Free Intermezzo by Eleanor Anne Cox Page B

to her care. She could not love Rebecka as she had loved Jonathan. Not only had Jonathan, as a person—not merely as child—been the moral mainstay of her universe, but after his death, love of any sort was too painful. If the love for a child could so upset Adela’s delicately balanced psyche, then the love for man could easily destroy her. She would surely be drowned in the flood tide of her own emotions. No, the more unnoticeable she was, the better.
    In particular, she did not choose to be noticed by Charles Henry Beaumont. His position of power in her life was already too threatening to consider any further complications in their friendship.
    Probing deeper, Adela realized that, in a perverse way, it was of critical importance to maintain some sense of strategic superiority in dealing with men, and especially with her employer. Somehow there was considerable comfort to be had in the thinly veiled contempt Adela could feel for a cold-blooded libertine with his chill fiancée and his almost vulgar mistress. Adela in her quakerish morality, her prim propriety, could feel quietly superior to Waterston, to his mistresses, to his prospective bride—to them all.
    The next morning, on schedule, Richard Brewer called at the house in St. James Square in order to plan a program and to begin rehearsing with Miss Trowle. Soames was almost nonplussed at the door. Clearly Mr. Brewer was some sort of servant, but on the other hand, he was a friend and colleague of Miss Trowle, and Miss Trowle, whatever her status, was not of the servant classes. It was a problematical situation which Soames settled to the best of his butler’s ability by simply showing the Brewer chap directly into the music room, very much in the same way that he would have directed a chimney sweep to the various chimneys in the house.
    Adela, who was at work on a sonatina at the desk, raised her head and smiled impulsively as Richard was ushered into the room.
    Soames sniffed and left the room.
    “Hello, Adela,” Richard began tentatively. “You are looking very well—very well indeed. I came expecting to meet an old friend and I find a grand lady instead.”
    “Surely I am not grand, Richard, and I will always be your friend.”
    But still, hat in hand, he seemed awkward.
    “Are you feeling well, Adela?”
    “Quite well. The work in this house is agreeable.”
    “And your pupil is tolerable?” he asked.
    “Not only tolerable, Richard, Rebecka is delightful and she is gifted. Working with her has been an almost unalloyed joy. She is open and eager and very enthusiastic.”
    Still he seemed ill at ease.
    “And your employer, or rather your cousin, Lord Waterston?”
    “Lord Waterston is indeed more of an employer than a cousin. He is certainly preferable to many of our other employers. Waterston is usually on his dignity but is, nevertheless, quite fair in his judgments and is, of course, an ardent connoisseur of the arts. All in all, I have found myself in a most satisfactory situation—far better than I could have reasonably hoped for. And how is your own music progressing, Richard?”
    “Come and we shall see.”
    They began to play a Mozart sonata for violin and piano, one they had played together many times before. And only then were the restraints relaxed and the barriers erected by the house in St. James Square almost dissolved. It was good, so good, to be playing in harmony with someone else again—to anticipate the beat—to be part of a larger sound. Adela decided she really must convince his lordship to buy another smaller instrument for the music room so that she and Becka might hazard duets.
    After the final chord they remained silent for a minute or two.
    “I say, Adela, I would not have thought it possible but you are wonderfully improved. You have always been very good but you have found new clarity, new control, and a new power of expression. We have never done the sonata half so well before.”
    “Thank you, Richard. I have had so