Theodora watched him do it and felt, as she always felt, a small cold stone settle in her chest.
"You will not," said Lady Ivers from the doorway, "do that at the table."
"I wasn't, Mama," said Theodora.
"He was. I saw him from the landing. Waving his hands about like a Neapolitan. Piers." She came around the table so that he could see her face; she had learned that much, at least, though she did it as if it were a humiliation visited on her personally. "Speak, Piers. You have a tongue. Mr. Kinross says that every day you are allowed to wave your hands is a day lost to articulation. Good morning, Mama. Say it."
Piers said it. He had a voice; it was a hoarse, flattened, careful voice, with the consonants pushed into place one at a time like furniture into a too-small room, and it cost him something every time, and he hated it. "Good morning, Mama."
"There," said Lady Ivers. "You see how well he does when he tries." She sat down and poured her tea and turned on Theodora a face so luminous with hope that Theodora had to look away from it. "Calderwood," she said. "Calderwood. Do you know he has not stood up with anyone this Season? Not one. Lady Cressingham told me so herself. Not Miss Fenn, not the Dunstable girl, not anyone. And he crossed the whole room to you without an introduction. Lady Cressingham was beside herself. She did not know whether to be offended or to take the credit."
"I expect she will manage both," said Theodora.
"Don't be clever. Gentlemen do not like a clever girl. Did he say he would call?"
"He did not say anything of the kind."
"He will call." Lady Ivers stirred her tea with a sort of violence. "He must call. Theodora, you understand me. You understand what this would mean. Your father's affairs — " She glanced at Piers, who was watching her mouth with his usual blank attentiveness, and lowered her voice, which was pointless and which she always did. "Mr. Eccles has written again about the mortgage on the home farm. If we cannot pay the interest at Midsummer, he will foreclose, and then the rest goes with it. Coldharbour, Theodora. Everything. And Piers to be provided for all his life, a boy who can never earn his bread. You know this."
"Piers can earn his bread perfectly well, Mama. He draws better than anyone I know. He reads Latin better than I do."
"A deaf man," said Lady Ivers, "will never be anything but a burden on his family, and I will not have him made more of a curiosity than he is. That is why he is going to Mr. Kinross in September, and why he will not wave his hands at my table." She put down her spoon. "A duke, Theodora. If you have the smallest regard for your brother."