Sedition by Katharine Grant Read Free Book Online

alarmed by his accent. A foreigner. “The boy,” she said.
    “What boy? I have not brought a boy.”
    Mrs. Frogmorton raised her hand to indicate the shot boy and found a beribboned note pressed into it. “Claude Belladroit. My credentials.” French—that was it, thought Mrs. Frogmorton. Those th ’s hissed into z ’s. Those rolled r ’s. This man was French. She felt quite flustered. He must be a Catholic, and probably part of the nonsense going on over the sea. Yet it was those neat, straight eyebrows that now gripped her attention. She had never seen such eyebrows. Had they been plucked into shape? And his lips quivered, as though waiting for her permission to smile.
    “Madame?” He appeared anxious for her approval.
    Mrs. Frogmorton stood straight. She understood that she was being charmed. That was what foreigners did. She resented it. The man did not seem to notice her resentment. A quick flash of small, even teeth, then a sharp berating of the muscle hired to shift the pianoforte. They must hurry since Madame Frogmorton had emerged without overshoes or cloak, Monsieur said. Quick quick now. Mrs. Frogmorton was startled. Her husband would never have noticed if she was cold. Monsieur ran up the steps and Mrs. Frogmorton could only follow as he zealously inspected the downstairs rooms. In the street, the pianoforte was dismounted, body first, the mechanism groaning.
    As the pianoforte was brought indoors Monsieur verbally beat the muscle without cease. “This is a home, you clowns, not a warehouse! Take care of the statuary. Mind the pillars. Do not brush the paint. Do not displace a speck of dust on any of this big brown furniture, should we find dust in this home, which I doubt. Get on! Do I have to carry the instrument myself?” Once the pianoforte was safely in the hall, he ran out and threw the carter a tip like a slap in the face. He ran back into the house. “Upstairs?”
    Mrs. Frogmorton meant to expostulate. Instead she said, “Upstairs on the right. The harpsichord has been moved to accommodate.”
    The only flaw was the fuss Monsieur made over the instrument’s exact placing in the drawing room. Mrs. Frogmorton wanted it under the chandelier, sideways to the door, the centerpiece to a room whose furniture, however she placed it, was never elegant, and whose welcome, despite a generous fireplace, never convinced. Monsieur wanted the pianoforte in the corner farthest from the fireplace, tail toward the middle of the room. Mrs. Frogmorton could never remember how Monsieur won, nor why she forgave him. She only knew that she was being ushered out politely but firmly so that Monsieur could “bed the pianoforte in”—a phrase Mrs. Frogmorton had never associated with musical instruments. Foreigners, she thought. They turned even plain English upside down.
    Harriet arrived home just after midday. The other girls visited later to be told of the concert plan. Marianne and Everina Drigg were quick to say that pianofortes had not been thought well of by the Misses Lee at the Academy for Young Ladies, where the sisters had been expensively educated. Marianne also declared that as the oldest of the girls and the one who knew most about music, she should have been consulted. Harriet had been dismayed at the thought of effort. Georgiana Brass had just been dismayed. Alathea had been curious, though she had not asked to know more. It made people uncomfortable if you found out things for yourself.
    The following afternoon the girls and the three mothers were gathered in the Frogmortons’ downstairs parlor, a room as unsuccessfully put together as the drawing room though decorated more lightly, with chinoiserie on a pair of blue-veined marble-topped tables, and on a third, a clock with a camel feature that Mr. Frogmorton had received as a present for a favor he did not care to recall. The settles, solid and English, had come from the sudden sale of another Manchester Square house, the paneling too. Mrs.