“She has not said so to me,” Nancy interrupted.
“Well, that of course is just what you would expect. Parents and teachers must always expect to be suddenly confronted with the inexplicable reserve of the young. Just as she wrote you a full account of that foolish business with Enid Wilson and Joan Hutchinson, so she has given me her confidence about her career. I fancy that the instinct to entrust a secret to an outsider is a normal one. You would be expected to regard her theatrical hopes with a professional eye just as I should be expected to regard her escapades with a professional eye.”
Nancy nodded her agreement with this.
“Very well,” Mother Catherine went on, “if Letizia is going on the stage it is important that she should now concentrate on deportment, elocution, dancing, singing, and all the graces that will adorn her vocation. Another of our pupils longs to paint, and another who shows signs of having a really lovely voice wishes to become a singer. I propose to send these three young cousins of the Muses for a couple of years to Italy with a dame de compagnie. Thus each one will be able to study what will most help her afterwards.”
“To Italy!” Nancy exclaimed.
“I don’t think Letizia will ever have a voice as good as her mother’s,” the nun said, with a smile. “And that reminds me, will you sing Adeste Fideles for us at the midnight Mass?”
“Oh, I never sing nowadays,” Nancy replied, the tears standing bright in her eyes at the thought of the delight that was in store for that little daughter—a walking maypole now perhaps, but still so much her little daughter.
“But you must sing for us,” Mother Catherine insisted. “We want to hear your voice roll out above our thin notes. It is so dreadful, this news that the French Government has forbidden midnight Mass in any of the French cathedrals or churches this year. What woes that wretched country is calling down upon itself! It will hearten us to hear your voice singing that wonderful old hymn.”
Nancy felt that it would sound like affectation to refuse after this, and into her voice at midnight she put all the triumph, all the gladness, all the gratitude in her mother-heart.
So, for the next two years Letizia was writing home to England the most absorbing accounts of Rome, where she and her companions spent most of their time, though on different occasions they visited all the famous cities of Italy. While up and down the length of England, in and out of Wales, over to Ireland, and across the border into Scotland wandered her mother.