Then the step went away again, down the passage and down the stair, and she heard it no more. She did not open the door.
She stood there with her hand on the latch until the window began to go gray. Then she lit the stub of her candle and wrote her note on the back of the dance card, because it was the only paper she had, and laid it on the pillow. She folded the blue silk gown and left it on the chair, because it had been Lady Livia's before it was hers. She put on her own old brown stuff gown and took her own small bag and nothing else—not so much as a hairpin that she had not paid for.
Then she went down the back stairs and out through the kitchen garden, past the skep that she had put back over the wall. She walked away across the park in the first cold light, with the dew soaking through her shoes.
She had walked to the crossroads, and taken the carrier's cart, and then the mail, and then her own two feet. She had come west because it was the only place in the world she had ever heard spoken of with love. She had come up that track a fortnight later with her shoes worn through. At the top of it, an old woman sat on a bench, looked at her for a long moment, and said, "You have her hands. Come in, then." And that was the whole of it.
When she had finished, the Duke leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and pressed his joined hands against his mouth. She sat and waited, looking at the light by the ford. She could feel him beside her on the bench, very still, the way he had been still in the bees.
When at last he spoke, his voice was so quiet and so level that for a moment she did not understand how angry he was.
"She told us she'd found them in her own case," he said. "That her maid had overlooked them. And all the while she had put them in your trunk."
"Her maid did."
"In my house." He was looking at his own hands. "And I let her sit at my table all that week and tell me there had been a soldier."
"You couldn't have known."