Page 40 of Miss Determined
“Who tattled?”
“Tansy Pevinger caught the finish from upstream and politely waited for the path to clear before relaying the news to her mother.”
Well, of course. “She relayed the news to Lawrence Miller, who told his aunt, Mrs. Patsy Miller, who conveyed word to her cousin, Mrs. Holly Pevinger, when she took the day’s eggs to the vicarage. Mrs. Holly P might have mentioned something to Mr. Dabney when he put up her gig, and from thence, getting news to the inn was the work of a mere five-minute chinwag beneath the market cross.”
“London is no different, Lissa.”
“London is worse, but I live in the hope that Mr. Clementi won’t be accompanying us.” The squabbling from the music room had escalated to the I-hate-you and you-are-not-my-sister phase, so Lissa set aside her bonnet and prepared to speak peace unto the heathen.
“Put them on bread and porridge for a week,” Grandmama said. “A good smack to the fingers wouldn’t go amiss either, and no fire in the nursery until they recall their manners.”
Neither Diana nor Caroline had set foot in the nursery for years. “They are anxious because we will soon leave home for Town. Mama hasn’t decided whether the girls are to come with us or bide here.”
Diana delivered her signature and entirely mendacious, “I will never speak to you again!” Which was met with Caroline’s familiar, “Let the rejoicing begin!”
Lissa opened the door to the music room in time to catch Diana sticking out her tongue and Caroline brushing at her cheek with her cuff. They stood six paces apart, so the final phase of the hostilities—hair pulling—was still a few minutes off.
“Why is Di somean?” Caroline wailed. “I try to practice, and every time I do, Di comes around and says she has to practice, and she’s older, so she gets first crack at the piano, and then Mama says she has a megrim and no more pianoforte for the day, and I hate stupid duets anyway.”
Lissa wrapped her arms around Caroline, who was still enough of a child to accept the embrace. She was gaining height, though, and Lissa prayed that a merciful God would not visit too many more inches on a girl who already bore the burden of bright red hair.
“Diana,” Lissa said, “you have hurt your younger sister’s feelings.”
“Caroline can’t keep up. She doesn’t practice nearly as much as I didat her age,”—delivered with a nasty little emphasis—“and the piece is in the simplest possible key.”
I am ashamed of you.The words begged to be spoken in the most disappointed and imperious tones, but that would engender more spatting. Caroline tried hard, but she lacked Diana’s appetite for attention, and thus her playing was more circumspect.
More plodding, truth be told. More cautious and dull.
“You were a fiend at Caroline’s age,” Lissa said, “while Caroline is more drawn to the natural world. I will practice the duet with Caroline until we’re confident of the fingering, but you have to admit you set a blazing pace.”
Diana sank onto the piano bench facing outward. “I love to go fast.”
Caroline pulled away from Lissa and sat beside Di. “But you stumble on the difficult passages because you don’t make yourself work out the fingering. I don’t want to trip and fall at the cadenza. That’s the last, hardest flourish, and everybody will recall that I couldn’t manage it no matter how many arpeggios I played correctly.”
“Who is everybody?” Diana countered. “Grandmama? Lissa? The cat?”
Insight struck with painful certainty.Everybodydid not include Gavin, who’d always encouraged Diana’s music and admired the wild flowers Caroline collected along the river.
“Gavin has been gone two years,” Lissa said. “Two yearsthis week. We miss him.” She’d attributed the same upheaval last year to her impending Season and realized only in hindsight that the anniversary of Gavin’s disappearance had complicated matters.
“We worry about him.” Caroline plucked at her damp and wrinkled cuff. “I am tired of praying that God will keep him safe, but I’m afraid to pray that God will send him home, because if Gav doesn’t come home, maybe he can’t come home, and w-won’t ever.”
“I said I’d never speak to him again when he made fun of my bird bonnet,” Diana said. “A fortnight later, I spoke to him for the last time.”
They both looked so young and so forlorn. “Not the last time. England has rules about recording deaths and notifying the home parish and so forth.”
“Do highwaymen and cutpurses follow those rules?” Diana asked.
“He’s not dead.” Caroline for once sounded more mulish than Diana. “I’d know it. He said he could not wait to see how beautiful I was when I grew up, because I was so lovely in girlhood. He will come home.”
Oh, Gavin.“I agree,” Lissa said. “He will come home, and when we are done rejoicing at his return, we will stick out our tongues at him and never speak to him again for at least an hour. Until he does come wandering back to us, though, somebody has to sew the new trimming on my old bonnets, and I nominate you two.”
“Caroline sews straighter seams than I do,” Diana said. “She has more patience.”
Caroline was concerned that not even her stitchery reflect poorly on her, and that broke Lissa’s heart, but Diana was apologizing after a fashion.
“Perhaps you can serenade us while Caroline and I work at our straight seams. Mama says every bonnet must be retrimmed.”
