Blackmoore by Julianne Donaldson
Chapter 1
lancashire, englanD, July 1820
A woodlark sings of heartache. A swallow calls in the two-tone rhythm of a race. And a blackbird’s song is the whistle of homecoming.
Today it was the woodlark that called me to my window. I stopped pacing and rested my hands on the sill, leaning out to hear him better. For just a moment, my restlessness eased as I listened to this woodlark’s tale of heartache, of sorrow; his falling notes never ended happily, no matter how many times I heard him sing.
I usually loved the woodlark’s song better than any other. But today his sorrow made me nervous. I backed away from the window and turned compulsively to check the clock on the mantel again. It read only three. I cursed the slow crawl of time on this nothing-to-do-but-wait day. Several hours remained before night would fall and I could sleep and then wake and leave for Blackmoore. The waiting should have been comfortable for me—I had been waiting to visit Blackmoore all my life, after all. But on this last day, the waiting felt more than I could bear.
Opening my traveling trunk, I removed the Mozart piece I had packed away earlier that morning and left my bedchamber. The sound of crying reached me as soon as I opened my door. I hurried down the hall 1
J u l i a n n e D o n a l D s o n and took the stairs two at a time, stopping on the step above the one on which Maria lay sprawled.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” I bent over her prostrate form, imagining all sorts of calamities that might have befallen my younger sister while I was pacing in my room.
She rolled over, her face toward the ceiling, her dark wavy hair cling-ing to her damp cheeks, her chest heaving with the force of her sobs. I grasped her arm, shaking her lightly, and said, “Tell me, Maria! What has happened?”
“M-Mr. Wilkes has gone away and m-may n-never return!”
I leaned back and looked at her doubtfully. “Really? You are crying over Mr. Wilkes?”
She answered with a fresh sob.
Pulling my handkerchief from my pocket, I thrust it toward her.
“Come, Maria. No man is worth this amount of grief.”
“Mr. W-Wilkes is!”
I seriously doubted that. I tried to wipe her face with the handkerchief, but she pushed my hand away. I sighed. “You know, there are more comfortable places to cry than the stairway.”
She clenched her hands into fists and yelled, “Mama! Kitty is being unkind again!”
“Kate,” I reminded her. “And I am not being unkind. Only practical.
And speaking of practical . . .” I reached toward her face with the handkerchief again. “How can you breathe with all that fluid on your face?”
She waved my handkerchief away with a sob. “Take your practicality elsewhere. I don’t want it.”
“Of course you don’t,” I said, my patience snapping. “You want to cry on the stairs for a man you have met only five times.”
She glared at me while screaming, “Mama! Kitty is being unbearable again!”
“Kate,” I said, my own anger flaring. “My name is Kate. And Mama is not even here. She is out on calls. And if you refuse to see reason, then 2
I refuse to comfort you. Now, please excuse me. I have a Mozart concerto to practice.”
She locked her gaze with mine and refused to move so much as an inch, forcing me to hold onto the banister and jump over her to reach the bottom of the staircase. Shaking my head in disgust, I entered the drawing room and shut the door firmly behind me. A moment later another one of Maria’s wails rose high and loud, and my cat, who sat perched on the pianoforte, arched her back and yowled in time. I shot her a look of disgust. “Oh, not you too.”
There are many wrong ways to play Mozart and only one right way.
Mozart was meant to be played as precisely as one would work a math-ematical equation. The music was meant to be marched out in regular fashion, each note a little obedient soldier, taking up only its allotted space in time. There was no room in Mozart for the disturbing influence of passion. There was no room in Mozart for a cat named Cora that clawed at my shoulder while attempting to climb away from the noise. And there was certainly no room in Mozart for sisters who wailed outside the door of the drawing room at the precise moment that I was trying to practice.
After several minutes of trying to play over the noise of Maria’s wail-ing, I was definitely playing Mozart the wrong way, pounding the keys with so much passion that I broke a fingernail. “Drat!” I muttered, and another sobbing wail came from the hall. I tipped my head back and yelled out over the noise, “Mozart is not meant to be played this way! It is an insult to his musical genius!”
I heard quick footsteps outside the door, and Maria’s sobbing turned to nearly incomprehensible speech. “Kitty was so unbearable, Mama and she has no compassion for my heartache and told me to cry elsewhere when anyone could see that I did not choose a place to cry, I simply had to cry and happened to be near the stairs when the impulse struck—”
“Oh, not now, Maria!”
At the sound of my mother’s voice, Cora leapt from my shoulders 3
J u l i a n n e D o n a l D s o n to the floor. In a streak of gray fur, she dashed across the room and hid herself under a chair.
The next moment the door flew open, and Mama marched into the room. She had not stopped even to take off her bonnet, and her chest heaved in an almost violent fashion from her quickened breathing.