Chapter 9

The September morning light was coming through the clean windows of the foundation building, and the village was beginning its Monday sounds outside, and in twenty minutes thirty-seven children would arrive and fill the thirty-seven empty seats. And Agnes Burch stood at the front of her classroom and looked at the Marquis of Rothwell with the gray eyes that had been assessing him since he appeared in the doorway on Thursday morning."You came here to close this school," she said."Yes.""You have stayed five days.""Yes.""You have read the composition books, and attended the afternoon sessions, and come to the Sunday service, and arrived this morning before the children." She said each thing with the deliberateness of a woman building an account from the evidence. "And now you are telling me you intend to return.""Yes," he said, for the third time."For the instruction?" she said."Partly," he said.She looked at him for a long moment. Twenty minutes had become fifteen. Outside, a child's voice was audible—not Thomas Buley's, a different child, one he did not yet know, arriving early."You should know," she said, "that I am a schoolmistress in a Durham village, and you are a Marquis, and the distance between those is considerable.""I am aware of the distance," he said. "I have been aware of it since Thursday morning, along with a number of other things. And I have found that the awareness of the distance has not altered my intention to return.""I am also not," she said, "a woman who will be managed in any arrangement." She said it without apology, the statement of someone reporting a fact. "I have been managing this foundation on my own terms for four years, and I do not intend to stop being the person who does that.""I know," he said. "It is one of the things I find most..." He stopped, and the word he almost used was not the word he was prepared to use on a Monday morning twenty minutes before thirty-seven children arrived, and he settled for: "...instructive."Something happened in her face: not the full expression, not yet, but the very beginning of something that was not composed and was not professional, and was briefly, completely herself.

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