Ivers, which Mrs. Bartle had sold out of the front window in Fetter Lane in a fortnight, and which had been reviewed, rather sourly, by a gentleman who ran a school in Hackney.
Coldharbour had not been lost. Sir Humphrey Ivers, who said very little about anything, had gone up to London in August and sold the home farm himself, and his coins with it, and paid Mr. Eccles, and come home and told his wife at dinner that he would not have his daughter married to pay his debts, and that Piers was not going to Hackney, then or ever; and Lady Ivers had stared at him across the table as if he had grown another head, and then, astonishingly, had begun to cry. She did not come to the opening of the school. But she sent a basket of apples from Coldharbour for the children, and a note in her own hand that said only, For Piers's pupils, and Theodora kept the note in the green notebook, under School.
Piers came. He sat at the far end of the deal table with the twins from Shoe Lane, teaching them the alphabet, and his hands were never still for a moment.
The Duke of Calderwood came at noon, on foot, without his hat, and stood by the wall with an ear trumpet in his coat pocket that he had not yet learned to use without embarrassment, and watched. When the children went home he stayed, and helped her stack the slates, and got chalk on his sleeve. And when the room was empty and the light in the two windows had gone the colour of honey, he stood across the deal table from her, squarely, and lifted his two hands, and spelled on them, slowly, letter by letter, not clumsily any longer: W-I-L-L Y-O-U.
He did not finish. He did not need to. She could read the rest of it on his face.
Theodora looked at him for a long moment. Then she lifted her own hands and answered him, in the old two-handed alphabet that half the deaf children of England learned from someone, somehow: A-S-K M-E I-N T-H-E S-P-R-I-N-G. And then, because he had earned it, and because she wanted him to understand: T-H-E S-C-H-O-O-L F-I-R-S-T. T-H-E-N Y-O-U.
He read it. She watched him read it, the way he read everything now, all the way to the end. Then he pressed his thumb into his closed fist, the Ivers sign, the sign for a thing that must be borne, and turned it over, and opened his hand, slowly, palm up, between them on the table. A sign that did not exist yet, in any book. They would have to invent it together.
"I would be honored," said the Duke of Calderwood, "to wait."