"That is not me doing anything," Cordelia said. "That is how it works. A stammer does not follow you into a tune. You can sing all day and nothing will catch."
"Why does nobody say?"
"Because nobody has ever tried to find out."
She taught him to read music that spring, an hour on Tuesdays because he asked. By the summer, he could copy a treble part clean, and Loveday was paying him a penny a sheet. The men in the yard let the joke drop; nobody told them to. A boy who is earning is a different boy.
Cordelia said nothing about it indoors. It was a stable matter. That is the thing about a kindness done in a yard: everybody in the yard remembers it; nobody indoors ever hears of it until the day it comes up the front steps by itself.
On the 11th of October, 1814, Mr. Loveday came out on the wrong Tuesday. He asked for Lady Wexford, not for Cordelia. He was in the morning room twenty minutes.
What he had come about was this: a lady of large fortune wanted variations written on an air. Her name he was not at liberty to give, and never did give. She wanted the work done in the country, quietly, for private use: no name on it, not published, and nobody in London who would talk. She was offering forty guineas.
Loveday had one person in the world he wanted to hand that to. But Cordelia was a gentlewoman under her stepmother's roof. A gentlewoman does not take a commission over her guardian's head. Loveday was sixty-four and he was careful. So he went to Lady Wexford first, which was correct, and which was the worst thing he ever did.
She heard him out to the end. "Forty guineas?"
"Forty, madam."
"Paid how?"
"Through me, in two payments, on delivery and at quarter day."
"And you proposed to say all this to my husband's daughter?"
"I proposed to give her the work, madam, and the money that comes with it."