CHAPTER 20 #3
She had no wish to write another letter. She had no patience for accounts. The drawing room could not be improved until tomorrow, and the Gardiners’ kindness had left her with the uncomfortable sense of having been cared for at an angle.
This left only the rooms she had not yet dared to improve.
She went upstairs to the music room.
The music room had not been locked. Nothing in Portman Square was so theatrical as that. It had merely remained unused, which in a well-ordered house came to almost the same thing.
Mrs. Marwood had not played, but she had liked to hear Elizabeth do so in the half-hour before dinner, provided the piece was neither foolish nor long enough to encourage melancholy.
Mr. Marwood, in older stories, had preferred Handel, because accounts and fugues both improved by knowing where they meant to end.
Mrs. Marwood had tolerated Mozart when well executed, distrusted airs with too much sweetness in them, and once said that Beethoven did not enter a room politely but generally had the decency to know what he meant once he arrived.
After Mrs. Marwood’s death, Elizabeth had found no reason to sit at the instrument.
There had been letters, tenants, mourning notes, linens, bills, visitors, Pom-Pom’s digestion, and the quiet horror of being told by every room that she had inherited a life before she had discovered what to do with it.
All of those things had possessed the advantage of requiring something from her.
The pianoforte required only that she begin.
She stood beside it for some time, one hand resting on the closed lid.
Then she opened the music cabinet.
Several pieces were too pretty to be borne. A song Jane had once admired looked too gentle for the day. A sonata of Clementi seemed innocent enough to be offensive.
At last she drew out Beethoven.
The first chords answered her badly because her fingers were stiff. The room seemed too large around the sound; the grave phrases struck the covered harp, the cold grate, the shut cabinet, and returned to her as if the room had forgotten how to answer music.
Elizabeth played badly for eight bars, tolerably for twelve, and then with enough force to cease judging herself.
Beethoven did not comfort. That was perhaps why he suited her. Comfort would have been impertinent. Beethoven did not take one’s hand, recommend prudence, or urge one to think better of the world before the evidence was complete.
He made demands.
Elizabeth preferred demands.
She played until the stiffness left her hands and something else — anger, grief, humiliation, loyalty, she did not know and would not sort it — moved through her fingers into the keys and became less private by becoming sound.
Pom-Pom entered halfway through the second page, decided the proceedings did not threaten his authority, and settled beneath the pianoforte with a sigh.
When Elizabeth stopped, the silence did not return at once. It seemed to remain altered, as if the room had been reminded of its proper employment and now stood waiting to see whether she meant to neglect it again.
She sat with her hands resting lightly on the keys.
Then she looked about.
The room was not right.
Not wrong in any disgraceful sense. Mrs. Marwood had permitted no disgraceful rooms. But the vases on the mantel were too solemnly paired, the little cabinet near the door narrowed the entrance without earning the privilege, and the chair by the far wall had the air of a person sentenced to hear music without ever being invited into it.
“No,” said Elizabeth.
Pom-Pom opened one eye.
“You may object if you like,” she told him, “but I have decided against symmetry.”
He shut the eye again.
Elizabeth rang.
When James appeared, she had already crossed to the window.
“This chair should come nearer the light. Not so near as to fade the covering, but near enough that a person may sit with a book and still be accused of attending to the music. The small cabinet may go against the inner wall. Those vases are to be separated before they grow proud of one another.”
James received this as no more than an ordinary development in household government.
“Yes, miss.”
By the time Mrs. Albright came in, summoned perhaps by instinct rather than bell, Elizabeth had opened the cupboard and discovered three folios of music, one cracked porcelain shepherdess, two candle branches that had no business being hidden, and a quantity of dust which proved that even excellent households required provocation.
Mrs. Albright looked from the open cupboard to the chair now standing nearer the window.
“The room is to be used again, miss?”
Elizabeth looked at the pianoforte, the moved chair, the divided vases, and the winter light lying thinly across the carpet.
“Yes,” she said. “I believe it is.”
Mrs. Albright accepted this with the gravity due to a domestic revolution.
“Then I shall have the fire laid here tomorrow.”
Elizabeth touched the edge of the music still open on the stand.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
The word did not sound quite as empty as it had lately done.