"I daresay." The housekeeper stood a moment in the door, looking at the snowdrifts. "It's a great deal of paper for one young woman."
"I like paper," Clara said.
It was perhaps the truest thing she had said all day, and she saw the grey face flicker, very faintly, as if something behind it had very nearly smiled.
She worked for a week without seeing the master of the house.
It was easy enough to do. Dunmere Court was a great place, and he seemed to live in a small and shuttered corner of it, like a snail in the whorl of its shell. The servants spoke of him in lowered voices. His valet brought him his meals on a tray. The rooms on the east side, which had been his father's, were kept locked, and the footman who passed them in the evening went a little faster than elsewhere.
But she heard him.
She heard him at night, when she lay awake in her narrow bed under the eaves, listening to the house settle: a slow, uneven tread, a step and a drag, a step and a drag, going up and down the long gallery on the floor below. It went on for an hour. Sometimes two. Then it stopped, and a door closed, and the house was quiet.
She did not ask about it. She had learned, in six years of other people's households, the first law of the dependent, which is that one does not ask.
She sorted the papers instead. It was slow work, and it was good work, and she found, as she had when she was a girl at her father's elbow, that she was happy. She made piles: Estate. Household. Correspondence, social. Correspondence, legal. Bills paid. Bills unpaid. She wrote labels in her small upright hand. She kept a ledger. She learned the late Viscount's character from his papers as one learns a stranger's face from his portrait: a man of great exactness, who docketed every receipt, who endorsed every letter with the date of its arrival and the date of its answer, and who kept, in the lower drawers of the black desk, a series of account books so cramped and careful that it made her eyes ache.
She did not like him. She could not have said why. It was merely that a man who wrote so neatly and with such cold completeness seemed to have left no room in his life for anything that could not be entered in a column.
On the eighth day, at twenty minutes to midnight, she met the Viscount.
She had stayed late, because she was in the middle of a bundle and hated to leave it, and she had gone out into the hall for a fresh candle. She came round the corner of the great staircase with the candle in her hand, and nearly walked into a man.
He was very tall, and he was standing quite still in the dark, one hand on the newel post. He wore no coat, only a shirt open at the neck and a dark waistcoat, and in the light of her little flame she saw his face for a single, startled second: lean, hard-boned, unshaven, with deep lines beside the mouth and a faint white scar that ran from the left temple into the hair. His eyes were grey. They were extraordinarily tired.
"Oh," said Clara, and dropped the candle.
It rolled across the stone floor and went out.
"I beg your pardon," said a voice in the dark, low and rough, like cloth being drawn over gravel. "I did not mean to startle you."