"If you put your hands on him again at my father's order without first asking whether the order is worthy of a Christian, you will find that I have a longer memory than this house gives me credit for."
Deane's candle flame leaned. "Miss, I do as I am bid."
"Then learn to hear what is being bid," she said, and passed him.
Upstairs, Sir Ridley sat in his dressing-room with a box open on his knees. Inside lay a cracked leather pocket-book from the campaign, a broken spur, and a scrap of paper in a round soldier's hand:
Capt. Ashbrook — crown mark — life for life — M.H.
He had kept it. He had not looked at it in years. He set the scrap on the table and put his face in his hands and stayed that way until the candle burned low enough to smell of ending.
VI.
Two days passed in a weather of suspended sentences.
Raff worked. He watered, groomed, mended, and spoke when spoken to. The loft over the feed room held his narrow bed and a wooden chest with a change of shirts and a battered prayer book that had been Mathias's. At night he sat on the chest and turned the crown on his arm to the lantern light and asked his father, who could not answer, whether ink had been a kindness or a chain.
Leonora kept to the house by day and walked the shrubbery at dusk where the yews made a dark room of their own. Once Raff found her there without seeking—his path to the north paddock crossed hers—and they stood with a yard of wet grass between them while a fine rain beaded on her hair.
"My father has written to Crowle's widow," she said. "Lieutenant Crowle. The witness. She lives in Bath. He wants confirmation that he is not inventing his own honour."
"Men do that," Raff said. "Invent. Forget. Both."
"Have you invented me?" she asked.
"No." The word was immediate. "You are the least invented thing I know. That is the trouble."
She smiled, brief and real. "Good. Trouble I can work with. Invention I cannot."
On the third morning Mr. Alaric Pewsey returned without invitation.
He came into the morning room where Leonora sat with Jemima Crowle—yes, Crowle; the lieutenant's niece, visiting from her aunt's house in Winchester and sharp as a pin. Jemima had been told enough of Thursday's disaster to be useful and not enough to be endangered. Pewsey bowed. His fair hair was damp from the ride. His smile did not reach his eyes.
"Miss Ashbrook. Miss Crowle. I heard there was illness. You look remarkably recovered."