“Indeed. Yet Orfeo fails the test.”
“What?” She blinked. “Do they deceive him?”
“Well, it’s...” Georgiana hesitated, her fingers picking upthe melody again. “Euridice faints, you see. And so Orfeo feels compelled to look back.”
“Even after being told not to? Seems like rather an obvious trick.” Caroline picked up another grape. “I myself would never be so fooled.”
“Indeed.” Georgiana smiled, watching her own fingers glide over the keys. “I suspect you would end up staying and ruling the underworld by sheer force of will.”
“It sounds as if it needs a little more ruling, if demons are running amok setting ridiculous traps for people. Do not they have proper work to do? Tending to hellfire and, er...” She wasn’t quite sure what tasks demons might be reasonably entrusted with, now that she thought about it, but hazarded a guess anyway. “Boiling cauldrons and poking people with hot irons and so on?”
“The thing is,” Georgiana said, as her right hand played a series of notes that sounded like twinkling stars, “it’s not about the look. It is what is behind the look. The emotion, you see. Does Orfeo trust her to follow him even if he is not leading her? Is that not what love is?”
Caroline opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again. She honestly had no idea if that was love, though what Georgiana said did make rather a lot of sense. Curiosity pricked her. “Is that what you think love is?”
Georgiana didn’t seem to hear the question, her eyes lost and focusing on some distant point in the room as her hands roved over the keys, the melody fading away. After the final notes, her hands dropped into her lap, and she sat quite still. “He receives a reward anyway.”
“Orfeo? But you said he failed the test,” Caroline protested, annoyance flaring. Composers simply could not be trusted towrite a straightforward tale; really, they were almost as bad as novelists. “This is rather a confusing story.”
“I promise it all makes sense once you see it. Cupid—the god of Love—sees Orfeo’s fidelity and restores Euridice to life, so they can be together once more. It’s a rather happy ending, really.”
“But that is not fair.” Caroline sat up straighter, irritation blooming bright as a summer flower. “He failed! He ought not to have received any reward. How very like a man. I do not suppose that if it had been the other way around—this Euridice going into the underworld to rescue her lover—that she would have been quite so fortunate if she had failed her task.”
“I believe that Gluck’s interpretation is a more romantic one than the original, where Euridice is forever condemned to the underworld after Orfeo fails, though I—”
“Any sensible woman would not have looked back in the first place,” Caroline interjected, not content to let the point lie.
“In the Bible, Lot’s wife is told not to look back when Sodom and Gomorrah fall,” Georgiana reminded her, “and when she does, she is turned into a pillar of salt.”
“Yes, well.” She sniffed. “Rather odd how in both cases, the woman is the one punished, regardless of which member of the party actually looked back.”
Georgiana laughed. “If you had only been born a man, you would have made a wonderful lawyer.”
“If I had been born a man,” Caroline retorted, “I would have aspired to be the kind who could employ wonderful lawyers to make arguments on my behalf. Will you perform something else?”
“What would you have me play?”
“Anything you like.”
Georgiana began to play something she often trotted out at parties—a pretty little melody designed to be pleasantly unobtrusive—but Caroline stopped her, holding up a hand. “No, no, none of that. Something you want to perform, not something you think I want to hear. I’m tired of watching you suffer through these tunes.”
For a moment, Georgiana’s gaze held hers, burning with a sudden, fierce look that stole Caroline’s breath away. But when she blinked, the look was gone, replaced with an expression of warm gratitude. “I wasn’t aware that anyone had observed my... suffering. I hope it was not too obvious.”
“Not at all. I notice more than you give me credit for, Miss Darcy.”
“And I credit you more than you notice, Miss Bingley.” She began to play, something ominous and slow, which sounded like a scythe swinging in tall grass. It was entirely unlike anything Caroline had heard her render before, and yet it suited Georgiana somehow. Caroline recalled the scent of Miss Darcy’s bedchamber, the roses as dark and sultry as spilled blood. There was another side to Georgiana that few saw, if any.
Perhaps the lake runs deeper than you think, a voice in her mind supplied. Caroline swallowed and did her best to focus on the music. Now was not the time to think about lakes again.
“And now, something for the lady,” Miss Darcy said, smiling over at Caroline. “Allow me to please you in turn.”
Surprised, she blinked. “Well, I remember seeing a performance ofDido and Aeneastwo or three years ago, which I thought very beautiful. Might you know something from—”
Before she could even finish her sentence, Georgiana played the first few drawn-out notes from Dido’s famous lament, then beamed at the look of surprise on Caroline’s face.
She sat, entranced, as Georgiana’s playing conjured the memory of the opera as if it were happening all over again right in front of her: Dido, queen of Carthage, clasping the hand of her maid Belinda, begging the girl to remember her mistress but to forget Dido’s fate, which had always seemed to Caroline like a rather impossible request; one could hardly remember a person but forget what had happened to them. Nevertheless, it was a beautiful and poignant piece which had touched Caroline deeply. Georgiana played the rest, allowing the tune to die down into a whisper before roaring back to life with a thunderous peal that brought Dido’s vocal ascent perfectly to mind. Caroline applauded loudly, causing a blush to pink her friend’s cheeks.
“I do not know how you can keep all those melodies in your head at once and pluck from them as easily as one takes a book from a shelf,” she declared. “It is a mystery to me.”
