There is a kind of evening that pretends to be about music.
Cecily Broome made such an evening possible, and was told to stand behind the stool and turn the pages.The instrument is tuned, the candles are counted, the chairs are set out in curved rows, and everybody agrees afterwards that the playing was delightful. But nobody in the room is listening to the playing: they are listening for whether a girl can hold a room, and whether her hands are steady, and whether a man with money and a title will look up.It is a market held to the sound of a pianoforte.At Wraysbury in the spring of that year, Honoria Sowerby had three daughters to bring to that market, and one evening in which to do it. She prepared for it the way a general prepares for a river crossing. What she did not prepare for was that the Duke of Carrow could read music.Cecily Broome was twenty-nine years old and had no position in that house that anybody could have written down.She was not a governess; the Sowerby girls had finished with governesses years before. She was not a companion, because a companion is engaged and paid, and there had never been an engagement, and there had never been any money. She was not a servant, and the servants knew it and were careful with her in the particular way servants are careful with somebody whose situation they understand better than she is allowed to.She was the daughter of Honoria Sowerby's late sister. She had come to Wraysbury at nineteen after her father's practice failed and he died of it.How that came about explains most of what follows.Thomas Broome was an attorney in Norwich with a good name and no instinct whatever for money. He took cases he should have refused. He acted for a corn merchant named Rudd across four years and never once pressed him for the fees, because Rudd's wife was ill and Broome could not bring himself to add to it. When Rudd went under, he took eleven hundred pounds of unbilled work with him.Cecily was seventeen when the clerks stopped coming. She was eighteen when the house went. She remembers the auctioneer's man writing numbers on the backs of the dining chairs in chalk, and she remembers thinking quite clearly that he had a terrible hand. Her father died in the February following, of nothing anybody could name, in lodgings with his Dutch treatise on the table. What he left her was two trunks, a reputation for being the daughter of a fool, and the ability to read music the way other people read a newspaper.