Lady Wexford had a view about that, and she said it out loud about twice a year: "It is a very pretty accomplishment, and I have never once begrudged you it. But you are seven-and-twenty, and you spend your mornings in a stable."
The stable was where the instrument was. It had been moved out of the drawing room the winter Sir Roland died—too loud for a house in mourning—and it never came back. So there was a square room over the harness room, a stove, and a square piano with two notes dead in the bass. Cordelia went out to it after breakfast in all weathers.
She bought her paper from Mr. Loveday. He kept a music shop in Shrewsbury, tuned organs, and came out to Ludlow on the second Tuesday of every month. Ruled paper was threepence a quire. She could not always find threepence.
So there was an arrangement. It was small and ordinary, and everything in this story comes out of it. Loveday sold parts—country choirs, subscription concerts, a militia band at Bishop's Castle. Somebody has to copy those out, and copying wants an exact hand. Cordelia copied for him at a shilling a sheet and took half of it in paper.
"You are the fastest hand I have ever had," he told her once. He was standing in the stable room with his hat still on. "And you are the only one who has ever corrected me."
"You had a wrong accidental in the Purcell."
"I had a wrong accidental in the Purcell for eleven years."
"I know."
"Nobody said."
"Nobody was reading it."
"That is true. And I would rather you had not said it out loud." He put the hat down. "Does anything reach you here that she has not seen first?"
"Nothing comes into this house at all that she has not seen. The bag goes to her."
"And if I wrote to you direct?"
"Then she would read it, and then she would give it to me, and then she would ask me what was in it. Do not write to me direct." Cordelia turned a page over. "Ask what you came to ask, Mr. Loveday."