"No." He caught her wrist. "I am sorry. I should not ask it. But I should be glad if you would come to the door."
So she went up the steps beside him, one at a time, with the wind pulling at her bonnet, and stood a little behind him on the doorstep while he stood and looked at the knocker.
It was a small brass dolphin. It had been polished so often that the face was almost gone.
"It is not locked," Adrian murmured. "She said it was not locked."
"Then knock," said Clara.
He knocked.
There was a long silence. Then the sound of light, quick, uneven footsteps in the passage beyond, and the scrape of a bolt, and the door opened.
The woman who stood in it was small and slight and grey, with a lace cap and a great white shawl and a pair of steel spectacles pushed up into her hair. She had the long, gentle, rather tired face of a person who has spent nineteen years looking at her work by a window, and there were lines at the corners of her mouth that were not all from smiling. In her hands she was holding a lace pillow, bristling with bobbins, which she had evidently seized by mistake on the way to the door.
She looked at Clara. She looked, politely, inquiringly, at the tall dark man in the greatcoat.
And then she looked at him again.
The lace pillow slid out of her hands and struck the doorstep. A hundred bobbins rolled and clattered over the stones.
"Mama," said Adrian.
"Oh," said Eleanor Ravensdale, in a voice as thin as thread. "Oh. It is not possible."
"No," he said. His own voice was hardly there. "It is not. I was told that. For nineteen years."
She put out one hand, very slowly, as if she were reaching toward something that might vanish, and touched his face. Her fingers ran along the jaw, the temple, the white seam of the scar.