Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [28]
He nodded at a few men who walked past our table and they nodded back, but showed no inclination to stop and chat. I thought it rather strange that people did not seem to speak to anyone but their immediate companions, and precious little mingling was occurring.
“How peculiar,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve yet seen people change tables or move to talk to someone else.”
“It is by design,” Jack said. “People come here to enjoy a social setting where one is not compelled to interact with one’s fellow men. I find it refreshing.”
I shook my head and laughed. “If one wants to be quiet, then why leave one’s house?”
“As you can see, most come here with their friends. It’s a good way to be alone in a crowd.”
I wanted to say that being alone in a crowd seemed to miss the point of both crowds and solitude, but bit my words back. After all, how would I make Jack like me enough to tell me his secrets if I argued with his every word? I was certain my mother would be proud of my feminine deductive abilities if she only knew.
My self-congratulations were cut short due to the sudden cessation of music which distracted me. I watched as several men wheeled around a piano, and moved it to occupy the stage the four musicians had just left. The mahogany piano gleamed, and its white keys were so bright in the blinding light they seemed to fuse together into a single strip of pearly radiance. They seemed pure light, with an occasional dark gap of the black keys. The smell of burning wax added an almost religious atmosphere to the proceedings.
The men also brought around a chair in which the pianist was already sitting—I thought that it was someone crushed with age or disease, and assumed the upcoming performance would likely be more about honoring the unfortunate than actual entertainment. Imagine my surprise when the figure in the chair raised its stick arms and rained its fingers onto the keyboard in an avalanche of sound, cascades of loud clear notes filled with both passion and precision.
“Bravura” was the only way to describe the performance. All conversation and laughter ceased, and even the waiters dawdled with their trays, reluctant to move for anything as mundane as delivery of drink and food. Even I was enraptured.
My own relationship with music had always been uneven and fraught with doomed romance, much like any good novel. Despite a string of teachers and a variety of instruments from clavichords to flutes, I showed no proclivity toward musical performance whatsoever. My fingers got entangled in themselves and my breath came out ragged and wrong. I could not hit a proper note if my life depended on it. All this was, of course, a cause of bitter disappointment to my mother, who herself was quite an accomplished, albeit infrequent, piano player, and who remembered too acutely it was her skill at the piano that had initially enchanted my father. It took both Eugenia and Miss Chartwell reminding her rather cynically that what I lacked in musical education I more than made up in titles and impending wealth to console my dear mother.
Despite all that, I quite enjoyed music as a listener, and I could not have been happier sipping my Champagne and discreetly tapping my foot under the cover of my bell skirt in tempo with the music.
Jack smiled at me. “You seem to enjoy the music.”
I nodded. “I do.”
He looked sly, almost impish. “Notice anything unusual about the player?”
“Not as such,” I replied. “Unless you consider being carried around in a chair unusual.”
“That’s because he does not have legs.” Jack seemed to enjoy his grisly words.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“And no head,” he added, laughing openly. “Look.”
The music stopped and while the applause still hung in the air, the stagehands approached the pianist’s chair and swung it around. There was laughter