"Now then," she said. "The duck."
Rose fetched it from behind the curtain, where it had been all along. They sat in the window seat. Hester read about the duckling who lost her way among the bulrushes and called and called until her mother came paddling round the bend, and she read it in her ordinary voice, and only once, at the line and her mother said, I was here all the time, did the ordinary voice fail her, so that she had to pretend to cough.
Rose did not ask again whether she was going. That was worse than if she had.
It was past ten before Hester was alone. Her room adjoined the night nursery through a door she left ajar: a narrow chamber with a sloping ceiling, a washstand, a chest of drawers, a chair, and a small shelf on which stood her father's Bible, her mother's sampler, and a miniature of Kit at twelve with his hair standing up. She sat on the bed with a candle and broke Mrs. Ormsby's seal.
Madam, it began, I have the pleasure to inform you that Mrs. Henry Carrow, wife of Mr. Carrow of the Honourable Company's civil service at Calcutta, has received your particulars most favourably, and wishes to engage you as governess to her three daughters, aged nine, seven, and six, at a salary of one hundred and twenty pounds per annum, your passage to be paid and a further twenty pounds allowed for outfit.
One hundred and twenty pounds.
The family sailed from Portsmouth in the Countess of Harcourt on the fourteenth of November. Mrs. Carrow would be obliged by an answer by return.
Hester set the letter down on the coverlet and looked at it for a long while.
At Ashcombe she was paid fifty pounds a year, which was generous; Mrs. Ormsby had told her so with something like envy. Of those fifty she kept eight for gloves and stockings and the occasional book and the mending of her boots. The rest went to Salisbury, to a narrow brick house in St. Ann Street where her mother lived with Kit, and from there, a little at a time, to the counting-house of Messrs. Gale and Penruddock, bankers, who held a note for three hundred and twenty pounds with her father's signature on it.
It had not been his debt. That was the bitter part, the part she had stopped saying aloud because it changed nothing. The Reverend Thomas Bennett, curate of Upper Wishford, had put his name to a friend's loan because the friend was in trouble and her father had never in his life been able to look at trouble and walk past. The friend had gone to America. The bank had come to the curate. Her father had paid what he could, and grown thin and quiet, and died in the hard winter of 1810 with the note still owing, and Mr. Penruddock, who was not a cruel man but was a careful one, had written to the widow with regret.
There was no law that made a daughter answer for her father's signature. Hester knew that. But there was her mother, who could not sleep for shame, and there was Kit, seventeen and clever, who wanted to be articled to an attorney and could not be while the family name sat in a ledger in red ink. And there had been her father's face, at the end, when he asked her to forgive him for leaving them so poorly, and she had said there was nothing to forgive, and had meant it, and had made him a promise he had not asked for.
In six years she had paid two hundred and ten pounds. One hundred and ten remained. At Ashcombe that was three more years of careful gloves. In Calcutta, it was a single year. Kit could have his articles by summer.
That was one reason, and it was a true one. It was the reason she had given Mrs. Ormsby.