Free Rite of Summer: Treading the Boards, Book 1 by Tess Bowery

put some hours of work in before I get any rustier.” Waggling his fingers in demonstration put off Coventry’s visible disappointment.
    “Of course.” Coventry nodded his permission. “Very understandable. It will be a better group tomorrow as well, once Downe and his sons are here. We shall make a proper party of it and bag some beauties for the table.” He clapped Stephen jovially on the shoulder. “Enjoy your practice. I hope we shall have the honor of enjoying the fruits of it.”
    “If my strumming and plucking amuse you, then it would be my pleasure,” Stephen replied in an equally jovial tone. He clasped his hands behind his back in an attempt at the casual ease that this sort of conversation demanded.
    Coventry gave him a look that suggested he’d said something wrong, but he simply nodded again. “Something to be arranged then,” he said, a little cooler toward Stephen than before, and headed for the front doors. “Have a good morning, Mr. Ashbrook.”
    Why couldn’t every conversation be as amiable as those with his friends back in the city? Every word spoken here had to be selected like fruit at market, turned over and measured in the hand to check for bruises and for poison.
    Bread, jam and coffee procured, Stephen ate quickly before anyone else wandered in to trap him in a conversation. Without Evander to use as a distraction, he would inevitably misstep in some other hideously unfortunate way.
    The sun was streaming in through the tall windows in the conservatory by the time he returned to it, and the dark wood of the beautiful pianoforte gleamed like burnished bronze. On a whim, Stephen opened the lid and ran his fingers along the keys. It sang to him, not as perfect a sound as Rosamund’s, but with its own sweet charm. He let his fingers glide across the keys of their own volition and struck up a sweet, simple dancing tune that seemed to send the curtains to pirouettes. Here he had no audience, no critical composer standing guard, only music, a faint summer’s breeze and the midmorning sun to warm him through. The tight knot between his shoulders eased and released, tension ebbing further from him with every passing moment.
    But he was flirting with a mistress when his one true love lay untouched in her felt-lined bed.
    A flip of the latch on the violin case and he lifted the lid, exposing Rosamund’s sleek brown lines to the light of day. Her maple body and spruce neck had been made in the Stradivarius style, her skin polished to a gleam by years of careful waxing. She settled against his collarbone as though made to fit. Or perhaps, over the years, he had grown to accommodate her shape.
    Stephen needed no sheet music for this. The exercises poured forth as purest muscle memory—first scales, then fingering. Once his hands were loose again he set to playing Evander’s “Adagio”, slow and sweet, the first piece he had ever written for Stephen. The notes were lazy winter evenings entwined in each other’s arms, new wine and old cheese eaten from willing and supple fingertips. It was hope and promise and a thousand other things that, like those long, dark nights, had begun to fade in the light of summer and years of slow disillusion. The music, at least, was his to keep.
    The sun was at its zenith in the sky by the time Stephen set down his bow. His fingertips tingled and blood rushed back to them as he placed Rosamund back in her case. The world outside called to him, the breeze at the window toying with his hair. A walk, then, and a chance to explore on his own. There was as of yet no sign of the hunting party’s return.
    Stephen left the house by way of the kitchen doors, a hunk of fresh bread in one hand and a piece of good cheese in the other. Coventry had not been wrong about his cook. Gravel crunched beneath his feet once he was out of the kitchen yard. The light danced merrily through the leaves of the trees that shaded the path, casting dappled shadows over the ground. The breeze