Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 19
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What he eventually said was:"I have been trying to work out for four months how to say this so that it does not sound like a rescue, and I cannot, so I will say it plainly and you may do as you like with it. I do not want to give you a position. You have one. I want to be in the room where the work is being done. That is the whole of it."Cecily Broome was holding a volume of Corelli. She said, "Your Grace, I have seventy pounds, and no family who would receive you civilly, and a reputation in this county as the poor relation who plays."He said, "I know what you have. I have read your catalog. It is the best-written document in this house."And she laughed, which she had done exactly twice in ten years, and then she said yes. And then she put the Corelli back on the shelf in the correct place before she let him take her hand, which he has told the story of at every dinner they have given since.They were married in the October following, sixteen months after she first came to Carrow with Dunnage driving. By then the catalog was bound, and she had begun the second job, which was the manuscript volumes, and she did not stop that to be married either.Six years after the evening at Wraysbury, there is a room at Carrow that used to be the small library and is now the music room, because the Duchess wanted the north light and did not want the good instrument in a room where people were expected to talk.There is a music evening at Carrow four times a year, and it is not a market. That is a deliberate thing, and it is the Duchess's rule. Nobody at Carrow performs who does not wish to. No young woman is walked to an instrument by her mother. Anybody who wishes to play may say so at the door and will be put on the list, and the list is kept in order of asking, and the Duchess plays third or eleventh or wherever her name happens to fall.Twice, girls have asked at the door who were not asked to by anybody, and one of them was a tenant's daughter of sixteen, with a voice like weather. There is now a fund, administered without ceremony, that pays for four such people at a time to be taught properly by somebody who tells them the truth. It is not charity, and the Duchess is extremely particular about that word: "It is a correction of an oversight," is how she puts it, in the tone of a woman going through a page of a ledger that does not balance.The catalog is finished and bound in four volumes, and there is a copy in Cambridge. The forty unsigned pages have been published with an introduction that says, honestly, that we do not know who wrote them. Two names have been proposed, and neither will hold. The Duchess believes it was a woman. She says so only at her own table, and only when pressed, and when her husband asks her what she is going on, she says "the hand," and will not be drawn further. She has given instructions that the introduction is not to say it, because she cannot prove it, and she has been very clear with herself about the difference between what she knows and what she would like.There are three children. The eldest is a girl of five, who has been at the instrument since she was three, and who has not once been told that she is ready.Mr. Krause was written to in the June after the evening, and the letter did not mention the twenty-second of April at all, and neither did his reply, and neither of them has ever raised it in six years. He came to Carrow in the second year, as master, at a salary that made him sit down. He is sixty-seven now, and he teaches the child, and he tells her the truth every fortnight, which she does not always enjoy.