"I regret," the Duke said, "a great many things, my lady aunt. This will not be among them."
He asked then, in front of the visiting families, whether Mrs. Barlow would see to it that his afternoon correspondence was brought up, in a voice of such ordinary calm that it did more to still the room than any louder defense could have managed.
Iris curtsied this time because the moment required the form even if her heart did not. She left the gallery with her son's hand in hers and her spine very straight and did not let herself shake until she had turned two full corners out of anyone's sight.
She handed in her notice the following morning.
She did not do it out of pride, or not only out of pride. She told herself it was arithmetic. A woman with a fatherless son could not afford to be the subject of a countess's amusement in a house where the countess held more sway in practice than the master did in his chair.
She could not afford Toby growing up hearing himself called what Honoria had called him.
She wrote the letter at the kitchen table by a single candle in a hand steadier than she felt, gave it to Mrs. Hatch before the household was fully awake, and asked only that she be permitted to work her month in peace.
Mrs. Hatch read it standing in the scullery doorway and did not for a long moment say anything at all.
"You would leave over her," she said finally. It was not quite a question.
"I would leave for my son."
"It amounts to the same thing."
"It does not," Mrs. Hatch said, "amount to the same thing at all. And I think you know it, or you would not look so wretched writing it."
She folded the letter without reading further and set it in her apron pocket rather than on the tray where such letters went.
"Give me a fortnight before this goes to His Grace. There is a thing I ought to have told you long before now, and I find I've been a coward about it, which is not a thing I enjoy discovering about myself."
Iris did not understand her. She had no leisure that week to try.
Lady Honoria, sensing blood, pressed her advantage with the quiet persistence of a woman used to getting what she wanted through patience rather than force. She dropped remarks in corridors, ensured the visiting families' account of the gallery scene traveled faster than any denial could catch it, and suggested to anyone who would listen that a duke enfeebled in body was easily enfeebled in judgment too.
A petition to Chancery regarding the management of his affairs might, in the circumstances, be considered an act of family duty rather than ambition.
Iris heard none of that directly. She only felt the house grow colder around her, the way a room grows colder when a door has been left open somewhere out of sight.
She went on folding linen and feeding her son and not crying where it showed, waiting out her month like a woman waiting out a winter she did not expect to survive with anything intact.
She did not know in that week that the Duke had asked Mrs. Hatch twice why the maid had stopped bringing his correspondence up herself and had been told both times only that Mrs. Barlow was much occupied, which was true, and left out entirely why.
Mrs. Hatch found Iris in the still room on the ninth day of her notice, straining the last of the season's lavender water, and shut the door behind her with the particular firmness of a woman who intended to be heard out before she was interrupted.
"I want to tell you a thing," she said, "and I want you to let me finish it before you say a word because I have been turning it over a fortnight and I will lose my nerve if you stop me."
Iris set down the muslin and waited.
"Do you recall the winter your boy took the fever? The bad one. In February. When you had no coin for the physician, and I found you sitting up with him wrapped in every blanket in the house, praying over him like the roof was coming down."
"I remember it," Iris said. Her throat had gone tight without her permission.
"A physician came that night from the county town, sent for at an hour no ordinary man sends for anything, and paid. He was told plainly never to give his name and plainer still never to send you a bill."
Mrs. Hatch's hands, usually so steady, were twisting a corner of her apron.
"I kept his secret a year and a half because he asked it of me. And I am breaking it now because I think you are about to leave this house believing something about him that is not true, and I cannot let you do that on my account."
Iris felt the room tilt very slightly.
"Who sent him?"
"You know who sent him."
"He does not know me. He barely knew my name until three weeks ago."