He got down at the gate. He came across the grass to the side of the hives where he always stood now, and he took a folded paper out of his coat and held it out to her.
She read it standing there in the sun. It was a letter from the jeweler, written in a clerk's careful hand, and signed at the bottom by the master of the house himself. It said that in the spring before the ball, Lady Livia had brought her pearls to his shop and sold them back to him—the whole rope. At the same time, she had ordered a copy made in paste, the finest French work, so that the difference could not be seen across a room. It said that the real pearls had been sold again to another customer in the autumn. And it said that he was very sorry indeed to have to put such a thing in writing, but that His Grace had been most insistent.
"He didn't want to write it," the Duke said. "It took most of a day."
"How did you make him?"
"I told him who I was and what she had done with his copy." He was swaying a little on his feet. "And I told him my family has bought every jewel it owns from his house for a hundred years. I said we would go on doing so, or we would not, depending on whether I left his shop with that letter in my coat." He paused. "I wrote to every house that was at the ball as well, from London, before I came back. I said that you left Elmfern with nothing that was not yours, on my word, and that anybody who wished to say otherwise might say it to my face."
Isabel folded the letter. She held it against her apron with both hands, the way the little housemaid at Elmfern had once held a dance card. Her eyes were stinging, and she did not care.
"I could not have done that," she said. "I want you to know that I know it. I could have lived on this hill until I was as old as Kezia and been right the whole time, and never once got through that jeweler's door. You rode to London and back without sleeping and put my name back in my hands. Nobody has ever done such a thing for me in my life. Thank you, Oswin."
He looked at her. He seemed about to say something, and then he did not, and she saw that he was too tired to find any words at all. So she took him by the arm, as he had once offered his arm to her on a terrace, and led him into the cottage, and sat him down in Kezia's chair by the fire. He was asleep before she had got the kettle on.
She went down to the inn alone that afternoon. He woke while she was tying her bonnet and wanted to come, and she said no. She said it gently, but she said it the way Kezia said things about the bees, so that there was no arguing with it. This was hers. She told him it had been done to her in the dark in a little room at the top of his house, and she would finish it herself in daylight with the door open.
He studied her from the chair. Then he nodded and sat back, and said he would be there when she came home. She noticed the word he used—home. She let it pass without a word, but she noticed.