"His grace, sir?"
"His grace."
"I have never seen His Grace."
"No," he said and did not smile and did not look away. "You have not."
She was quiet a long moment. The fire popped once. "May I speak to my mother about it, sir?"
"You may speak to her about anything you like. Take your time. Tell Mrs. Ambry when you have decided. There is no hurry in this house for the answer to that question."
She stood, and he stood, and she went out. In the passage, she passed a footman with a tray, and a maid with an armful of linen, and a small child in a starched pinafore, standing very still on a stool being measured for a coat, a thin child with dark hair and a chapped mouth, who watched Hester pass with the grave patience of a person who has been measured for many things and has learned not to fidget.
Hester smiled at her. The child did not smile back, but her eyes stayed on Hester until the door closed.
Alice, she thought. That will be Alice.
She did not know then that the man in the gray coat had watched from the parlor window as she walked down the drive, and had watched until she had reached the gate, and had not moved from the window for some minutes after she had gone.
She took the work. She took it because her mother's feet were bad, and 30 pounds was 30 pounds, and Mrs. Ambry had asked her plain, and because a child called Alice had looked at her without smiling, and she had not been able since to stop thinking of the child's chapped mouth.
She began on the Monday. She was given a small room over the still room that smelled of dried lavender, and a black stuff gown, and a set of keys that opened three cupboards in the linen press, and nothing else. She was given a ledger and a pen, and a stool at a high desk in Mrs. Ambry's own room, and every morning after breakfast, she wrote in a hand her aunt had taught her, small and even and unshowy, the accounts of the house.
Mr. Holden was often in the passage. He was often in the west room. He was, she learned by the end of the first week, more often in the house than any man of business she had ever heard of. He passed her in doorways and inclined his head and did not speak. And once, when she dropped a pen, he bent and picked it up and gave it back to her without a word. And his hand for a moment was very close to hers and neither of them said anything.
On the Thursday of the second week, she came upon Alice on the back stairs. The child was sitting on the third step from the top with her arms round her knees and her face pressed into them. She was not crying. She was not making any sound at all. There was a bruise coming up on the side of her jaw that was the shape of a knuckle.
Hester sat down below her. She did not touch her. She waited.
After a long time, Alice said into her knees, "The lady says I am not to sit in the blue chair."
"Which lady, love?"
"The lady with the laugh."
"Ah," said Hester. "That lady."
She had met the lady with the laugh on the Tuesday. Her name was Lady Corisande Veitch and she was the present Duke's cousin on his father's side. And she had come to Blackmere for what she called a fortnight and what Mrs. Ambry called a siege. She was tall and fair and beautifully dressed and her laugh was a bell rung three times in quick succession. And she had, on the Tuesday, in the front hall in Hester's hearing, said to her maid that it was a curious modern fashion to keep freckled charwomen at a walnut desk and that she supposed the north country had its own ideas of ornament.
Hester had not answered. She had walked past with the ledger under her arm and had not looked at Lady Corisande and had not looked away from her either and had gone into Mrs. Ambry's room and had shut the door and had sat down and had written a line of accounts in a hand as steady as any she had ever written.
She looked now at the bruise on Alice's jaw.
"Did she strike you, love?"
"She said I was in her way."
"She said the chair was hers."
"She said her hand went of its own accord."
"Hands do not go of their own accord. No, come with me."
She took the child not to Mrs. Ambry and not to the west room but to the still room where her mother had taught her a hundred small things about a hundred small hurts. She wrung a cloth in cold water and held it to the child's jaw and said nothing while she held it. Alice, after a while put her free hand on Hester's wrist and left it there. It was the first time the child had touched her.
"Alice, yes, you are to sit in the blue chair whenever you like. You are to sit in any chair in this house you like. If the lady with the laugh says otherwise you are to come and find me and I will sit in the chair with you."