The Reason a Piano Tuner Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Duke Holds the Lamp

Everard stands too close while she works, his cousin sneers at a woman tuner, and the duke comes to the music room at midnight with a proposal.

I began that night with the strings closest to the crack and worked outward.

First I had to take the action out, which is the row of little wooden hammers that strike the strings.

It lifts out in one long piece, and it is heavier than it looks.

I had it half out when I found the duke still standing behind me.

"You don't need to stay, Your Grace."

"I'm not staying," he said. "I'm watching."

"Watching is staying with your arms folded."

He unfolded them and took the lamp off the bench.

"Where do you want it?"

I showed him.

He knelt on the floorboards at the side of the case and held the light low and steady inside it.

I leaned over the open frame with my sleeves rolled to the elbow.

It put my face a hand's width from his.

He did not shift and neither did I.

His lamp lit the long gold strings and the scar over his eye.

It lit a small cut on his thumb, too, from something he'd mended that day.

"My father played this," he said.

He said it flatly, the way a man names a fact he has stepped around for years.

"What did he play?"

"Hymns, mostly. And bad Scotch songs when he thought we were out of the house."

"Did you play?"

"I was told I had no ear."

He moved the lamp a little to the left, exactly where I needed it.

"I've kept the lid shut for ten years."

"And now you want it fixed."

"My mother wants it fixed. I want her to stop asking me for things."

I laughed, once, and then I stopped, because my breath was on his cheek.

I felt him notice it.

I took up my tuning hammer and set it on the first pin.

It is a long iron wrench with a socket at the end.

You turn it a hair at a time until the string hums at the right pitch.

I turned.

The pin came loose and slid, and the note dropped under my hand.

"There," I said, quietly. "That's what it does. The wood won't hold the pin."

"Can you hear how bad it is?"

"I can hear that it was good once."

He was silent for a moment.

Then he said, in a low voice, "That's the first sensible thing anyone has said to me about this house in a month."

The doors opened behind us before I could think what to answer.

"There you are, Everard. I was told you'd gone to ground in here."

A slim man in a mustard waistcoat strolled in with his hands in his pockets.

He had glossy black hair down to his collar and a gold watch chain across his middle.

He looked at me kneeling inside the piano and made a small, pleased sound.

"And what is this? The new man?"

"This is Miss Tallis," said the duke, without getting up. "She is the tuner."

"A woman?" He came nearer. "Does she carry the little hammer in her reticule?"

"I carry it at my belt, sir," I said. "Where it's no use to anyone who wants to be funny."

The duke made a noise in his throat that might have been a cough.

"My cousin Barnabas," he said. "Barnabas, go back to the card room."

"Aunt Lavinia asked after you." Barnabas leaned on the case, close to my elbow, and rapped the walnut with one knuckle.

I put my hand flat on the wood to stop the tremor in the strings.

"Don't," I said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You're setting the whole instrument shaking. It makes the work harder."

He lifted his knuckle slowly and smiled at me.

"I do hope you can mend it," he said. "It would be a terrible shame if Everard's evening came to nothing."

He said evening as though it meant something else.

Then he walked out, and left the door open behind him.

The duke got up and shut it himself.

When he came back he did not kneel down again.

He stood with his hand on the lid and looked down at me.

"Do you want him moved to another wing?" he asked. "I can arrange it."

"I want you to hold the lamp," I said. "I can manage your cousin."

He knelt.

I worked on.

The clock in the hall struck ten, and then eleven, and neither of us spoke except for the small talk of the job.

"Higher." "There." "Steady." "Hold it."

Somewhere past eleven I noticed that I had stopped feeling the cold.

The room had gone warm with one man's body and one small flame.

I set the last pin of the night, struck the note, and heard it hold for the length of a breath before it slid.

"That is as far as the wood will let me," I said.

I sat back on my heels and my knee brushed his.

Neither of us moved the knee.

"Miss Tallis," he said.

"Your Grace."

"I have a proposal for you."

My stomach turned over once, and I was angry at it.

"If it is another tuner," I said, "I am not interested in a quarrel with my father's trade."

"It is not another tuner," said the Duke of Ashvane.

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