"I know. I read that much myself. It took me three tries." He looked at her. "I would pay you, of course. Whatever you think fair. You need not think of it as — I know what it costs, a thing like the Address. I know you did not print three hundred copies out of your pin money."
She thought of the green notebook, and of twenty-three pounds four shillings and sixpence, and of the room above the cooper's shop in Plough Court. She thought of the waterman's boy, Davit, who had learned the word for river last Friday and had spelled it on her palm eleven times in a row for the joy of it. She thought how easy it would be.
"No," she said.
His face did not change, but something behind it did.
"Not payment," said Theodora. "I will teach you. But I won't be paid for it, your Grace, not by you, and not in secret. If you want to learn from me you must come to the house in Half Moon Street and learn in my mother's drawing room, with my brother in the room, and let him help me teach you, because he is better at it than I am, and because he has been told all his life that his hands are a disgrace, and he has just watched a duke spell good day on his." She held his eyes. "That is my fee. That my brother sees you do it."
The Duke of Calderwood looked at her for a long moment, there at the Grosvenor Gate with the whole of the Ring going by.
"You drive a hard bargain, Miss Ivers," he said.
"I am the daughter of a man who owes money to half of Wiltshire," said Theodora. "I have had to learn."
And he laughed — the real laugh, the one from the bookseller's in Holborn, she supposed — loud enough that a lady in a passing landau turned her head to stare.
So for the next three weeks, on Mondays and Thursdays, the Duke of Calderwood came to Half Moon Street at two o'clock and sat in the yellow chair and was taught, and Lady Ivers, who believed with her whole heart that she was watching a courtship, sat in the corner with her netting and was so happy that she very nearly stopped noticing what her son did with his hands.
They began with the alphabet, because it was the floor everything else stood on. Piers was merciless. He made the Duke spell the names of every street between Piccadilly and the river, and the names of all the Kings of England from the Conqueror, and the names of the greys, which were Castor and Pollux, and when the Duke made a mistake Piers would seize his hands and put the fingers in the right place, as if he were arranging cutlery, and the Duke would let him. By the second week the Duke could spell slowly