His voice was not loud. It was worse than loud. It was the voice of a man who has put his hand on a wound he believed had closed and found it open under the cloth.
"She is frightened," said Hester.
Rose pulled back out of her arms with great dignity and set both fists on her hips, a posture she had learned, Hester feared, from Mrs. Pell. "I am not frightened."
"Then why did you say it?" the Duke asked. He said it to his daughter directly, which he did not always do. He so often spoke to Rose through someone else, as though she were a foreign country and he required an interpreter.
Rose looked at him as if he were very slow.
"Because she stays," she said.
Three words. Hester felt them go into her like cold water. There had been three governesses before her in two years, and a nurse before that, and before that there had been a woman whose portrait was turned to the wall in a room nobody entered.
She stood. She kept Rose's hand in hers, because to let go of it now would have been a cruelty, and she made herself meet the Duke's eyes.
"Your Grace," she said. "Perhaps I should leave."
Something moved in his face. He let go of the door and came three steps into the room, onto the sunlit floor, close enough that she could see the small muscle working at his jaw.
"Is that what you want?"
It was not a question an employer asked a governess. Employers did not ask what governesses wanted; they asked whether the French was progressing and whether the child was eating her greens. Hester looked down at the floorboards, at the bright squares of light, at the toe of his boot inside one of them and her own slipper inside another.
"It may be wiser," she said.