Rondo Allegro

by Sherwood Smith

“It was, I learned,” Parrette said. “But they changed the law not long after our revolution broke out. Though it is thought best to bide quiet, as John-Coachman says, as there is still ill feeling.” Parrette frowned, and added, “Some of it is on account of war in Ireland, five or six years back, the Irish, mostly Catholics, wanting independence in the way of the American colony.”

  War everywhere, Anna thought as she disposed her shawl about her elbows. Why was it necessary to forbid worship if it was not one’s own tradition?

  She recollected that the legation in Naples had had to build their own chapel, as the king had forbidden an English church to be built. Her mother had told her that Lutherans and Catholics and Church of England and the Jews as well all worshipped the same God, and read out of the same Bible, or half the Bible, with the Jews.

  But when kings and governments meddled with religion, there was another excuse for war.

  o0o

  That evening brought another change: the dowager appeared at dinner wearing spectacles. She said nothing about them, but commented in a brisk tone, “I wonder when we may safely begin looking for Henry?”

  Anna smiled across the table at her. “I thought to count up the days from my own travel, but I know not how much time he spends when he lands. Oh! I wake every day in hopes of post, saying when he is to come.”

  “We’re all looking for Henry’s return,” Frederick Elstead said genially.

  Frederick and Mary Elstead were dining with them, as they often did. Mary ignored the commentary about her brother. She was regarding her mother’s spectacles with faint surprise. But she said nothing, and Emily, who had not been consulted, decided not to take any notice, in hopes that the silly old fool would take the hint and recollect what was due to the family, if not to herself.

  After dinner, as the women passed into the drawing room, Harriet came to Anna and said low-voiced, “I would have told you, but she desired me to keep her secret.” She pointed at the piano. “Now she can play again.” Harriet made a face. “If Penelope doesn’t attack her first, and scare her into putting them away.”

  “Why should she do such a thing?” Anna asked.

  “Because Papa had set his face against anyone making such a spectacle of themselves, and Penelope will fuss about what others might say.” Harriet smothered a soft laugh. “Do not be suspecting him of a pun. Papa would never have so lowered himself.” Her expressive brows contracted. “My brother John was far worse. How would it look—we would be made a laughingstock—people would ask us when we were to set up shop-keeping. He was quite, quite—”

  Whatever she was going to say was cut off when Emily interrupted in a smooth, brisk tone. “Tea, Lady Northcote?”

  It occurred to Anna that there was one more person in that house who had set her mind against spectacles as well, though Emily said nothing. But Anna sensed it in the way Emily looked everywhere else, as if the sight of those little framed lenses offended her.

  o0o

  Sunday dawned with tiny flakes of snow falling. The wheels of the coach crunched along the road to church, where, as before, people gathered before and after the morning service. And as before Penelope Duncannon decided when the family was to leave, marching through and rounding them up like a scolding nanny.

  Anna was peripherally aware of Caroline speaking with Dr. Blythe, something she would have paid scant attention to had she not noticed the way Dr. Blythe looked after Caroline when her sister pulled her firmly away.

  Surely there could not be anything wrong in talking to the minister after church, Anna thought.

  She was distracted when Penelope addressed the dowager the moment the footman had safely shut the coach’s door. “Lady Northcote,” she stated. “I had no wish to draw the stares of ill-bred persons, but I would be failing in my duty if I did not point out that Papa would never have countenanced the wearing of spectacles at any time, but most especially in church.”

  “Why not in church?” Harriet exclaimed. “Such rules are spooney!”

  “Harriet!” Penelope gasped in shock.

  Emily said in a low, cold voice, “Harriet. You will permit me to point out that vulgar expressions are never tolerable in persons of birth and breeding, but are particularly unacceptable on Sunday.”

  Caro turned to Penelope, and said, bravely, “Oh, but Penelope, what can possibly be wrong if Lady Northcote is enabled to see her hymn book—”

  “Caroline, you interrupt me,” Penelope snapped.

  Caro looked down like a chastened schoolgirl instead of a woman of forty years.

  “Nor,” Penelope went on, “would have my late brother, little as we agreed. We should have agreed on this.”

  “I think—” Caro began.

  “Caroline, please. Must you continually put yourself forward? You know better, at your age. Good manners requires the eldest finish speaking.” And to Emily, “I very much loathe to point it out, but those have so vulgar an appearance.”

  “I agree,” Emily stated calmly. “But my authority in this household has been superseded.”

  Anna was about to speak—to say she hardly knew what—but Harriet leaned forward. “You may think what you wish, Penelope, but I take leave to tell you that you are wrong about vulgarity.”

  “Harriet Duncannon!”

  “Would an empress ever be called vulgar? How about the queen of the French?”

  “What nonsense is this?” Penelope demanded.

  Anna tried a peace-making deflection. “Those spectacles are modeled on the fashion put forward by the Empress Catherine the Great. She took the fashion from Queen Marie Antoinette. I learned this in the royal court at Naples.”

  “Yes,” Harriet exclaimed. “And the oculist showed us in a book. Other great ladies wear them, a vast number. So they cannot be vulgar.”

  The dowager said in her timid voice, “I did so appreciate seeing my hymnal. And I can now play the instrument again.”

  Penelope stared at her, and, her face very much reddened, turned Anna’s way. “You, Lady Northcote, may be looked upon in some wise as representing my step-brother, until such time as he returns to his home to take up his responsibilities. Do you mean to say that you approve of this start?”

  Anna very much disliked being pulled into this dispute, but she recognized that she had perhaps been a cause. Deference she would try, but she would not attempt to placate so direct an attack. “I understood that I am come into a musical family,” she said. “If spectacles will serve to enable the Dowager Lady Northcote to see her music, I can only applaud. I saw many such in royal houses,” she added.

  Penelope sat back, pushing her hands into her muff. She muttered under her breath; when they drew up before the house, her tone became scolding as she vented her emotions in her patient sister’s direction. Anna heard the words “French manners,” and “royal houses,” but chose to pretend to deafness.

  The rest of that day dragged on wearily, Penelope having managed to destroy what was supposed to be a day of peace. She carried her disapprobation all the way to church again, only unbending long enough to accept her expected ride home.

  o0o

  The next week saw many changes.

  On Tuesday, it seemed that the entire countryside crowded in a continual line of carriages to pay their calls. Everyone sat stiffly in the traditional circle on the fine chairs in the formal drawing room. Their conversation was as rigidly defined: the coldness of the weather, the prevalence of colds, fear of sore throats, which took up the requisite quarter hour.

  Anna remembered her mother telling her that one must never be caught rudely looking at the clock, though calls must be strictly limited. As she listened to the flow of talk, it occurred to her that people who had been making and receiving these calls all their lives must have trained themselves to know how much to say, and to listen to, before the time was over, the same way a musician trained to find the true note, or to beat the correct tempo.

  She heard herself presented over and over, which intensifi
ed the sense that she was merely playing a role. She did not catch all the names in the series of pale faces that paraded in and out, their accents identical, and their conversation nearly so.

  The only person she recognized was the rector, Dr. Blythe, who kept up a gentle dialogue about gardens until it was time to go. On leaving, he issued a general invitation to call at the parsonage.

  He said to Anna, “The ladies know that though I am a bachelor, my housekeeper, Mrs. Eccles, is famed for her pies, and likes nothing better than to serve my parishioners. She is happiest seeing her good things eaten. I will admit to an ulterior motive, in hoping to elicit your interest on behalf of our school. But that may wait until you have had time to look about you.”

  He was the last. When the household stirred again, Anna took the opportunity to address Harriet. “What am I to understand by his invitation?”

  Harriet smiled, glad to put the elegant lady right, glad to be asked. “Why, he is a bachelor, you know. In the ordinary way, we would not call upon him. But his being our rector changes things. Everyone calls upon him. And it’s true about the pies,” she added with the earnestness of youth.

  Anna was able to get away soon after. Now that the dowager could read for herself, Anna had no obligations, and she was learning to take her walk when she could. She could dance in the gallery at any time. No one went there. But her singing depended upon the weather. The least clearing of the sky found her out on what was becoming a familiar ramble, along pathways lined by stones now mossy with age.

  She had found a grotto where sound cupped pleasingly, and her only audience was birds and the occasional little creature. When she had emptied her heart of song, she ran back, refreshed even though she shivered.

  o0o

  After dinner that night, the dowager introduced two changes. First, she had invited her eldest granddaughter, whose first uncertain attempts at music under Nurse’s guidance had revealed, she said, a great deal of taste.

  And then she sat down to the fortepiano herself, playing the sonata that Haydn had written for the once-famed Miss Jansen, whom the dowager had heard play at a private subscription concert at a ducal manse before she was married.

  The dowager attacked the piece with a vigor that surprised Anna from so gentle and timid a woman. Here was clearly a joy in music akin to her own, and proof that the lady, however aged, was still very much a part of the world.

  The dowager also made it clear that she preferred to make her own music rather than serve as accompanist for Emily’s singing, and so Anna continued to fill that post. She had no need to practice that.

  While she played, her gaze wandered about the room, from fire to framed pictures, then was caught by the earnest little figure sitting on the edge of her chair, watching her mother. Eleanor Duncannon clasped her thin hands tightly, and her lips parted.

  When her mother sang one of her favorites, “Robin Adair,” the child began to sing very softly. Anna easily differentiated the child’s voice from her mother’s louder one, and liked what she heard. She was thrown back to Maestro Paisiello’s music chamber, always warm and bright from the brilliant Neapolitan sunlight, as she began singing at about the same age.

  When Emily had finished, and was putting away her sheet music, Anna got up from the instrument and approached the child. “Are you partial to singing?” she asked Eleanor.

  “Oh, yes,” the little girl said. “Nurse tries to teach me. Until I can have a governess, which was to happen and then my papa died—”

  “Eleanor, little girls do not put themselves forward.” Emily appeared, her voice smooth as always, but Eleanor flushed and dropped her gaze. “Forgive me, Lady Northcote,” Emily said to Anna, “but I do not wish my daughter to develop pert manners. Nothing can be more fatal.”

  She stretched out her hand to ring the bell. Nurse, who must have been waiting in the hall, instantly appeared.

  In the general motion as the child made her curtseys and the tea things were in passing, Harriet came up to Anna and muttered, “As if she didn’t racket all over the countryside with Henry when she was not much older. I remember, though I was Justina’s age. They think I don’t, but I do.”

  Anna said, “Do you think it would be inappropriate to offer Eleanor a lesson? I would go to the nursery, that no one would be disturbed, and the child could not be thought to be putting herself forward.”

  Harriet did not care one way or another about music, but she loved the idea of circumventing Emily, who she felt ignored those girls shamefully. “I think you ought to.”

  With this assurance, the next day, Anna found her way to the nursery wing. She could not help looking about with interest. Here the captain must have spent a good deal of his childhood; there were battered toys, demonstrably old, a shelf packed with books, and a low table with scissors, paper, chalk, and all the accoutrements of childhood. The smell of chalk dealt Anna an unexpected blow, bringing back her time with her mother, so precious; she had resented the hours her mother had to spend among the royal children, until she was old enough to be included among them for lessons, where she could be relied upon to know her place.

  Nurse looked up in surprise at this unexpected invasion of her domain. She was a plump woman somewhere between fifty and sixty whose light hair was going gray. Her voice was mild as she said, “Make your curtseys like young ladies.”

  Justina resembled her sister in her spindly limbs, but her hair was a light brown. The baby lay in a bassinet, sleeping, as the little girls copied out their letters.

  “I came to ask if Eleanor wishes to learn to sing,” Anna said, and her reward was the flashing up of Eleanor’s eyelids, so that the firelight reflected in her wide eyes.

  Nurse said apologetically, “I have started them on their letters, but music, well, I can find out some notes, but I never put myself forward for governess duties.”

  Anna said, “As it happens, I had many singing lessons when I was small, but I have never taught, so this would be an experiment for us both. If Miss Eleanor has the interest.”

  “Oh, yes, Lady Northcote,” the child said, bridling. And before Anna could say anything, she launched into “Robin Adair” in a high, quick voice, mimicking her mother’s studied gestures as she sang.

  Anna waited a verse through, and then walked over to the battered spinet in the far corner. She pressed a couple of chords, shuddered and lifted her hand. No wonder the child sang flat. The spinet was hopelessly out of tune.

  She said, “Try this.” Softly, so softly, she dropped her jaw, rounded her lips and sang a C.

  Eleanor sang it back. It was close enough that Anna smiled and said, “Good! Now try it here.” She touched her ribs. “Not here.” A touch to the throat.

  Eleanor sang it exactly the same, though she stuck out her middle.

  Anna said, “Listen to the difference.” She touched her own throat, squeezed up and sang a shrill note. Then she opened her throat, her hands at her middle to show how deep she breathed, and sang it again, low and pure.

  Eleanor’s eyes widened. “Oh, that’s pretty. I want to do that.”

  Anna smiled back, patiently instructed the girl a little longer, until she had the main idea, and then promised to return again if Eleanor practiced.

  That evening, Eleanor did not appear after dinner, on the orders of her mother.

  28

  I must now beg the reader’s indulgence, well aware that however few of us enjoy the polite duty of formal calls, still fewer want to hear about someone else’s.

  Still, following Anna on her first round of Barford Magna’s principal families—or those whom Lady Emily Northcote considered to be first—will demonstrate, in contrasts, the characters of the three ladies who pulled on hats, gloves, and pelisses that frosty morning.

  Anna’s only emotion was curiosity to see how English people lived.

  Harriet had learned to cordially loathe formal calls before the year’s respite required by mourning. That is, she had hated her status as schoolgirl, which
Emily, whose sense of delicacy dictated a submissive and above all silent demeanor for girls yet to be introduced to society, had encouraged.

  Unfortunately, in recent years, only the two had performed this strictly regulated duty that Emily, as principal woman in the parish, felt she owed the neighbors. As the dowager’s eyesight had dimmed, so had her willingness to careen blindly over the countryside. She preferred to visit her friends singly, for as long as conversation lasted, and those friends accepted this gentle idiosyncrasy.

  Now that she was no longer principal lady of the parish, Emily had to find sufficient motivation in showing her replacement the way. For there was certainly no pleasure in the tedium of visiting on dull country people. Emily longed to be in London again, among clever people of fashion and rank; there, the strict fifteen minutes was a necessity due to the numbers. One must not accidentally neglect anyone, or the next brilliant ball, or talked-about soiree, might pass with one only hearing about it after the fact.

  Buried in Barford Magna as she was, she was aware of every dull ticking of the clock.

  At least, Harriet thought privately as they climbed into the impressive carriage with the Northcote arms painted on the side, the worst would be got over first. That, and she had a spanking new gown to show off, for the first time in her life, and Polly had learnt that French way of doing up her hair.

  The Elstead family lived at the Groves, closest to the Manor. Squire Elstead was a stout man with large side-whiskers, his bulging waistcoat well-dusted with snuff. He seldom spoke. When he did, he invariably prefaced each remark with a self-deprecating, rattling chuckle, to which his wife listened apparently unmoved. Anna could not help wondering what it might be like to spend one’s life hearing that noise.

  “And when shall we see Henry return among us?” the squire’s wife asked.

  “I hope very soon,” Anna replied, trying not to hear insinuation in the lady’s tone. Nature might have given her an irritating voice. Anna would assume nothing more.

  “I am certain it cannot seem too soon for some, naming no names,” Mrs. Squire Elstead said archly. “And I, for one, look forward to his account of the last glorious day of our dear Nelson . . .”