As Jamie became more and more occupied with his rag, Julia took the time to sort out her discomfiture.  She remained beside him, keeping her arms close in her lap, out of the way, watching his hands dance back and forth in their own time.  Julia suspected that it would be easy to love Jamie differently than she already did, but the idea felt dangerous, too, like one of those bumblebees buzzing around the garden – sometimes you forgot it was even nearby, but sometimes it buzzed so close, treacherous, and you had to stay very still lest it turn and sting you.  Julia finally slid off of the bench and stretched out her arms over her head, so that the muscles all down her sides pulled and elongated and tingled all the way down to her ankles.  She wanted to move, to loosen up everything and shake the loose bits and pieces out of her mind.  

“Are you liking this?”

The music stopped and Julia let her arms flop down to her sides.  “Yes,” she answered at once, without considering the question at all.  She tugged at her blouse, fidgeting to make it right where it had come untucked at the edges of her jumper around her waist, and thinking over his offer to play something else.  Silent, the room felt vacant.  

“Will you play something I can dance with?” she asked.  She crouched to tug off her socks, tossing them onto her shoes.  “Not too fast.  Like for a waltz.”

As Jamie began to play again, Julia took a few careful steps, the beginning of her part in an old fashioned waltz.  The floor was cold against her toes, and she felt stiff all over, but the more steps she took, the warmer she felt, like all the tension was melting away to heat up the stones beneath her.  Her arms came up, outstretched at her sides.  She had no partner to take her hands, but she didn’t need one.  This was easy, a mindless collection of steps that she could do in her sleep.  Soon she melted into a ceilidh variation that she liked, but it didn’t fit with this song as well, and she switched again to a French version.  The longer she danced, the more her arms engaged in her movement, the more she deviated from the pattern to improvise.  

Julia had always preferred her dancing lessons over the piano lessons; she loved the symmetry and the grace, the challenge of throwing her whole body into the music and keeping time just right.  She danced far better than she played, but her opportunities for dancing at school stood few and far between, to the point of nonexistent.  At home she could dance in her room alone whenever she liked.  She could even wander out to the cedar wood and dance alone if she wanted to sing the music for herself.  At evenings she would sometimes dance alone or occasionally with her father in the parlor while Gail sat at the piano.  At the castle, if somebody played an instrument alone, people thought they were brilliant.  If somebody danced alone, they were thought to be insane.  Even at the masques she had never danced – that would have involved boys who generally forgot that she existed.  But today, with Jamie at the piano, Julia felt moved to dance – she could and she would and she did just that on her pale bare feet with the pink toenails.  

Julia tried to think whether Jamie had ever observed her dancing for more than a handful of steps at a time during her bursts of excitement that cropped up here and there.  He must have, over the years, but she pushed that thought away from her mind as it made her grow more self-conscious.  She didn’t want to be worried and restrained.  She spun at the direction of an invisible hand guiding her, her hair cascading across her face, and she twisted back again, feeling wild, like she was in her own bedroom with the door closed and the window wide open to the summer.  

All at once, Julia stopped, her mess of hair settling half over her face as she stood facing Jamie at the piano.  “Who do you think would kiss me?” she asked him.  It would be good to know where to start if she only had until the start of January.



Life unfolds in proportion to your courage.