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the piano. Sitting down on the bench, she tried to clear her mind, the better to choose a selection. She panicked for a moment, never having been asked to perform for guests. At last one of Chopin’s romantic piano ballades came to mind. As she hesitated, she remembered how long it had taken her to memorize it, note by note, with help from her mother. Those were such good memories.
    She began to play, and let the pleasure of the music soothe her nerves and quench her unease. Only when she was done did she realize that everyone had remained silent throughout. A burst of warm applause made her bow her head with happiness.
    She almost felt like a normal woman. But she wasn’t—not yet.

Chapter 4
    T he next morning, Robert walked the fields with the other men toward the marsh at the far end of the park, where they were supposed to find plenty of birds to shoot. The grass crunched beneath their feet from the frozen damp overnight. The sun was just rising, casting its rays through the brilliant foliage of a copse of trees ahead. A half dozen beaters had already gone in front, waiting for a signal to drive the birds toward them.
    Robert couldn’t keep his mind on what he was about to do, though he held his gun with well-trained caution. He was remembering Mrs. Blake’s performance last night, and he still could not forget how impressed and awed he’d been. His bookish youth had made him familiar with the works of Chopin, and he knew the ballade she’d chosen to play was considered one of the most technically difficult. And yet she’d memorized it without ever reading the sheet music.
    Seeing her with her eyes closed and her expression suffused with peaceful joy, one could almost forget she was blind. He’d looked around and seen the other men’s faces show surprise and reluctant delight. Lord Collins’s expression was far more inscrutable, and his son’s simply impassive. But Miss Collins? She did not like to be upstaged, and surely knew she had been. Perhaps that was why Mrs. Blake chose not to sing. It would have only pointed out even more strongly who was the more talented of the sisters.
    Robert hoped his request for Mrs. Blake to play hadn’t further distanced her from her family. It was simply that he’d been annoyed at seeing her relegated to a corner alone, like a dotty old lady.
    If she had wanted to show him her family situation, it was working. In less than twenty-four hours, he was already defensive on her behalf.
    And he was also full of regret that he’d brought up the subject of his brother, Neil. They were only two years apart, and they should have been close, but their father had been a firm believer in raising up his sons to be competitive. Their tutor had taken that one step further and set them against one another to “spark their competitiveness.” All it did was ruin their relationship, and made Robert retreat into his books. When Neil had died, Robert became the focus of their father’s fanatic need to control everything around him. And so he had to follow him around day after day whenever he was home for holidays, learning the man’s obsessive methods for controlling his estates, watching other men cower to his father’s bullying. Only one man could not be cowed, and that was a retired military officer who lived in their village. Robert would often seek him out to hear his adventures—which was probably why he bought a commission himself, when he felt himself turning into his father.
    Robert was glad when they arrived at the pond and the beaters had begun their work. Birds took flight, and he aimed and shot. Some men had a servant reload one gun while they shot another, but Robert reloaded quickly by himself. Birds plummeted from the sky, and dogs brought them back without taking a single bite.
    Several hours later, as they walked back toward the manor carrying bags of birds for the evening meal, Robert happened to glance down another path, and to his surprise, he saw Mrs. Blake walking