She found the stub of a candle in her apron, the one she carried for the back stairs, and she lit it. She set it, absurdly, on the corner of his desk because there was no cake in the room, and she was not going to fetch the sad one from the larder and make a ceremony of its sadness.
"It is not much of a candle for a Duke's birthday," she said.
"It is considerably more than I was given an hour ago," he said.
She did not curtsy. She did not apologize again. She sat on the low stool by the cold hearth because her legs had simply stopped holding her up properly, and she watched her son turn a wooden button over and over in a duke's hands, and for a while none of the three of them said anything at all.
She did not know then that the Duke of Farrow had been the one, eight months before, who had sent a physician from the county town in the dead of a February night when her boy's fever would not break and she had no coin for a doctor and had been too proud, or too frightened, to ask anyone for one.
She did not know he had given the order himself and told the physician plainly never to give his name.
She thought the man in the chair was a stranger to her in every way that mattered.
She was wrong about that and had been wrong about it for eight months. She would go on being wrong about it for a while yet because he had built his concealment carefully, and he was not by nature a man who confessed things easily, even things that did him credit.
Iris carried Toby back to his drawer bed with her heart beating harder than the errand required. She told herself it was fear of dismissal. She was nearly convinced.
Mrs. Hatch was waiting in the passage with a candle and an expression Iris could not read.
"He'll have me turned off," Iris said before the housekeeper could speak. "I ought to have known better. My boy has no business upstairs."
"His Grace," Mrs. Hatch said, "has not asked me to turn off a single soul in eleven months, and I do not expect tonight to be the first."
She studied Iris a long moment.
"You lit a candle for him."
"It seemed a poor sort of birthday without one."
"It was," Mrs. Hatch said, and something in her voice made Iris look at her twice. "It was a good deal poorer than you know."
Iris did not press her. She had learned that, too, not to press for things that were not offered freely.
She thanked the housekeeper and did not know for what, then went to her narrow room above the laundry and lay a long while listening to Toby's even breathing before she found her own.
She did not know that the Duke sat by his window another hour after she had gone, with the stub of candle burned to nothing on his desk, thinking not about his birthday and not about the aunt who had not come, but about a maid who had refused to leave a room she had every reason to flee.
She would have done it for anyone, he thought. That was the trouble with her. She would have done exactly the same thing for a scullery boy, a stranger at the gate, or a dog no one wanted.
He was closer to the truth of that last thought than he yet understood, because it was exactly what she had done three weeks before, and he had watched her do it.
And he had not told her that either.
Three weeks before the birthday that no one attended, the head groom had given an order in the stable yard in the flat voice men use for things they do not want questioned. The old blind hound was to be put down before the week was out.
The dog had been the late Duke's favorite in his hunting years. Deaf now as well as blind, fed at the kennel's expense for nothing but the memory of what he had once been able to do.
The new Duke could not hunt. There was, the groom said, no earthly use in keeping a dog that could serve no one.
Iris heard it the way she heard most household business, from the yard with a basket on her hip. She said nothing. She was not asked, and it was not her place, and she went on with her work.
If anyone had questioned her that afternoon, they would have found nothing in her face but the ordinary tiredness of a woman with too much linen and too little time.
She went to the kennel that night anyway, after the house was dark, with a heel of her own bread wrapped in a cloth because she did not believe a creature ought to spend its last days hungry, regardless of what use it had left in it. No one had asked her to think that, and she thought it anyway.
She did not know the library window looked down on the kennel yard. She did not know the Duke, sleepless as he so often was, had wheeled himself to that window at an hour when a man with working legs would simply have paced, and had watched a maid he did not yet know by name kneel in the cold beside a dying dog no one else in his household had troubled to feed with kindness rather than duty.
She fed the dog. She did not speak to it in the foolish voice some people used for animals. She spoke to it plainly, the way she spoke to everyone, and she stayed until it had eaten every crumb.
She did not once look up at the house to see who might be watching because she did not imagine anyone was.
She was wrong about that, too.
The Duke gave no orders the next morning. He simply summoned the head groom and said, in the short, absolute sentences he had used since the accident because they cost him less than long ones, that the hound was to be kept fed and left alone and that he would hear no further word on the matter.