Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 2
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Her aunt came for her in a hired chaise. Honoria was not unkind that day; she was efficient, which in the circumstances was better. She said one sentence on the road that Cecily has never repeated to anybody.She said, "You will find, my dear, that people who are good are very expensive to be related to."That was ten years ago, and Cecily has thought about that sentence perhaps once a week ever since. She decided about it eventually, though it took her until she was a duchess with a household of her own to run: it was neither a warning nor an apology. It was a woman explaining in advance, and to a child, the terms on which she would be housed.What she did was everything nobody else wished to do. She wrote the invitations and kept the acceptance book. She did the flowers when there were flowers. She sat with Mr. Sowerby's mother on the days the old woman was frightened, which was most days by then. That went on another two years. When the old woman died, she asked for Cecily and not for her son, and Honoria never entirely forgave either of them for it.And she copied music.That last one is the reason for this story, so it is worth understanding what it meant. Printed music was expensive, and it was frequently wrong. A sonata came from the engraver with mistakes in it: a wrong accidental, a missing rest, a bar that did not add up. Every serious household had somebody who corrected it, and copied out parts, and marked the fingerings for the player, and penciled in where the page could actually be turned without breaking the line.At Wraysbury, that person was Cecily.She had learned it from her father, who had been an attorney with an untidy office and a very tidy ear, and who had taught her thoroughbass out of a Dutch treatise on Sunday afternoons because he had nobody else to teach it to.She played well. That is a plain fact, and the story does not work without it. She played the way people play who have been at an instrument since they were four and have never once been asked to perform: accurately, quietly, and entirely without display.At Wraysbury, she was permitted to play in the mornings before eleven, when the family was not down. That permission has a small history, and it is characteristic.In her second year at Wraysbury, Cecily played in the afternoon. She had finished the letters, and the house was empty, and she sat down at the good instrument in the long drawing room and played for perhaps half an hour.Honoria came back early. She did not shout; Honoria never shouted. She had a much better instrument than that.