the smallest dab of butter, her one rebellion for the day, and listened to the strains of the sonata in her mind, while picturing the stranger.

*

Owen found the breakfast room after one or two false starts. A large man in a rumpled brown coat gazed up from a plate piled high with eggs and kippers.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” the giant muttered, waving his fork. “You must be Pritchard, here on Gideon Kendrick’s business. Mrs. Morrit told me. Sorry I wasn’t here to greet you.”

“Aye. Are you Marshall?” Owen asked, assuming him to be the steward who looked over the estate in the absence of the duke and his brother.

The man nodded in acknowledgement, and sudden awareness of how foolish his flight through the house the night before might have seemed sent heat up Owen’s neck. “I hope I didn’t wake you last night. I was, erm, wandering, and I knocked over a vase.”

The man shrugged. “Footman’ll clean it. Duke kin afford it. Music disturbed you too, I see.”

You don’t know the half of it . Owen nodded. “She was going out the window when I got there.”

Marshall chuckled. “Right shy she is, though she comes regular to pound on that thing.”

“Who is she?”

“Annie Potter. Uncle’s the vicar in Nether Abbas, name of Virgil Howard. Potter was the wife’s side.”

“Why so late at night?” Why so shy? Why does she flee? How did she learn to play that well? How can that treasure be hidden away? Questions, appropriate and less so, swirled through Owen’s head.

“Dunno. I suspect the old muckworm won’t let her practice on the church’s wheezy old organ—or she don’t like it.” He waved the fork again. “Sit yourself. Is that a delivery from Kendrick you have for me?” Marshall indicated the bundle in Owen’s hands with an inclination of his head.

“Aye.” He lay the package wrapped in brown paper on a side table, and spoke to the footman about his preferences.

“Good,” Marshall said. “I needed those documents. You got it here in good time.”

“I was on my way to Exeter for meetings, and I popped in for a visit on my way. Gideon asked me to bring it. He said I could get what you needed here faster, and it wasn’t terribly far out of my way. I had time.”

“Friends, are you?” Marshall’s brows rose.

“Since he was first plucked out of the mines and brought on by old Kendrick. My father was a friend of theirs,” Owen replied, inhaling the aroma of well-brewed coffee with pleasure.

“Has he heard from his brother? His Grace, that is?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“Still wandering around the American west?” Marshall asked.

“Gideon seems to think he isn’t coming back, at least not any time soon. Pity that,” Owen said, peering around the room.

“You leaving this morning?” Marshall asked.

Owen started to say yes, but hesitated. “How often does this girl turn up with her music?”

“It varies. Sometimes nights in a row, sometimes not for a few weeks. You thinking of staying?”

Owen shrugged. “Always at night?” he asked.

“Kendrick gave her permission to come anytime. At first, she came to the kitchen door in the daytime. Stopped right soon. I suspect those folks in the vicarage piled more work on her days so she slips out at night.” Marshall chuckled. “I leave the window open.”

“What does she look like?” Owen asked.

“Plain little faded sort of female. Not much you’d notice unless she starts to play piano.”

No one would ever call Lucia plain or pale. Owen thought. She’s vibrant and full of life. But that music… It haunted him.

“I’m due in Exeter for a meeting the first of the week, but I could stay a few days to see if she comes again, if I wouldn’t be intruding. I’d like to hear her play again.”

“You’re welcome. I could use the company and the family won’t mind.”

Hours later, Owen brushed down his horse, Caerwyn, and fed him after a hard ride.

He’d galloped over fields, past tenants’ cottages, and over gentle streams. He even walked his mount slowly through the village and peered closely at the vicarage, always thinking fancifully that he might see Lucia around the next bend. All he saw was a maid emptying slops.

Owen walked to the house in the gloaming, with the sun just resting on the hills in the distance. It would be hours before the deep of night when he might expect the elusive musician, and some few before dinner with Marshall. After he’d changed from his ride, the music room called to him.

He found no sheets of music on the piano itself, leaving him to wonder if Annie carried her books with her or if she could play the sonatas perfectly from memory. Again, the likelihood of such a prodigy in Nether Abbas seemed slight.

He found a cabinet filled to the brim with compositions, ancient and new.

He would have to ask Gideon who kept the music room furnished.

There was no sign of dust or wear, but that, he suspected, was the stern housekeeper’s doing, or perhaps Marshall ordered it on behalf of their mysterious visitor.

A new piece caught his interest, a recent composition.

Soon he slipped into the lure of music, lost in what the composer called a “nocturne,” stumbling occasionally but finding his way. Time passed unnoticed. When the room darkened, he found flint on the mantel and lit the candelabra atop the piano before continuing.

Marshall’s voice pulled him back to reality. “You didn’t say you were a musician. I thought you were one of Kendrick’s clerks.”

Owen laughed at that. “Hardly. As I said, we’re friends. I’m the music director at Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff. I’m an organist. I haven’t played piano in a good while.” He was, in fact, the organ master.

The supper felt interminable. Kindly though Marshall was, they had little in common.

Owen had exhausted the man’s information about the elusive Annie Potter, and it wasn’t long before amusing anecdotes about the Kendrick children ran out as well.

Marshall had no more interest in the challenges of a cathedral choir school than Owen did the minutiae of estate management.

Borrowing a selection of books from the library, Owen climbed up the stairs to his room filled with hope.

I can afford three days. She isn’t Lucia, but the music was exquisite. Whoever she is doesn’t belong hiding in Nether Abbas. She shouldn’t be hidden in the night.

He lay awake longer than he ought, but she didn’t come.