"Do." He looked at his son. "You had that from your mother as well, Ned. *I'll think about it.* She said it to me for two years before she married me."
The door closed. The postilions gathered their reins. The black chariot rolled out through the Strand gate into the noise and glare of the street and turned east, toward Deptford. Edmund watched it go. At the corner, just before the traffic hid it, he thought he saw a broad gloved hand lift for a moment at the window. He could not be sure, then or afterward.
XIII
Captain Stannard's letter appeared in the *Morning Chronicle* on Monday. It was short and entirely without excuse. It said that the words he had spoken at the Cocoa Tree concerning a lady were false in every particular, that he had known them to be false when he spoke them, and that he asked her pardon publicly, having no right to ask it privately. By the time it was printed he was in Ostend. Jane Stannard came to the fund's committee on Wednesday as usual, on foot from Kensington, with her eyes swollen. She sat in her usual place and took the minutes, and nobody said a word to her about it. Afterward Sophia walked her to the corner and gave her the fare home, and Jane took it.
"Gone before noon," Sophia said that evening, folding the newspaper. "Of all of them, it was Captain Stannard who went."
The inquiry was fixed for October. The yard at Deptford was put on half-time at the end of June. Edmund was suspended from his post at the Victualling Office on full pay, pending the inquiry. Sir Ralph Tennant wrote him a private note to say that this was customary and no reflection on him, and that he had never in forty years heard a man recite a survey book from memory, and hoped not to again. Jem Toller was turned off by nobody, because the man who would have turned him off went down to the cooperage himself on the Monday and shook his hand in front of the whole shed and said nothing at all. Pruett went on sending six shillings a week.
Lady Sophia did not go to Shropshire, or not yet. There had been a long evening in Brook Street, and a longer morning. Lord Thornbury said a great many things, and Sophia listened to every one of them, as she had promised. At the end of it they reached what the Earl called a truce and Sophia called terms. They were not entirely friends again, but they were not enemies. Her name was talked of everywhere for a fortnight. Then the Tsar left for Dover, and London found other things to talk about. Two invitations failed to arrive that summer that would otherwise have come. Four new subscribers joined the widows' fund, all of them women, and one of them a duchess.
Edmund called on the Thursday, as he had been told to. He sat in the small back drawing room in Brook Street with the window open on the garden and the sounds of the mews coming in, and Tibby sewing ostentatiously in the corner. He looked at Sophia, and found for a long time that he had nothing to say.
"I burned the letter," he said at last. "The one I wrote to my father, before Chalk Farm. Kit gave it back to me."
"What did it say?"
"That I hoped in time he'd be able to say he had done what he believed right." He turned his hat in his hands. "I think he can, you know. That's the worst of it. I think he did."