The room smelled of dust and forgotten things. Rosin from a hundred neglected violins, the faint, acidic tang of polish, and the dry, papery scent of old wood.
It was a purgatorial space, belonging neither to the fragrant, beeswax-polished halls of Mayfair nor the coal-smoke and gin-soaked air of the rookeries. It was a neutral ground, a no-man’s land situated above a dingy music shop, and for that, Beatrice was grateful.
It felt, in a strange way, like theirs alone.
She adjusted the collar of her plainest day dress, a dove-grey wool that her maid had called funereal. It was meant to make her invisible, but under the relentless gaze of Finnian Shaw, she felt as conspicuous as if she’d worn court attire.
He stood by the grimy window, arms crossed over his chest, a fortress of a man silhouetted against the weak afternoon light. The tension in the small room was a palpable thing, a third presence that hummed with a dissonant chord of mistrust and anticipation.
They had not spoken a word since he had unbolted the door and gestured for her to enter. The silence stretched, thin and brittle.
“The pianoforte is old,” he said finally, his voice a low rumble that seemed to shake the dust motes from the air. “But the proprietor swears it holds its tune.”
Beatrice moved towards the instrument, running a gloved finger over its scarred lid. It was a Broadwood square, well-used and unloved.
She imagined the parade of indifferent students who had hammered out their scales upon its keys. “It will suffice, Mr. Shaw.”
Her tone was clipped, more formal than she intended, a shield against the unnerving reality of what she was doing. She was Lady Beatrice Marlowe, alone in a rented room with a man who wrote plays that would make her brother’s blood run cold.
“Good,” he said, not moving from the window. “Because the story does not wait for gleaming instruments or the approval of your kind.”
The barb struck home. Beatrice’s spine stiffened.
“My ‘kind’ is not at issue here. We agreed to a partnership based on art, not station. Or has your courage failed you in the light of day?”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips, a fleeting, dangerous thing. “My courage has never been in question, my lady. It is my sanity I am beginning to doubt.”
He pushed away from the window and walked towards the small, rickbacked table in the center of the room, pulling a sheaf of papers from his satchel.
“I have written the opening of the second act. A soliloquy for our protagonist, Alistair. He has just learned of his betrayal, but he cannot name his betrayer. It is not rage he feels. Not yet. It is… a hollowing. A sudden, cold void where his trust used to be.”
He spoke of this Alistair as if he were a living, breathing man. The intensity in his eyes was hypnotic.
He was no longer the common playwright from the rookeries; he was a creator, a god breathing life into a world of his own making. Beatrice felt an answering thrum of excitement deep in her chest, a feeling that overshadowed her fear.
She sat at the pianoforte, pulling off her gloves and flexing her fingers.
“Show me,” she said, her voice softer now, stripped of its defensive edge.
He laid the pages on the music stand.
His handwriting was a bold, aggressive scrawl, full of sharp angles and impatient slashes, yet the words themselves were poetry.
A silence where the heart-song played,
A stolen note, a trust betrayed.
My world, a glass, now cracked and starred,
Reflects a truth my soul has barred.
Beatrice read the lines twice, her fingers hovering over the ivory keys. She could feel it—the hollowing he described.
It was the feeling she had at her brother’s balls, the silence where her own music should be. She closed her eyes, letting the character’s desolation merge with her own.
Her hands found the keys. The melody that emerged was not a grand, dramatic pronouncement of sorrow.
It was something far more insidious. A simple, recurring theme in a minor key, played in the lower register, spare and haunting.
It was the sound of an empty room, of a clock ticking in a house where no one would ever return. Over this sparse foundation, her right hand began to pick out a fragile, questioning counter-melody, a string of notes that rose with a flicker of hope before falling, unresolved, back into the bleakness of the bassline.
Finnian stood motionless, his breath caught in his chest. He had imagined a tempest, a furious outpouring of grief.
He had not imagined this. This quiet, creeping despair was a thousand times more devastating. It was the sound of a soul slowly freezing over.
“Yes,” he breathed, the word a reverent whisper. “That’s it. That is the sound of the void.”
He moved to stand behind her, leaning over her shoulder to point at a line on the page.
“Here,” he said, his voice urgent now, the last of his suspicion burned away by the fire of creation.
“When he sings, ‘a trust betrayed,’ the music should fracture. It should break, just for a moment.”
“A dissonant chord,” she murmured, her fingers finding it instinctively—a jarring, ugly sound that immediately resolved back into the main theme. “As if the glass has just been struck.”
“Precisely!” He slapped his hand on the top of the pianoforte, making the old wood groan.
The sudden, explosive sound made her jump, but she wasn’t frightened. She was electrified.
“You see it. You hear it.”
For the next hour, they were no longer a lady and a playwright. They were a single entity, a composer with two minds and four hands.
He would pace the room, acting out a scene, his voice shifting between characters, his hands carving emotions from the air. She would translate his raw passion into the sophisticated language of music.
“He’s arguing with her now,” Finnian declared, striding across the floorboards.
“But he still loves her. It’s a battle. His words are daggers, but the music… the music has to betray him. It has to ache with his love.”
Beatrice’s hands flew across the keys, a frantic, passionate arpeggio rising against a somber, sorrowful undertone.
“The melody is the argument,” she explained, not pausing in her playing. “The harmony is the truth.”
“The harmony is the truth,” he repeated, his eyes wide with a kind of fierce joy she had never seen on any man’s face.
He saw her, truly saw her, and in his gaze, she felt more herself than she ever had in any gilded ballroom.
They worked until the grey light began to fade, filling the dusty room with the skeleton of an opera that was more real and more alive than the stifling world outside its walls.
They had forgotten their rules, their stations, the very danger of their meeting. There was only the story, and the music that gave it a soul.
Finally, Finnian sketched out a new stanza for the final duet, a moment of fragile reconciliation. “It needs… a shift,” he said, scribbling furiously.
“A modulation. From the despair of C-minor to… something else. Something hopeful.”
He leaned over the music stand again, placing the freshly inked page over hers. Beatrice followed his notations, her fingers tracing the melody in the air before she played it.
“Here,” she said, her voice low and focused.
“The transition could happen on this line. A pivot chord. It will feel like a sunrise after a long night.”
Her finger pointed to a specific bar on the sheet music. At the exact same moment, his hand moved to indicate the same spot.
Their hands brushed.
It was nothing. A fleeting, accidental contact of skin on skin.
But a bolt of lightning shot up Beatrice’s arm, searing a path directly to her heart, which gave a painful, frantic lurch. The music stopped.
The creative fervor that had filled the room vanished, sucked out as if by a sudden vacuum. In its place, a new tension descended, one that was infinitely more potent and terrifying.
The air grew thick and heavy. All she could hear was the frantic pounding of her own blood in her ears.
His hand was rougher than she’d imagined, calloused and warm. The brief touch had felt more intimate, more real, than the chaste, gloved hands that had ever led her in a waltz.
Finnian snatched his hand back as if he’d been burned. He stared at his fingers, then at hers, which still rested, trembling slightly, on the page.
His dark eyes lifted to meet hers, and the raw shock she felt was mirrored there. The artist was gone, and in his place was a man—a man looking at a woman with an expression of stark, unguarded awareness.
“Forgive me,” he rasped, his voice hoarse.
He took a clumsy step back, bumping into the table. The fortress walls were back up, higher and more imposing than before.
“It was… nothing,” Beatrice stammered, pulling her own hand away and folding it tightly in her lap. Her cheeks were aflame.
The room, which had felt like a shared sanctuary moments before, now felt impossibly small, charged with an unspoken confession.
They stood in an awkward, deafening silence, the ghosts of their respective worlds rushing back in to pull them apart. He was the commoner. She was the lady.
And they had just shared a moment of connection that defied every rule that governed their lives.
“I should go,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
She rose from the bench, her limbs feeling unsteady. “My brother will… I must be home.”
“Of course,” Finnian said stiffly, moving to the door but not looking at her. “The same time, next week?”
“Yes.” The word was breathless. “Next week.”
She swept past him, her skirts rustling in the quiet room. She did not dare look at him as she left, but she could feel his eyes on her back.
As she descended the narrow, creaking staircase and stepped out into the damp chill of the London evening, her mind was a whirlwind. The music they had created was a triumph, a glorious secret that sang in her veins.
But it was the memory of that fleeting, accidental touch—the harmony of two souls colliding in a dusty, forgotten room—that echoed loudest in the silence of her heart. It was the first true note of a beautiful and terrifying new composition.