Matilda understood the implication before anyone spoke it: they could continue without Hester; they could not continue without her. The knowledge should have felt satisfying. Instead, it frightened her.
Hester heard it, too. "Matilda," she said with controlled warmth, "go and have the foolish thing bandaged. We shall resume shortly."
Matilda rose carefully. Pain flashed through her heel, sharp enough to steal her breath.
Robert moved instinctively, then stopped before touching her. "May I offer my arm?"
She looked at him. The question itself surprised her; men of his rank were not accustomed to asking women in her position what they preferred. "Thank you, Your Grace, but Mrs. Canning will assist me."
"Of course." No offense, no insistence. He stepped back.
Matilda took one careful step, then another. The room seemed impossibly large. She was halfway to the door when a loose manuscript page slipped from the stack she had left beside the pianoforte and drifted to the floor.
Robert bent and picked it up. "Miss Dracott."
She turned. He held the page by its edge. "Yours?"
Her heart gave one hard beat. In the margin, written in her own hand, was a correction to the second variation. She knew the page; she had rewritten that passage three nights earlier. Hester's printed program, still folded in Robert's other hand, credited the entire Fantasia to Mrs. Hester Dracott.
Matilda crossed the distance and accepted the page. "Yes, Your Grace."
"The page?" His eyes rested on the correction. "Or the alteration?"
Behind him, Hester had gone very still. Matilda could feel her watching. She could feel God knew how many years of silence standing between the truth and her tongue.
"The alteration," she said at last.
Robert studied her face. "I see."
But the quiet way he said it told her he saw far more than she wanted him to.
Mrs. Canning reached her side and gently took her arm. Matilda turned toward the door. Behind her, conversation slowly resumed, uncertain and thinner than before.
She had almost crossed the threshold when she heard a gentleman praise Hester once more for the beauty of the final movement. Hester thanked him.
Matilda did not look back. Robert did. He glanced from the woman accepting the praise to the handwritten correction in Matilda's departing hand.
Then he lowered his eyes to the three drops of blood still bright upon the floor.
Mrs. Canning did not speak until the door of the small morning room had closed behind them. Only then did she guide Matilda toward a cushioned chair near the fire and kneel with the calm efficiency of someone who had spent thirty years managing ailments, fainting guests, frightened maids, and minor household catastrophes without once allowing panic to improve any of them.
"Sit, Miss Dracott."