She laid down her finger.
"I read that line four times to be sure. They were paying the maids, your grace. The whole of the ancient world was paying the maids."
He was silent for so long that she thought she had gone too far.
He did not look at her. He looked at the stone, and at the loaf, and at the 19 small proofs that 10 years of learning had been wrong.
"Read me the 15th line," he said.
She read it. He asked for the 30th. She read that too, and the figures.
"61 lines," said the Duke. "You have 20 left."
"20. And the last is the one I am not yet certain of."
"Why?"
"Because it is the only one that is not a number, your grace. It is an instruction. I want it right."
He nodded once, as if this were the most sensible remark in the house.
* * *
He was walking back along the north gallery an hour later, with the dog at his heel, before he understood he had been counting. 60 loaves, 40 jars, 12 measures of oil.
He had paid seven men £12,000. She had asked him for a lamp.
He stopped beneath the portrait of his father and did not raise his eyes to it.
He had been afraid of that stone since the year he was 26. He had never once asked himself why.
Tonight the fear had a new shape. It was not that she might be wrong. It was that she might be right, and he would have to hear it.
Judge leaned against his knee and looked up at him with the old patient face of a creature that knew exactly what he was doing.
"Do not," said the Duke.
The dog went on looking.
He had ordered a housemaid's wages to be paid from his own purse the day she began. He did not think about it now. He thought about the lamp.
In the morning, he sent for Mrs. Puit.
"Double the oil in the tablet room," he said. "Do not say who ordered it."
"I never do, your grace."
"You have a face like a ledger, Puit."
"It has been said," said Mrs. Puit, "that I am a very honest woman."
He left before she could add anything worse.
It came to him on the stair that the housemaid had not once asked what the stone was worth. Every other person in the house had asked. Sutherby had asked it in his sleep. She had asked instead how the goat was spelled.