Someone to Hold by Mary Balogh

Author:Mary Balogh [Balogh, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-02-07T08:00:00+00:00

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After school one day earlier in the week, when the children were all outside playing or otherwise occupied elsewhere and the playroom was empty, Camille had sat down at the old neglected pianoforte, which had been pushed off into one corner, and played softly to herself. She had never been more than a tolerably skilled musician, but playing the pianoforte was a necessary accomplishment for a properly brought-up young lady and she had persevered. She had been missing playing as well as embroidering and watercolor painting—all strictly according to the rules set down by her governess. Sometimes she wished she could go back and relive her girlhood with more of a questioning, even rebellious spirit, but it could not be done. Going back was never possible, and there was no point in wallowing in regrets for what might have been.

When she had looked up from the pianoforte after a few minutes, it was to the discovery that three children had crept into the room unnoticed and were standing perfectly still, watching her. They would go about their play soon enough, she had thought after smiling vaguely at them and turning her attention to another remembered piece, but after that there were two more children watching her, as well as the original three and one of the housemothers. The next time she looked up, she was forced to the startled conclusion that there must surely not be a child left in the garden or any other part of the building. The playroom was as full as she had ever seen it.

She had switched to playing some folk songs that everyone knew—everyone in her old world, anyway, but apparently not in the new. She had picked out a few of the simplest tunes and taught the melody and the words of the first verses. The girls had soon been singing along with her while the boys looked warily at one another and held their peace while at the same time holding their ground.

Music in the form of folk songs and simple hymns and a few rounds had become a part of the school curriculum from that day, and Camille had soon been scheming for a way to bring in the boys. She had done it by brushing up on her knowledge of sailors’ working chants and explaining them as exclusively male music. Indeed, for a while she banned the girls from singing them, something that proved highly successful when the girls burned with resentment and the boys preened themselves and sang loudly and lustily and not necessarily musically.

It was not singing she was teaching early on the Friday afternoon after the visit to Mr. Cox-Phillips’s house, however. It was dancing. It had all started during the morning, when Camille had unveiled the purple knitted rope, whose various parts she had stayed up late the night before weaving together into one. It could not be unveiled, of course, without being put to immediate use. They had gone out as far as

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