Lady Wexford put a folded paper on the desk. "On that. Do not lose it, and do not be clever with it. She wants the thing she remembers. She will not thank you for a lot of learning laid over the top of it."
"How long has she got?"
"She did not say. Christmas."
"Am I to write to her?"
"You are to write nothing to anybody. She is a private woman, and I have promised her she will be left alone." Lady Wexford was already at the door. "You will send it to me, and I will see to the rest."
The paper had three bars of melody on it and nothing else: no key, no title, no date. The ink was shaky. The note stems all leaned the same wrong way, the way they do when a person has not written music since they were young.
Cordelia studied it for a while. A tune somebody has chosen is one thing; a tune somebody has carried is another. And this was the second kind. You can tell: a carried tune is always slightly wrong. It has been rubbed by going round in her head for years, and the corners are off it.
She spent a week doing nothing but playing those three bars. She began writing at the end of October. There are seven variations. They took five weeks and part of most nights, and she did the fair copy twice because she blotted a page of the first one. On the first page, above the first bar, she wrote a dedication. There was an old woman at the other end of this, and she had nothing else to send. She did not sign it—the lady wanted no names. She put two letters, which is what a copyist does.
Then she wrapped it in oilcloth, gave it to Mr. Loveday in the December, never saw it again, and never asked what became of it.
Nobody thanked her. She had not expected anybody to. It had been explained to her that it was a favor. Five weeks and part of most nights. The guineas are not the largest thing that was taken off her.
Four miles away, an old woman got a parcel.
The Dowager Duchess of Amberley was a Manchester cotton man's daughter. She married very high at nineteen, and for fifty years afterwards people had been telling her she had done well for herself. She had two sons. The second was Lord Peregrine, who went into the 61st at seventeen because his brother had everything, and was killed at Vitoria in June of 1813, at twenty-four.
There is a thing mothers do that nobody warns them about: they lose the face first, then the voice. What holds longest is whatever the person made a noise with. Within the year, she was losing that, too. So she wrote down the three bars she had left on a half-sheet with a hand that shook. She was particular about two things: it was not to be published, and she wanted the name of whoever wrote it. She asked for that name, and then she went on asking.
The manuscript reached Amberley in the January of 1815. She had it played to her once by a woman she paid to come out from Shrewsbury, then sent the woman out of the room and wrote to ask again who had written it.