She stood up and brushed off her knees, and looked at him properly for the first time. He was a tall, dark man in a black coat, standing in the grass at the side of her hives with his hat in his hand. He might have come to call on a lady in a drawing room.
"Go home, Your Grace," she said. "Please."
"No."
"There is nothing for you here."
He looked along the row of skeps, and at the cottage with its white-blue door, and at the old woman on the bench who was watching him with her head on one side like a blackbird. Then he looked back at Isabel.
"I'll wait," he said.
"For what?"
"For you to tell me why." He put his hat down on the wall. "I'm good at waiting. I've had a great deal of practice."
She turned and walked into the cottage and shut the door behind her. It was not a loud shutting; she had never been a woman who slammed doors. She stood with her back against it in the dim little room, with the veil still over her face. She was shaking from head to foot. She could not have told anybody whether it was fear, or anger, or something else that had no business being in her at all.
A year earlier, on the afternoon of the Midsummer Ball at Elmfern, nobody had looked at Isabel Renbury at all. That was the natural order of things. She was a lady's companion, and a companion is a kind of furniture that walks. She carries the shawl. She finds the fan. She knows where the smelling salts are and which cushion the lady prefers. And she sits a little behind the lady's chair, so that people who wish to speak to the lady do not have to look past her.
Isabel had been doing it for three years, since the winter her father died and left her a good name and nothing else. Lady Livia was the lady. She was the widow of a baronet and the most beautiful woman in the county, and everybody said she would be the next Duchess of Hensley. She had been saying it herself in the softest possible way for most of the spring.