Mr. Pell opened his mouth and shut it again.
"The ones with the hourglass lock," said Adrian. He spoke very quietly. She had never heard him use that voice, and it made the short hairs lift on the back of her neck: it was the voice of a captain of cavalry who has decided to take a hill. "Mr. Pell, I will ask you once. You have been at Dunmere for forty years. You served my father. You have been, I think, as loyal a servant as any man could wish. I should like to go on thinking so."
The old man's hands were trembling.
"His late lordship was very particular," he whispered. "He gave me orders, my lord. He said that after his death, those drawers were to be burnt. Unopened. By me. In the presence of no one." A tear ran down the side of the pudding nose. "I did not do it. I told myself that I would, after the funeral, and then after the new year, and then, my lord, I found I could not. I have been a coward. I have been a coward for nineteen years. I carried them to the post every March, in the old days, to the postbag, and every March he took them from me at the door. Give me that, Pell. He never said what became of them. I never asked." He looked up, wretched. "But I knew, my lord. I always knew. They were in his own hand. I mean her hand. I saw the direction. I knew whose it was."
"Give me the key," said Adrian.
The old man fumbled it out of his waistcoat pocket, a small, black, hourglass-shaped thing on a loop of faded blue ribbon, and put it in the Viscount's hand.
"I am sorry, my lord," he said. "I am so sorry."
Adrian looked at the key. When he spoke his voice was gentle.
"Thank you, Pell. That will be all."
The first drawer held bills of exchange and a quantity of dried lavender. The second held a miniature of a young woman in a muslin cap, wrapped in a handkerchief, with the glass cracked across, which Adrian looked at for so long without speaking that Clara turned away. The third was empty.
The fourth drawer was heavy. It came out with a grating sound, and inside it, laid flat and side by side, in an orderly row, as a soldier lays out his accoutrements, were eighteen letters.
They were all in the same sloping brown hand. They were all addressed to Master Adrian Ravensdale, and later, in a slightly different hand as the years went on, to Mr. Adrian Ravensdale, and later still, with a new pride that Clara could feel in the very ink, to Captain Adrian Ravensdale, 10th Hussars. They were each marked in the corner, in the neat, cramped writing of the late Viscount, with a date, and a single word.
The word was Retained.
None of them had been opened.
"Eighteen," said Adrian, from a very long way off. "Ninety-eight to the year fifteen. And the one this April, which is nineteen." He put out his hand and touched the nearest, very lightly, as one touches a sleeping animal. "He did not even open them."