"Go down and see about my tisane yourself, child," the Dowager said that wet evening. "The bell brings Cyril's people, and I am out of patience with Cyril's people. Take a shawl; the passages are his economy too."
So it was Jacintha in the still-room passage at dusk, and Jacintha who found the theft in progress: Gooseberry on the ledge by the spill-box, one white paw in the act of hooking a twisted spill over the edge. The cat froze; the spill dropped; Jacintha laughed and knelt for it, and a larger hand arrived on it at the same moment as hers.
She had not heard him come. The Duke of Ottershaw was kneeling on the flags of a service passage in the half-dark, his hand over hers over a piece of twisted waste paper, and the passage, which had been an ordinary width for two hundred years, was suddenly very small. She could hear the rain on the leads. She could hear her own heart. Neither of them moved their hand.
He was looking at her — at her, in the way she had spent three years being careful to prevent, and his eyes went once, slowly, to her mouth, and the air in the passage went thin. His fingers curled, a half-inch, around hers. She felt the warmth of them all the way to her elbow, and she understood with terror how little she would do to stop what happened next.
It was Jacintha who stood up. Because she was a servant in this house and he was the master of it, and that sum was hers to keep, and hers alone. "Your spill, your Grace," she said, and put it in his hand, and did not run, but went. To be noticed at last, she thought that night, dry-eyed and furious at the ceiling, by the one man whose notice I cannot afford.
Farrant moved three days later, smooth as ever. He called on the Dowager with papers and sympathy and drew his chair confidingly near. "The consolidation is complete, aunt. At Michaelmas your establishment removes to Bath. A superior situation — society, the waters, everything suited to your years. I have taken the lodgings myself; you will find them warm."
"Warm," said Griselda. "You have discovered the virtue late, Cyril."
"And in Bath," he went on, perfectly pleasant, "with the society of the Rooms at your door, you will naturally have small need of a resident companion. Miss Pinnock shall have a fortnight's wages, and a character gladly given." He laid the words down one at a time, payment concluding all business. "She has been attentive, I am sure, in her way. Attentive young persons are readily placed."
He bowed himself out, and left an old woman and a young one sitting very straight in a small cold room.
"I will write to my sister's people," said Griselda at last. Her voice was level; her hand on the chair-arm was aged suddenly. "Something will be contrived, child."
"Of course, madam," said Jacintha, and went down at dusk with the scraps of a supper she had left untouched, and knelt at the scullery step where the saucer sat empty, and could not for a moment make herself click it against the stone. She said it very low, to the empty yard. "We are neither of us able to pay our way here."
He found her two mornings later in the Dowager's little book-room, packing the books-of-nothing into a crate — the almanacs and sermon-collections that furnished a shelf and had gone unopened for thirty years. She heard the door and knew the step before she turned.
"Don't," said the Duke. He was pale, and his hands were at his sides. "Leave the books. Miss Pinnock — before anything else is said in this house, there is a thing I should have said two years ago, and I ask you to stand there and let me say it badly."
She stood, a dead rector's sermons in both hands.
"The parcels are mine." He said it flatly, unpractised, a man reciting against his own silence. "The trimmings at the step. They have been mine almost from the first. I saw you from the gallery window — six in the morning, in the rain, the October after I came home, feeding a starving animal out of a servant's supper. Out of your own supper. I have kept the game larder open to you since, by the back stairs, and kept my own counsel. My cousin's rule against strays has been dead letter since the week he wrote it. I countermanded it quietly, in the one way I seem able to do anything."
He looked at the crate, at her hands, anywhere but her face, and pressed on. "A man watched a kindness done in secret every morning for two years, because it was the first thing in this house since Waterloo that made the place bearable to him, and he could not once bring himself to come down the stairs. That is the man. That is the whole of his courage, and you have now heard all of it."
The room rearranged itself around her, quietly, two years of it: the wrong-hour walks, the unenforced edict, the parcels tied with string by a duke's own hand in a locked larder before dawn.
"You provisioned us," she said. "The two of us."
"It was the least that could be done, and I did the least. Yes."
"It was not the least." Her eyes were stinging and her voice stayed gentle, and the gentleness was the blade of it. "It was kind, and it was constant, and I forbid anyone to speak against the man who did it — even you. But you have just now called yourself a watcher, your Grace, and there I must agree with you. You watched Mr. Farrant put out the fires. You are watching him put out your mother. A man who fights nothing loses everything, and he loses it politely, and the people who cannot afford to fight lose it with him."