Mrs. Bartle was setting type in the front room when Theodora came in. She was a big, square, competent woman in a brown stuff gown and an apron that had once been white, and she looked up over her spectacles and said at once, "You've had a gentleman."
Theodora stopped in the doorway. "I beg your pardon?"
"Here. Yesterday. Asking after you." Mrs. Bartle set down her composing stick and wiped her hands. "Not by name, mind. Asking after the Sister. Came in about four o'clock, very quiet, very particular, tall, dark, a mark through his eyebrow like he'd walked into a door. Bought six copies of the Address. Six! Paid in gold. Then he asked me, as polite as you like, whether the author might be persuaded to receive a letter. I said I didn't know who the author was, it come to me through an agent. He looked at me a good while, and then he said — I'll tell you exactly, I wrote it down — he said, 'I understand. If you should happen to see the agent, would you tell the Sister that a reader is very much obliged to her?' And he stood there while I said it back, watching my mouth the whole time, so close I thought he meant to kiss me." She folded her arms. "Is he trouble, Miss Theo?"
Theodora found that she had sat down on the bench by the door, among a stack of handbills for a lost dog in Holborn.
"I don't know," she said. "I think he may be a duke."
"Well," said Mrs. Bartle, after a moment, "that's trouble of some sort, I should think."
Through the green baize curtain, Joby had seen her. He came out at a run and flung his arms round her waist, and then stepped back to shape on his small, ink-stained fingers the greeting he always gave her, the one he had invented himself: T, and then a hand laid flat on the top of his own head, which meant, as far as either of them had ever been able to work out, my friend who is taller than me. Theodora answered it. She went through the curtain and took off her gloves, which she never wore at the deal table, and sat down in front of the five slates and the map of the world with the hole in it, and taught, for two hours, the words for bread, and river, and boat, and Thursday. She did not think about the Duke of Calderwood once, except a dozen times, and each time she put the thought down again, the way one sets down a cup that is too hot to hold.
He had bought six copies. He had read it a good many times since last winter. Speak to the face, not to the back of the head.