"Against the mice."
"Mice of unusual organisation, your Grace. They take only the twisted spills, and carry them upstairs. One was found in her Grace's slipper on Tuesday, which the mice deny."
He looked down the garden to where the calico sat on the wall, a fresh white spill clamped in her teeth, contraband moving under bond. He laughed. It was a short, surprised sound, long out of use. "And is she prosecuted?" he asked. "The mice being innocent."
"There is a difficulty about witnesses, your Grace. The only party who watches her is disinclined to inform."
"Then she is safe," he said, "for I am the other party who watches, and I am disinclined too."
It was the nearest either of them had come to saying aloud what they were: two people standing inside the same secret. After that the secret had three keepers.
The parliament of three met most mornings after that — duke, companion, and cat — and the Dowager, who missed little within a mile of her two rooms, began inventing errands for her companion of a suspicious geometry. "You are pale, child. Go and quarrel with that animal of yours."
He talked. That was the astonishment of the summer: the silent man talked, and each time the cat opened the door of it. A question about where a stray wintered became the house as it had stood in his boyhood.
"Every hearth in it lit," he said, looking up at the dark windows. "You could hear my father laugh two floors off. He laughed a great deal. People forget that about him, because the portraits scowl." A pause. "My cousin calls the cold rooms economy. My father would have called them what they are, and turned him out of doors in his own coat."
"And his son, your Grace?"
"His son," said the Duke, "watches from the gallery, and is ashamed, and does it again the next day."
Another morning, an idle report of Gooseberry asleep on the warm flue-top became the Peninsula, and then, in six flat sentences, Waterloo, and the friend who had gone out with him and stayed on that field. She understood that she was the first person he had let see it whole.
"He would have liked this garden," the Duke said at the end of it. "He would have laughed at me, standing about in the lavender at six in the morning. He kept me sensible for seven years, and I have been short of it since."
"You might practise, your Grace," said Jacintha. "The mornings are said to be the best of this house."
He looked at her a long moment. "So I have heard it argued," he said, and that morning, for the first time, he was the one who stayed at the flagstone after the saucer was licked clean.
"You have been fair to everyone in this house," she said once, because it was true. "The maids' wages, the pensions Mr. Farrant struck off that reappeared. Everyone knows whose hand that is."
"Small things," he said.
"Then why the large silence? You could contest the consolidation. Take back the management. It is yours to take."
He was quiet so long she thought she had spent it all. "To fight paper," he said at last, "a man must speak. Rooms full of people, Miss Pinnock. Attorneys. My cousin swims in that element and always has. Since the eighteenth of June, 1815, I have found that I—" He stopped, and finished simply. "I hoard my voice. It is a flaw. I know its name, and knowing a flaw's name has yet to cure one."
Underneath the summer the screw turned by small clicks: an inventory taken of the plate; a hedge-row of standing timber sold; the dower-house chimneys "surveyed" by men who measured everything and mended nothing. Farrant, meeting Jacintha in the corridor, was exquisitely civil, and had begun to watch her with a new attention empty of admiration.
The rain came back at the end of August, and with it the evening that changed everything.