Nobody asks the woman with the cloth what she knows.
It is not that her knowledge is small. It is that the room has already priced her at nothing.
"She will dust the stone," said the Duke of Kestrel Mere. "She will not read it, touch it, or look at it above the line of her cloth."
He did not turn his head to say it.
"The next time, she leaves this house without a character."
Nobody in the tablet room breathed.
Hester Larkin stood against the paneling with a beeswax cloth in her hand. She was six and twenty. She had been a housemaid at Kestrel Mere Hall for 3 weeks.
She had expected the sack. She had expected a lecture on gratitude. She had not expected to be dismissed before a full room by a man who would not look at her.
The room watched.
Seven scholars sat along the oak table, fed and warmed at the Duke's expense for 10 years. Two ladies of the county had come to view the stone and had stayed to view her. A footman studied the ceiling. Every one of them waited for the maid to break.
The tablet room smelled of beeswax, cold candle smoke, and a decade of patience that had begun to look like waste.
The stone stood on an oak plinth at its center. It was black granite, 4 ft high, cut with 61 lines of tiny figures. Birds, reeds, loaves, eyes.
The late Duke had carried it from thieves in the year 1836. It had been argued over ever since.
Her lips were moving.
"Your grace," said Dr. Lucien Sutherby.
He rose as he said it, one hand flat on the table like a man taking an oath. He was 50, silver-haired, and dressed in good black broadcloth that had never met a kitchen.
He drew 600 a year from the Duke to read the stone. He had read nothing. He did have a gift for finding who was standing nearest the fault.
"I found her at the second column on Tuesday," he added. "I am sure it was innocent."
"It was dusting," said Hester.
The Duke looked at her once.
His eyes were amber, the color of weak whiskey held up to a window. He was six and thirty, of middle height, broad through the shoulder, weathered ruddy by weather he had chosen to stand in.
He owned 40,000 acres and a coat with a mended cuff. He did not seem to know about the cuff.
"Do you understand me?" he said.