"Will she strike you?"
"She will not strike me."
"How do you know?"
"Because I will not be surprised."
"It is being surprised that hurts."
The child considered this with the gravity of a woman of 40 and did not speak and after a while took her hand back and put it in her lap and Hester wrung the cloth again and held it again to the jaw and did not know that a man in a gray coat had come to the still room door and had stopped in it and had not spoken and had after a long moment gone quietly away.
That evening at supper Lady Corisande said over the soup, "I hear the child's daughter is nursing the foundling. How very Christian. One hopes the freckles are not catching."
Mrs. Ambry who did not sit at that table heard of it from the footman who did. She wrote it in a small book she kept for such things. She had over 18 years filled three such books.
The next morning Hester was sent for again to the small parlor. Mr. Haldane was at the fire. He did not sit.
"Miss Wren,"
"I am told the child was struck."
"Yes, sir,"
"By whom?"
"The child has said,"
"I would rather she said it to you, sir, and not I."
"You do not wish to name the lady."
"I do not wish to be the mouth of a child, sir. She has her own."
He looked at her a long moment. "You have been in this house a fortnight. You have opened a lock 25 men could not open. You have taken a ledger no one has kept properly since my mother died. You have sat on a back stair with a bruised child and asked her nothing she did not wish to say. You have not once in a fortnight asked me for a thing."
"I have not needed a thing, sir."
"No," he said. "You have not." He was quiet. "Miss Wren. I owe you the truth of a matter and I have owed it to you since the morning of the cabinet, and I have been a coward about it, and I am done being a coward. Will you sit?"
She sat. Her hands, folded in her lap, were steady. She had, since she was 12, trained herself that her hands should be steady where it showed.
"My name," he said, "is not Holden. Holden was my mother's name. She was a plain woman from a plain county, and she used it in the years when she wished not to be looked at. I use it in the same years. My name is Ash. I am the ninth Duke of Blackmere. I signed the 25 invitations. I sat in the chair by the window because I wished to see what any of the 25 would do with the box, and what any of them would do with a servant who came in with a hot brick, and what with red knuckles would do with a lock she had not been promised a penny for. You did not know I was watching. That is the only kind of watching that tells the truth. I am sorry I lied to you by silence. I would rather have told you at the cabinet. I did not know then what I know now."
She did not speak. She looked at him. Her hands stayed steady.
"I have not asked you a single question about yourself in a fortnight because I did not wish to ask you anything as your master that I had not first earned as a man. I am asking now only that you know who has been in the parlor and in the passage and on the other side of the still room door. I am not asking you for an answer to anything else. Not today. Not this month. Perhaps not this year. I will not press you. You are not my servant. Mrs. Ambry has your papers and they are yours to take. If you wish to walk out of this house at 11:00, you may do so with 30 lb in your hand and a character from me that will get you any place you like within a 100 miles."
She was quiet a long time. The fire popped. A rook called once far off.
"Your Grace," she said.
"Ash, if you will."
"Your Grace," she said again, plain. "You watched me on a back stair with a child."
"I did."