Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 16
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Georgiana stood in the middle of the room for a while. Then she said, "That is not a good answer," and went out. She was nineteen, and she was right, and it was the first time in ten years that anybody at Wraysbury had told Cecily Broome that she was wrong about something in a way that was worth having.Honoria did not rage, and she did not accuse. She went, over about nine days, extremely quiet. And then she began, without ever announcing it, to remove Cecily from the parts of the house where people could see her: there was suddenly a great deal to be done with the old lady upstairs; the acceptance book for the summer was given to Arabella, who lost it; Cecily was not at dinner on the two evenings the Pelhams came.It was not punishment for a fault, because there had been no fault. It was the ordinary reaction of a woman who has discovered that a thing she owned has been valued by somebody else. Cecily saw exactly what it was and said nothing, because saying something had never once worked.She went on copying the music. That was the part Honoria could not bring herself to stop, because the music still had to be corrected, and there was nobody else.There is a particular quality to a house that has decided, without saying so, to be finished with you: the tea comes at the same hour; the fire is lit; nobody is rude. And a door that used to be open when you walked past it is now, four times out of five, closed, and there is always a reason, and the reasons are always true.Cecily counted over those nine days the number of sentences addressed to her that were not instructions. It was a thing she did to keep her temper, and she was not proud of it. The answer was two: one was from Georgiana, who asked what she was reading; one was from a housemaid called Sarah, who said it was a cold morning for May, and who said it twice because the first time Cecily had not understood that she was being spoken to.On the ninth day, Honoria came into the small parlor with three sheets of a Pleyel and said, "These want doing before Thursday," and put them on the table and turned to go. Then she stopped in the doorway with her hand on the frame.She said, "You made her cry, you know. Arabella. She has not sung since."Cecily looked at the three sheets of Pleyel. There were perhaps nine answers available, and she had ten years of practice at not giving any of them. What she said in the end, and in the mildest voice she had, was:"I did not sing on the twenty-second, Aunt."Honoria stood in the doorway for a moment. Then she said, "No, you did not," and went out and shut the door, and that was the last conversation the two of them had at Wraysbury that either of them would remember.Three invitations came for her in that month from three houses that had been at the evening, and all three were declined on her behalf before she was shown them. She found out about the second one because a footman named Dunnage told her and risked his place doing it, and she never forgot him, and he was pensioned at Carrow forty-one years later.