Free The Touch by Colleen McCullough

grateful, Miss Jenkins accepted instantly.
    She was not yet thirty years old, but she looked forty, the more so because her coloring was nondescript and her skin, after constant exposure to the sun, was seamed with a network of fine lines. Her musical gift she owed to her mother, who had taught her to read music and tried to find a piano for Theodora to play on whichever goldfield they happened to be living.
    “Mama died just one day after we arrived in Sofala,” said Miss Jenkins, “and Papa followed a year later.”
    This kind of nomadic existence fascinated Elizabeth, who had never been more than five miles from home until Alexander had sent for her. How hard it was for women! And how pathetically glad Miss Jenkins was for the chance Alexander had offered her!
    That night in bed she turned of her own volition into her husband’s arms and put her head on his shoulder.
    “Thank you,” she said very softly, and pressed a kiss on his neck.
    “For what?” he asked.
    “For being so kind to poor Miss Jenkins. I will learn to play the piano well, I promise. It is the least I can do.”
    “There’s one other thing you can do for me.”
    “What?”
    “Take off your nightgown. Skin should feel skin.”
    Caught, Elizabeth obliged. The Act had grown too familiar to provoke embarrassment or discomfort, but skin on skin didn’t make it more pleasurable for her. For him, however, this night clearly marked a victory.
     
     
    OH, BUT LEARNING to play the piano was difficult! Though she wasn’t entirely without aptitude, Elizabeth didn’t come from a musical environment. For her, it meant starting from absolute scratch, even in rudimentary matters like the forms music took, its vocabulary, structure. Days and days of stumbling up and down the scales—would she ever be ready to play a tune?
    “Yes, but first your fingers have to become more nimble and your left hand has to get used to making different movements from your right. Your ears have to distinguish the exact sound of every note,” said Theodora. “Now once again, dear Elizabeth. You are improving, truly.”
    They had passed from formality to calling each other by their first names within a week, and had established a routine that did much to alleviate Elizabeth’s loneliness. Theodora came up on the car at ten o’clock each weekday morning; they did the theory of music until lunch, which they ate in the conservatory, then transferred to the piano for those interminable scales. At three Theodora took the car down to Kinross again. Sometimes they walked in the garden, and once took the snake path until Theodora could point out her little house to Elizabeth; she was entranced with it, so proud of it.
    But she didn’t invite Elizabeth to visit it, and Elizabeth knew better than to ask. Alexander had been firm on that point; his wife was not to visit Kinross for any reason whatsoever.
     
     
    WHEN ELIZABETH missed her second lot of courses, she knew that she had conceived. But what she didn’t know was how to tell Alexander. The trouble was that she still didn’t really know him, nor was he the kind of person she thought she might want to know. Rationalize her fears though she did, he still loomed in her mind as a rather remote figure of authority, immensely busy—she didn’t even know what to talk to him about! So how could she give him this news, which filled her with secret joy that had nothing to do with the Act or with Alexander? No matter which way she turned it over in her mind, she couldn’t find the words.
    Two months after she arrived in Kinross House, she played Für Elise for him; for once he had come home to dinner. Her performance delighted him, as she had wisely waited until her fingers could negotiate the keyboard without a mistake.
    “Wonderful!” he cried, plucked her off the stool and sat down in an easy chair with her on his lap. First he chewed his lips, then cleared his throat. “I have a question to ask.”
    “Yes?” she said,