She got down to four shillings on a Tuesday, and did the arithmetic sitting on a wall outside Bath, and found that it came to about six days. And a carter she had begged a ride from that morning had said—meaning nothing by it, the way people say things—that if she was looking for a place, she might try Corvedale, because the Duke was dying, and the house was in a state, and they were forever wanting people.
The Duke of Corvedale had been dying for eight years, and the whole of that county knew it. Nicholas Ware had been eight-and-twenty when Dr. Ambrose Pell of Bath came down and examined him for the third time, sat him in his own library, and told him with the entire confidence of a man of two-and-sixty who had been the first physician in that part of England for thirty years that his heart was failing, that he ought to put his affairs in order, and that he would not see five-and-thirty.
He was six-and-thirty now.
That was the part nobody in that county ever remarked on, because dying is a thing people do not check the arithmetic of. He had been given seven years, and he had taken eight, and about four people had noticed, and every one of them had put it down to the constitution of the Wares, and had gone on being sorry for him.
The condition itself was real, and Hannah found that out inside a week. He could not climb a flight of stairs without stopping at the turn. He was breathless in cold air. About four times a month, there was a night in which he could not lie down at all, and he had a chair in the garden room for exactly that purpose; everybody in that house knew about the chair, and nobody had ever once mentioned it to him.
He had put his affairs in order. That was the thing about Nicholas Ware, and it had taken him eight years. Everything a careful man could do about his own death had been done twice and reviewed annually, except the one thing: if he died without a son, Corvedale went sideways to a cousin's line. Not a villain, not an enemy—simply a family in Northumberland he had met four times, and had nothing whatever against, and did not want to give a house to that had been his mother's and his grandmother's.
His mother had been at him about it until she died. His agent had raised it about nine times in eight years, and had stopped raising it in about the fourth. And Nicholas Ware had refused every arrangement anybody proposed for eight years, for one reason that he had never said out loud to any living person: he was not going to ask a woman of twenty to marry a man who would be dead inside three years, and watch her be pleasant to him about it.
He was in the hall when she came, which was luck, and he was there because the hall was on the ground floor, and there were about four rooms in that house he did not have to climb to anymore. She had been turned away at the back door by a footman who was entirely within his rights, and she had walked around the whole of that house on the gravel—about four hundred yards, in boots that had done three weeks—and had gone up the steps and pulled the bell.
Nicholas Ware heard the whole of the exchange from about twenty feet away. He heard a woman's voice say that she was not asking for charity. He heard her say that she wanted a bed for two nights and would work for it, and would take any work at all, and that she could keep a house and had done for nine years. And he heard her say, when the man told her that His Grace was not receiving anybody:
"Then may I speak to the housekeeper? I am not going to make any trouble, and I shall go directly if I am refused, and I want you to know that I would not have come to the front door if there had been anywhere else."