The other reason she had given no one.
Six weeks ago, Rose had taken a fever. It was nothing in the end, a feverish cold that settled on her chest and made her cough like a little dog, but the physician had looked grave for one evening and that one evening had been enough. Hester had not gone to bed. Neither, at a little past midnight, had the Duke. He had come in his shirtsleeves, without a candle, and sat down on the other side of the cot, and they had stayed so until morning, not speaking much, taking it in turns to wet the cloth for Rose's forehead. Once, near four, when Rose's breathing eased and she turned onto her side with a sigh, he had put his face in his hands. When he lifted it he said, very quietly, "Thank you for staying," and she had understood, all at once and with no possibility of mistake, that she loved him.
She had written to Mrs. Ormsby the next morning.
A governess who fell in love with her employer had two courses open to her, and only one of them ended with her character intact. She had seen the other course. Everyone had. The girl at the Marchmonts' who had been sent off in a hired chaise at six in the morning, with a quarter's wages and no reference. The talk afterwards, in every drawing room in the county. Nobody ever asked what the gentleman had said or done. Nobody needed to. It was always, somehow, the governess who had climbed.
And so: Calcutta. Half a world away, where she would never again have to stand in a sunlit room and hear a child say forever in front of the one person who must never know how much she wanted it.
She took a sheet of paper from the drawer and dipped her pen.
Dear Mrs. Ormsby, she wrote, and then sat for a very long time with the pen above the page, until the ink dried on the nib and she had to dip it again, and then once more, and the candle burned down to the stub, and in the next room Rose said something in her sleep that might have been a word and might have been nothing.
She did not finish the letter that night.
III.
Lavinia Thorne, Dowager Duchess of Ashcombe, had lived in this house for thirty-three years and been its widow for six, and in all that time she had never once raised her voice in it. She did not raise it now. She sat down in the straight chair by her writing table, folded her gloved hands, and waited for her son to finish walking up and down her carpet.
"You had no right," he said at last.
"To carry a letter? I carried a great many letters in this house before you were breeched."
"You know what I mean. You did it in front of Rose. In front of her."