What Happened at Midnight(19)

“Didn’t you want to go into business?”

He shrugged. “Not particularly. It seemed to involve a great deal of sitting around and talking to others. Rather dull, actually. I’ve always liked working with my hands. I gather he gave me that plot of land to beat my misplaced ambitions out of me. To give me an impossible task, just so I could fail at it.”

When he’d been sixteen, she would have just started in Vienna. She’d been full of hopes about her playing—that she’d become so brilliant that she might play anywhere, despite the unfortunate deficiency of her sex. They’d both taken on impossible tasks. But he’d succeeded at his.

“I didn’t believe them,” John said. “Not even when all the available choices failed. Tile drains, laid at reasonable intervals, simply covered in water. There was too much mud to manage a proper drainage canal. It took me two years to convince myself that no passive draining scheme would serve. And even then, I wouldn’t give up. That’s when I began to consider an active scheme. I ordered architectural drawings from the Netherlands, from drainage windmills in Kent.”

“And so you built a windmill and showed them all.”

“It wasn’t that easy,” he said. “I built it, and it didn’t work. It took me another six months to work out the details. By that time, my father…”

“Was he urging you to give up, to move on?”

There was a long pause. “No,” John said softly. “But I remember the moment when I finally got the machinery in the tower to work right. It looked right. I examined it from every angle, and it matched the specifications I had. I took it apart and put it back together three times, and still the bloody thing wouldn’t work. I was beginning to lose the light, and the oil lamp was not bright enough to show intricate detail. I had told myself I was going to finish that day. And that’s how I figured it out—because I was too stubborn to leave. It got so dark I couldn’t see—so I heard it instead. Just a faint grinding. Enough for me to realize the wood pump rod wasn’t seated properly. It was so close to straight I couldn’t see that it was off. But I could hear it. I fixed it in the dark, and the next morning, when I came to look at the results, my reservoir was filling and my land was drying.”

“What did your father have to say to that?”

“As I recall, what he said was, ‘What are you showing me all this mud for? Haven’t you got seed to sow?’” John quoted. “He wasn’t much for talking. But after that he said no more of my going into business and leaving the farm to others to manage.”

“How horrid.”

“No. It just wasn’t his way to give praise. Not to my face. After he passed away, though, I heard that he’d crowed about it to all of his friends.”

That put Mary in mind of her piano master. But thinking of Herr Rieger only made her sad. Maybe that’s what she’d liked about John, when first they met—that automatic understanding of what it was to take on an impossible, years-long task. She’d met him long after he’d built his windmill. At that point, there had only been talk of all the things he’d done—and no hint of how difficult they might have been. The other girls had spoken of him in hushed tones, as if he were some sort of magician, and a handsome one at that.

But he was real—real and warm. And he wasn’t with any of those other girls. He was here in the dark with her, holding her arm, losing sleep to talk with her at night. He’d achieved so much on his own. And what had she done?

Once, that question might have made her throw up her hands in despair. But perhaps it was because she was so close to him. Perhaps it was because they’d resumed their friendship, and the world no longer seemed as impossibly frightening as it once had been.

Crickets sounded again, thin and reedy in the night.

Perhaps she had given up hope too easily. She’d let Sir Walter take everything from her without a fight. Maybe she didn’t need to be devastated when John left. Maybe she was strong enough not only to face her world, but to change it.

Herr Rieger came to mind again, his mouth narrowed to a flat, white line. Not right, the image of him barked in her head. Try again. This time, slow—once your fingers know the way of it, you can speed it up.

“I was wondering,” she said quietly. “Could you perhaps do me a favor?”

“What is it?”

A little step. She’d play it slowly at first. Once she knew the way of it…

“A paper,” Mary said. “Bring me a newspaper.”

IT WAS NOT UNTIL NOON three days later that Mary had a chance to reveal her bounty. Lady Patsworth was sewing; her husband had left the two women alone to answer letters. He sat in the next room over, close enough to hear, but hidden by the door. It was as good a chance as either of them would ever get. The front room, papered in a delicate pink and gold, gleamed in the morning sun.

“Now,” Lady Patsworth was saying, “white ruffs might seem too much like livery, but—”

Mary adjusted her skirts, rescuing the paper from its place in her petticoats. She slid it into Lady Patsworth’s sewing basket and gestured for the woman to continue. But Lady Patsworth had stopped talking. She looked at the paper; she looked at Mary. She reached out and touched it with the edge of her fingertips, as if she were afraid it might reach up and bite her.