Read Three Original Ladies 02 - Lord Trowbridge’s Angel for Free Online Page A

before the last course and go to the music room to prepare her mind and heart.
    ~ ~*
    Frank was the first to arrive. As with the night before, he looked splendid in his evening clothes.
    “You look lovely,” he said to Sophie in a low voice, shaking his head slightly as though to dislodge a vision. “Like you have been performing for years.” He handed her a bouquet of fragrant gardenias. “Perhaps you could put one of these in your hair.”
    “Thank you. That is a wonderful idea. Maybe you could do it?”
    He plucked a flower out of the posy. “Let me see. I think we want it on the side, toward the back.”
    Her breath completely stilled as he came close.
    “You’ll have to anchor it securely, or it will fly out while I am playing.”
    She felt him loose a pin. The flower slid into place and was fixed securely.
    “Thank you so much. What a very dear idea.”
    They stood smiling at each other until suddenly the Carstairs, Fanny, and Buck were upon them. They went into dinner.

{ 6 }

    WHEN FRANK ENTERED THE MUSIC room to see Sophie standing by the piano on top of a small dais, she looked different from the girl he knew. She had left the dinner table before the last course, she said to prepare; Frank wished he had been able to do the same. Her face had a lofty, removed look. Her head sat differently on her neck, which now seemed swan-like.
    Conversation hushed as the small audience sat in the prepared chairs, facing the dais. Sophie waited a long moment, then put bow to strings, and bowed her head. As she lifted it, she drew the bow full length across the strings. A pleading note sang through the air, characterized by restraint.
    As she continued playing, swaying slightly, eyes closed, Frank knew a gradual feeling of deepest humility and wonder. The music captured the love and awe of a sublime act of worship. Her bows were drawn out long and gracefully, her face incandescent. The melody went from a rich volume to whispering and back again. The piece, he realized, was really very simple; it was Sophie who gave it such dynamism.
    Each note met him somewhere near his heart, murmuring a message that stretched him inside. His cynicism was being hollowed out, and the hollow was being filled with authentic feelings, some of which he had never felt before. His heart was ruling his head. It was liberating.
    For once, he was fully present in his body, in the moment. Sophie was touching him everywhere, and he yearned to touch her back with the same poignancy. The intimacy he felt with the music and with Sophie enchanted him.
    When she was finished, she held her violin to the side and bowed from the waist. He rose to his feet. “ Brava! Bravisima! ” he shouted, clapping with all his energy. The others were doing likewise.
    She stood with such simplicity, a broad smile on her face, as though she had just given them a gift. Which she had. His ennui was blown away. Sophie had pierced into his depths. Depths he had ignored since feeling small moments of bright joy as a child—studying his collection of carefully chosen rocks, composing a tale of valor and adventure with himself as the hero, smelling his mother’s sweet lavender scent as she hugged him before bed. Eton had proved the end of those brilliant moments, until Sophie had excavated below his public school/London gentleman persona.
    Frank knew not how to express this to her. Stepping up onto the dais, he put a hand on her waist with the lightest touch and whispered into her ear, “You are magnificent. Words cannot express how you have affected me.”
    She looked up at his face, returned his grave look, and said, “I am glad the music reached you.”
    “I am alive with awe,” he said.
    Buck and Fanny joined him, the latter embracing her, and his moment alone with Sophie was ended. Stepping off the dais, he sat and stared ahead of him, holding his chin in his hand and drawing his index finger across his upper lip. His future no longer looked gray. It was brilliant. As