"I always thought it a terrible waste."
"Yes," he said. "I think I understand that."
He stood a moment longer. Then, abruptly, he said, "Would you do me a service, Miss Whitlow?"
"Of course."
"The post comes up to the house at eleven. It has been coming to my desk, and I have not been opening it. I find I cannot. It is mostly condolences. Letters about my father, and the estate, and invitations that will have to be refused." His mouth tightened. "Mr. Pell has been dealing with the business letters, but the rest accumulates. I would be grateful if you would read it for me. Sort it, and answer what needs answering, and tell me what I have to know. I cannot manage the pen." He lifted his left hand, in its black glove, without looking at it. "And I confess I have no great wish to learn how many people are sorry."
It was the longest speech he had made to her, and she felt the weight of it.
"I should be honoured, my lord."
"It is not an honour. It is a chore."
"Then I shall do it well," said Clara.
He looked at her, then, properly, for the first time since the dark of the hall. The lamp was behind him, and she could not see his face, but she saw him nod, once, slowly, as a man might nod who has been given something he did not expect and does not quite know how to hold.
"Thank you," he said, and went away.
For the next three weeks she took the morning post at eleven, in the study, from the hands of the under-footman, and sorted it into three piles on the great black desk: Answer. Read. Burn. She wrote the replies in her own hand, signing herself secretary to Lord Dunmere, and brought him the ones that needed his word. She read him the news from London, from his own regiment, from his old comrades, in the long bright evenings in the library, with the doors open on the garden and his eyes closed in the big chair. He listened without comment. He never asked her to stop.
And she found, very gradually and with some alarm, that she had begun to look forward to eleven o'clock for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with paper.
The letter came on the twenty-eighth of May.
It was a Tuesday. It was raining, a fine soft rain that hung in the limes like smoke, and she had lit the study fire against the damp. The under-footman had brought the post at the usual hour, a fat little bundle tied with string, and she had cut the string and begun to sort, quickly, from habit, without really looking.
A bill from a saddler in Salisbury. Burn. A card of condolence from a lady in Bath. Read. A pamphlet on drainage. Burn. A letter from a Colonel Fenwick, in a big, kind hand, that would want an answer. A circular from a wine merchant.