"I am listening."
He did not sit. He stood with his hands at his sides, the amber gone dark in the lamplight, and spoke as if he were reading from a document he had written many years ago.
"I didn't tell you why I cannot dismiss Sutherby. My father's will binds me. I didn't tell you why I have wanted the stone read.
"My father said a duke is a wall. He said walls are not fed. He said whatever was warm in me was a flaw in the masonry, and he cut it out daily for 19 years.
"On his deathbed, he told me the answer to what a kestrel is lay in the stone. I did not read it. I could not. I paid seven men £12,000 to do it for me, because I did not wish to learn which way the answer ran.
"I laid the fire. I set the chair. I would do it again.
"The reading is yours. You may publish it under your name. You may burn it. You may go tonight with a character and a year's wages, and I will withdraw nothing. I will ask nothing. You may refuse me entirely, and the house will be exactly as warm."
The room was so quiet she could hear the lamp.
She had believed for a week that he meant to keep her reading and sign it himself. He had just given away the one thing a duke could keep.
"Why?" she said. "Tell me."
"Because you asked for honest terms. That is one."
He did not say more. He did not seem to know how.
She looked at the man who had stood behind a closed face for 36 years, and had just opened it, and had not asked her for anything.
"The last line," she said. "I have not read it aloud to anyone."
"You need not read it to me."
"I know."
She turned the copy book to the final page and set the pencil down beside it.
"I will finish it," said Hester. "For the stone. Not for you, your grace."
"That is exactly what I hoped you would say."
He went out. The dog stayed. The chair went on being warm.
* * *
At midnight, the Duke sat in his father's study with the lamp turned low and did not read the papers in front of him.
He could hear the pencil. It was a small sound, three rooms away, carried along the north passage by some trick of the old stone. He had never before noticed that the house was built to carry sound.