Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 11
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"In the music. There is a note."She reached past him and turned the pages back, quite unselfconsciously, and found page seven and held it out. "There."The Duke of Carrow took the music and read the margin. He read it for rather a long time.Thirty-one people watched a duke read a piece of sheet music at a country house musical evening, and every one of them was working out, at their own speed, what kind of evening this had turned into. Mrs. Pelham looked at her sister. The Ansteys looked at Honoria. Mr. Sowerby, who had spent the entire evening in a chair by the second window doing what he always did, which was to be present without being involved, put down his glass.Then the Duke turned back to the first page and read that, and then he went through the whole sonata, standing at the instrument in front of thirty-one people, turning pages at about a page every four seconds, which is the speed at which a person reads music they can hear in their head.Nobody said anything: there is no polite way to interrupt a duke reading. He stopped twice: once at bar forty-one; once in the second movement at the bar with the dropped rest.Then he looked up and said to the room in general, "Whose pencil is this?"Honoria Sowerby, who had spent a month of maneuver and a very expensive dinner arriving at this exact moment, and who had it now going in a direction she did not recognize, said, "I am sure I could not say, Your Grace. The music comes from London.""The engraving comes from London. This does not." He held the open page up—not high, just enough. "Eleven errors corrected, two of which I would have missed at sight, and I have been reading music since I was six. The whole first movement re-fingered for a small hand. A carry-over cut and pasted in at the fourth page-turn because the turn was impossible as printed, which is a thing I have seen done twice in my life, and both times by professional men."He turned to page seven again."And somebody has written a sentence in the margin of the slow movement, which is the best piece of musical criticism I have heard in England."The room was entirely silent.