Just Like Heaven (Smythe-Smith Quartet #1)(81)

He gave a mental shrug and moved on to Daisy. He would have supposed that the governess simply had one of those faces that always looked familiar, except that she didn’t. She was staggeringly beautiful, but in a quiet, serene way. Not at all the sort of person a mother usually wished to hire as a governess. He supposed that Lady Pleinsworth had felt safe in doing so; she had no sons, and if her husband ever left Dorset, Marcus had never seen him.

“Thank you, my lord,” Daisy said when he poured for her. “It is most democratic of you to take on such a task.”

He had no idea what to say to that, so he just gave her an awkward nod and turned to Iris, who was rolling her eyes in open mockery of her sister. She smiled her thanks when he served her, and he finally was able to turn back to Honoria.

“Thank you,” she said, taking a sip.

“What are you going to do?”

She looked at him questioningly. “About what?”

“The musicale,” he said, thinking that should be obvious.

“What do you mean? I shall play. What else can I do?”

He indicated the governess with a subtle motion of his head. “You have a perfect excuse for canceling.”

“I can’t do that,” Honoria replied, but there was more than a twinge of regret in her voice.

“You don’t need to sacrifice yourself for your family,” he said quietly.

“It isn’t a sacrifice. It’s—” She smiled sheepishly, maybe a little wistfully. “I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t a sacrifice.” She looked up, her eyes huge and warm in her face. “It’s what I do.”

“I—”

She waited for a moment, then said, “What is it?”

He wanted to tell her he thought she was quite possibly the bravest, most unselfish person he knew. He wanted to tell her that he would sit through a thousand Smythe-Smith musicales if that was what it took to be with her.

He wanted to tell her he loved her. But he couldn’t say it here. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just that I admire you.”

She let out a little laugh. “You may take that back by the end of the evening.”

“I could not do what you do,” he said quietly.

She turned and looked at him, startled by the gravity in his voice. “What do you mean?”

He was not quite sure how to phrase it, so he finally went with, haltingly, “I don’t enjoy being at the center of attention.”

Her head tilted to the side, she regarded him for a long moment before saying, “No. You don’t.” And then: “You were always a tree.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Her eyes grew sentimental. “When we performed our awful pantomimes as children. You were always a tree.”

“I never had to say anything.”

“And you always got to stand at the back.”

He felt himself smile, lopsided and true. “I rather liked being a tree.”

“You were a very good tree.” She smiled then, too—a radiant, wondrous thing. “The world needs more trees.”

By the end of the musicale, Honoria’s face ached from smiling. She grinned through the first movement, beamed through the second, and by the time they got through the third, she might as well have been at the dentist, she’d shown so much of her teeth.

The performance had been every bit as awful as she had feared. In fact, it had quite possibly been the worst in the history of Smythe-Smith musicales, and that was no shabby feat. Anne was reasonably accomplished on the piano, and had she been given more than six hours to figure out what she was doing, she might have done a decent job of it, but as it was, she’d been consistently one and one-half bars behind the rest of the quartet.

Which was complicated by the fact that Daisy had always been one and one-half bars ahead.

Iris had played brilliantly, or rather, she could have played brilliantly. Honoria had heard her practicing on her own and had been so stunned by her level of skill she would not have been surprised if Iris had suddenly stood up and announced that she was adopted.

But Iris had been so miserable at having been forced onto the makeshift stage that she’d moved her bow with no vigor at all. Her shoulders had slumped, her expression had been pained, and every time Honoria cast a glance at her, she’d appeared on the verge of running herself through with the neck of her cello.

As for Honoria herself . . . Well, she’d been dreadful. But she’d known she would be. Actually, she thought she might have been even worse than usual. She’d been so focused on keeping her mouth stretched into that rapturous smile that she’d frequently lost her place in the score.

But it had been worth it. Much of the first row of the audience was filled with her family. Her mother was there, and all of her aunts. Several sisters, scads of cousins . . . They were all beaming back at her, so proud and so happy to be a part of the tradition.

And if the other members of the audience looked mildly ill, well, they had to have known what they were getting into. After eighteen years, no one attended a Smythe-Smith musicale without some inkling of the horrors that lay ahead.

There was quite a round of applause, almost certainly to celebrate the end of the concert, and when they were done, Honoria kept on smiling and greeted the guests with courage enough to approach the stage.

She suspected most doubted their ability to maintain a straight face while congratulating the musicians.