Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 5
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The Miss Pelhams, who had no instrument and a great appetite for other people's, took the bait inside a fortnight and asked whether their brother might bring a friend. Honoria then gave a dinner for eleven that she could not afford, at which the Pelham brother ate very well and heard three times that his sisters were much wanted at Wraysbury. And on the twenty-ninth of March, a note came back from Barrow Court in a secretary's hand, accepting for the twenty-second of April.Cecily wrote out the reply. She wrote out all of them. She sat in the small parlor with the acceptance book and entered thirty-one names over nine days, and her aunt came in twice to ask whether the Pelhams had answered.He would come on the twenty-second of April.There were three and a half weeks to prepare, and Honoria used every hour of them. Arabella was to sing two of the four arias. Lavinia was to be seated near the fire with the portfolio open on a stand at a distance from which the skies were the most visible part. And Georgiana was to play the Clementi.Here is what those weeks actually contained, because the story turns on labor, and most of the labor in that house was invisible by design.Arabella worked at her two arias with Mr. Krause on the alternate Fridays and with a hired man from Cambridge on the Tuesdays, and Cecily heard both of them through a wall for three weeks. The hired man told her she was magnificent. Mr. Krause told her once that the second aria sat two notes too high for comfort and might be taken down; Arabella said that Signor Ravani had always said it was her best key, and Mr. Krause said, "Then we will keep it in that key," and did not mention it again.Lavinia's three weeks consisted of choosing which nine of her eleven landscapes to show (which took her most of them and three changes of mind) and of being fitted for the gown. She did not paint anything. Mr. Prentice came on the Tuesdays as usual and worked on a twelfth, in which Lavinia would eventually do the sky.Georgiana practiced. She practiced badly at first, which is to say too fast and too often—three hours a day at a piece that wanted forty focused minutes. By the end of the first week, her hands hurt, and she was worse than when she started, and she cried in the passage where she thought nobody was.Cecily found her there. She did not offer to teach her; she had learned in ten years exactly where the line was.What she said was, "When my father was learning a thing he could not do, he used to say that the hands are stupider than we are, and they need to be told a small thing many times, not a large thing once."Georgiana wiped her face and said, "What does that mean?""It means that if you play the four hard bars twenty times slowly this evening and then stop, you will play them better tomorrow than if you play the whole sonata six times tonight."