"My mother. My man. A surgeon in Brussels who is probably dead. Nobody else." He turned his head and looked at her, and she saw that this was the part he had brought her out here to say. "My brother Rowland died last March, Miss Ivers. You will have heard. Everyone loved Rowland. He was the eldest and the best, and he talked to everyone, and he could remember the name of every tenant's dog. I was the second son. I was meant to be in the army, which suited me, because in the army nobody minds much if a man is quiet. And then Rowland took a putrid fever and was dead in nine days, and I was the Duke of Calderwood, with a seat in the Lords and nine thousand tenants and a mother who had already lost one son and was not prepared to watch the town laugh at the other."
"So she told them you were grieving."
"She told them I was grieving. It's quite convincing. A man in mourning is allowed to be abstracted, and to miss what is said to him, and to answer wrongly, and to leave early. For a twelvemonth." His jaw tightened. "The twelvemonth was up in March. Now I am only rude. Or dull. Or proud. I have heard all three. Read all three, I should say. On people's mouths."
"And next year," said Theodora slowly, "when it is worse — "
"Next year I am to take my seat in earnest. There is a bill coming on the poor laws in which I have some interest, and my father's old friends expect me to speak, and my brother's old friends expect me to fail." He was quiet a moment. "I have a cousin, Lord Selby, who is my heir. He is perfectly pleasant. He has noticed, I think. He watches me very closely at dinner. He would not do anything so crude as to say anything. He only watches."
They had come round to the gate by Grosvenor Gate again. The groom behind them coughed once, discreetly, like a man reminding the world he was not there.
"What do you want of me, your Grace?" said Theodora.
He drew the greys to a walk. "I want you to teach me," he said. "Properly. I have been trying to learn the alphabet from the plate at the back of your book, and you saw this afternoon how well that answers. I want to learn to read mouths as you do — I have been doing it, a little, by myself, but I am slow, and I guess, and it is like reading a book by lightning. You can do it across a ballroom. I watched you do it last night before you ever came near me. You were reading Captain Vossey."
"Captain Vossey owes Mr. Quilling twenty pounds."