Chapter 19: Cecilia Is Wrong About Something Important

The thing withheld was this: Vordescu had met Klara Weiss.

Not as Van Drecht's records rendered her — an abstraction of exsanguination, a date and a parish, a woman reducible to a footnote in a hunter's ledger — but as a particular person, in a particular winter, in Munich, in 1743. She had been twenty-three. She had played the harpsichord with more enthusiasm than accuracy and laughed at herself for it. He had known her for six weeks before the hunger that was always, always present beneath the performance of a civilised man had briefly, catastrophically, failed to be performance.

He had not told Cecilia this. He had told her about Munich; he had not told her about the six weeks. The distinction had seemed, in the private sitting room at Thornfield Abbey, entirely reasonable. The distinction was not, Cecilia now suspected, reasonable at all.