He found her afterward on the half-landing of the mismatched staircase, where she had gone because she could not stay in the supper room another minute and could not, quite yet, face her mother. The ballroom music came up the well of the stairs, faint and sweet. He stood two steps below her, so that his face was level with hers, and the candle in the sconce above them fell on both.
"Miss Ivers," he said. "I have a confession to make, and I would like you to let me make all of it, because I am not good at this and I may not manage it twice."
"Very well."
"I don't need you," said the Duke of Calderwood.
Theodora looked at him.
"I thought I did. I thought — that night, at Cressingham's — that I'd found the one person in London who could get me through it. I told myself that was why. It was easier to say than the truth. But I have just told a hundred people that I'm going deaf, and the sky did not fall, and I find I can manage the House with a good secretary and a slate, and an ear trumpet, God help me, and my cousin's face in the candlelight was worth any amount of humiliation." The ghost of the smile went past the window and, this time, stayed. "So I have no use for you whatever, Miss Ivers. None. I want you to understand that before I say anything else. I don't need you to be my ears, or my hands, or anyone's charity. I only want you. Because you talk to me as if you want me to understand. Because you drive a hard bargain. Because you told a duke to take off his hat in Fetter Lane." He held out his hand, palm up, steady as a sentry. "They are playing a waltz. Will you dance with me? I would be honored."
She took it. They did not go down. They danced on the half-landing, badly, in a space six feet square, with the music coming up faint from below and his eyes on her mouth and the lopsided acanthus leaves of Mr. Ruddle's balusters going round and round them; and when the music stopped he kissed her, once, very gently, as if she were a word he had been trying for a long time to read and had finally got right.
The room in Red Lion Court opened on the twenty-ninth of September, Michaelmas Day, with eleven children on its rolls and four more promised by Christmas. It had two windows, a stove, a deal table long enough for twenty, a girl from Shoe Lane to keep it, and a map of the world on the wall with Persia in it. It had been paid for by four hundred and twelve subscribers at a guinea each and by eight hundred copies of the second edition of A Plain Address to the Families of the Deaf, by Theodora