But she did not put the purse away. Hester, at the door, looked back and saw her sitting quite still, staring at it, as if it were something she had been handed by mistake.
VIII.
Kit's letter came on the Wednesday.
Dearest Hes, it ran, in his dreadful sprawling hand, Mother has told me about the Calcutta business, because she cannot keep anything from me and I cannot keep anything from her, and we have been sitting up two nights over it, and we are agreed, and you are not to argue. Mr. Penruddock called on Tuesday. He says that since you have paid two hundred and ten pounds in six years without missing a quarter, the bank will take the rest at twenty pounds a year without interest and think itself honoured. He said honoured, Hes. I wrote it down. And Mr. Fowler of the Close has said he will take me as a clerk on wages until I can be articled, so I shall be earning, and Mother says Miss Lacey's school in the Close wants a mistress for French and drawing and the use of the globes, and asked after you particularly.
So you need not go to India. You need not go anywhere you don't wish to go. I would rather be a poor clerk with a sister in England than a rich attorney with one in Bengal. Don't do it for us. Do what you want, for once in your life. I don't think you've ever done it. I don't think you'd know how.
Hester read it four times and laughed aloud, and then cried, and then washed her face in cold water and sat down to think, for perhaps the first time in six years, about what she wanted.
It was not as simple as she had imagined. Wanting never was.
She wanted Rose. That was the plainest thing. She wanted to see her grow, and read her harder books, and be there when she was frightened. She wanted Edmund Thorne, and she could admit that now, alone, with the door shut: his voice, his silences, the way he had sat on a dusty floor in his riding coat and let her tell him he was wrong. She wanted to be loved by him openly and without apology.
But she wanted, too, to stand in front of him as herself. Not as a servant whose wages he paid and whose bread depended on his pleasure. Not as a debtor whose ledger he could close with a stroke of his pen. Not as the governess who had climbed. If he asked her and she said yes, she wanted to know, beyond any doubt, that she had been free to say no.
And she did not want to go to Calcutta. She had never wanted to go to Calcutta. She had wanted to run.
She wrote two letters that afternoon. The first was to Mrs. Ormsby, with her compliments and regrets to Mrs. Carrow, and it took five minutes. The second was to the Duke of Ashcombe, giving one month's notice of her intention to leave his employment, and that took until dark.
She took it to him herself, to the library, where he was sitting with Rose on the hearthrug and a pile of Caroline's sketchbooks between them. He read it standing, while Rose looked from one to the other.
"You are going to India," he said. His voice was quite steady.