Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 17
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The Duke wrote in May. The letter was addressed to Mr. Sowerby, and it asked, with complete correctness, whether Miss Broome might be permitted to look at some music in the library at Carrow, which was uncataloged and which contained a quantity of manuscript that nobody had been through since seventeen eighty-two.Honoria read it first. Of course she did. She said at breakfast that it was a very great condescension, and that of course dear Cecily could not possibly be spared.And Mr. Edmund Sowerby, who had said perhaps four hundred words of consequence in twenty-two years of marriage, put down the newspaper.He said, "She may go."Honoria said, "Edmund."He said, "She may go. I have sat in that room and heard what my own house has had in it for ten years, and I have been ashamed of myself twice a day since. She may go, and she may take the carriage, and she may take as long as she likes."And then he picked the newspaper back up, because he was not a brave man in general and had used most of what he had.Cecily went to Carrow on the ninth of June with Dunnage driving. Carrow is eleven miles from Wraysbury, and she had never been further than Cambridge in ten years.The library was on the north side and had not been properly opened since the old Duke died: eleven hundred volumes of music, three-quarters of it uncataloged, in presses that had been shut long enough that the first one she opened breathed out at her. She stood in that room for some minutes without touching anything. Then she took off her gloves and started at the left-hand end of the top shelf, because that is where you start.The Duke came in at about noon and found her on the fourth step of a library ladder with three volumes under one arm, and he said, "Miss Broome, there is a man in Cambridge who does this.""Then he should have been sent for six years ago, Your Grace.""He was. He came for two days and sent in a bill for nine guineas and a note saying the collection was of no particular interest."