And then a small, square letter, folded thin and sealed with a blob of plain red wax.
She turned it over. It was addressed in a sloping, graceful, slightly old-fashioned hand, in brown ink, to The Right Honourable Adrian Ravensdale, Viscount Dunmere, Dunmere Court, near Marlborough, Wiltshire.
Clara had handled, by her own calculation, something over a quarter of a million letters in her life, and her fingers knew the thing before her eyes did. The paper was old, or at least not new, a good laid paper of a kind that had gone out of fashion before the war. The seal had been pressed with a thumb, not a signet. The fold was careful. The writer had taken a long time over it. And the postmark, in the corner, in a faint black circle, said LYME, and below it, Ap. 29.
It had been in the post for a month.
She looked at it for a long moment. Something stirred at the back of her mind, a small, cold, uncertain thing, like the first drop of rain before a storm, and she could not have said why. It was only a letter. It was addressed to him, as a great many were. It had come in with the others.
Read, she thought. It must be Read.
But her hand did not put it on the pile. She found that she was holding it up to the window, in the grey light, looking at the writing. It was a woman's hand. It was a hand that had been taught by a good master, long ago, and had never quite got over it. The capitals leaned forward, the lower loops were generous and open, and the d in Dunmere ended in a tiny, flourishing curl, like a thing that had been done every day for years and was done now without thinking.
She had seen that hand before.
She stood very still, with the rain whispering on the glass, and tried to think where.
Not in the study. She had been through the study's papers for seven weeks. She would have known it. Nor in any of the letters she had read to him. She put her fingers to her temple and made herself breathe slowly, as she had learned to do when a difficult name would not come.
The library, she thought. The little ivory box on the mantel.
She had noticed it on her first evening. It was a plain small box, of yellowed ivory, no bigger than a snuffbox, and it stood quite alone on the library mantelpiece with nothing near it, like a thing that had been put out of the way of harm. She had not touched it. But once, a week ago, the Viscount had gone to the mantel and opened the lid, and taken out a single slip of paper, worn soft as cloth, and held it for a moment without unfolding it, and put it back. She had seen the corner. Brown ink. A forward-leaning hand.
Clara put the letter down on the desk as though it were hot.
It was none of her business. She told herself so, quite sternly. She would put it on the tray with the others, as she had done every day, and she would carry the tray upstairs at noon, and she would say, "There is one that came from Lyme, my lord, that I did not open," and that would be the end of it.
She put it on the tray.
She carried the tray up at noon.