"He did not need to," said Clara quietly. "He knew what they said."
"Yes." He drew a long unsteady breath. "He was perfectly sure."
He gathered them up, all eighteen, in both hands, the good one and the maimed one, and held them against his chest.
"I should like to be alone, Miss Whitlow."
"Of course, my lord."
"I will read them. All of them. I think it may take the night." He did not look at her. "Will you—" He stopped. "No. It is not fair to ask."
"Ask, my lord."
"Will you stay in the house? In case. I do not know, in case I should want to say something to someone. I do not know why."
"I shall be in the study," Clara said. "Until you want me. Or until morning."
He nodded, once, with his face turned away, and went out of the room carrying his mother's letters, and she heard the slow step and drag go down the corridor and up the stairs. A door closed. And Clara sat down on the floor of the study among the snowdrifts of paper with her back against the black desk, and put her face in her hands, and for the first time in six years let herself weep for someone who was not herself.
She stayed in the study all night.
She did not sleep. She made no pretence of working. At some point, a little after midnight, she lit the lamp, and at some point after that Mrs. Grice came in without knocking and put down a tray with a pot of tea and a plate of bread and butter and went out again without a word. At two the clocks began to strike, all seventeen of them, out of step, in the dark upper house, one after another, like a congregation of the very old remembering the same hymn. She sat and listened, and thought about a small boy in a nightshirt standing at a rain-spotted window.
At half past four, as the grey was coming into the east, she heard the step and the drag on the stair.
He came in without a candle. He was still in his shirt-sleeves, and he was holding the letters, but they were open now, all of them, the sheets loose and crumpled and creased as a letter is that has been read and re-read and held in a shaking hand. His eyes were red and swollen. His face was the face of a man who has been through a very long fever and has come out the other side of it, weak and washed and strangely light.
"I have read them," said Adrian Ravensdale.