"He has known your name," Mrs. Hatch said gently, "since before your boy's fever broke. He asked me for it the week you arrived, when he saw you carrying coal up the back stairs yourself because the boy who ought to have done it was laid up. You never once complained of it to anyone."
She let that sit a moment.
"There is more, if you want the whole of it. The miller's note, the one your husband left unpaid before he died. That never came due because someone settled it and never told you. The coal that turned up outside your door last winter with no bill attached. I do not think, in a year and a half, he has once let himself be thanked for a single one of them."
Mrs. Hatch's voice softened.
"And I do not think, watching him this fortnight, that he intends to start now, because I believe he is more afraid of you than of anything Lady Honoria can bring against him."
Iris sat down very suddenly on the still-room stool, the way her legs had gone the night of the birthday, and did not trust herself to speak.
"I did not tell you this so you would stay for gratitude's sake," Mrs. Hatch said. "Gratitude is not love, and you are not a woman who owes anyone anything for kindness rightly given. I told you because you are about to walk out of this house believing you were nothing to him but an embarrassment in a gallery. And that is a lie. I find I cannot let a lie stand when I know the truth of it."
Iris did not withdraw her notice that day. She told herself she needed time to think, and it was true, though not the whole truth.
The whole truth was that she was afraid of what it would mean to stay for a reason larger than arithmetic. Afraid of hoping for a thing that had, in her experience, a very poor record of being handed to women in her position.
She went back to her work. She fed her son. She did not seek the Duke out and told herself that was dignity.
And it was, though it was also, if she was honest with the still-room silence at the end of each day, something closer to fear.
The Duke sent for her on the eleventh day, not through Mrs. Hatch, but by his own hand. A note in a firm, unhurried script asked whether Mrs. Barlow might spare him a quarter hour in the small morning room at whatever time suited her, adding in a line crossed out once and then let stand anyway that he would understand entirely if she preferred not to come.
She went.
She told herself it was only good manners owed an employer and did not believe herself for a moment.
The small morning room faced east and caught the last of the afternoon warmth in a way the great library never did. It was, Iris would think later, the only room in that enormous cold house that had ever felt as though it was built for two people rather than for show.
A fire had been lit, though the day did not strictly require it. Tea sat untouched on the low table. The Duke had positioned his chair by the window, not looking at the drive this time, but at the door, waiting for her.
"You handed in your notice," he said before she had properly crossed the threshold.
"Yes, Your Grace."
"Because of my aunt?"
"Because of a great many small things, Your Grace, of which your aunt was only the loudest."
He studied her a long moment, the way he had studied Toby's button on his birthday, as though trying to memorize something he expected to lose.
"I have not been honest with you," he said. "I find, now that the moment has come to correct it, that I do not know how to begin. So I will simply begin badly and trust you to forgive the clumsiness of it."
She said nothing. She had learned that, too, to let a silence do its work rather than filling it out of nervousness.
"The physician who came for your son, the debt that was never called in, the coal at your door. Mrs. Hatch has told you, I think, or I would not see that look on your face now."
He drew a breath.
"I sent for none of it out of duty. I am not, whatever my aunt believes, a man who does his duty by every servant in this house with such particular attention. I did it because I had watched you some months before feed a dying dog with your own bread at an hour when you believed no living soul was awake to see it, and ask nothing of anyone for it. Not thanks, not notice, not so much as a kind word from the groom you defied."
His gaze held hers.
"I wanted to know what kind of woman does a costly thing for a creature that cannot repay her and expects nothing for it. I have spent a year and a half finding out from a distance I told myself was discretion and was, if I am honest with you now, closer to cowardice."
"You watched me," Iris said slowly.
"From the library window. I did."
"And you never said."
"I did not know how to say it without it sounding like a purchase. A duke who buys a physician for a maid's son and then presents the bill of it to her in exchange for her regard. I did not want your gratitude, Mrs. Barlow. I did not think I had earned the right to want anything more than that from you. And I still am not certain I have."