Marguerite Kaye - The Truth Behind Their Practical Marriage

She wandered off on her own, trying to calm her racing pulses. She’d been kissed before. A good many kisses had been snatched from her or pressed upon her, during her early travels, before she’d become adept at spotting the warning signs, but she didn’t count those as kisses. Received and never freely given, they had variously disgusted, repelled or angered her. But Aidan’s kiss was very different. Firstly this, her first real kiss, had been as much her doing as his. She’d wanted him to kiss her, and he had duly obliged. Secondly, she was certain he wouldn’t have, if he’d thought for a moment he was forcing himself on her. Which was why she wanted to kiss him again. That, and the fact that it had been too brief, that first kiss. It had made her feel as if she were flying and melting at the same time, and that was the most important reason of all.

Was it wrong of her to want to kiss him again? Aidan had been on the brink of apologising. Yet he had been the one to end it before it had really begun. He doubtless worried that he had taken advantage of her innocence. Which he hadn’t because she’d wanted him to kiss her and he knew that, because otherwise he wouldn’t have.

She was going round in circles. Exasperated, Estelle rolled her eyes at herself. For goodness sake, it was just a kiss! A delightful kiss, but hardly one fraught with danger, not in broad daylight in the middle of a piazza . A delightful moment in a delightful day that she refused to spoil by analysing it any further.

She’d made a full circuit of the church now, and joined Aidan where he was standing beside a rather battered harpsichord.

‘Well,’ he asked her, ‘is it to your taste? The church, I mean?’

‘Very much. In the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, in any of the big churches in this city actually, you feel as if God is so remote as to almost not be present. Here, you feel He is so much more approachable, as if you could just sit down there and talk to Him. Do you think that’s an odd thing to say?’

‘If it is, then that makes oddities of both of us for I feel exactly the same. Clodagh fears that I’ll return to Ireland a convert to Catholicism. I told her that it would be no bad thing,’ Aidan said, ‘for it would give me something else in common with the majority of my tenants. But my sister, though a liberal in many ways, is very much a traditionalist when it comes to the subject of religion.’

‘Are you likely to become a convert?’

He shook his head, smiling wryly. ‘That would require me to have strong feelings on the subject, and I don’t. Look at this now. You claimed to be able to play almost any instrument, a church harpsichord should present no challenge.’

Estelle sat on the stool and opened the lid reverentially. The keys were worn, but when she struck some experimental soft chords, she discovered that the instrument was perfectly in tune. Her fingers twitched, feeling the connection, as if the harpsichord was begging to be brought to life. ‘I shouldn’t, not without permission,’ she whispered.

‘There’s no one around,’ Aidan replied, ‘go on, I dare you.’

Bach’s French Suite flowed from her fingertips to the keyboard, and she was quickly lost, playing her favourite movement, the fifth, meaning to stop there but finding her fingers flying on to the next and then the next as the music swooped and soared around the small church. She brought the seventh to a flourishing close, resting her hands on the keys and breathing deeply with the kind of intense satisfaction that only music could provide.

Aidan’s applause made her eyes fly open. She blushed deeply. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…’

‘Please don’t apologise. That was quite breathtaking.’

‘You told me you’d not a musical bone in your body.’

‘Estelle, you made me feel as if I had heartstrings that were being plucked. You have a rare talent.’

‘Raw talent, perhaps. I’ve never really had any lessons.’

‘Then you’re even more talented than I thought. You played for almost fifteen minutes without sheet music and as far as I could tell you didn’t make one mistake.’

‘I should think not, the number of times I’ve played that piece. We had hardly any sheet music when I was little, so the few we had, I played over and over again. That was one of them.’

‘You’ll think this sounds fanciful, but it was as if the music poured straight from your heart through your fingers and on to the keys and then into the air, filling the church with beauty.’

She stared at him, quite dumbstruck for a moment. ‘That is possibly the loveliest compliment anyone has ever paid me.’

‘I find that hard to believe. Anyone who has heard you play…’

‘They are few in number. My sisters, mostly, so they’re bound to think I’m good.’ She closed the lid of the harpsichord, frowning. ‘I wonder if that is why Phoebe opened her restaurant, because she needed some independent approbation of her cooking. I never thought of that before.’

‘Perhaps you should play in an orchestra.’

Estelle shuddered. ‘It was a family joke, that Phoebe would open a restaurant and I would establish an orchestra, but I never thought of it as anything other than a bit of fun. I don’t like to play for strangers.’

‘Then I’m extremely honoured.’

‘You’re not a stranger, I thought we’d agreed that yesterday.’

‘We did, and now we’ve known each other almost two days, I suppose we should consider ourselves old friends. Look Estelle, what happened earlier…’

‘Please don’t apologise,’ she interrupted hastily. ‘You must know perfectly well that I wanted you to kiss me. There’s nothing to apologise for, or to discuss. I’m twenty-five years old, Aidan.’

He held his hands up. ‘But if we were in England…’

‘I’m a woman of independent means, with a mind of my own and I’m not in England. I’m beginning to wish that we hadn’t kissed now.’

‘Well I’m not, despite the fact that I know we shouldn’t have.’

‘Oh. Good. Then why are we arguing?’

‘I’ve no notion at all.’

‘Can we forget about conventions and rules, and what we ought to do, and what people might say? Forget all about the real world for a little while?’

‘You’ve no idea how much I crave that.’

There was the slightest tremor in his voice. She touched his arm tentatively. ‘What did I say to upset you?’

‘Nothing. Your playing moved me, that’s all.’

She didn’t believe him, but she didn’t want to upset him further, and having agreed to forget about the real world, she didn’t feel she had the right to enquire either. ‘It was written for the organ, that piece. You don’t get the full majesty of it on a harpsichord.’

His smile was grateful. ‘You do know there’s an organ here too?’

‘It’s quite usual for a church to have both. A pipe organ is operated by a lever which works enormous bellows. It’s very strenuous work and tends to be saved for high days and holidays, since it’s difficult to find volunteers for the task. The rest of the time a harpsichord will suffice.’

‘Are the bellows too strenuous for a feeble mathematician, do you think?’

‘Aidan, you can’t possibly mean—the harpsichord is one thing but I would not be comfortable playing the official church organ without permission. It would be sacrilegious.’

‘There is no one to ask. Do you honestly think God would mind?’ Aidan said, ushering her towards the instrument. ‘I take it this lever is the bellows. How do I…?’

‘Slowly!’ Laughing, Estelle sat down, flexing her fingers. ‘And regularly—like you’re pumping water.’

She tested a chord, and it blared out, making Aidan jump and making her laugh more. She played a series of intricate scales, and then, with a theatrical flourish, the opening bars of Bach’s most famous piece for the organ, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, before launching into the piece, playing it with a dramatic gusto that had Aidan, as she had intended, struggling to contain his laughter as he worked the bellows. When she was done, collapsing over the keyboard herself in gales of laughter, he applauded with a gusto to match her own, calling bravo, and it was only when he ceased that the pair of them realised he was not alone in his applause.