Chapters (19)
‘Couldn’t remember a word,’ said Daisy. ‘Lucia, we all want to turn the whole thing over to you, Queen and all. Will you –’
‘Please, Lucia,’ said Georgie.
Lucia looked from one to the other in amazement.
‘But, dear things, how can I?’ she said. ‘I shan’t be here to begin with, I shall be at Tilling. And then all the trouble you’ve been taking, Daisy. I couldn’t. Impossible. Cruel.’
‘We can’t do it at all without you,’ said Daisy firmly. ‘So that’s impossible too. Please, Lucia.’
Lucia seemed quite bewildered by these earnest entreaties.
‘Can’t you come back for the fête?’ said Georgie. ‘Rehearse all day, every day, till the end of the month. Then go to Tilling, and you and I will return just for the week of the fête.’
Lucia seemed to be experiencing a dreadful struggle with herself.
‘Dear Georgie, dear Daisy, you’re asking a great sacrifice of me,’ she said. ‘I had planned my days here so carefully. My music, my Dante: all my lessons! I shall have to give them all up, you know, if I’m to get this fête into any sort of shape. No time for anything else.’
A miserable two-part fugue of ‘Please, Lucia. It’s the only chance. We can’t do it unless you’re Queen,’ suddenly burst into the happy strains of ‘It is good of you. Oh, thank you, Lucia,’ and the day was won.
Instantly she became extremely businesslike.
‘No time to waste then,’ she said. ‘Let us have a full rehearsal at three, and after that I’ll take the Morris dancers and the halberdiers. You and Georgie must be my lieutenants, dear Daisy. We shall all have to pull together. By the way, what will you be now?’
‘Whatever you like,’ said Daisy recklessly.
Lucia looked at her fixedly with that gimlet eye, as if appraising, at their highest, her possibilities.
‘Then let us see, dear Daisy,’ she said, ‘what you can make of Drake’s wife. Quite a short part, I know, but so important. You have to get into that one moment all the loyalty, all the devotion of the women of England to the Queen.’
She rose.
‘Let us begin working at once,’ she said. ‘This is the Golden Hind: I have just stepped on to it. Now go behind the piano, and then come tripping out, full of awe, full of reverence… Oh, dear me, that will never do. Shall I act it for you once more?…