Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 7
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She wrote:This is the only true thing in the piece. Play it slower than feels safe. It will not sound empty. It will sound like somebody meant it.Then she shut the music, and went to bed, and did not think about it again.Georgiana practiced for the last week with the corrected copy in front of her, and improved considerably, and never once asked why the music now made sense. That is not cruelty: she was nineteen, and she assumed the world arrived correct. Most people do.Arabella, in the same three weeks, asked Cecily twice to hear her arias, and both times what she meant was that she wished to be listened to. So Cecily listened and said what was true, which was that the tone was lovely, and did not say the other thing, which was that the second aria was in a key that sat badly for her and that a semitone down would have transformed it. She did not say it because she had learned, in ten years at Wraysbury, exactly what happened when she was right in front of her aunt.Lavinia asked her nothing.And on the eighteenth of April, four days before the evening, Honoria Sowerby came into the small back parlor where Cecily was making a fair copy of the second aria and told her what her part in the evening would be."You will turn for Georgiana.""Yes, Aunt.""Wear the gray, not the blue. The blue is too much beside the girls.""Yes."Honoria paused at the door. She was not, whatever else, a stupid woman, and there was a version of that conversation in which she said something else.