"Did I?"
"I think so."
The Dowager gave a small, dry, wavering laugh, that cracked in the middle.
"Adrian," she said. "Can you forgive me?"
He did not answer at once. Clara watched him, and saw him look at the small blind figure in the chair, and the tight old hands, and the wet cheeks, and she saw the long struggle go across his face like weather across a hillside. She saw the boy of ten, and the captain of Hussars, and the man in the dark gallery.
He crossed the room. He knelt on the carpet in front of the chair, as he had perhaps not done since he was small, and took the trembling hands in his.
"I am going to find her," he said. "And when I bring her home, Grandmamma, you will say to her what you have just said to me. And then we shall see."
"She will not come."
"She wrote that the door was not locked," said Adrian. "I think she will come if I ask her."
The old woman put both hands on his bent head. "God bless you, my dear," she whispered. "God bless you. You are a great deal better than any of us deserved."
They left within the hour.
It was two days to Lyme in the Viscount's travelling carriage, and Clara remembered it afterward as a sort of dream, bright and swaying and not quite real. The Wiltshire downs rolled away behind them, pale green and white with chalk. They changed horses at Salisbury and slept at an inn in Blandford where the landlady, taking Clara for the Viscountess, put them in adjoining rooms with a knowing smile, and Clara lay awake for an hour, scarlet in the dark, listening to the slow tread beyond the wall.
She had never spoken so much in her life. It seemed that, having once begun, he could not stop. He told her about his mother. Not the letters, but the woman: how she had sung to him in the schoolroom in a voice that was not good but was warm, how she had smelt of orris root and ink, how she had once let him climb to the very top of the beech tree behind the stables and had stood at the bottom with her hands clasped and her face white and said nothing, because she did not wish to frighten him. He told her about the cold years after. About the headmaster who had flogged him, and the father who had said nothing. About the Hussars, and how he had loved it, because it was the first place he had ever been where no one expected him to be anything but brave. About Hougoumont.
"We held the farmhouse," he said, on the second afternoon, looking out of the carriage window at the pale line of the sea on the horizon. "Two hundred of us, against a great many more. It was the gate that mattered. If the gate went, the position went, and the whole ridge. We shut it with our backs. I do not remember who gave the order. I remember a French officer coming through the gap with a sabre, and I remember putting up my hand." He looked at the black glove. "I do not remember the pain. I remember that I thought, quite clearly, I am going to die, and nobody will be told in the right way."
"Oh, Adrian."