Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 9
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"Georgiana, play the four bars in your head. Not the whole thing, just the four."The girl closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them and said, "It is slower in my head than my hands want it.""Yes," said Cecily. "That is correct. That is what it is supposed to feel like."The performances began at half past eight.Arabella sang first. She sang the Paisiello, and she sang it in a voice that was genuinely pretty and genuinely small, and her Italian was flawless in the way that a parrot's Italian is flawless.The second aria was the one in the wrong key. It went as Mr. Krause had known in March that it would go: the top of the phrase sat two notes above where Arabella lived, and she got there four times, and each time the sound thinned and she pushed, and on the last of them, she went slightly under the note and stayed there for a beat and a half before she found it.The room made the noise a room makes. Honoria applauded with her chin up. Mr. Krause had said it in March and had been overruled by a singing master in Norwich who had been dead for four years.And Cecily, standing at the side, knew something worse than that, which was that Arabella would have taken it from her: not from Mr. Krause, who was paid, and not from her mother, who would have made it a correction; from the cousin, who had sat and listened to those arias twice and told her the tone was lovely. One sentence in the small parlor in March—that was all it would have taken, and she had not said it, because in that house, being right in front of her aunt had a price, and she had decided years ago that she would not pay it. That is the only shameful thing in this story, and it belongs to her.Then Lavinia was walked to the portfolio, and it was opened, and eleven people looked at the nine she had chosen, and Mr. Prentice of Bury St. Edmunds was not mentioned. The Duke looked at the landscapes for a courteous length of time. He said they were charming. He asked Lavinia one question about the light on the third one, which was one of Mr. Prentice's, and she answered it in a way that would have told anybody who painted that she had not painted it. The Duke did not pursue it. He put the portfolio down carefully, the way you put down something that has been handed to you under a misapprehension.Then Georgiana was called to the pianoforte, and Cecily came from the side of the room and stood behind the stool on the left, where a page-turner stands.Georgiana played the Clementi extremely well, better than she ever had. That happens sometimes, and it is the reason people keep making young women do this.She took the first movement at a tempo she could hold. She got through the passage at bar forty-one, the one with the missing tie, without the slightest trouble, because the tie was there in pencil. And in the slow movement, she did what the margin of page seven had told her to do: she played it slower than felt safe.