And while she talked, Piers came in behind her, quietly, with a book, as he always came in where he was not wanted. He stood by the door. Theodora saw his hand slip, and saw the book fall, a heavy quarto Virgil, flat on the boards behind the Dowager's chair with a noise like a pistol shot.
The Dowager did not stop talking. She did not turn her head. She did not so much as blink.
Theodora sat very still. She looked at the small, upright woman in the yellow chair, who was turned a little sideways, she saw now, with her right side toward the room and her left toward the wall, the way her son stood in ballrooms; who had not let a single word of anyone else's into the conversation for ten minutes; who was watching Theodora's mouth, all the while she spoke, with a fierce and practised attention that Theodora would have recognised anywhere, because she had been taught it on a nursery floor.
"How long, your Grace?" said Theodora softly, squarely, to her face.
The Dowager stopped.
It was the first silence since she had come in. It went on for a long time. Behind her, Piers bent and picked up the Virgil, and looked at his sister, and slipped out of the room again, and closed the door with great gentleness.
"Since I was nineteen," said the Dowager Duchess of Calderwood at last. Her voice had changed entirely; it was much smaller. "The scarlet fever. The left side. The right is not what it was, either, these ten years." She looked down at her hands. "Nobody knows. My husband never knew. My sons do not know. I found out very early, Miss Ivers, that if one talks, one is never asked to listen. That a woman who is thought formidable is never thought deaf. I have been talking for forty years." Her mouth twisted. "When Geoffrey came home from Belgium and could not hear me across the breakfast table, I told him what I had always told myself. That it was nobody's business. That one manages. That one finds a way, and the way is never to let them see." She lifted her eyes. "I taught him that. I didn't know I was teaching him. I thought I was teaching him to be strong."
Theodora did not know she was going to move until she had crossed the room and knelt by the yellow chair and taken one of the Dowager's small, cold, ringed hands in both of her own.
"He doesn't need a wife to hide him, ma'am," she said. "He needs someone to stop him hiding. I think perhaps you did too."
The Dowager looked down at her for a long moment. Then she withdrew her hand, not unkindly, and stood, and shook out her grey silk, and was formidable again; but it was a different kind of formidable now, Theodora thought, a kind with a door in it.