Hester did not go out. She stood in the middle of the empty nursery and made herself think.
Rose had heard about the ship. Rose had heard that Mama went away and didn't say. Rose had said to her, only that morning, in the voice of one asking something very important and pretending it was not: Did my mama have things? Where are they? And Hester had said she did not know, because she did not, because nobody in this house ever spoke of Caroline Thorne at all.
Mrs. Pell kept the keys of every room in the house, save one.
The late Duchess's apartments were in the east wing, at the end of a long gallery of portraits. Hester had walked past the double doors a hundred times. They were always locked. The Duke kept the key himself. Or he had, until some small, determined person had found the drawer he kept it in.
The doors were not locked tonight. One of them stood open the width of a child.
Inside it was cold and smelled of dust and lavender. The furniture stood in holland covers like a congregation of ghosts. Hester went through the sitting room with her candle, and through the bedchamber with its great curtained bed, and into a small dressing room beyond, and there, on the floor in front of a long glass, wrapped in an Indian shawl of faded crimson and gold, with a lady's silver-backed hairbrush clutched in one hand, Rose lay fast asleep.
Her face was streaked where she had cried. Around her on the carpet were the things she had found: a pair of long kid gloves; a fan; a little enamelled box of hairpins; a book of pressed flowers, open to a page of dried rosebuds, beneath which someone had written in a neat sloping hand, For R., from her garden, midsummer 1812.
Hester sat down on the floor beside her and did not wake her. She sent no word. She found that she could not, just yet, bear to move.
It was the Duke who found them. She heard his boots in the gallery, running, and then stopping at the open door, and then nothing for a long time. When at last he came through into the dressing room he walked like a man crossing ice.
He looked at his daughter asleep in her mother's shawl. He looked at the pressed roses. Then he sat down on the dusty carpet on Rose's other side, the Duke of Ashcombe in his riding coat, with mud to his knees, and put his face in his hands as he had that night six weeks before.
"I have not been in these rooms," he said at last, very low, "since the day they carried her out of them."
Hester said nothing. She had learned, with Rose, that silence was sometimes the only door a person could walk through.
"It was scarlet fever," he said. "Rose took it first. She was fourteen months old. I was in London. The House was sitting, and there was a bill, and I thought, children take fevers, she has the best physician in the county and her mother, I shall go down at the end of the week. Caroline would not let the nurses near her. She sat with her day and night. Rose came through it. And on the fifth day Caroline sickened, and by the time the express reached me and I had ridden through the night to get here, she did not know me." He drew a hard breath. "Rose had begun to talk that summer. Two or three words. Her first was Mama. She said it all that week, to her mother, over and over. And then her mother was gone, and she stopped. She never said it again. Not to anyone. Until Tuesday."