"The last letter told me that the person concerned was not a person I would find it useful to know. I have kept that sentence a whole year, and I have never once understood it. Tonight, I sat in my own drawing room and heard a woman told in front of eleven people that she has nothing of her own to put into anything, and I find that I understand it now."
For a moment, nobody said anything. Then Lady Wexford did, because she could not help it, and because a woman who has managed a thing that long cannot sit still while it is discussed in the third person.
"Your Grace, there has been a great muddle. That commission came through my house, and it was managed by me."
"By you?"
"My late husband had a considerable turn for music. It was got up out of his papers. I did not put a name to it because it was not my name to put."
She had claimed it in one breath without once thinking it through.
The Duke had not spoken for some minutes. He was standing at the fire with his back to it and his hands behind him. He had heard his mother ask for that name over eighteen months; he had signed the second of those two payments himself in the February, on one of his short runs into the county.
"Forgive me, Lady Wexford. Do you say that Sir Roland wrote it?"
"I say that it came out of his papers, and that I had the management of it."
"And the letters to my mother?"
"Written by me, as was proper."
"Thank you." He looked at the door. "Miss Wexford, stay where you are. Everybody else stay where you are as well. I am going upstairs, and I shall not be three minutes."
He was not three minutes. In the Dowager's dressing room at Amberley, there is a black cabinet with four drawers. In the top one is a flat parcel in oilcloth with a manuscript in it and five letters. The Duke had watched his mother put things into that drawer since he was a child. He came back with the parcel and untied it standing up. He did not hand it to anybody.