"You have watched her. It is not the same thing." He came away from the window then, and she saw his face, and wished she had not. "Rose had not said that word in four years, Mother. Not once. Not since the week Caroline died. She had stopped speaking of her altogether. And today she said it to a woman who wipes jam from her hands and reads her the same book about a duck thirty times without complaint, and I stood in that doorway and I could not breathe." He drew a long breath now, as if to prove that he could. "I am not a boy. I have not mistaken gratitude for something else. I know precisely what I feel, and for whom, and I have known it for longer than I would like to confess."
"And what does she feel?"
He was quiet.
"You do not know," Lavinia said, more gently than she had said anything that afternoon. "You do not know, because you are her employer and she cannot tell you. That is the other thing they never consider, the gentlemen. She is not free to say no to you, Edmund. Not in this house. Every word she speaks to you, she speaks with her bread depending on it. Think on that before you put her in a position where she must answer."
He looked at her for a long time. Then he bowed, the precise bow of a son to his mother, and went out.
Lavinia sat where she was until the light in the window had gone from gold to grey.
Then she unlocked the lowest drawer of her writing table, which held nothing but a rosewood box, and unlocked the box, which held nothing but a letter.
It was old. The paper had yellowed at the folds, and the wax of the seal had darkened from scarlet to the colour of dried blood. It had never been broken. It was directed, in a round, eager, girlish hand that time had not made any less familiar, to Her Grace the Duchess of Ashcombe, Ashcombe Park.
Susannah had been nineteen when she ran away with Mr. Daniel Lisle, who had come to the house in Berkeley Square to teach the sisters drawing and had taught the younger one considerably more than perspective. Lavinia had been twenty-two, two years a duchess, with Edmund not yet born. Their father had struck Susannah's name from the family Bible with a ruler and a pen. Lavinia's husband had said, in his reasonable voice, that a duchess could not be seen to correspond with a drawing master's wife, and that any letters arriving from Bristol were to be returned unopened.
Three had come. She had returned two.
The third had arrived on a morning when her husband was in London, and she had held it in her hands in this very room and found that she could neither open it nor send it back. If she opened it, she would have to answer it. If she sent it back, she would have to know she had. So she had locked it in a box, meaning to decide tomorrow, and tomorrow had become a year, and a year had become the letter from a Bristol clergyman, informing Her Grace with respect that Mrs. Daniel Lisle had died of a fever in the parish of St. Philip and St. Jacob, and had asked at the last that her sister be told.
Thirty-one years. She had never broken the seal. She did not know what Susannah had asked her for, at the end, and she had arranged her whole life so that she would never have to find out.
She did not hate the governess. That was the thing her son would never believe. She looked at Hester Bennett, at the darned cuffs and the straight back and the plain stubborn decency in the girl's face, and she saw a young woman about to step off the edge of the world she had been born to, for love, and she knew exactly what the world did to such women afterwards. It did not matter which direction one stepped. Up or down, the fall was the same, and the people one loved stood on the edge and watched, and did nothing, because doing nothing was respectable.