A Lily Among Thorns(36)
The rector saw her coming. “Why, there you are, Miss Jeeves!”
Solomon’s head snapped around to look at her. His playing faltered; he looked like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Somehow that smote Serena nearly as hard as those few lines in the St. Andrew of the Cross register. Was she such an ogre?
He sprang to his feet, knocking the little bench backward with a clatter. “Miss Jeeves! You look—you look ill. Would you like me to escort you home?”
She didn’t know what she would like, just that she didn’t want to go home yet.
“Your fiancé is truly talented,” the rector enthused. “You must be very proud.”
“I am,” Serena said softly. Solomon flushed and looked away, frowning in annoyance. Of course he thought she was shamming. She felt, if possible, worse. She wanted—suddenly she knew what she wanted.
“Play something for me.” She sat down on the floor of the dusty organ loft, hugging her knees and leaning her head against the wooden paneling. From here she couldn’t see over the wooden railing of the balcony. It made her feel small and invisible, and therefore safe.
Solomon sat. He laid his hand on her head for a brief moment, and then began playing something simple and elegiac that Serena soon recognized as “Angels We Have Heard on High.”
Leaning against the vibrating wood, she felt the notes thrum through her and rise to fill the grimy arched ceiling that was all she could still see of the church. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, dust tickling the back of her throat. The music shifted, soaring triumphantly. A tear slipped down her cheek; she hurriedly brushed it away.
Solomon squinted against the sunlight, stealing a glance at Serena as they stepped out of the church. When he had turned and seen her in the organ loft, she had looked positively woebegone, all the fight gone out of her for once. Now her eyes were unreadable again, and only a little subdued.
“I take it you found the record?” he asked gently.
She nodded. “It was sent to the bishop, too.”
He swore under his breath. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Neither had I.”
“Where does the bishop keep his records?”
Serena eyed him in faint amusement. “I feel a bad influence. But it’s no use. I’d have to hire someone to replace the entire sheet in the register, and I’d have to have someone break in twice to the archives, once to steal the page and once to replace it with another, and even if they don’t get caught, there’s still the chance that someone will remember making the copy, or they’ll have sent a copy to the archdeacon, or who knows what, and then it will look like I’m the forger.”
“So what are you going to do next?”
“Right now?” she asked, with an undercurrent in her voice that he couldn’t identify. “I’m going to do something more sensible with my hair.”
“Oh, don’t. I like it like that.”
But Serena ruthlessly pulled out pin after pin. “Here, hold these for me.” He held out his hand and a dozen pins fell into it. She unknotted the orange and gold bandeau. Her hair fell over her shoulders, black and untidy. The wind blew it into her eyes and she tried to blow it back as she shoved the bandeau into her reticule. He realized that this morning was the first time he’d seen her outside in daylight.
In the sun, her raven hair shone deep brown in places. He tried to imagine her at seventeen, wearing sprigged muslin and standing in the long rough grass of a Cornish cliff with the wind in her face—and found it was surprisingly easy.
She ran her fingers through her hair and twisted it expertly into its usual tight coil. Holding it in place with one hand, she stretched out the other for the pins. Solomon put his hand behind his back.
Serena rolled her eyes. “Oh, very amusing. Give them back.”
“Mm-mm.”
“This isn’t funny, Solomon.” Serena raised her eyebrows and shook her outstretched hand emphatically.
“Leave it down.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t, all right?” she said with a sort of concentrated hopeless resentment. Too late he recognized the undercurrent in her voice—hysteria. “I know this is how you want me to be. I saw how you were looking at me in that church. You want that laughing flower of a girl who clings to your arm, but I can’t be that. You think that if you just keep digging at me and trying to crack me open I’ll giggle and say, ‘Oh, la, Mr. Hathaway, what a tease you are!’ You think it’s somewhere underneath but it’s not. I am what I am and—and you can go to the devil! Oh God, I can’t breathe.”