Page 39 of Snapdragons
“Mr. Donovan would be so pleased.” It had been many years since Niles had thought of his oft-frustrated music instructor.
“An Irishman, was he?”
“He was, in fact.”
A moment later, the entire house party entered the music room, Digby at their head.
“Since your performance involves this room,” he said, “we’re beginning in here, with you two.”
Niles looked at Penelope in the exact moment she looked at him. Without speaking, she widened her eyes and shrugged almost imperceptibly, the message clear: what ought they to do?
A quick thought revealed an answer. He closed the space between them and whispered, “Scales?”
She laughed. “Perfect.”
Chapter Fourteen
Penelope and Niles stood besidethe pianoforte, facing the gathering. The other two ladies were seated. The Gents stood near them. Liam stood among them, but he didn’t appear to be succeeding in getting a foothold in this group of socially significant people.
“Shall you introduce our performance?” Penelope asked Niles. “Or shall I?”
“When given the option,” he said quietly, “I will always choosenotto be the spokesman.”
Why was that? He was articulate and entertaining and personable. That was a mystery she fully intended to sort later.
To the gathered group, she said, “Ladies and the Gents”—her adjustment of the usual form of address brought grins to the onlookers—“our impromptu performance will be a piece on the pianoforte that both Mr. Greenberry and I remember well from our long-ago years as very impressive students of music.”
Liam looked perplexed, no doubt owing to his memory of her participating in her music lessons under extreme duress. Niles’s friends watched in apparent anticipation of being very entertained.
She turned to Niles. “Shall we?”
Niles offered a very solemn nod, which she returned.
They stood next to each other at the instrument, Penelope positioned in front of the treble clef and Niles in front of the bass clef.
He whispered out of the side of his mouth, “We didn’t choose which scale to play.”
“C major?” she suggested just as quietly. “’Twas the simplest, after all.”
“Once up, once down?”
Undertaking such an absurdly brief “performance” would be particularly funny. She nodded.
They both hovered their right hands over a C key, two octaves apart from each other. At his nod, which they didn’t have to communicate ahead of time to each other, they began. From C to the next C, then back to the start.
With a flourish that matched each other despite, again, no prior discussion, they turned to the room and offered a bow and a curtsy respectively, both so overdone that one would think they were in the presence of every king and queen, emperor and empress in the world.
“Remarkable!”
“Bravo!”
“A triumph!”
Their audience offered their praise with an enthusiasm every bit as exaggerated and unwarranted as Penelope and Niles’s show of pride. Even Liam smiled. He was not an inherently unhappy person, but his worries over their standing in this group and her future had rendered him heavy of mind.
“We should call off the remainder of the impromptu performances,” Penelope said to the group as a whole. “This first one cannot possibly be outshone.”
“As true as that may prove,” Mr. Layton said, “we would not be very sporting if we refused to try.” He looked to the others. “Can everyone else’s performance be undertaken in this room, or do we need to relocate?”
