After settling a more subdued Anna back in bed, Mitchell found Vivienne Mourdant in the clock tower where Bridget had said she’d be, propped against the stone wall with one leg dangling off the bench. “I owe you an apology, Miss Mourdant.” He wouldn’t be able to sleep until he gave it. “What I assumed . . .”

Her profile was perfected by the shadows, her features soft in the glow of his candle. She tipped her chin down, the only acknowledgment of his apology. “I’m beginning to doubt any of us in this place are truly mad. Or perhaps madness isn’t what we think it is.”

“You’ve not seen all of Hurstwell.”

“I’ve seen enough.” Even in that oversized asylum gown, she was draped in elegance, just like her music. “What I’m beginning to realize is that this place is filled with people who need help . . . but the point is that they are people, broken or not.”

He couldn’t stop staring at those long, slender hands wrapped around the edge of the rough bench. They had created a miracle of sound with little apparent effort, music that had penetrated his pain-dulled heart and leaked into Anna’s unreachable mind where no one else had gone—or cared to go.

“You see it too, don’t you?” His voice was raspy, but his soul hopeful. Almost alive again. “That spark of humanity in the people here.” Most simply didn’t. They were busy. Overworked and tired.

In answer she simply looked up, that vibrant face beaming directly at him in that shadowed old tower, the lights of her eyes making it suddenly hard to breathe. Music was here, she was right. There was no place where it could not seep through, even the place of his deepest pain, and since she’d come it had invaded, ringing from those old gray walls and waking lost souls.

Their exchange in the chronic hall echoed back to him. “Most people don’t go about hearing music that isn’t there. It’s as simple as that.”

“Most aren’t listening.”

He was. He was listening. He settled on another bench near her and leaned close. “Tell me about it. About this music you hear.”

She looked down and thought for a moment, then spoke candidly. “The music . . . it haunts my heart and mind, and I invite it to, because quite frankly it is far more welcome than many other things trying to invade my thoughts. It’s like an echo, a reverberation after spending so many hours in the midst of sound and rhythm and song.” She closed her eyes, face turned up in the enchanting moonlight pouring through the translucent clockfaces above them. “And I can feel it. I put my hand on the pianoforte when someone plays, on the wall of this place when there is no one playing, and there’s a rhythm to everything. An undercurrent to the atmosphere.”