It was a gloomy morning that bid farewell to Lord Lima and Miss Berry. Grey clouds overhead threatened rain and the ground still glistened with remnants of rainwater from the previous night, but Lady Dalton’s insistence that the two should stay until the weather brightened fell on deaf ears.

“Nonsense,” the Viscount responded whenever she raised the concern. “You’ve been far too kind with your hospitality already, and we don’t care to outstay our welcome. The rain shall hold off, I’m certain.”

Hummel and Evans had loaded the car with luggage shortly after breakfast and with the car parked outside of Dalton’s front porch, the two families said their goodbyes.

“I hope to see you again soon, Miss Berry,” Lady Dalton said, the two ladies air-kissing one another affectionately as the gentlemen waited - some with little patience - for their exchange to come to a close.

“The feeling is quite mutual,” was the young girl’s reply. “It was such a pleasure to make your acquaintance - and that of your family.” Miss Berry smiled pointedly then at Blaine. She moved toward the car, happily taking the hand Blaine offered in assistance.

“It was a pleasure to meet you, also,” Blaine replied with a smile of his own, before letting go of the lady’s hand and stepping away from the vehicle to allow room for Lord Lima to move closer. Lima shook hands with Lord Dalton - the former expressing what a fine stay he’d had, the latter stating that he hoped the pleasure would be often repeated - before climbing inside the car with all the long-established grace of a noble. Hudson closed the door, before starting up the engine and pulling away from the sweeping lawns of the grand estate. Blaine watched as the wheels trundled slow and steady down the cobbled path, on and on for what seemed like an eternity, before it eventually pulled its way out of sight and he allowed himself the tiniest breath of relief.

“What a treat,” Lady Dalton said when the three of them eventually retired to the house, sitting by the fire of the drawing room and allowing the chill of the day to be chased away from them all.

“Quite a treat, darling,” Lord Dalton replied, the usual irony profound in his voice.

“Such a lovely young lady,” she continued, taking no notice of Blaine’s father and turning her attention to Blaine himself. “Did you not think so, Blaine?”

“She was... lovely,” he said, recycling his mother’s use of the word.

“It would be splendid to see her more often. She’s quite an accomplished young woman; her piano playing, the books she’s read...”

Blaine let his mother dotingly read off a list of Miss Berry’s many hard-earned accomplishments as he stopped listening completely. His mind was reeling; murmurs of the last three weeks replaying themselves over and over. He imagined that somewhere amidst trying to appease his mother and not being rude to Miss Berry, he’d probably given the impression that he’d easily be led into matrimony.

The memory of Miss Berry formed in his mind; the young lady in the summer dress; the loose locks of her hair; the dazzling smile; all of it - at least in the beginning of their encounter - designed to have him fall for her.

And yet, the two of them had become friends - and that made it even harder for Blaine to allow himself to marry her.

His mother continued to talk, her gaze flitting between the eyes of her husband and those of her son, clearly hoping to find some kind of life behind them, some kind of response that was more than a nod or a grunt, and Blaine, for a moment, thought how sad it must be for his mother to wait in a forever of silence, hoping for a visit from guests merely for someone to talk to. He and his father were, perhaps, too alike in that respect; neither of them could invest in this conversation, his father shifting restlessly in his chair as his mother continued to talk. He pictured himself in twenty years time, shackled to Miss Berry by wedding vows that had meant nothing to him at the time and meant less with each passing year, listening to her talk endlessly about their daughter’s handsome suitor or some other meaningless topic. He imagined her heart sinking a little more each time her ignored her: every time he went out riding instead of visiting some other rich and foolish family of esteem; any time he said ‘not now, sweetheart’, ‘another time, darling’, and even every time he refused to make love with her, his own wife. Every image rang out in his head, too loud, too vivid, too painfully real to ignore, and the voice in his head became more insistent with each one:

I can't marry her. I can’t marry Miss Berry. I cannot marry Miss Berry.

“I can’t marry her-”

The sentence was almost inaudible, but Lady Dalton’s talking ceased immediately. The grandfather clock ticked, loud and clear, in the otherwise silent room, seconds passing menacingly. Blaine hadn’t even meant to say the words out loud, but it was too late to retract them; even Blaine’s father’s attention had been captured.

“Gentlemen, would you excuse us?” Lady Dalton managed to choke out to the servants. Ryerson, Hummel and Evans exited the room silently, the door closing behind them with a soft click that sounded, to Blaine, like a gunshot. Another few seconds passed before his mother’s voice cut sharply through the stark silence.

“This is not up for discussion, Blaine Anderson.”

Blaine’s pulse pumped loud in his ears as blood ran to his neck, his face, his head. Anger encapsulated him.

“You’re damn right it isn’t!” The words burst from him before he could stop them, and all at once he found himself on his feet. His parents stared at him; his father passive yet interest piqued, his mother scowling. “I will not discuss with you every minute detail of my refusal to marry Miss Berry, but know that it is a refusal nonetheless.”

“I see absolutely no reason for you not to marry her,” Blaine’s mother said, standing to better meet her son’s eyes and make her point. “She’s young, she’s handsome, she has a fortune to inherit, her father’s title to pass on. She wouldn’t be too much of a handful to manage, and there’s not a person who could deny that the two of you look well together. I certainly didn’t find you altogether miserable in her company, which I must say greatly surprised me.”

“Mother, all of this has very little to do with marriage-”

“It has everything to do with it,” she snapped. “People below us, people below you, they can marry for love. They can marry for whatever they like. You, Master Anderson, you marry for fortune, you marry for title and you marry a woman you can stand to be around for the rest of your life.”

“Oh, how very old fashioned-”

“Not old-fashioned, Blaine. Realistic! Sooner or later you’ll tear that wretched head of yours from out of the clouds and realize that you have to marry sooner or later and good God! Why not marry somebody you can be friends with?”

“Perhaps some of us would prefer not to spend every day for the rest of our lives miserable!”

It was a rare moment when Blaine had the opportunity to express his anger and in the absence of any servants and overcome by his own fury, he kicked out at the table in front of him. A vase that sat upon it wobbled and fell, tumbling down onto the floor with a deafeningly loud crash. Blaine looked from the shattered glass that settled on the floor to his mother’s stern gaze, before turning on his heel and storming toward the door. Upon wrenching it open, he discovered Hummel, poised to knock in the very next moment. He started at Blaine's sudden appearance.

“I- I heard a crash, milord,” he stuttered.

Blaine was silent for a moment, trying to compose himself, recollect his thoughts. Hummel looked earnestly at him, his blue eyes seeking some kind of instruction.

“Hummel-” Blaine said. “Get somebody else to clean it. I need my riding clothes.”

*

Hummel had him dressed in his riding clothes within ten minutes - the two of them didn’t share their usual chit-chat - and Blaine had mounted his horse and was out of the grounds in another ten. The rain that had threatened as Miss Berry was leaving began to tumble down from the sky in earnest, and Blaine reveled in it, letting the bitterly cold drops slap against his face almost painfully. He urged the horse on faster with his whip, the rainwater seeping through his clothes and into his skin, the cold air making it almost unbearable to continue.

When Blaine was a child, he’d been given the impression that men were essentially independent creatures; that when he reached adulthood, he’d no longer have to bend to the will of his parents. Women did what their families told them to, unable to refuse lest they be cut off from all reputable society. Men, he’d always had the impression, were not quite so restricted. They followed conventions, of course, and married within the right circle of people. But as far as choosing whom in that circle to marry, deciding when to be married - he’d always assumed he’d get away with being able to make those decisions himself. Apparently being the only son of an Earl meant that one’s freedom became somewhat restricted.

Hooves pounded the grass, the deep thudding noise resounding in Blaine’s head and he focused solely upon the steady rhythm for a time, allowing it to fill his ears, erase his thoughts and become louder and more important than the sound of his own quickened breathing, the feeling of his heart beating faster from the exercise. Mud flecked up from the ground, covering his wet riding clothes and every uncovered inch of his body, and with a final nudge, her urged the horse on faster still, galloping through the empty stretch of field after field.

Blaine returned after almost two hours, soaked through and as muddy as if he’d forgotten the horse altogether and had merely rolled his way through Dalton’s gardens.

Kurt met him at the entrance of the house, his face altogether more calm than it had been when he left, and he even greeted Kurt with a smile as Kurt draped a thick blanket around him.

“You must be dreadfully cold, milord,” Kurt said, watching Blaine shiver from underneath the wool.

“I can hardly tell, Hummel,” he replied, following the footman into the house and up to his dressing room to change.

* * *
It was rare that Kurt ever found himself alone in a room. The house was always so alive: servants bustling from one room to the next; voices; bells; the sound of shoes tapping their way across parquet floors. The family would often occupy several rooms at once; Lord Dalton working in the library of a morning and his study most afternoons, Lady Dalton most often spending time in the drawing room engaged in various tasks or otherwise enjoying the light that came through the grand window throughout the day. Blaine, of course, sprang from room to room, garden to garden, from the house to the village and beyond on a regular basis. Bored and restless, always.

The family had, however, disappeared for the day, Lord and Lady Dalton having been invited to luncheon with one of His Lordship’s old friends. Blaine had asked Kurt to prepare him for riding an hour previously, and Kurt knew he wouldn’t be home for at least another hour.

Many of the staff had been advised by Ryerson to finish their tasks as quickly as possible and take the afternoon off. Kurt was not among this group of people.

He found himself alone in the drawing room, polishing dust from various valuable objects and taking great care not to drop any of them, when his eyes roamed involuntarily to the piano there. The same piano by which Miss Berry and Blaine had been accompanied in their duet five weeks or so ago.

Kurt was not a disobedient person - indeed he usually followed rules to the letter, never allowing himself the opportunity to break them. It was an unfamiliar feeling, the pang of temptation that ran through him as he stared at the instrument. It was grander - much grander than the one his mother had used to play, but he knew that if he drew closer to it and observed the thing that it would look the same, function the same, sound the same.

And there was nobody around to see him.

He made his way over to the instrument, his delicate white fingers eventually touching the cold, black surface of the pianoforte. The eighty-eight shiny black and white keys stared up at him, longing to be caressed, and for Kurt the temptation was too much. His index finger reached and pressed down on a key, letting the sound reverberate around the large room, finding no audience.

Before Kurt knew it, he was sitting upon the stool in front of the piano, both of his hands poised above the keys.

And he began to play.

He was surprised by how easily it came back to him, how his fingers knew the movements, knew which were the right keys before his ears even caught up and realized what melody he was playing. His mother’s favorite.

“Fur Elise.”

The music ceased at once. Kurt jumped up from the stool as though the very surface of it had become red-hot and it fell backwards, landing on the floor with an unpleasantly loud clatter. Kurt hurried to right it again, before fixing his anxious, wide eyes earnestly on Blaine, standing in the doorway of the room.

“Master Anderson! I-I’m so sorry! I shouldn’t have - I should never have presumed to-”

“Hummel-” Blaine raised a hand to stop the disjointed, mumbled apologies that tumbled from Kurt’s mouth. “Relax.”

Kurt frowned, perplexed by the instruction. “Relax, milord?”

Blaine chuckled, and Kurt felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment. “Yes. Relax.”

Kurt’s breathing slowed, cheeks still scarlet, and his eyes fell from Blaine’s hazel irises to focus on the floor. “It wasn’t my instrument to play. I’m sorry, milord.”

“And yet you played it with such spirit that I cannot find it in myself to chastise you for playing it at all,” Blaine replied. His tone of voice was low and soft, a stark contrast to the fallen stool and Kurt’s frantic apologies a few moments before, and Kurt thought he could sense a lightheartedness there that made him dare to look up into the face of the older boy, finding a smile on his lips as he did so. “Where did you learn to play that way?”

Kurt cleared his throat, regaining an ounce of confidence but still feeling a gentle heat in his cheeks. “My mother, milord. She had a beautiful voice and could play the piano far, far better than I ever could.”

“I couldn’t imagine it to be possible for anybody to be better than yourself,” Blaine was quick to respond.

“How flatteringly untrue, milord,” Kurt responded, unable to keep the smile from his face and the giddiness out of his voice. “Miss Berry, for a start, can play with much better technique than I am able.”

Blaine chuckled as he made his was over from the doorway to the piano and sat on the stool in front of it, flexing his fingers - a little dirty from the horse ride - over the keys. “Miss Berry played with excellent technique, to be sure,” he said, the piano twinkling quietly as his fingers touched down lightly on the higher notes. “But she does not play with as much heart as you. She hears the music, but she does not feel it.”

Blaine’s fingers worked their way up and down the keys melodically and Kurt found it difficult to tear his eyes away from their movement.

“With all due respect, milord, I disagree,” Kurt dared to say as he pulled his eyes away from Blaine’s hands working the keyboard and looked at his face. Blaine looked up at him quizzically, but did not stop playing. “Miss Berry didn’t so much as glance at her sheet music when she was playing - and still she played beautifully and without error.”

Blaine considered this for a moment and turned back to look at his fingers. The flow of notes stopped for a moment as he rearranged their position. “There is quite a difference between playing from memory and playing from the heart, Hummel. And I suspect Miss Berry practices the former, while you encompass the latter.”

Kurt felt his face flush at the compliment, thankful that Blaine was concentrating on his hands and that nobody else was around to see him. Kurt watched Blaine’s fingers as they began to dance lightly across the keys, playing what he recognized to be a more modern song than his own performance had been: ‘Meet Me Tonight In Dreamland’.

Blaine seemed almost oblivious to his surroundings as he played, clearly finding solace in the music. Kurt surveyed him as he listened. His clothes were dirty from his ride, his fingertips mucky, too, contrasting starkly with the clean, white keys of the instrument beneath them. His jaw was set firmly, a day’s stubble just setting itself upon the jaw line. Blaine’s eyes followed his fingers as they paced delicately over the keys, a look of concentration under his long, black eyelashes that Kurt could just notice contrasting with his skin. That was it, for Kurt; that was the breath-taking moment that he realized how handsome - how truly, unbelievably handsome - he found the Earl’s son.

At length, Blaine began to sing along with the music, lyrics that Kurt barely knew but to a melody that he thought he had definitely heard somewhere before. “Meet me tonight in dreamland, under the silvery moon...”

Kurt, caught up in the slow and melodic beauty of the song, found himself humming along as Blaine sang. The sound of his own voice caught him off-guard, but Blaine raised no objection to its presence, so he simply continued.

“Meet me tonight in dreamland, where love’s sweet roses bloom. Come with the love-light gleaming in your dear eyes so true; Meet me in dreamland, sweet dreamy dreamland; there let my dreams come true...”

The song came to a close too soon, the last note fading into silence too quickly and Kurt was left with a thought that almost threatened to overwhelm him; he’d actually performed with Blaine.

Kurt applauded softly; the noise seemed to startle Blaine out of some kind of daydream. He took Kurt’s appearance in for a moment, before smiling.

“Thank you,” he said. “For joining in. One doesn’t often have the opportunity of giving impromptu performances for the house staff, lesser still the chance to perform with them,” he joked.

Kurt smiled politely, unable to come up with a response. “Shall we change you into clean clothes, milord?” he eventually asked.

“Hm?” Blaine raised his eyebrows, before looking down at his clothes, noticing the mud as if for the first time. “Of course, yes. That would probably be appropriate.” He rose from the stool and walked slowly with Kurt toward the door of the drawing room.

“You weren’t gone for long today, milord,” Kurt remarked to fill the silence.
“No,” Blaine agreed.

“I wonder if there was something unsatisfactory about your ride?”

The two made their way across the hallway to the grand staircase. “Oh no,” Blaine replied, a smile playing on his lips. “No, nothing unsatisfactory. Sometimes it’s just nice to spend time by myself in the house,” he said by way of explanation. Kurt didn’t press the subject further, although he suspected what he meant was that he wanted the opportunity to roam the house while his parents weren’t around.

“Milord, with regard to my... My lapse in propriety...” Kurt trailed off, finding himself quite unable to ask anything of his superior.

“Your secret is safe with me,” Blaine replied, and Kurt tried not to sigh his relief too heavily.

The men eventually reached the staircase, Blaine slightly ahead of Kurt. They ascended slowly, in a peaceful and comfortable silence. Blaine turned his head back to Kurt as they were halfway up, as though ensuring that Kurt was still close behind him, and smiled. Kurt returned the friendly gesture, and as Blaine turned back to look in the direction he was heading, Kurt felt his cheeks grow warm once again.

* * *

Blaine changed at last into cleaner clothes, Hummel left the room in order to aid the other staff in preparing for dinner. Blaine watched him go, his spritely valet who was somehow intimately friendly as well as always professional. He smiled, imagining him as a child, accompanying his mother in singing; an idealistic image of family love that Blaine ached to think didn’t exist any more, Kurt’s mother being gone and his father so far away.

Blaine sat in his chair by the window and looked out onto the grounds across which he’d ridden just a short while before. His fingers danced on the table before him, and it took him a few minutes to realize that his fingers were miming the pattern of keys that played ‘Fur Elise’. His ears rang with the musical piece that Hummel had played, his thoughts filled with images of his soft, white fingers dancing along the keys.

It was entirely true, what he’d said. Hummel had played the song with more emotion, more intensity than he had heard Miss Berry play with over the previous few weeks. It had been the main reason he had waited so long to interrupt him, unable even to bear the idea of not listening to it that little while longer.

It was beginning to dawn on Blaine that in the month he’d known Hummel, the two of them were already much closer than he and Puckerman had ever been. His former valet had been good at his job, that much was true; certainly Blaine’s father had had nothing to say about Puckerman now that he was working as his valet - and his silence on any given subject was usually indication enough that there was nothing wrong with it, since a complaint was the only thing worth stating aloud.

But with Puckerman, Blaine had always felt a distance between them; a relationship that never crossed - or even came near to crossing - the line of formality. Hummel, clearly, was different. The two shared a friendship, almost. No, not almost. They did. What they had was a friendship. He and Hummel - he and Kurt - were friends.

Blaine smiled to himself, eyes watching the sky change color as the sun slowly descended. The low clouds cast an unusual shadow over the gardens and the muddiness the rain had left behind over the previous days seemed all but disappeared, replaced instead by neatly trimmed, perfectly still hedges and flowers glowing in the sunset, all of it a display of showiness that made the gardens of Dalton appear far more beautiful than they really were.

Kurt’s voice echoed in his head, the sweet, delicate sound of music that Blaine imagined could lull any restless baby to sleep or draw a dying man back from his eternal slumber. Blaine listened to it, thought of it in comparison with Miss Berry’s and then dismissed the idea, the sound of Kurt’s voice far too pleasant to be put against that of the young lady’s.

It wasn’t until Kurt knocked on his door and announced to him that it was time to come down to dinner that Blaine realized quite how long it was he’d been thinking on the topic. He thanked Kurt for informing him and walked immediately down to the dining room, where his parents were returned from their luncheon with friends. It didn’t matter how he dressed the situation up, or how he expressed the idea to himself in his mind - he knew that he had to admit to himself that he enjoyed Kurt’s company far more than he enjoyed that of Miss Berry’s. A glance at his silent parents confirmed to him that they probably wouldn’t be best pleased to find that out.