Rose was at the table with a cloth and a basin, very seriously washing the paint from her own fingers.
"I did it myself," she said. "You needn't."
"So I see."
Rose dried her hands and looked up at the portrait, and then at Hester, and frowned in the way she did when she was working out a sum.
"That's Mama," she said, pointing. "Papa says she'd have liked you. And you're Mama too. I have two. Is that allowed?"
Hester knelt down on the rug, as she had knelt eleven months and a lifetime ago.
"It's allowed," she said. "She was first. We'll always say so. But yes. You may have two."
There was a step in the doorway.
The Dowager stood there in her dark grey, her black gloves, her strict grey hair, and in one gloved hand she held a white envelope. For one moment the room went very still, and Hester felt the old cold water rise in her.
"This came by the morning post," Lavinia said. "From Salisbury. It is your brother's hand, and he has written Articled across the back of it in letters an inch high, which I could not help but see." She hesitated, and something in her face that had been shut for thirty-one years was not, quite, shut any longer. "I have not opened it."
Hester rose, holding Rose's hand.
"Then come in, ma'am," she said, "and we'll open it together."
And the Dowager Duchess of Ashcombe came across the threshold, into the light.