“Tell me, Iris,” he urged. “I really want to know.”
“Oh, all right. It was last year.”
“When she was sick,” Richard cut in.
Iris looked at him with surprise.
“You mentioned it to me,” he reminded her.
“Ah. Well, she wasn’t sick.”
“I had a feeling.”
“She faked the whole thing. She said she was trying to get the entire performance canceled, but honestly, she was just thinking of herself.”
“You told her how you felt?”
“Oh yes,” Iris replied. “I went to her house the next day. She tried to deny it, but it was clear she wasn’t sick. Even so, she insisted that she had been until six months later at Honoria’s wedding.”
“Honoria?”
Oh, right. He didn’t know Honoria. “Another cousin,” she told him. “She’s married to the Earl of Chatteris.”
“Another musician?”
Iris’s smile was clearly half grimace. “Depending on your definition of the word.”
“Was Honoria—I’m sorry, Lady Chatteris—in the concert?”
“Yes, but she is so lovely and forgiving. I’m sure she still believes that Sarah was ill. She always thinks the best of everyone.”
“And you don’t?”
She met his gaze dead-on. “I have a more suspicious nature.”
“I shall remember that,” he murmured.
Iris thought it best not continue this thread of the conversation, so she said, “At any rate, Sarah did eventually admit the truth. The night before Honoria’s wedding. I don’t know, she said something about being unselfish, and I simply could not contain myself.”
“What did you say?”
Iris winced at the memory. She had spoken the truth, but she had not done it kindly. “I would rather not say.”
He did not press her to elaborate.
“That was when she claimed she was trying to get the event canceled,” she said.
“You don’t believe her?”
“I believe she considered it when she was making her plans. But no, I do not think it was her primary motive.”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters,” she said with a passion that surprised herself. “It matters why we do things. It has to matter.”
“Even if the results are beneficial?”
She dismissed this out of turn. “Clearly you’ve moved on to the hypothetical. I’m still talking about my cousin and the musicale. And no, the results were not beneficial. At least not to anyone aside from herself.”
“But one could say that your experience was unchanged.”
Iris just looked at him.
“Consider it this way,” he explained. “If Sarah had not feigned illness, you would have played in the musicale.”
He glanced at her for confirmation, which she gave.
“But she did, in fact, pretend to be ill,” he continued. “And the result was that you still played in the musicale.”
“I don’t see your point.”
“There was no change in outcome for you. Her actions, while underhanded, did not affect you in the least.”
“Of course they did!”
“How?”
“If I had to play, she had to play.”
He laughed. “You don’t think that sounds just a tiny bit childish?”
Iris ground her teeth with frustration. How dare he laugh? “I think you’ve never got up on a stage and humiliated yourself in front of everyone you know. And worse, quite a few you don’t.”
“You didn’t know me,” he murmured, “and look what happened.”
She said nothing.
“If not for the musicale,” he said lightly, “we would not be wed.”
Iris had no idea how to interpret that.
“Do you know what I saw when I attended the musicale?” he asked, his voice soft.
“Don’t you mean what you heard?” she muttered.
“Oh, we all know what I heard.”
She smiled at that, even though she didn’t want to.
“I saw a young woman hiding behind her cello,” he continued. “A young woman who actually knew how to play that cello.”
Her eyes flew to his.
“Your secret is safe with me,” he said with an indulgent smile.
“It’s not a secret.”
He shrugged.
“But you know what is?” she asked, suddenly eager to share. She wanted him to know. She wanted him to know her.
“What?”
“I hate playing the cello,” she said with great feeling. “It’s not even just that I dislike playing in the concerts, although I do. I loathe the concerts, loathe them in a way I could never begin to articulate.”
“Actually, you’re doing a fairly good job of it.”
She gave him a sheepish smile. “I really do hate playing the cello, though. You could set me down in an orchestra of the finest virtuosos—not that they’d ever allow a woman to play—and I’d still hate it.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Well, I don’t anymore. I don’t have to now that I’m married. I shall never pick up a bow again.”
“It’s good to know I’m good for something,” he quipped. “But honestly, why did you do it? And don’t say you had to. Sarah got out of it.”
“I could never be so dishonest.”
She waited for him to say something, but he only frowned, glancing to the side as if lost in thought.