"This is the manuscript. There is a dedication on the first page, and my mother and I are the only people in England who have read it. I am going to read all of it; half would be worse than none.
"'These variations were made in a cold room in Shropshire in November of 1814 on three bars sent to me in a lady's own hand. I have been told nothing about the gentleman they are for, only that he is dead, and that he whistled this coming up the back stairs, and that his mother cannot hold the tune any longer. I am sorry to say I do not think that gets better. But a thing written down does not go off. This is written down now. It will still be right in fifty years when everybody who remembers him is gone, and that is the only useful thing I have to offer.
"'I have kept it where he had it, in the treble. I have let the left hand go quiet underneath. That is what a house sounds like after somebody has stopped coming up the stairs.
"'Whoever plays it should be told two things: the third goes slower than it looks. 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. And the last eight bars are not sad. People will play them sad. They are only tired, which is another thing entirely, and anybody who has been up all night with this in their head will know it at once.
"'I am not to be named, and I do not mind it. There is nothing to name. Nobody has ever paid me a farthing for a note of this, and I do not look to begin now. C.W.'"
He put the page down on the top of the instrument.
"'The third goes slower than it looks.' Miss Wexford said that to my mother about four minutes ago, standing where she is standing, with no music in front of her and this page locked in a cabinet on the floor above. There are seventeen people in this room, and two of them had read that sentence before tonight. I am one; my mother is the other." He turned the leaf over. "The manuscript is dated the 29th of November, 1814. Lady Wexford, Mr. Denning tells me that Sir Roland Wexford died in the June of 1811. Is that right?"
Lady Wexford said nothing at all.
"Then he did not write it. And the letters are in the hand that signed your name in my hall book this evening. Mr. Denning has that book at his elbow; he has been comparing them for the last two minutes, which is why he has not looked up. The last of them says that the person concerned is not a person I would find it useful to know." Then he looked straight at Cordelia for the first time all evening and asked her the only thing left to ask: "Who wrote the piece?"
An hour earlier, she had been told she had nothing of her own to put into anything. She stood there with both hands at her sides and could not get a word out. It was Tom Skreen's trick, and she had never once needed it herself.
So the Dowager answered for her, in the voice she had used on servants and bishops for fifty years. She got it right in eleven words:
"She did. And she was told it was a favor."
Lydia Callow did not sing that night; nobody remembered to ask her. She sat with the green book on her knee until the carriages came.