Page 30 of The Duke’s Duet

The Dowager Duchess moved to stand beside him at the balustrade, her silk skirts rustling softly in the evening breeze. The familiar scent of her French perfume - the same one she'd worn throughout his childhood - wrapped around him like a memory. Moonlight caught in the amethysts at her throat, the same ones his father had given her when Harper was born. She'd told him once that they were a reminder of music - his father had said their deep purple matched the colour of her voice.

For several long moments, she said nothing more, and Harper felt his tension mount. His mother's silences had always been more eloquent than words, more effective than any direct confrontation.

She'd wielded them like weapons during his youth, especially when he'd disappointed her - or worse, when he'd disappointed his father.

The gardens below lay silvered in moonlight, the formal paths and carefully tended flowerbeds a testament to mankind's eternal desire to impose order on nature's wild beauty. Rather like society's endless rules and restrictions, Harper thought bitterly. Always trying to contain, to control, to force everything into acceptable patterns.

A strain of music drifted out from the ballroom - a waltz, elegant and precise and utterly soulless. Harper found himself mentally rearranging the notes, hearing how it should be played, how it would sound with real feeling behind it. How Melody would interpret it...

"Lady Harriet is quite accomplished," his mother said finally, her voice carrying that careful neutrality he knew so well. "Her watercolours were much admired at Lady Jersey's morning gathering last week. And her musical education has been most thorough. The Westfields spared no expense in her training."

"How fortunate for Lady Jersey." The words emerged more sarcastically than he'd intended, but he couldn't bring himself to regret them. "Though I noticed that she considers Mozart's works 'simple pieces’. Hardly the observation of someone who truly understands music. Or anything else of real value."

"She understands what a Duchess needs to understand." His mother's rebuke was gentle but unmistakable. "The social graces, the proper accomplishments, the importance of maintaining dignity and decorum at all times. She has been trained since birth for exactly this position."

"And is that all a Duchess should be? A perfectly trained ornament? Someone who has never felt real passion for anything in her life?" He turned to face his mother fully. "You weren't trained from birth to be a Duchess. You were the daughter of an Italian count who sang in her garden and made my father forget every rule of diplomatic protocol."

Colour rose in his mother's cheeks.

"That was different."

"Was it? You were foreign, Catholic, with no connections to English society. By all the rules that you now hold so dear, you were completely unsuitable."

"Your father was only the second son then," she said softly. "He had more freedom."

"Until his brother died, and suddenly duty became everything." Harper couldn't keep the bitterness from his voice. "I remember, Mother. I remember how he changed. How the music died in our house. How you stopped singing."

She flinched slightly, one hand rising to touch the amethysts at her throat.

"Your father did what was necessary."

"Did he? Was it necessary to become so rigid, so cold? Was it necessary to strike his own son's hands for daring to play with feeling instead of precision?"

Moonlight caught the tears that had gathered in his mother's eyes.

"I never knew... about your hands. He never told me."

"Of course he didn't. It wasn't proper to discuss such things." Harper turned back to stare at the garden. "Just as it's not proper for a Duke to perform in public, or to enjoy doing so, or to feel..."

"To feel what, Harper?" Her use of his given name made him stiffen. She so rarely called him anything but Brightwood these days. "What is it that you're fighting so hard against?"

The question hung in the air between them, weighted with all the things he couldn't say. How could he explain what he himself barely understood? This desperate yearning for something real, something true, in a world of careful facades and measured responses.

"Do you remember," he said instead, "the night that you taught me that Italian lullaby? The one your mother sang to you?"

"Ninna nanna, ninna oh." His mother's voice caught on the words. "You were seven, I think. Couldn't sleep because of the thunderstorm."

"Father found us in the music room. You were singing, and I was trying to pick out the melody on the pianoforte. Do you remember what he said?"

She closed her eyes, pain flickering across her face.

"He said that it was charming to see a child play at music, but that you must learn proper English pieces now. That there was no place for Italian folk songs in a future Duke's education."

"That was the beginning, wasn't it? When everything started to change? When music became about proper form and correct technique instead of..."

He broke off, struggling to find the words.

"Instead of joy?" His mother's voice was barely more than a whisper. "Instead of the pure pleasure of creating something beautiful?"