Cordelia did not answer that. The answer was standing eight feet away and had just been kind to her in front of eleven people, by her own account of it. The Dowager waited. Then she let it go and asked something else.
"What you played after it? The turn on the third and the fourth? Where did that come from?"
"It is in the tune, Your Grace. It is only made plain. And after that, there are six more."
The room had gone very quiet.
"Are there?" the Dowager said. She sat down again; somebody gave her the stick back. "There is a third one. It goes faster on the page than it goes in the ear. Every woman I have paid to play it in this house has run away with it. What ought to be done about that?"
"It goes slower than it looks."
"Why?"
"It is written in small notes because the line underneath is long. If you take the small notes at their face, you lose the long line, and the long line is the whole of it."
The old woman sat quite still for a moment. "Sit down, the whole of you. What I have to say will take a minute, and I am too old now to say it at people who are standing up.
"In the summer of 1813, my second son was killed in Spain at Vitoria, in a business the newspapers gave four lines to. He was four-and-twenty. He had nothing of his own and never would have had, and he was the only person in this family who was any pleasure to live with. He whistled the same thing going up the back stairs from the time he was six. He did not know where he had got it, and I never asked. You do not ask about a thing a person does every day of his life.
"Within the year, I could not hold it anymore. It kept turning into something else in my head, and each time it turned, it went further off and I could not get it back. So I wrote down what I had left: three bars. And my hand was not steady. I sent it to a music seller in Shrewsbury and asked to have it made into something I could not lose. Forty guineas. It is the cheapest thing I have ever bought.
"What came back was seven variations. I have had them played in this house twice since, on the day of the action and on his birthday, and I have not yet managed to sit through the last one.
"I asked for one thing besides the music: the name of whoever wrote it, so that I could thank them in my own hand, like a Christian. I asked nine times. I offered twenty guineas simply for leave to send one letter. I was refused five times in a large sloping hand by somebody who informed me that the person concerned had been fully paid and desired no further correspondence. The other four of mine were not answered at all.