"1 hour," he said. "Between 6:00 and 7. Not a minute after."
"Yes, doctor."
"One candle, from the box in the passage. I will count the stubs."
"Yes, doctor."
"You must understand how much I have done for you. A woman in your position has no business in a room like this. I have made an exception."
He smiled as he said it. She saw that he meant it. That was the worst of him.
The room was cold when she went in. It was not cold when she had been there 5 minutes.
Someone had laid a fire in the grate before dawn and lit it, and set a straight chair beside it with a cushion on the seat. The lamp on the table had its wick trimmed square.
Hester stood very still.
Mrs. Puit, she supposed, or a footman with a conscience. It hardly mattered. Nobody had ever warmed a room for her.
She did not sit in the chair.
She dusted the plinth first, the way she had been told, and then she stood before the stone with her cloth held at the line of her chest.
The bottom of the fourth line held a small half circle with a stroke beneath it. Every scholar in the house called it the setting sun. It had produced 10 years of learned papers on the dying of kings.
She looked at it, and the room went away.
Bloomsbury. A kitchen with a broken shutter and a candle stuck in a saucer. Thomas at the table with his sleeves rolled back and ink to the wrist.
He had been a copyist in the great museum's Egyptian rooms at 20 shillings a week, drawing signs for men who signed the drawings.
"Come and look, Hetty," he said. "The scholars would have you believe it is a mystery, and it is not. It is a receipt. Half of it is a receipt."
He tapped the half circle.
"A loaf is a loaf. Every man who ever put on a gown wants it to be the sun."
She had laughed. She had sat beside him and learned 40 signs before the candle guttered.
Later, there were £700, penciled into a child's copy book he bought for a penny. Later still, there was a cough, a doctor's bill of £90, and a March morning on which he stopped teaching.
A coal fell in the grate.
She was in a cold house in Yorkshire with a cloth in her hand, and the stone was still there. It was still a receipt. Nobody in this house would ever hear it from her.