Godspeed (23 page)

Again, I knew denial would be useless, and so I said nothing.

“I know that you have heard him make remarks to me that can wound me as nothing else on this planet can, or in the universe ever could. Still I love him, because he is who he is, and I have loved him all of my life. Before I even understood exactly how or why I felt about him as I do, I loved him. So, as someone who has spent years keeping him alive, so that he can do extraordinary things like save throwaway children from dying in the streets of broken hearts, let me tell you this.”

He turned away, staring back into Quinn's laboratory as he spoke. “He's done much for other people, and you are right. He is a good man.” He hesitated but a moment before adding, “He can never love me, and he will never love you. A lifetime of loving him will not help him, but it will consume you. Destroy you, as it is slowly destroying me.”

He took two bold steps forward but then stopped, and spun on his boot heel back toward me one last time. Tears were in his eyes, and a single drop escaped down his cheek as he concluded our conversation. “There is Hell to be paid for Quinn's gifts, and he is the one who pays most dearly of all.”

As he quit the room, he left me with one last warning.

“Do not let him find you here.”

C
HAPTER
24

HOURS PASSED
and still Quinn did not return. Soon the sun would rise and I would have to recharge the charm; and so, to bed.

First, I wished somehow to make amends as much as possible with Schuyler if I could. I searched him out, and found him in the red room. I was about to call his name when a sound made me stop in the doorway.

It was the sound of the key case on the piano creaking as it was lifted.

Then came the grating sound of moving furniture, as the piano bench normally pushed aside to accommodate Jib's wheelchair was returned to its proper position.

I stood just out of view and watched. I had never seen Schuyler actually play the instrument before, and had begun to wonder if the stories he told about giving music lessons to the young people who frequented the house were not only untrue, but impossible because he lacked the talent.

He hesitated before sitting down. Something caught his attention; out of the corner of his eye he spotted an article of clothing that drew him toward it, in what appeared to be something of a trance-like state. His eyes clouded over, then he turned away, and I could no longer see his facial expressions. But it did not take seeing them to observe and understand the change in his posture, and the emotions that accompanied it.

Quinn's overcoat was slung over the back of one of the chairs; he had apparently been in too much of a hurry upon his leaving to take it with him.

Schuyler shook his head a little as he picked the item up, and then he gripped it between his fingers, holding it tightly there as he turned and moved to the rack to put it in its proper place.

He hung the coat up reverently, smoothing out the sleeves and straightening it just so upon the peg; then he ran his hand gently up and down the lapel of it more than once. He seemed not to want to move away from it and stood stationary for a long moment; so long in fact I really began to feel as though I should move on and let him have his privacy. I was intruding, even if unseen, and I knew that I should go.

Just as I reprimanded myself into believing that I had better leave him in peace, he moved back toward the piano and sat down. He took a moment to straighten the tails of his ornate brocade waistcoat behind him. He tugged down at the lace on the sleeves of his shirt and adjusted his collar before finally drawing a deep breath, placing his long, pale fingers down upon the keys, and starting to play.

The first melody he played was angry, intense, and cutting in its violence; his hands ran up and down the keys faster than my eyes could follow them, and they became something of a blur.

Clearly, he was capable of giving music lessons to anyone he chose.

The fury of the piece did not suit his mood, though, and soon he stopped playing entirely, gasping in deep, halting breaths and mumbling something softly to himself that I could not make out from this distance. His lips were moving but no sound seemed to form beyond them, at least not sound that carried far enough past his sorrow to reach my ears. He was captive to it, and I was captivated by this sight from which I simply could not bring myself to look away.

He wrung his hands for a moment, closed his eyes, and then returned them to the keys. His second melody of choice was so different from the first it was nearly impossible to believe the same musician had played both.

The notes were tenderly struck, slowly sustained as his foot pressed on the pedal below. Then he did something that I never in my life could have expected.

He slowly licked his lips to moisten them. He drew another, deeper breath, closed his eyes, and began to sing.

His voice itself was disarmingly beautiful. The words, devastating for their impact; tender, pure, and possessed of a longing that I knew all too well myself, even if I lacked the talent to transform them into the structure of song.

His hands moved up and down the keys in perfectly measured motions, his eyes remained closed and his tone completely sincere in its grief. The timbre of his voice was purely elegant, ringing, clear, and true to every note he struck.

In each lyric, his pain was palpable, flowing from every vein and running as deep as the heart of the man himself.

The sight and the song were beyond haunting; this performance was meant for no one to see, and yet I could not turn away. I was transfixed upon what I so clearly knew I was seeing.

What I saw was so much more than simply recital; it was agony realized in musical form.

It was, simply put, a love song, and the man singing it deeply and truly pined for the love of someone who did not reciprocate those feelings.

He reached the second verse and then his voice broke, softly, without ever losing pitch. The words turned to whispers that I could not make out over the increased volume of the piano as he drove his fingers into it with greater and greater momentum.

It was then that I noticed his shoulders rise and fall more rapidly; his chest collapsed and elevated desperately as he gulped in vain for enough air to fuel the speed of his broken heart.

Tears fell from his eyes and splashed down onto the keys but he ignored them; it was clear to me that this was not the first time that he'd turned to music for solace from this life, but still it certainly eluded him.

He began to slow the motions of his hands and was truly lost to his tears. Not just crying, but weeping from the depths of his perpetually tormented soul.

He held the last notes down until the sustain pedal lacked the ability to draw them out a second longer. Then he covered the keys, folded his arms down on top of the case, and dropped his head onto them.

It was then that I slowly backed away.

I knew I was in no position to offer him any comfort, and it certainly was not my place to interrupt this moment of what he imagined to be private grief.

If I was certain of anything after that moment, it was of this thing alone; that while I was certain no one could love Quinn more than I did, I knew that Schuyler had, most certainly, loved him longer.

I startled a second later when I heard the sound of footfalls behind me. Afraid it might be Godspeed I spun, wondering how I'd explain to him if he'd seen me eavesdropping on Schuyler's song; or worse, what he might do if he himself saw Schuyler in such a state and could not accept any excuse that Schuyler might offer him for his melancholy.

I was relieved when the person behind me turned out to be Penn.

“How often does he do that?” I asked, certain that Penn would have heard the music, wherever in the house he had been.

“Often enough,” Penn whispered, and then, thinking better of disturbing Schuyler in this moment, just as I had, he turned and moved down the corridor back toward the exit to the shop without saying a single word more.

C
HAPTER
25

“I MUST GO OUT,”
Quinn advised me, storming into the room with unusual speed applied to his already unusually long strides. “You will accompany me.”

I blinked several times in disbelief.

I had not set foot outside the building's many rooms since I first was carried inside them; my tenancy here was still something very much, I had been told, to be hidden.

Ironic
, I thought,
considering I was the very least of the secrets he was hiding in this house…

“Surely you would rather that I stay with Mister Algernon,” I stammered at last.

“Mister Algernon has told you to call him Schuyler more times than I can count, and the man is otherwise engaged at the moment. He cannot keep an eye on you, and I am…” He paused, shifting uncomfortably as he took his overcoat from the rack in the corner of the room and laid it over my shoulders. “I am loath, still, to leave you on your own.”

I worried in that moment that for all the strength I'd regained, and all the time that had gone by now, he still had serious concerns about the ability of my heart to sustain my life. It never occurred to me that he might simply need my company.

I was so surprised by this turn of events that it took me a moment to even process that he had given me his own overcoat to wear, not something of Schuyler's. I remembered wearing his waistcoat one night on the balcony that seemed a lifetime ago, and never forgot the way it felt. Wearing anything of his seemed the closest thing to heaven I had ever known.

What pleased me the most, to be truthful, is that it was something that he did without thought — an automatic gesture to keep me warm and safe, two feelings that always strengthened in me the moment he entered any room.

He noticed me tugging at the heavy wool garment with both hands, trying to settle it down onto much smaller shoulders than it was intended for so I could begin to button it.

Then he said something that took the sparkle out of the moment for me — and I was sure that fact must have been evident to him.

“We will have to see about procuring you a more varied wardrobe now that the weather's turned. You should have a coat of your own.”

I nodded slightly as I saw him reach out and at first, attempt to button the coat for me.

He looked down at me and then quickly back up into my face for a moment. Gentleman that he was, and being that this was not a medical intervention, he withdrew his hands before they made contact with the coat or anything close to my body. “Button up quickly,” he said, as he turned away. “We can't keep the Magistrate waiting.”

“We're going to see Jib's father?”

“Yes, and I do not know how long the meeting will last. If you begin to feel tired, all you will have to do is mention the fact, and their staff will show you to a place to lie down. If you begin to feel anything more than tired…” He glanced up at me from the stack of papers he was placing into a leather messenger bag, and locked his eyes on mine to reinforce his directive. “Then I want you to have them come and fetch me immediately.”

*   *   *

The carriage ride was shorter than I imagined it would be. Still, by the time we arrived, I was already feeling fatigued. I saw the concern in Quinn's eyes as he measured, it seemed, the meter of my breaths, and clutched his medical bag tighter in his left hand. The messenger bag was slung over his right shoulder, and with his right hand he reached out quickly to steady me as I faltered a step and nearly lost my footing on the curb.

“Are you all right?”

I nodded.

We were left at the corner of what appeared to be two beautiful, residential streets. There were only two houses in view, one on either street, back and away from where they met at that corner, and both with gates so tall that all you could make out of the houses from this distance were the shingles of the roofs.

I was stunned and frozen in place for a moment by the sheer force of memory and all the emotions that accompanied it. This place reminded me so much of the street upon which stood the house where I had grown up; the house I had been cast out of.

I didn't even have time to wonder which direction we were to go in before the doctor gently tugged at my sleeve once to bring me back from dreaming.

“This way.”

He led me toward the taller, grander set of gates. I marveled, thinking that the way they shone in the light, I half expected that Saint Peter was waiting with the Book of Life on a podium before him, just beyond the barricade.

I was nervous. I began to wonder what I would be doing all the time that Quinn was in his meeting with the Magistrate. The community of servant families in and around Fairever was small, what would I do if one of the help within this home recognized me? What could I possibly say to them if they asked how I had come to look as drawn as I did, and heaven forbid what if…

“Come on then, they are expecting us.”

Us?
I thought.
At least they knew I was coming along.

Quinn soon disappeared with the butler, and a ladies' maid escorted me off. “You are to meet the lady of the house,” she informed me, and then knocked upon a heavy door.

Before the door opened to reveal Jib's mother, I heard her speak to someone else in the room.

“Thank you, that will be all, Eveline.”

“Please ring if I can assist you in any way, Madame,” a woman's voice replied. Then I heard a door open and close, but not the one before me; there must have been another entrance to the room that allowed the woman to exit from her employer's presence.

Then the door in front of me did open, and the words I heard put me at ease before I ever laid eyes upon the woman who was speaking them.

“Taking into account what young Doctor Godspeed told me, the thought occurred to me that you would be more comfortable without an audience.”

I could once again only nod, struck dumb by the vision of her as she came fully, at last, into view.

She was a tall and elegant woman, and adding to the allure of her spellbinding silhouette was the positioning of a tall, ornate hat atop her head of silken curls. It was black and white, striped, and trimmed with lace and braided ribbon.