Silent Melody Read Online Free Page B

unfamiliar and uncomfortable tightness of her stays.
    At the grand age of two-and-twenty, she was about to attend her first real ball. Oh, she had occasionally—when Luke, Duke of Harndon, had insisted—attended local entertainments with her sister and brother-in-law, and there had sometimes been dancing, which she had sat and watched. And she had always been present at the occasional balls held here at Bowden Abbey, though usually she had watched unseen, looking down from the gallery. Dancing had always fascinated her.
    She had always wanted, almost more than anything else in the world, to dance.
    She could not dance. She was totally deaf. She could not hear the music. Though sometimes she imagined that once upon a time she must have heard it. She could not remember music—or any sounds at all—but there was a feeling, an inner conviction that music must be more beautiful, more soul-lovely than almost anything she had ever seen with her eyes.
    Tonight she was to attend a ball, and everyone was behaving as if the whole occasion were in her honor. Almost as if this were her come-out. In reality the ball was in honor of Anna. There was always a ball at Bowden a few months after Anna’s confinements, following the christening of the baby. There had been balls after Joy’s birth seven years ago, and after George’s and James’s more recently. Now there was to be this one, following Harry’s birth. He needed to demonstrate to his neighbors, Emily had once seen Luke say as he bent over Anna’s hand and kissed her fingers, that his duchess was just as beautiful now as she had been three months before, nine months swollen with child.
    â€œLud,” Lady Sterne said now, taking Emily’s hands in her own and bringing both her eyes and her mind back from the glass, “but you have not heard a word we have said, child. I vow your head has been turned by your own beauty.”
    Emily blushed. She wished Aunt Marjorie would speak more slowly.
    â€œLuke will approve, Emmy,” Anna said with her warm smile, cupping Emily’s chin with one gentle hand and turning her head so that she would see the words.
    That would be no small accomplishment. Although Luke loved her unconditionally, Emily knew, he also did not always approve of her. He paid her the compliment of treating her as if she had no handicap. He often pushed her into doing things she had no wish to do, assuring her briskly that she could do anything in the world she set her mind to doing, even if she must do it silently. He was unlike Anna in that way, and the two of them sometimes exchanged hot words over her. Anna felt that her sister should be allowed to live her life in her own way, even if doing so made her unsociable and totally unconventional. The implication, loving though it was, was that Emily could never be quite as other women were. Luke was more capable of bullying.
    There had been the time when she was fifteen, for example, and he had decided that it was time she learned to read and write. And she had learned too—slowly, painfully, sometimes rebelliously, with Luke himself as her patient but implacable teacher. After the first week, he had banished Anna from the schoolroom and had never allowed her back in. Enough of foolish tears, he had told her. Emily had learned in order to prove something to him—and more important, to herself. She had had everything to prove to herself at that painful stage of her life.
    She had proved that she could learn, as other girls could. But she had learned the severe limits to her world. Books revealed to her universes of experience and thought she had never suspected and would never properly understand. She
was
different—very different. On the other hand, there was in her intense relationship with the world close at hand something unique, she believed.
    Luke’s approval, Emily thought now, smiling back at her eldest sister, was worth having. Sometimes she almost