He had said it aloud, all of it. He had stood in the tablet room and spoken every sentence he had kept behind his teeth since he was seven. She had asked him why. He had said the only true thing he had left.
He waited for the shame. It did not come.
What came instead was a lightness, absurd and unwelcome, like the ground going from under a man who had leaned too long on a wall.
Judge lay across his feet.
"I gave her every door in the house," said the Duke to the dog. "She may walk out of any of them."
The dog thumped his tail once against the floor.
That was the whole idea. The trouble was that he did not want her to leave.
He had not intended to find that out at midnight, in this chair, under this ceiling. He had intended to stand with his hands open and lose nothing. He did not know how a man went about wanting a thing he had promised not to hold.
The pencil stopped. Started again.
He did the only sensible thing available. He rang for Corbold, his steward, and gave an order that would cost him a great deal in the county, and that he did not regret in the least.
Then he went to bed and lay awake until the pencil ceased.
* * *
On Friday, the copies were gone.
Hester came to the tablet room at 6 with her lamp and found the table swept bare. 60 lines, fair copied in her own hand across 20 leaves of foolscap, were gone. So was the ink. So was the second cushion. Only the chair remained.
She stood in the doorway with the lamp shaking.
Then she put her hand to her apron pocket and felt the copy book, soft and warm as a living thing. The last line was in there, and nowhere else.
"I do hope nothing is missing," said Dr. Sutherby, from the passage behind her.
He had a key on his watch chain. It had been lost for 3 weeks.
"Doctor."
"Mrs. Larkin. I had meant to speak to you."
He came a step nearer, smiling.
"The learned society meets in this room tomorrow at noon. 40 gentlemen, the Duke, half the county. I shall present my reading of the stone. A very full reading, I think."
"I am sure it will be."