"Then what ought I to have done, Miss Wexford?"
"Exactly what you did, and then died of it slowly, which is what you have been doing since March. Stop."
That is what an old man got instead of a scene.
The Dowager Duchess of Amberley finally did the thing she had been trying to do: she wrote a letter of thanks in her own hand. It went four miles, and it took a day.
She also did something less pretty, which she never apologized for: she had the seven variations engraved in London that autumn at her own charge, with the composer's name on the plates in full, and sent a hundred copies into the county to people she chose herself. Somebody asked whether that was not against her own rule.
"My rule was that his noise should not be sold. This is not selling. This is giving it to Shropshire, whether Shropshire wants it or not."
Cordelia married the Duke of Amberley at Bramfield in September of 1817, quietly, with fourteen people present. She kept writing, which the county found the hardest part to place; a duchess who works is a difficult thing to be at ease with. There are three books of hers with her name on the plates, and a fourth in her own hand that has never been out of the house.
Tom Skreen went to Loveday at fourteen and had the Shrewsbury shop at thirty-one. There is a man alive in that town who will tell you old Mr. Skreen stammered like a cart on cobbles right up until he opened his mouth to sing.
Loveday died in 1822. The receipt for forty guineas was in his ledger where it had been all along.
Nine years on, there is an evening in the March at Amberley when the family plays the seven variations through. The last one always gets played now, because the woman at the instrument is the one who wrote it, and she does not stop. The stick still comes off the old woman's lap at the fourth bar; she lived to eighty-one, and she never once stopped doing it.
The manuscript is in the black cabinet still, with two letters at the bottom of the first page where a name should be, and nobody at Amberley has ever had it altered.
A child of the house asked her once why she had not simply told them that night that it was hers.
Cordelia said, "I had been told for ten years that I had nothing. You do not answer that. You put it on paper, and you leave it about. And one day, somebody reads it out."