And she thought, with a sudden painful rush of understanding, that whatever happened now, whatever came of it, she was lost.
Before they left, there was one more door to knock on.
The Dowager Viscountess of Dunmere was sitting in the room of clocks, as she had been on the day Clara first arrived, in the same high-backed chair, in the same lace cap, her face turned toward the window where the morning was beginning to come. She did not turn when the door opened. She had known, Clara thought, who it would be.
"Grandmamma," said Adrian.
"You have found them."
It was not a question. The thin voice was perfectly steady. But the sleeping birds of her hands had begun, very slightly, to tremble in her lap.
"You knew," Adrian said.
"I knew."
"For nineteen years."
"For nineteen years." She lifted her blind face, and Clara saw, with a pang, that the pale eyes were wet. "Not at first. Edmund was very clever. He told me that Eleanor had gone abroad for her health and that she had died, and I believed it, because I had never liked her and I was glad to think that God had settled the matter. It was two years before I found a letter. It had been misdirected, to the dower house, by a clerk at the post office who did not know the family. I opened it. I read it. I knew the hand." Her breath caught. "I went to my son. I said, Edmund, what have you done? And he told me. And he told me that if I said one word to the boy, he would put me out of this house and I should never see you again either."
"Grandmamma—"
"I was fifty-nine. I was a widow. I had nowhere to go." A tear ran down the old cheek into the lace. "I told myself that it was for the best. That a boy was better with a living grandmother and a dead mother than with no one. I told myself that for nineteen years. And every year on the fourteenth of March, my dear, I would sit in this room, and I would hear the postbag come up the drive, and I would think, there is a letter in it. And I did nothing."
Nobody spoke. The clocks ticked. In the corner the little bracket clock, always late, struck the half hour a minute after the rest.
"When Edmund died," said the Dowager, "I thought, now. Now I shall tell him. But I could not. I was ashamed. Eighty years old, and I was ashamed. I could not find the words. I thought, I will send someone to find it. Someone who knows how to look. Someone honest." She turned her face, with great precision, toward Clara. "I asked my solicitor to find me a person who had been brought up among letters. He found you. It was not an accident, my dear. I am sorry for that, too. I used you."
"My lady," Clara said, and her voice shook, "I think you gave a very frightened old woman a great deal of courage to ask a very good question."