Piers stared at him. Then the boy's face broke open, all at once, the way a winter pond breaks when a stone goes through it, and his hands flew — too fast, much too fast, a torrent of letters and Ivers signs together, who taught you, where did you learn, can you read me, do you know any others — and the Duke laughed, a short startled sound, and shook his head and held up one palm, and Piers stopped, and began again, slowly, spelling for a beginner.
H-O-W.
The Duke's eyes went, just for an instant, to Theodora. Then back to the boy. He spelled, laboriously: B-O-O-K.
"Piers," said Lady Ivers. Her voice was shaking. "Piers, that will do. Your Grace, I am so very sorry. He knows he is not to — we are trying so hard to break him of it — "
"Please don't apologise on my account, ma'am," said the Duke. He did not look away from Piers. "I asked him." And Piers, glancing at his mother's face and then back at the Duke, let his right hand drop to his side and pressed his thumb hard into his fist.
Theodora saw the Duke see it. She saw him recognise it, and go still, and saw his eyes come round to her across the yellow drawing room, slow and certain as a compass needle swinging north. Page thirty-one of A Plain Address to the Families of the Deaf. My brother and I have a sign of our own for a thing that is not true but must be borne. It is a thumb pressed into the fist. It means: hold on. I set it down here because I think every family must have one, and it is better to make it together than to make it alone.
He knew. He had known, she thought, since the ball; but now he was sure.
He said nothing about it. At the twenty-second minute he rose and asked Lady Ivers whether he might have the honour of driving Miss Ivers in the Park tomorrow at five, and Lady Ivers said yes in a voice like a kettle coming to the boil, and he bowed, and went away. And Piers went up the stairs three at a time and came down again with a slate on which he had written, in enormous capitals, HE IS DEAF, THEO. NOT ALL THE WAY. BUT HE IS.
"I know," said Theodora. She wiped the slate clean with her sleeve before their mother could see it. "Hold on."
He drove a high-perched phaeton with a pair of greys, and a groom up behind who was as silent as the box he sat on, and he drove it well, keeping his left side to the railings and his right side, and his face, to her. The Park at five was a slow river of carriages and riders and walkers going round and round the same mile and a half as though they had somewhere to be. Everyone looked at them. Theodora had never in her life been looked at by so many people at once, and she found that it was exactly as unpleasant as she had always supposed.