"No," said Hester. "I am going to Salisbury. To my mother's house. There is a school in the Close that wants a mistress, and I shall have a room of my own and twenty pounds a year to pay Mr. Penruddock, and I shall pay him." She made herself go on. "Your Grace. Edmund. I cannot stay in this house as your servant while you wish me to be something else. Every kindness you did me, I would wonder if it were wages. Every refusal I made you, I would wonder if I could afford it. I will not be courted by a man who pays me."
He was very still.
"But if you still wish to ask me," she said, "in a month, or six, or a year, then you may come to St. Ann Street and ask me there. In my mother's parlour, which is very small and has a smoking chimney and is not yours. Where I can say no to you and still have a roof over my head. And then, if I say yes, you will know I meant it. And so shall I."
For a long moment he did not answer. Then something in his face eased, as if he had set down a weight he had been carrying a long way.
"Is that what you want?" he said, and she heard in it the echo of the nursery, and knew he meant her to.
"Yes," said Hester. "That is what I want."
Rose had understood enough. She stood up on the hearthrug, sketchbook in her arms, with her lower lip set like her grandmother's.
"You said Mamas stay."
Hester knelt. "No, sweetheart. You said it. And you were right, in a way, but not quite in the way you meant." She took the child's hands. "I am going to write to you every Sunday. Every single one, until you are tired of me. And you will write back, and your Papa will help you with the spelling. And one day soon you will come and visit me in Salisbury and see the cathedral, which has the tallest spire in England, and my brother Kit, who will let you win at spillikins. I will keep every promise I make you. That is how people stay, Rose. Not by never leaving the room. By keeping their word when they're out of it."
Rose looked at her with enormous, doubtful eyes. Then she looked at her father.
"Will you write to me too, Papa? When you go to London?"
The Duke sat down on the hearthrug beside her.
"I shan't go to London this winter," he said. "I find I've a great deal to do at home."