Chapter 7 The Salon
The Drummond house occupied a corner of Hill Street, Mayfair — the scent of hothouse lilies reaching the pavement through an open casement — with the quiet self-possession of a property that had been valued at four thousand a year before its owner died and had not depreciated since.
It was handsome without distinction — pale stone, four bays, iron railings that had been painted within the fortnight.
The windows on the first floor blazed with candlelight.
A hired linkboy stood at the pavement’s edge, his torch describing small arcs in the December air as he waited to guide departing carriages.
It was twenty minutes past eight o’clock on a Thursday evening, and Mrs. Drummond’s salon was receiving.
Georgiana Darcy descended from the carriage Lady Mercer had sent for her — a kindness or a convenience, depending on one’s assessment of Lady Mercer’s motives, which were never entirely separable from her appetite for gossip — and stood on the pavement for three seconds longer than was necessary.
The three seconds were not hesitation. They were the interval she had agreed upon with the Colonel, who was watching from a hired cab at the far end of the square: three seconds’ pause on the step meant she had arrived without incident.
An immediate entry meant urgency. A return to the carriage meant abort.
She counted to three, adjusted the reticule on her wrist, and went in.
The hall was narrow and warm and smelt of beeswax and something sharper underneath — oranges, she thought, clove-studded and placed in bowls, the kind of fragrance a hostess employed when she wished her rooms to be remembered.
A manservant took Georgiana’s cloak and directed her upstairs.
The household received guests as a well-run mill receives grain: smoothly, in sequence, without visible effort.
The drawing room occupied the full width of the first floor, divided by a pair of folding doors that stood open between the front and back rooms. The company numbered perhaps thirty — officers in dress uniform, civilians in dark coats, women in evening dress whose quality Georgiana assessed with the involuntary precision of a young woman who had been schooled in fabrics by her Pemberley housekeeper and could distinguish Spitalfields silk from Lyon at ten paces.
The conversation was a sustained hum pitched at the level that indicated confidence rather than volume.
These were people accustomed to being heard without raising their voices.
Mrs. Drummond came forward the moment Georgiana’s name was announced.
She was not what Georgiana had expected, though Georgiana could not have specified what she had expected, having formed her picture of the woman entirely from Lady Mercer’s description — “handsome, clever, and very nearly French in her manner of holding a room.” The description was accurate on the first count, approximate on the second, and precise on the third.
Mrs. Drummond was perhaps forty-five, with dark hair dressed simply, and a face whose attractiveness derived less from its features than from the animation of its expression.
She moved through her own drawing room with the easy authority of a woman who had been hosting for twenty years and regarded each evening as a production in which she served as both director and principal performer.
“Miss Darcy. Lady Mercer has told me so much about your playing that I have been quite unreasonable in my anticipation. You will find the Broadwood in the back room. I had it tuned on Tuesday, which I hope meets your standards — Lady Mercer warned me you would know if it had not been.”
“You are very kind, Mrs. Drummond.”
“I am very selfish. I have not heard a proper performance in this room since October, and my nerves require music as other women’s require salts. Come, let me introduce you.”
The introductions were conducted with a briskness that spoke of practice.
Georgiana was presented to a Colonel Warren of the Horse Guards, whose moustache preceded him into conversation by a quarter-second; to Mrs. Elliot, a sharp-eyed woman in plum silk who assessed Georgiana with undisguised maternal calculation; to Mr. Stanhope of the Colonial Office, whom Georgiana recognised from Hanover Square and who recognised her in return with a bow that was correct and unrevealing; and to a Mr. Prideaux, a fair-haired man of thirty whose introduction identified him as a secretary at the Admiralty and whose handshake lasted one beat longer than convention dictated.
“A pleasure, Miss Darcy. I understand your brother is in town.”
“He is, sir. He attends to business.”
“Estate business, I imagine. Pemberley is in Derbyshire, is it not?”
“It is.”
“A long way from the sea.” Mr. Prideaux smiled. The smile was pleasant, uninstructive, a smile suited equally to drawing rooms and depositions. “I envy landlocked men. The Admiralty keeps us chained to charts and tide tables. Do give your brother my compliments.”
Georgiana returned the smile with one she had been practising since November — an expression of mild, agreeable blankness that communicated nothing except good breeding and the willingness to be charmed.
It was, she had discovered, the most useful face a young woman could wear in company.
It invited disclosure. People spoke freely in the presence of a face that promised not to understand.
She moved through the room. The hearing tube was in her reticule — Mr. Gardiner’s brass instrument, no larger than a gentleman’s snuffbox when collapsed, its bell-shaped ear trumpet designed to amplify sound through a narrow cone.
She did not touch it. The reticule hung from her wrist, its contents invisible, its weight familiar from two days of carrying it through the Gardiners’ house until the object felt like nothing more remarkable than a comb or a handkerchief.
The ordinariness was the point. One did not notice what one expected.
The Broadwood stood in the back room, a six-octave grand in rosewood with brass fittings that had been polished with more enthusiasm than expertise.
Georgiana opened the fallboard and tested a chord.
The tuning was acceptable — the fifths were clean, the upper register bright without harshness, the dampers responding with the slight delay that characterised the Broadwood action and distinguished it from a Viennese instrument.
She had played worse. She had played better.
The piano was adequate to the purpose, which was not to deliver an exemplary performance but to establish a reason for her presence and a location from which to observe.
She was asked to play at a quarter past nine.
Mrs. Drummond made the request with a gracious informality that was not quite spontaneous — the request had been anticipated, prepared for, and the timing chosen to coincide with the arrival of a fresh round of wine and the natural intermission that occurs in a gathering when conversation has reached its first exhaustion and requires a new stimulus to continue.
Georgiana sat at the Broadwood and played Haydn’s Sonata in E-flat, the one she had been practising since October, the one whose first movement began with a simplicity that invited inattention and whose development section demanded it.
The room settled. The conversation dimmed. She played.
She played well. This was not vanity — it was assessment.
The Haydn was a piece she knew at the level where the fingers conducted their own conversation with the keys and the mind was free to occupy itself elsewhere, and elsewhere, on this evening, was the room behind her.
She listened while she played. The hearing tube remained in the reticule.
She did not need it yet. What she needed now was the natural intelligence of a musician’s ear, trained across twelve years to distinguish every sound in a room — the scrape of a chair, the clink of glass on glass, the quality of a whisper that was not quite whispered.
The drawing room doors were open. Through the sustained passage of the second movement, she heard the company resume its conversations in the front room, the voices layered beneath her playing like a figured bass beneath a melody.
She catalogued them without turning her head.
Colonel Warren was discussing cavalry procurement with a man whose voice she did not recognise.
Mrs. Elliot was interrogating someone about the Chatsworth ball.
Mr. Stanhope spoke in low tones to Mr. Prideaux by the far wall — she caught the words “dispatch” and “February” and filed them.
The Haydn concluded. Applause, polite and genuine in unequal measure. Mrs. Drummond appeared at her elbow.
“You play like an angel, Miss Darcy. An absolute angel. Stay, please — I will not let you leave before the supper tray. Come, there is someone in the small parlour you must meet.”
Georgiana followed. The small parlour was a room she had not been shown during the introductions — a study or morning room on the far side of the back drawing room, its door half-closed, the light within lower than the candlelit brightness of the main rooms. Mrs. Drummond led her through the door and introduced her to a Mrs. Cavanagh, a stout woman in grey silk who was, Mrs. Drummond explained, “our most devoted patron of young musicians” and who immediately engaged Georgiana in a conversation about Clementi that lasted seven minutes and established Mrs. Cavanagh as a woman of strong opinions and modest knowledge.
The conversation was useful. It placed Georgiana in the small parlour, legitimately, with the door open behind her, and beyond the door the back drawing room, and beyond the drawing room the passage that led to the rest of the first floor.
Mrs. Cavanagh talked. Georgiana listened, replied, smiled, and watched.