Please tell his grace that I could not stay for the morning. I have taken nothing that was not mine.
That was all the note said. It was written in pencil on the back of a dance card and folded once, and it lay on a pillow nobody had slept on.
The housemaid who found it was the youngest in the house at Elmfern. She came up the back stair at first light with a can of hot water, the way she did every morning, to the little room under the roof where Lady Livia's companion slept. She knocked and nobody answered, and she went in.
The room was cold. The bed was made so tight you could have bounced a button on it. The candle had burned down to a puddle in the saucer, which meant somebody had sat up with it the whole night. On the chair by the window lay a gown of pale blue silk, folded as carefully as if it were going back to a shop. The housemaid knew that gown. Everybody in the house knew it: the companion had worn it to the ball the night before, and it had been Lady Livia's before it was hers.
The housemaid could read a little. She read the note slowly with her lips moving, and then she turned the card over. On the front, where a lady writes the names of her partners, there was only a single name in a strong, slanting hand that was not the companion's.
The girl looked at it for a long time. Then she ran down four flights of stairs with the card held against her apron. She did not stop until she was standing in the door of the library, out of breath, in a place she had never been allowed to stand.
The Duke of Hensley had not gone to bed either. He was still in his evening clothes, with the neckcloth pulled loose, standing by the cold grate as though he had been waiting for somebody to come through that door.
He took the card from her. He read the note, and turned it over and saw his own name, and turned it back again. He read it a second time. Then he put it inside his waistcoat very carefully, the way a man puts away something that might break.
"When?" he said.
Nobody knew. That was the answer the whole house would give him all that day and all that week. Nobody had heard a door. Nobody had seen a girl with a bag on the drive.
At breakfast, Lady Livia said with a sigh and a small, helpless lift of her hands that the poor creature had always been restless and ungrateful, and that there had been talk of a soldier. She was so sorry for the trouble to the house. The Duke said nothing at all.