Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 4
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"Yes.""Bar forty-one, the tie.""Yes."He nodded slowly. Then he said, "In Hanover, I would have paid a man for that work. Here it is done at night by a young woman in a back room with two dead notes in the bass, and no one has said thank you."Cecily said, "It is not difficult, Mr. Krause."And he looked at her, and he said the thing she thought about for the rest of that month:"It is not difficult for you. That is not the same sentence."Then the footman brought his hat, and he took it and went out to the gig, and neither of them ever mentioned it again until the twenty-second of April in a drawing room in front of thirty-one people.The Duke of Carrow came into the neighborhood in March. He was thirty-six. He had inherited four years earlier from a cousin, which had been a surprise to everybody, including him, and he had spent those four years doing the unglamorous work of a man who has been handed an estate in poor order: reading, traveling, dismissing people, and paying debts that were not his.He was not handsome in the way the county had hoped. He was tall and rather heavy in the shoulder, and he had a face that gave away nothing at all, which people took for coldness and which was, in fact, fifteen years of not being anybody important.Honoria Sowerby got the invitation accepted through the Miss Pelhams, whose brother had been at school with the Duke's cousin, and it cost her three weeks of maneuver and one very expensive dinner. The maneuver deserves a moment, because it is the only thing Honoria Sowerby was ever unquestionably excellent at.She began with a note to the elder Miss Pelham about a receipt for damson cheese, which is a thing nobody has ever wanted. She followed it with a call. On the call, she mentioned, in passing, that Wraysbury had a Broadwood grand standing idle, and that it seemed a shame, and that she had sometimes thought of a small evening.