"You did not come in."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because you were doing a thing that was between you and her and I have learned at some cost not to walk into rooms where I am not needed."
She thought about this. She thought about it for what felt to her a great while and was in truth perhaps half a minute. Then she stood. "I will keep the ledger, Your Grace. I will sit with the child. I will not today say anything else. You have not asked me to. I am grateful for that. May I go?"
"You may go."
She went. In the passage she stood a moment with her hand on the wall. She was not shaking. She had told herself she would not shake and she did not. She walked back to Mrs. Ambry's room and sat down at the high desk and opened the ledger and wrote a line of accounts in a hand as steady as any she had ever written. And after the line she sat still for perhaps a minute and then she wrote the next line.
The siege of Lady Corisande ended a week later and did not end quietly. It ended at a supper the Duke had been to give for a visiting bishop and the bishop's wife in the long dining room with the good silver out and the candles lit, and Mrs. Ambry standing very straight against the sideboard, and Alice, at Hester's insistence and the Duke's plain ascent, in a new dark blue frock, at a small place laid at the foot of the table where a child might sit and be seen.
Hester was not at the table. Hester was in the passage with the ledger because there had been a question about the wine, and Mrs. Ambry had asked her to check a figure.
Lady Corisande, between the fish and the mutton, remarked in a voice pitched for the whole table that it was a great pity Alice's people had not been found since a child of such uncertain origin was so difficult to place at a Christian table, and that she wondered whether the Duke, in his kindness, had considered a good asylum in the north where such children were kept clean and out of the way of persons of quality, and where, she understood, the freckles of the north country were considered no obstacle at all. Her laugh went bell, bell, bell.
Alice put her fork down. She was seven. She looked at her plate.
The Duke set his glass down very carefully. "Corisande, my dear, you will apologize to the child. You will apologize to Mrs. Ambry, whose table you have insulted. You will not apologize to me because I am beyond your reach in this. You will then go upstairs and Mrs. Ambry will have your trunks packed and a carriage will take you to your brother's house at Marchwell in the morning. You will not come back to to in my lifetime. If my heir has any sense, he will not have you in his. That is all."
There was a silence in the room that Hester, in the passage with the ledger, heard through the door.
"Ash," said Lady Corisande, and her voice had gone thin. "You cannot be serious. Over a foundling? Over a child,"
"he said, whom you struck. Whom you have gone on striking with your mouth every day since. I have been slow in this house. I am not slow anymore. Apologize."
She did not apologize. She stood, and she walked out, and her heels were loud on the boards.
Alice, at the foot of the table, did not cry. She picked up her fork again after a little while, and ate three more bites of mutton, because her plate had been set for her, and it would have been rude, she felt, not to eat what had been set. Then she asked, very small, whether she might be excused, and the duke said she might. And she got down from her chair, and walked the length of the room with her hands folded in front of her, as she had seen Hester fold hers, and she went out into the passage, and put her face into Hester's apron, and did not make a sound.
Hester held her. She did not speak. She held her until the child's shoulders stopped shaking, and then she held her a little longer, and above the child's dark head she looked once through the crack of the not quite closed door, and saw the duke at the head of the long table looking back at her, and he did not smile, and she did not smile, and it was, both of them knew, an agreement.
The next morning Mrs. Ambry took Hester into her own room and shut the door and sat her down at the high desk and gave her a cup of tea. And then she said, "Now, I have been forbidden to tell you and I am going to tell you anyway because I have kept this house 18 years and I have earned one act of disobedience. Sit."
"I am sitting, ma'am."
"The rent on your mother's rooms in Butcher's Lane has been paid these three years by a hand that is not the parish and is not the linen draper. The doctor who came to your mother in the winter of the bad cough came because he had been sent and he had been sent by a man who told him plain he was not to say who had sent him. The coals in your mother's grate this last Christmas were a gift. The blanket on her bed is a gift. The boots your mother is wearing today are a gift. She thinks they are from the parish. They are not. I have known who they are from since the first quarter day. He asked me not to say. I am saying."
Hester set the cup down. Her hands at last were not steady. She put them in her lap and pressed them flat against her thighs and they were still not steady.
"How long, ma'am?"
"Three years."
"Three years?"
"He saw you at Stapleford Fair. You were 12. He was 19. You did not open the tinker's box though you knew how. He asked me when he came into the title to find out who the girl with the yellow hair had been. It took me a year. When I had found you, he began paying the rent. He did not know then what he wished of you. He knew only that a child who saw a trick and did not use it was a child worth the rent of a room. He has been waiting 14 years to see you again without your knowing he was looking. He saw you a fortnight ago in a servant's passage with a hot brick under your arm. He has been very quiet about it."
Hester did not weep. She had trained herself not to weep where it showed. She sat at the high desk with her hands flat on her thighs and her freckled face perfectly still and she looked at the ledger and she looked at Mrs. Ambry and she said plain,
"He did not tell me. Not that. Not any of it. He told you who he was. He did not tell you the rest because the rest would have felt to you like a bill."
"Yes, that is why."