"Tonight," she said, "when they're all in. I'd rather tell you in the dark."
It was dark when it happened. The bees went in at dusk, the way they always did, with the last few stragglers coming home low and heavy over the heather. The wind got up on the hill, as she had said it would. Kezia went into her bed early, which she never did, and left the kitchen door standing open behind her, so that a square of firelight lay out on the grass.
Isabel and the Duke sat on the bench by the wall, with the whole dark valley below them. Down there, a single light showed at the inn by the ford, and somewhere a dog barked and was answered. She had wrapped herself in her mother's old shawl. He had put his coat on, as he had been told, and he sat with his swollen wrist resting on his knee while she watched the light by the ford.
Then she told him. She told it plainly, looking straight ahead of her into the dark, the way you would tell somebody the road to a town you never mean to visit again.
When the ball ended a year ago, the whole company had crowded into the hall at Elmfern while the carriages were called. It was past two in the morning. There were cloaks and wraps, and sleepy young ladies, and old gentlemen looking for their hats. The Duke himself was out on the steps seeing an old lady who could hardly walk into her carriage.
And in the middle of the hall, in a clear space that seemed to open around her as if by accident, Lady Livia turned to her companion and spoke in her soft, carrying, pleasant voice:
"Isabel, dear, you did put my pearls in the red case? Only my maid has just come down, and she says the case is empty."
That was all she said. She said nothing else then or afterwards in front of anybody; she did not need to.
Isabel said that yes, she had put them in the case just as she had been told. Lady Livia said, "Of course, of course, it must be some silly mistake. We'll look in the morning." And then she laid her hand very kindly on Isabel's arm, the way a lady does with a servant she has decided to forgive.
The hall had gone quiet. It was only for a moment, but in that moment Isabel saw every face in it turned toward her, and she saw what they were thinking, all of them, as clearly as if they had said it out loud: the companion, the one who danced with the Duke.