Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 18
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Cecily came down the ladder and put the three volumes on the table, opened the middle one, and turned it round."That," she said, "is a set of parts in somebody's own hand, and the viola part has been copied by a different person from the other three. And whoever copied the viola part could not read very well and has made the same mistake in every repeat. It is of no particular interest to a man being paid by the day."There was a pause. The Duke said, "How long will it take you?""Four months, three days a week. Longer if you keep me talking."He went away and came back an hour later with a chair that was better than the one she had. He set it down, said nothing whatever about it, and left her to the shelf.It took her until the following March, working three days a week, and she was paid for it at her own insistence at the rate a professional cataloger would have received, which was the first money Cecily Broome had ever earned in her life. She was paid seventy pounds in total. She has the receipt for the first payment still—twelve pounds ten—in a box in her own writing room, and she has never told her husband that she kept it; he found it in the second year of their marriage and put it back exactly where it had been.In the eighth week, she found, in the middle of a bound volume of undistinguished sonatas, forty pages in a hand she did not know: unsigned, unattributed, and better than anything else in the room.She had opened the volume expecting nothing. It was a made-up book, the kind a dealer assembles out of oddments to sell as a lot, and the first ninety pages were exactly what such books contain: two thin sonatas by a man who taught in Vienna and never wrote anything else worth binding, and a set of variations on a tune that was popular in seventeen seventy-four and is not now.Then the paper changed: different maker, slightly grayer, and the ruling of the staves done by hand rather than by a rastrum. And on it, in brown ink and a small, sloped hand, a trio for keyboard, violin, and cello, complete in three movements, with no title page and no name anywhere on it.She read the first page standing up. Then she sat down and read it properly, which took forty minutes, and by the end of the second movement she had put her hand flat on the table beside the book, which is a thing she does perhaps twice a decade. She spent two days on it. Then she wrote out a fair copy and left it on the Duke's desk, with a note that said only:Somebody in seventeen eighty-one bought this by accident. Page twelve.He asked her, in the library, that September, six months after the catalog was finished. Badly. He had rehearsed it, which she could tell, and about eleven words in he stopped and said, "This is going wrong," and started again, and the second attempt was worse.