Chapter 11

"I know," she said. "I can see their comments in the margin. You kept none of their suggested reductions." She looked at him. "They suggested reducing the trustee provision.""They did," he said."You did not reduce it.""No," he said.She looked at the document and then at him, and the composure was doing its work, but he had been watching for four months, and he had learned to see beneath it: the specific signal, the slight shift in the gray eyes that indicated she was feeling something she had not yet decided what to do with."Thank you," she said for the second time, in the same plain register."You are welcome," he said in the same register.She looked up."I mean," he said, "that the thanks is received as it is given: plainly, without the elaboration of either." He held her gaze. "I am not in the habit of doing things for people because I expect gratitude. I am in the habit of doing things because they are right. The endowment is right. The trustee provision is right. I would like you to receive both without the mechanism of gratitude, because you have nothing to be grateful for beyond what is simply correct."Agnes Burch sat across the desk in the small office of the Rothbury Foundation and looked at the Marquis of Rothwell, who had arrived in September with a closure notice in his pocket and had been coming back every fortnight for three months, and said, "You have changed.""Since September?""Since you arrived in the doorway," she said, "on Thursday morning. The man who stood in that doorway had already written the closure notice. He was here to complete a procedure." She looked at him steadily. "That man would not have written the trustee provision.""No," he said, "he would not have.""What changed?"He considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "Thomas Buley's candle," he said.

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