Something happened at the corner of his mouth that was not anything like a smile. "What is your name?"
"Hannah Poole, sir."
"Poole." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand, which was a thing Hannah had seen men do in the street a thousand times, and had never once seen done by a man in a coat like that. "I am Aubrey Massingham. I do not suppose that means anything to you."
"No, sir."
"Marchford," he said. "The Duke of Marchford. It does not appear to be doing me a great deal of good this morning."
Hannah Poole knelt on the cobbles and did not move at all. He saw her face.
"Do not," he said. "Whatever you are about to do—get up, or apologize, or say 'Your Grace.' Do not do it. I have been 'Your Grace' for eleven years, and I have just been sitting on the ground in front of you, and you may call me whatever you like for the rest of the day."
"I ought to go, sir."
"Yes," he agreed. "You ought."
Neither of them moved.
"May I ask you something?" said the Duke of Marchford. "It is not a fair question, and you are entirely free to say you cannot answer it. And I shall not think one thing worse of you."
Hannah's hands had gone cold. "Ask it, sir."
"You have been fitting her gown since the March. Then you have been in a room with her for four months," he said. "And I want to know—and I am asking a stranger in an alley because there is not one person in that church I could ask—whether she was happy."
And there it was.
Hannah Poole knelt on the stones of Vine Court with a box beside her and heard Mrs. Gill say, *'We are not asked. We are never asked. And the day you say one word out of turn is the day this house stops being sent for.'* She was three-and-twenty. She had eleven shillings a week and a mother at Islington who had no other income. There were four girls in that workroom and Mrs. Gill had turned two off in the winter.
"No, sir," said Hannah Poole. "She was not."
The Duke of Marchford shut his eyes. "Since when?"
"Since before I ever saw her." She could hear her own voice and it did not sound like hers. "I have fitted that gown eleven times since the 9th of March, and she has lost near two inches off her, and she does not look at the glass. And I let the waist out on the 2nd of June without being asked because she could not have got into it otherwise. And I did not tell one living soul, and I have thought about nothing else for four days."
He did not say anything.
"And I want to say the rest of it, sir, because if I do not say it now, I never shall." Hannah's hands were shaking and she put them flat on her knees. "On Tuesday, she was standing on the box and she looked at me in the glass, and she opened her mouth to say something to me, and I did not let her. I said the hem wanted straightening, and it did not. I knelt down, and I put my head down, and I did not let that girl say it, because if she had said it to me, I should have had to do something about it, and I have got a mother at Islington."
The Duke of Marchford opened his eyes and looked at her. "You knew this morning," he said.
"I knew on Tuesday, sir. I knew in the March, and I did not let myself know it." Hannah Poole's face was entirely wet, and she did not wipe it. "You have been sitting on this ground for four minutes, and I have been holding on to you, knowing exactly why she did not come, and I am not going to kneel here and be thanked for it."
Somewhere behind them, at the top of Vine Court, the wedding carriage stood at the gate of St. Bride's with the white ribbons still on it, and the horses shifted, and nobody came out.
"Miss Poole," said the Duke of Marchford, "where is she?"
"I do not know."
"Do you know why?"