"He did not tell you the rest, I suppose," she said. "He wouldn't. He is a fool too. He came home from Lady Cressingham's that first night, and he came up to my sitting room at one in the morning, which he has not done since he was a boy, and stood in the doorway, and he said, 'Mama, there is a girl who talks to me as if she wants me to understand.' That was all. He didn't say a word about ears, Miss Ivers. Not one. The ears came afterward, when he had to think of a reason that a soldier could say out loud." She went to the door. "I give a ball on Tuesday. The last of the Season. Your mother will receive a card this afternoon. She will tell you she does not mean to come; she will come, because one does not refuse me. I would be obliged if you would come too." She paused with her hand on the latch. "And you may look at my staircase. I am told you have opinions on it."
Lady Ivers put off Coldharbour until Wednesday. She said it was because one did not refuse the Duchess of Calderwood, and that it would look very odd if they did, after everything; she said it in a voice that dared Theodora to believe any other reason. She did not give back the green notebook. But on Monday evening Theodora found it on her pillow, closed, with nothing written in it that had not been there before, and she sat on the edge of the bed with it in her lap for a long time and did not understand her mother at all, and loved her, which was not the same thing as understanding but lasted longer.
The staircase at Calderwood House went up in a double sweep from a marble hall the size of a church, and its balusters did not match. Theodora saw it the moment she came in. The left flight was carved in a severe, fluted Roman way; the right flight, which ought to have been its twin, had acanthus leaves on every third baluster, slightly lopsided, as though the carver had been thinking about something else. She stopped dead at the foot of it, and the Dowager, receiving at the top in silver tissue and every pearl she owned, looked down at her over the rail and said, without troubling to lower her voice, "My husband's grandfather's joiner. A Mr. Ruddle. He drank."
Theodora laughed out loud, in the middle of the marble hall, and a dozen people turned to look at her, and she did not care.
He was in the ballroom. She saw him at once, by the second window, with his right shoulder to the wall. He saw her a moment later, and she watched him see her, and watched his face do the thing it did when he had decided to guess