"Yes," she sat a long time. The fire popped. Somewhere in the house a door opened and closed. She thought of her mother in Butcher's Lane sitting on the low stool with her feet in the basin wearing the boots she believed were the parishes and she thought of the tinker at Stapleford Fair and she thought of the walnut cabinet with the seven dials that were a lie and she thought of a man in a gray coat who had stopped in the still room door and had not come in.
"Ma'am,"
"Yes,"
"Where is he this morning?"
"In the west room."
She stood up. She smoothed her apron. She walked out of Mrs. Ambry's room and down the passage and through the green baize door into the front of the house where the carpets began and she went to the west room and she opened the door without knocking and she went in.
He was at the cabinet. The door of it was open. He was putting something back into it, a small tin box, the same one she understood that Alice's papers had come out of. He turned when she came in.
"Miss Wren."
"Your Grace."
"Ash."
"Ash." She said it plain. She had never said it. She said it now once and then she did not say anything else for what felt to her a long time. And he did not fill the silence and she was grateful again. Again that he did not fill the silence.
"You paid my mother's rent."
"I did."
"You sent the doctor."
"I did."
"You bought the boots she is wearing."
"I did."
"You did not tell me."
"No,"
"you did not tell me because you did not wish me to feel I owed you a yes."
"Yes."
"You have owed me the truth of that for 3 years and you did not give it to me and I am angry about it."
"You have the right to be angry about it."
"I am angry about it. And I am also, I find, grateful and I do not know yet in what order those two things will settle in me. And I am telling you now that they will take a while to settle and I am telling you also that I will not pretend they are settled while they are not. Because I have not, since I was 12, pretended anything at all. And I do not mean to begin for a duke."
"No," he said. "I would not have you begin for a duke."
"Then I will go on being angry a little while longer. And I will go on keeping the ledger and I will go on sitting with the child and when I have stopped being angry I will tell you. And then and only then you may ask me the question you have not yet asked. Is that agreed?"
"That is agreed."
"You will not press."
"I will not press."