So on the third Friday she told him. She said it at the window table, low, under the noise of her mother's netting needles: "If you would like to see what the Address paid for, your Grace, you might be at the top of Fetter Lane tomorrow at ten. I am there on a Saturday this week, because of the Whitsun holiday. You must come on foot and you must not look like a duke."
"I don't know how not to look like a duke."
"Take off your hat," said Theodora, "and look interested in other people."
He came on foot. He did not look in the least like anything but a duke, and Mrs. Bartle's devil took one look at him and dropped a tray of long primer all over the floor. But he took off his hat, and he stooped under the low door of the back room, and stood by the wall with the map of the world on it, and watched Theodora teach five children the words for coal and candle and Whitsun, and did not say a word for an hour. Then Peg the chandler's daughter, who feared nobody, went up to him and took his hand and spelled into the palm of it, very slowly, as if to an idiot, W-H-O.
He looked down at her. He spelled back, carefully, on his own fingers so she could see: F-R-I-E-N-D. And then, because he had learned it from Piers, he laid his flat hand on the top of his own head, Joby's sign, my friend who is taller than me; and Joby, at the end of the table, shrieked with outrage and delight, and in a minute all five of them were round him, pulling at his coat and showing him their slates, and Theodora sat at the head of the table with her hands in her lap and could not, for a moment, see anything at all.
Afterward he walked with her as far as Temple Bar. It was a mild grey morning with a smell of rain in it. Neither of them said anything until they reached the Bar, and then he stopped, and turned to face her, there in the middle of Fleet Street, among the porters and the carts.
"How many," he said, "are waiting?"
"Eleven. On my list. There will be more."
"And you need — "
"Sixty pounds for the first year. I have twenty-three." She made herself meet his eyes. "Please don't."
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to say that you have nine thousand tenants and sixty pounds is nothing to you, and it's true, and it's very kind, and I won't take it." She was surprised to find her voice so steady. "Your Grace, listen to me. If a duke gives